Despite its proximity to the center of London, Hampstead had the air of a village—a village that crawled with writers and thinkers. Among the permanent residents in Highgate Cemetery, which was also a short walk away, were Karl Marx, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot and Radclyffe Hall. Back when London was shrouded in toxic smog, Hampstead, high on a hill, with eight hundred acres of heath land, drew consumptive poets and sensitive artists with its cleaner air. Mort had been the first among Leonard’s crowd to stay there, renting a room from Jake and Stella Pullman while he was at art school in London. Next was Nancy Bacal, who had gone to London to study classical theater at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and stayed on to become a radio and television journalist. Nancy, like Leonard, had been given the “starter bed” and a hot-water bottle in the living room until Mort moved out and Mrs. Pullman, judging her worthy, allowed her to take over his room. Which is where she was when Leonard showed up in December 1959.
Bacal, a writer and teacher of writing, cannot remember a time when she did not know Leonard. Like him, she was born and raised in Westmount. They lived on the same street and went to the same Hebrew school and high school; her father was Leonard’s pediatrician. “It was a very strong community, inbred in many ways, but in no way was he the usual person you’d find in the Westmount crowd. He was reading and writing poetry when people were more interested in who they were going to date for their Sunday school graduation. He pushed the borders from a very early age.” What made it more curious was that Leonard was not openly rebellious; as Arnold Steinberg noted, he seemed conventional, respectful of his teachers, the least likely to rebel.
“Here you have the contradiction,” says Bacal. “Leonard was embedded in religion, deeply connected with the shul through his grandfather, who was president of the synagogue, and because of his respect for the elders; I remember Leonard used to recount how his grandfather could put a pin through the Torah and be able to recite every word on each page it touched, and that impressed me enormously. But he was always prepared to ask the hard questions, break down the conventions, find his own way. Leonard was never a man to assault or attack or say bad things about anything or anyone. He was more interested in what was true or right.” She recalls the endless talks she and Leonard would have in their youth about their community, “what was comfortable, where it left us wanting, where we felt people weren’t penetrating to the truth.” Their conversation had taken a break when Bacal left for London, but when Leonard moved into the Pullmans’ house, it picked up where it left off.
Stella Pullman, unlike most residents of Hampstead, was working-class—“salt of the earth, very pragmatic, down-to-earth English” is Bacal’s description. “She worked at an Irish dentist in the East End of London; took the tube there every day. Everyone who lived in the house used to schlep down there once a year and have their fillings done. She was very supportive—Leonard still credits her with being responsible for him finishing the book because she gave him a deadline, which made it happen—but she was not what you’d call impressed by him, or by any of us. ‘Everyone has a book in them,’ she’d say, ‘so get on with it. I don’t want you just hanging around.’ She’d been through the war; she had no time for all that nonsense. Leonard was very comfortable there because there was no artifice about it. He and Stella got along very, very well. Stella liked him a lot—but secretly; she never wanted anyone to get, as she would say, ‘too full of themselves.’ ” Leonard kept to his part of the agreement and wrote the required three pages a day of the novel he had begun to refer to as Beauty at Close Quarters. In March 1960, three months after his arrival, he had completed a first draft.
Late at night, after closing time at the King William IV pub, their local, Nancy and Leonard would explore London together. “To be in London in those times was a revelation. It was another culture, a kind of no-man’s-land between World War II and the Beatles. It was dark, there wasn’t much money and it was something we’d never experienced, London working class—and don’t forget we’d started with Pete Seeger and all those workingman songs. We’d start out at one or two in the morning and wander way out to the East End and hang out with guys in caps with Cockney accents. We’d visit the night people in rough little places, having tea. We both loved the street life, street food, street activity, street manners and rituals”—the places and things Leonard had been drawn to in Montreal. “If you want to find Leonard,” says Bacal, “go to some little coffee bar or hole in the wall. Once he finds a place, that’s where he’ll go, every night. He wasn’t interested in what was ‘happening’; he was interested in finding out what lay underneath it.”
