Although he had been brought up with so much, Leonard was happy with very little. He thrived in the Mediterranean climate. Every morning he would rise with the sun, just as the local workmen did, and start his work. After a few hours’ writing he would walk down the narrow, winding streets, a towel flung over one shoulder, to swim in the sea. While the sun dried his hair, he walked to the market to buy fresh fruit and vegetables and climbed back up the hill. It was cool inside the old house. He would sit writing at George and Charmian’s wooden table until it was too dark to see by the kerosene lamps and candles. At night he walked back again to the port, where there was always someone to talk to.
The ritual, routine and sparsity of this life satisfied him immensely. It felt monastic somehow, except this was a monk with benefits; the Hydra arts colony had beaten the hippies to free love by half a decade. Leonard was also a monk who observed the Sabbath. On Friday nights he would light the candles and on Saturday, instead of working, he would put on his white suit and go down to the port to have coffee.
One afternoon, toward the end of the long, hot summer, a letter arrived by ferry for Leonard. It told him that his grandmother had died, leaving him $1,500. He already knew what he would do with it. On September 27, 1960, days after his twenty-sixth birthday, Leonard bought a house on Hydra. It was plain and white, three stories high, two hundred years old, one of a cluster of buildings on the saddle between Hydra Town and the next little village, Kamini. It was a quiet spot, if not entirely private—if he leaned out of the window he could almost touch the house across the alley, and he shared his garden wall with the neighbor next door. The house had no electricity, nor even plumbing—a cistern filled in spring when the rains came, and when that ran out he had to wait for the old man who came past his house every few days with a donkey weighted on both sides with containers of water. But the house had thick white walls that kept heat out in summer, a fireplace for the winter and a large terrace where Leonard smoked, birds sang and cats skulked in the hope that one might fall from its perch. A priest came and blessed the house, holding a burning candle above the front door and making a black cross in soot. An elderly neighbor, Kiria Sophia, came in early every morning to wash the dishes, sweep the floors, do his laundry, look after him. Leonard’s new home gave him the pure pleasure of a child.
One of the things I wanted to mention and which a lot of people haven’t caught,” says Steve Sanfield, a longtime close friend of Leonard, “is really how important those Greece years and the Greek sensibility were to Leonard and his development and the things he carries with him. Leonard likes Greek music and Greek food, he speaks Greek pretty well for a foreigner, and there’s no rushing with Leonard, it’s, ‘Well, let’s have a cup of coffee and we’ll talk about it.’ He and I both carry komboloi—Greek worry beads; only Greek men do that. The beads have nothing to do with religion at all—in fact one of the Ancient Greek meanings of the word is ‘wisdom beads,’ indicating that men once used them to meditate and contemplate.”
Sanfield’s friendship with Leonard began fifty years ago. He is the “Steve” described in Leonard’s poem “I See You on a Greek Mattress” (from the 1966 book Parasites of Heaven), sitting in Leonard’s house on Hydra, smoking hash and throwing the I Ching, and the “great haiku master” named in Leonard’s poem “Other Writers” (from the 2006 collection Book of Longing). He is also the man who would introduce Leonard to his Zen master, Roshi Joshu Sasaki. In 1961, when Sanfield boarded a ferry in Athens and, on a whim, alighted at Hydra, he was “a young poet seeking adventure.” Like Leonard, he “fell in love” with the place. The people he met in the bar at the port told him, “Wait until you meet Leonard Cohen, you’re both young Jewish poets, you’ll like him.” He did.
Sanfield’s memories of Hydra are of light, sun, camaraderie, the voluptuous simplicity of life and the special energy that emanated from its community of artists and seekers. It was a small community, around fifty in number, although people would come and go. The mainstays, the Johnstons, he says, “were vital in all of our lives. They fought a lot, they sought revenge on each other a lot with their sexuality, and things got very complicated, but they were really the center of foreign life in the port.” Among the other residents were Anthony Kingsmill, a British painter, raconteur, and bon vivant, to whom Leonard became close; Gordon Merrick, a former Broadway actor and reporter whose first novel, The Strumpet Wind, about a gay American spy, was published in 1947; Dr. Sheldon Cholst, an American poet, artist, radical and psychiatrist who set his flag somewhere between Timothy Leary and R. D. Laing; and a young Swedish author named Göran Tunström, who was writing his first novel and was the model for the character Lorenzo in Axel Jensen’s 1961 novel Joacim (although many still believe Lorenzo was based on Leonard).
“A lot of people came through in those early years,” says Sanfield, “like Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso”—the latter of whom was living on the neighboring island, coaching a softball team. Leonard met Ginsberg on a trip to Athens. Leonard was drinking a coffee in Saint Agnes Square when he spotted the poet at another table. “I went up to him, asked him if he was indeed Allen Ginsberg, and he came over and sat down with me and then he came and stayed in my house on Hydra, and we became friends. He introduced me to Corso,” said Leonard, “and my association with the Beats became a little more intimate.”9
Hydra in the early sixties was, according to Sanfield, “a golden age of artists. We weren’t beatniks, and the hippies hadn’t been invented yet, and we thought of ourselves as kind of international bohemians or travelers, because people came together from all over the world with an artistic intent. There was an atmosphere there that was very exciting and I think touched everyone who was there. There were revolutions going on in literature, and there was the sexual revolution, which we thought we’d won and we probably lost, and a number of us—George Lialios, Leonard and myself—began to examine different spiritual paths like Tibetan Buddhism and the I Ching.”
George Lialios was a significant figure in Leonard’s life on the island. Nine years older than Leonard, with a thick black mustache, bushy beard and bright, piercing eyes, he owned a seventeen-room mansion at the top of the hill. “He was a remarkable man and a mysterious man,” says Sanfield, by various people’s accounts a philosopher, a musician, a semiaristocrat and an intellectual. Lialios himself says that he was “from Patras, born in Munich, both parents Greek, the family returned to Athens from Germany in 1935. Studied law, did three years’ military service during the so-called civil war, then followed studies of music and composition in Vienna, 1951–1960. An inclination toward philosophy is correct.” His Greek father had been a composer and a diplomat who was in Germany during World War II. George was fluent in Greek as well as in German and English. Leonard spent many evenings on Hydra with Lialios, mostly at Leonard’s house. Sometimes they would have deep conversations. Often they did not talk at all. They would sit together in silence in Leonard’s barely furnished, white-walled room, much as Leonard would with Roshi in years to come.
Another expat islander who played a part in Leonard’s life was Axel Jensen. A lean, intense Norwegian writer in his late twenties, he had already published three novels, one of which was made into a movie. The house where Jensen lived with his wife, Marianne, and their young child, also named Axel, was at the top of Leonard’s hill. Sanfield stayed in the Jensens’ house when he first arrived on Hydra; the family had rented it out while they were away. Its living room was carved out of the rock of the hillside. There were copies of the I Ching and The Tibetan Book of the Dead on the bookshelves.
When Marianne came back to the island, her husband was not with her. “She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever known,” says Sanfield. “I was stunned by her beauty and so was everyone else.” Leonard included. “She just glowed,” said Sanfield, “this Scandinavian goddess with this little blond-haired boy, and Leonard was this dark Jewish guy. The contrast was striking.”
Leonard had fallen in love with Hydra from the moment he saw it. It was a place, he said, where “everything you saw was beautiful, every corner, every lamp, everything you touched, everything.” The same thing happened when he first saw Marianne. “Marianne,” he wrote in a letter to Irving Layton, “is perfect.”10
It must be very hard to be famous. Everybody wants a bit of you,” