Leonard was finding it impossible to stay at his mother’s house after having lived on his own, and with Annie. He found an apartment on Mountain Street, and in order to pay the rent (and since he no longer had the excuse of studying in New York), he agreed to take a job in one of the Cohen family firms. For a year Leonard worked at W. R. Cuthbert & Company, the brass foundry that his uncle Lawrence ran. A reference letter written by the foundry’s personnel manager in December 1957 stated: “Leonard Cohen was employed by us for the period Dec 12th 1956 to Nov 29th 1957 in various capacities: Electro-cycle turret lathe operator, Brass die-casting machine operator, Time and motion study assistant. During the time of his employment, Mr Cohen was known to be honest, capable and industrious. We have no hesitation in recommending him for any sort of employment and would like to express our regret at his departure.”22
Leonard, who did not share this regret, was looking for work in America. He applied to the U.S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, DC, for a teaching position on a reservation. The bureau, oddly, had little use for a Jewish poet from Montreal with electro-cycle turret lathe skills. (It would be nine more years before Leonard would display his Native American scholarship in his second novel, Beautiful Losers.) So he moved on to another of the family firms, the Freedman clothing company, run by his uncle Horace. Leonard spent his days in the office, moving papers around, or in the factory, hanging the finished suits and coats on racks. His nights were spent in the clubs and bars of Montreal, which in the late fifties could still boast the liveliest nightlife in Canada—so lively that the military authorities had designated certain streets off-limits to its personnel because of the number of brothels. Montreal then was Canada’s New York, the city that never slept; musicians who played in its many nightclubs were expected to keep on playing until the last drunk was carried out.
With the new decade, and Quebec’s “Quiet Revolution,” just two years away, it was hard not to notice there was a change in the air. “People of different backgrounds—linguistic, religious and the rest—were beginning to come forward and take chances,” says Phil Cohen. Some of the clubs had started to feature more experimental musical acts. Among them was a jazz pianist named Maury Kaye. A small Montreal Jew whose goatee, thick black-framed glasses and unruly hair made him look like a beatnik, Kaye had become well-known on the Canadian jazz circuit as a big-band leader, a composer and a noted sideman who had played with Edith Piaf and Sammy Davis Jr. He also had a small, less mainstream jazz band that played late-night gigs at clubs like Dunn’s Birdland on Saint Catherine Street, a jazz parlor above a popular smoked-meats delicatessen, which was reached by a flight of rickety stairs. One night in April 1958, at midnight, when Kaye came onstage with his band, Leonard was with them.
Among the audience of around fifty people was Henry Zemel, a math and physics student at McGill, who had no idea at that time who Leonard was, although in the sixties they would become close friends. “It was curious,” remembers Zemel, “a little place with a small audience and a little stage. Leonard sang and he read some poetry but, as I remember, he sang more than he read poetry.” Recalls Aviva Layton, who went to Leonard’s first night with Irving to give moral support, “I don’t remember him reading poetry, I remember him singing and playing the guitar. He perched himself on a high, three-legged stool and he sang—his own songs. That magic that he had, whatever it was, you could see it there at these performances.”
“Maury Kaye was a very gifted pianist and jazz arranger. He would play something, and I would improvise. That was probably the first time that I . . .”
Performed onstage as a singer?
“Well, I was invited to read poetry now and then, but I never really enjoyed it, I was never terribly interested in that kind of expression. But I liked singing, chanting my lyrics, to this jazz group. It felt a lot easier and I liked the environment better. [Smiles] You could drink.”
Was it new to you, improvising? You’re better known for a more studied approach.
“Well, I would sit with friends on the steps of the place we were living in when we were at college on Peel Street and calypso was popular in a tiny corner of Montreal—there was a tiny black population and there were some calypso clubs there that we started going down to quite a lot—and I would improvise calypso lyrics about the people who were passing in the street, things like that.”