Through her broadcast work Bacal became familiar with London’s West Indian community and started to frequent a cellar club on Wardour Street in Soho, the Flamingo. On Friday nights, after hours, it transformed into a club-within-a-club called the All-Nighter. It began at midnight, although anybody who was anybody knew it did not get going until two A.M. “It was, theoretically, a very dodgy place but it was actually magical,” said Bacal. “There was so much weed in the air it was like walking into a painting of smoke.” She and Harold Pascal, another of the Montreal set who was living in London, would go there most Friday nights. The music was good—calypso and white R & B–jazz acts like Zoot Money and Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames—and the crowd was fascinating. Quite unusually for the time, it was 50 percent black—Afro-Caribbeans and a handful of African-American GIs; the white half was made up of mobsters, hookers and hipsters.
On the first night Leonard went with Nancy to the club, there was a knife fight. “Somebody called the law. Everyone was stoned and dancing,” she recalls, and then the police arrived. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been to any of these sleazy joints, but you don’t want to be there when they turn on the lights. Suddenly all the faces were white. The incident didn’t last long, but we were all pretty shook up. I was worried about Leonard, but he was cool.” Leonard loved the place. After a subsequent visit, Leonard wrote to his sister, Esther, saying, “It’s the first time I’ve really enjoyed dancing. I sometimes even forget I belong to an inferior race. The Twist is the greatest ritual since circumcision—and there you can choose between the genius of two cultures. Myself I prefer the Twist.”1
With the first draft of his novel finished, Leonard turned his attention to his second volume of poems. He had gathered the poems for The Spice-Box of Earth the year before and, at Irving Layton’s recommendation, had given it to the Canadian publisher McClelland & Stewart. Literally. Driving to Toronto with a friend, Leonard handed his manuscript to Jack McClelland in person. McClelland had taken over his father’s company in 1946 at the age of twenty-four and was, according to the writer Margaret Atwood, “a pioneer in Canadian publishing, at a time when many Canadians did not believe they had a literature, or if they did have one, it wasn’t very good or interesting.”2 So impressed was McClelland by Leonard that he accepted his book on the spot.
Poets are not especially known for their salesman skills, but Leonard worked his book like a pro. He even instructed the publisher how it should be packaged and marketed. Instead of the usual slim hardback that poetry tended to come in—which was nice for pressing flowers in but expensive to print and therefore to buy—his should be a cheap colorful paperback, said Leonard, and he offered to design it. “I want an audience,” he wrote in a letter to McClelland. “I am not interested in the Academy.” He wanted to make his work accessible to “inner-directed adolescents, lovers in all degrees of anguish, disappointed Platonists, pornography-peepers, hair-handed monks and Popists, French-Canadian intellectuals, unpublished writers, curious musicians etc., all that holy following of my Art.”3 In all, a pretty astute, and remarkably enduring, inventory of his fan base.
Leonard was sent a list of revisions and edits and given a tentative publication date of March 1960, but the date passed.
In the same month, Leonard was in the East End of London, walking to the tube s
tation from the dental surgery where Mrs. Pullman worked, where he had just had a wisdom tooth pulled. It was raining—Leonard would say “it rained almost every day in London,” which sounds about right—but, that day, it rained even more heavily than usual, that cold, sideways, winter rain in which England specializes. He took shelter in a nearby building, which turned out to be a branch of the Bank of Greece. Leonard could not fail to notice that the teller wore a pair of sunglasses and had a tan. The man told Leonard that he was Greek and had recently been home; the weather, he said, was lovely there at this time of year.
There was nothing to keep Leonard in London. He had no project to complete or promote, which left him not only free but also vulnerable to the depression that the short, dark days of a London winter are so good at inducing. On his application for the Canada Council grant, Leonard had said he would go to all the old capitals—Athens, Jerusalem and Rome, as well as London. On Hampstead High Street he stopped in at a travel agent’s and bought tickets to Israel and Greece.