Along with the Beat-style improvisations he had witnessed in Greenwich Village, Leonard had prepared some set pieces, among them “The Gift,” a new poem that had its premiere on his first night at Dunn’s.* “They called it Poetry to Jazz,” remembers David Cohen, Leonard’s cousin. “It was a very fifties-ish thing. Leonard wrote poetry and a little blues stuff and I remember him reading this poem very seriously: ‘She knelt to kiss my manhood,’ or something like that. I was cracking up, and all the young girls were going, ‘Ooh, isn’t he something else?’ Did it make Leonard popular with women? As the old expression goes, it didn’t hurt.” Leonard also ad-libbed and made jokes. Irving Layton, always his biggest cheerleader, declared him a natural comic.
Ever since Mort left Montreal to study sculpture in London, Leonard had increasingly come to rely on Layton for friendship and support. Several times a week he would go to Irving and Aviva’s place for supper. Often, after they had eaten, they would “crack a poem.” Aviva explains, “We would choose a poem—Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, anyone—and we’d go through it line by line, image by image. How did this poet put together those images? What does this poem really mean? How do we crack this poem? Honestly, it was worth more than a PhD from Columbia.” Some evenings they would go to the cinema—Leonard and Irving “both adored trashy movies,” Aviva says—“and then we would sit up till dawn talking about the movie, analyzing the symbolism, and try and trip each other up on how many symbols we’d seen.” On the nights they stayed in, they would “wheel in this old black and white television set with the rabbit ears on top and, while eating lots of candy—Leonard would always bring over a huge slab of his favorite, which was dyed sugar made to look like bacon—they would talk about what they’d seen until the cows came home.”
Although Layton was still married to Betty Sutherland, he and Aviva had been living together openly for some time. The arrangement worked as well as such things could, until Aviva took a job as a teacher in a private girls’ school—an institution not known for its sympathies toward alternative lifestyles. Irving and Aviva needed to marry. But Irving did not want to divorce his wife. Instead he proposed a solution: he would buy a wedding ring for Aviva and they would have a mock marriage ceremony—Leonard would be best man—and she could change her name legally to Layton. A date was set, and the three met at a bistro near Leonard’s apartment for lunch and champagne, “Irving wearing some awful bottle-green coat, [Aviva] in a white, seersucker secondhand dress with curtain bobbles on the bottom, and Leonard, of course, the only one dressed beautifully.” They headed off together to a small jewelry boutique on Mountain Street to buy the ring. “While I’m looking at the wedding rings,” says Aviva, “all of a sudden I notice that Irving is on the other side of the shop saying, ‘I’ve come to buy a bracelet for my wife. She’s an artist.’ Leonard, who just understood what I was going through, said, ‘Aviva, I’m going to buy you a wedding ring,’ and he did. He slipped it on my finger and said, ‘Now you’re married.’ And I thought, who the hell am I supposed to be married to? I’m telling you this story because that is so part of Leonard. I’m sure he can be absolutely impossible if anyone wants a marriage kind of relationship with him, but he was, and always has been, impeccable—thoughtful, courtly, generous, really the most honorable man.”
For detectives seeking to put together a picture of Leonard’s activities and state of mind, a file in one of the stack of boxes in his archives in Toronto might provide some interesting clues. Or muddy the water entirely. Alongside Leonard’s unpublished novel A Ballet of Lepers are a guitar
string, a driving license, a vaccination certificate, a chest X-ray form, a leaflet marking the declaration of independence in Cuba and a library card. Whatever crime it was, the evidence pointed to its having been committed by a troubadour planning an overseas journey, likely somewhere exotic. There is also a number of forms filled out by Leonard requesting arcane publications. Several of these are for books and articles on the benefits, problems, philosophy and technique of fasting. These include “Notes of Some English Accounts of Miraculous Fasts,” by Hyder Rollins, from the Journal of American Folklore in 1921, and the intriguingly titled “Individual and Sex Differences Brought Out by Fasting,” by Howard Marsh, from a 1916 issue of Psychological Review. Leonard also requested the books Mental Disorders in Urban Areas by Robert E. Faris and Venereal Disease Information by E. G. Lion. On thin yellowed paper is a typewritten essay titled “Male Association Patterns.” In it the author, Lionel Tiger, from the University of British Columbia—one of Leonard’s fellow counselors at summer camp—discussed male homosexuality and the desire for same-sex companionship, as displayed in “sports teams, fraternities, criminal organizations like the Cosa Nostra, drinking groups, teenage gangs, etc. The list is long,” Tiger wrote, “but the common factor is male homogeneity and the communal sense of maleness which prevails.”