Survival, in discussions of the mystery and motivations of Leonard Cohen, has tended to be left in the corner clutching an empty dance card while writers head for the more alluring sex, God and depression and haul them around the dance floor. There is no argument that between them these three have been a driving force in his life and work. But what served Leonard best was his survival instinct. Leonard had an instinct for self-protection that not all writers—or lovers, or depressives, or spiritual seekers, or any of those creative types that nature or nurture made raw and sensitive—possess. Leonard was a lover, but when it comes to survival he was also a fighter.
When Leonard’s father died, what the nine-year-old boy wanted to keep of his was a knife and a service revolver; when Leonard was fourteen, the first story of his ever published (in his high school yearbook) bore the title “Kill or be Killed.” Yes, young boys like guns and gangsters, and small Jewish boys who grow up during World War II have even more layers to add to the general chromosomal bias, but Leonard definitely has a fighting spirit. Asked who his hero was, he rattled off the names of spiritual leaders and poets—Roshi, Ramesh Balsekar, Lorca, Yeats—adding the caveat, “I admire many men and women but it’s the designation ‘hero’ that I have difficulty with, because that implies some kind of reverence that is somewhat alien to my nature.” But the following day Leonard sent an e-mail, having thought about the question. His message said, without qualification this time:
i forgot
my hero is muhammad ali
as they say about the Timex in their ads
takes a lickin’
keeps on tickin’ 4
Leonard still is a fighter. Some years after this correspondence, when Leonard, in his seventies, discovered that his former manager had bled his retirement account dry, he dusted off his suit, put on his hat and set off around the world to win his fortune back. But the gods conspired to give him an instinct for flight as well as fight. When it came to survival, Leonard would often turn to the first of the two for, as he put it, “the health of my soul.”5
Leonard was not entirely joking when he spoke about having had a “messianic” childhood. From an early age he had a strong sense that he was going to do something special and an expectation that he would “grow into manhood leading other men.”6 He had also known from an early age that he would be a writer—a serious writer. Of all the trades a sensitive and depressive man could follow, few are more hazardous than being a serious writer. Acting? Actors are on the front line, yes, but most of the damage occurs during auditions. Once they land a role, they have a mask to hide behind. But writing is about uncovering. “Not I, but the poet discovered the unconscious,” said Freud, through what an analyst’s analyst would recognize as the gritted teeth of envy. It’s about allowing the mind to be as noisy and chaotic as it wants and leaping into the dark depths of this pandemonium in the hope of surfacing with something ordered and beautiful. The life of a serious writer requires long periods of solitary confinement; the life of a writer as serious, meticulous, self-critical and liable to depression as Leonard means solitary confinement in one’s own personal Turkish prison, cornered by black dogs.
During childhood he had the comfort and kindness of women for protection. In his youth he had come to depend on having a community of like-minded, mostly (but not exclusively) male friends. He had no problem with leaving one place and moving to another—he traveled light and wasted little time on sentimentality. But wherever he lived, he liked to surround himself with a clan of fellow-thinkers: people who could hold a conversation, could hold a drink and knew how to hold their silence when he needed to be left alone to write. Athens couldn’t provide that. But an acquaintance in London, Jacob Rothschild (the future fourth Baron Rothschild, young scion of a celebrated Jewish banking family), whom he had met at a party, had talked about a small Greek island named Hydra. Rothschild’s mother, Barbara Hutchinson, was about to be remarried to a celebrated Greek painter named Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas, who had a mansion there. Rothschild suggested that Leonard go and visit them. The island’s small population included a colony of artists and writers from around the globe. Henry Miller had lived there at the start of World War II and written in The Colossus of Maroussi about its “wild and naked perfection.”