Fasting was something Leonard would pursue with enthusiasm in the coming years; he appeared as ardent about losing weight as Masha was to put it on him. As to homosexuality, by all accounts this was merely an intellectual curiosity, a subject that had been thrust into the zeitgeist by the Beats. When the British journalist Gavin Martin asked Leonard in 1993 if he’d ever had a gay relationship, Leonard answered, “No.” Asked if he regretted this, Leonard said, “No, because I have had intimate relationships with men all my life and I still do have. I’ve seen men as beautiful. I’ve felt sexual stirrings toward men so I don’t think I’ve missed out.”23 His friendships with his male friends were, and remain, deep and durable.
The summer of 1958 found Leonard back again in the Laurentians and at summer camp—as a counselor this time, at Pripstein’s Camp Mishmar, which opened its doors to children with learning difficulties. Leonard took with him his guitar and a camera. He went home with a roll of film that contained a series of pictures of women he met there. Nudes. Now that he no longer lacked the female company he had so long craved, he was making up for lost time. “Leonard’s always had yearnings for sainthood, [but] at the same time there’s certainly been a strong streak of hedonism in him, as there is in almost every poet and every artist,” said Irving Layton. “It’s because the artist is dedicated to pleasure and bringing pleasure to others particularly. And if he takes a little bit himself in giving pleasure to others, so much the better.”24
While Leonard was at college in New York and Mort at art school in London, they sublet their room in the boardinghouse on Stanley Street to friends. When Mort returned to Montreal, he converted the double parlor into a sculpture studio for himself, and he and Leonard talked about turning it into an art gallery. The two put in long hours fixing up the place and planning how it should be. They did not want the hushed formality and office hours of the other Montreal galleries, which “would all close at five o’clock,” says Rosengarten, “so if people were working they weren’t free to go.” The Four Penny Art Gallery, as they named it, was open every night until nine or ten, later on weekends, “and much later,” says Rosengarten, “if we had a vernissage.” Opening parties would carry on long into the night. Leonard immortalized one of these evenings in his poem “Last Dance at the Four Penny.” In the poem, the room on Stanley Street and all its associations—art, friendship, freedom and nonconformity—became a fortress against the savagery of the world outside its walls, in Montreal and beyond.
Layton, my friend Lazarovitch,
no Jew was ever lost
while we two dance joyously
in this French province.
The artists they exhibited were those whom the Montreal establishment ignored, among them Layton’s wife, Betty Sutherland. “We had some of the best young active artists at any given time, and it was very hard to find their work because the galleries were all stuck with their own rigid history and ideas,” says Rosengarten. “We sold poetry books, because no one else would sell them, and ceramics, because no one else would sell them either.” The Four Penny, says Nancy Bacal, became “a gathering place, a haven for art and music and poetry. On warm evenings we would all go up to the roof and sing folk songs and protest songs; Morton would play his banjo and Leonard would play his guitar.”
“The gallery,” Rosengarten says, “was starting to work. Starting to get the attention of the critics. And then in the dead of winter there was a huge fire and the building burned down. Completely. And that was the end of it, because we didn’t have insurance. We had a huge show on at that time and there were paintings from floor to ceiling, all gone. I had a little wax sculpture, which survived the fire, which was amazing. It was such a remarkably delicate thing and the only thing to survive.” The Four Penny was dead and cremated.