After leaving London, Leonard stopped first in Jerusalem. It was his first time in Israel. By day he toured the ancient sites and at night he sat in the Café Kasit, the haunt of “everybody that thought they were a writer.”7 Here he met the Israeli poet Natan Zach, who invited him to stay at his house. After a few days, Leonard took a plane to Athens. He stayed in the city one day, during which he saw the Acropolis. In the evening he took a cab to Piraeus and checked into a hotel down by the docks. Early the next morning, Leonard boarded a ferry to Hydra. In 1960, before they started using hydrofoils, it was a five-hour journey. But there was a bar on board. Leonard took his drink up on deck and sat in the sun, staring out at the rumpled blue sheet of sea, the smooth blue blanket of sky, as the ferry chugged slowly past the islands scattered like a broken necklace across the Aegean.
As soon as he set eyes on Hydra, in the distance, before the ferry even entered the port, Leonard liked it. Everything about it looked right: the natural, horseshoe-shaped harbor, the whitewashed buildings on the steep hills surrounding it. When he took off his sunglasses and squinted into the sun, the island looked like a Greek amphitheater, its houses like white-clad elders sitting upright in the tiers. The doors of the houses all faced down to the port, which was the stage on which a very ordinary drama unfolded: boats bobbing lazily on the water, cats sleeping on the rocks, young men unloading the day’s catch of fish and sponges, old men tanned like leather sitting outside the bars arguing and talking. When Leonard walked through the town, he noticed that there were no cars. Instead there were donkeys, with a basket hung on either side, lumbering up and down the steep cobblestone streets between the port and the Monastery of the Prophet Elijah. It might have been an illustration from a children’s Bible.
The place appeared to have been organized according to some ancient ideal of harmony, symmetry and simplicity. The island had just one real town, which was named, simply, Hydra Town. Its inhabitants had come to a tacit decision that just two basic colors would suffice—blue (the sea and the sky) and white (the houses, the sails and the seagulls circling over the fishing boats). “I really did feel I’d come home,” Leonard said later. “I felt the village life was familiar, although I’d had no experience with village life.”8 What might have also given Hydra its feeling of familiarity was that it was the nearest thing Leonard had experienced to the utopia he and Mort used to discuss as boys in urban Montreal. It was sunny and warm and it was populated by writers, artists and thinkers from around the world.
The village chiefs of the expat community were George Johnston and Charmian Clift. Johnston, forty-eight years old, was a handsome Australian journalist who had been a war correspondent
during World War II. Charmian, thirty-seven, also a journalist, was his attractive second wife. Both had written books and wanted to devote themselves to writing full-time. Since they had two children (a third arrived later), this necessitated finding a place to live where life was cheap but congenial. In 1954 they discovered Hydra. The couple were great self-mythologizers and natural leaders. They held court at Katsikas, a grocery store on the waterfront whose back room, with perfect Hydran simplicity, doubled as a small café and bar. The handful of tables outside overlooking the water made the ideal spot for the expats to gather and wait for the ferry, which arrived at noon, bringing the mail—all of them seemed to be waiting for a check—and a new batch of people, to watch, to talk to, or to take to bed. On a small island with few telephones and little electricity, therefore no television, the ferry provided their news and entertainment, and their contact with the outside world.
Leonard met George and Charmian almost as soon as he arrived. He was not the first young man they had seen walking from the port, carrying a suitcase and a guitar, but they took to him immediately, and he to them. Like Irving and Aviva Layton, George and Charmian were colorful, charismatic and antibourgeois. They had also been doing for years what Leonard had wanted to do, which was live as a writer without the necessity of taking regular work. They had very little money but on Hydra they could get by on it, even with three children to provide for, and the life they were living was by no means impoverished. They lunched on sardines fresh off the boat, washed down with retsina—which old man Katsikas let them put on a tab—and seemed to glow in the warmth and sun. Leonard accepted their invitation to stay the night. The next day they helped him rent one of the many empty houses on the hill and donated a bed, a chair and table and some pots and pans.
I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen Page 8