And Masha was in the hospital. Leonard’s mother had been admitted to a psychiatric ward at the Allan Memorial Institute, suffering with depression. The Allan, as locals called it, was housed in a grand mansion at the top of McTavish Street in Mount Royal. From its immaculately kept grounds, the view across Montreal was even better than from the park behind Leonard’s family home. “Loonies,” wrote Leonard, revisiting the incident in The Favorite Game, “have the best view in town.”*
It’s not surprising that Masha, a woman with a leaning toward melancholy, would be seriously depressed, after her infirm second husband had moved out of the house on Belmont Avenue and gone to live in Florida and then her infirm father had moved in. Nor was it strange that she should lean so heavily on her only son when he visited her—which he dutifully did—berating him for having more time for his shiksas than for his mother and, in the next breath, worrying that he wasn’t taking care of himself or eating properly.
It is also no surprise that Leonard would feel frustrated, helpless and angry—a multipurpose frustration, helplessness and anger that seemed to take in his own condition as well as Masha’s. He knew by now that he had inherited her depressive tendency, and he was not at his happiest himself. Every weekday, from seven in the morning, he worked in his dead father’s clothing company at a job he loathed, while the gallery he had helped create with Mort had literally gone up in smoke. But while Leonard soldiered on, uncomplaining—as Mort says, echoing the sentiments of many of Leonard’s friends, “He wasn’t the kind of moany-groany depressed person; he has a great sense of humor, and depression didn’t stop him from being funny”—the woman who had always supported him and indulged him could lie around all day in a place that looked to Leonard like a country club. There must have been fear too—not just at seeing his sole parent helpless but at the responsibility that came with that, and the vision of what might await him if he stayed in Montreal. The city he had escaped New York to come back to had become uncomfortable, even threatening.
An article that appeared in the Canadian magazine Culture, written by Louis Dudek, must have been the final blow. Leonard’s former teacher, publisher and champion criticized his writing as “a rag-bag of classical mythology” and a “confusion of symbolic images.” Layton leapt to Leonard’s defense immediately, branding Dudek “stupid” and declaring Leonard “one of the purest lyrical talents this country has ever produced.” But the damage was done; although Leonard remained friendly with Dudek, he could no longer feel safe in his position as Montreal’s golden boy of poetry. It was time to move. For which he needed money. But he could not bear to stay at the Freedman Company, and he knew he could not make a living as a poet. Leonard quit his job and devoted his energies to applying for scholarships and grants. In between working on poems, short stories and the occasional freelance review for the CBC, he and Layton sat together for hours on e
nd, filling in applications and writing proposals. Leonard requested money to travel to the ancient capitals—London, Athens, Jerusalem, Rome—around which, he said, he would write a novel.
In the spring of 1959, two letters arrived from the Canada Council for the Arts: Leonard’s and Irving’s applications had been approved. Leonard was granted $2,000. Immediately, he applied for a passport. In December 1959, shortly after his return from a poetry reading at the 92nd Street Y in New York with Irving Layton and F. R. Scott, Leonard boarded a plane for London.
Five
A Man Who Speaks with a Tongue of Gold
It was a cold gray morning and starting to rain when Leonard walked down Hampstead High Street, clutching a suitcase and an address. It was just before Christmas and the windows of the little shops were bright with decorations. Tired from the long journey, Leonard knocked at the door of the boardinghouse. But there was no room at the inn. The only thing they could offer was a humble cot in the living room. Leonard, who had always said he had “a very messianic childhood,” accepted the accommodation and the landlady’s terms: that he get up every morning before the rest of the household, tidy up the room, get in the coal, light a fire and deliver three pages a day of the novel he told her he’d come to London to write. Mrs. Pullman ran a tight ship. Leonard, with his liking for neatness and order, happily accepted his duties. He had a wash and a shave, then went out to buy a typewriter, a green Olivetti, on which to write his masterpiece. On the way, he stopped in at Burberry on Regent Street, a clothing store favored by the English upper-middle classes, and bought a blue raincoat. The dismal English weather failed to depress him. Everything was as it should be; he was a writer, in a country where, unlike Canada, there were writers stretching back forever: Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats. Keats’s house, where he wrote “Ode to a Nightingale” and love letters to Fanny Brawne, was just ten minutes’ walk from the boardinghouse. Leonard felt at home.
I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen Page 7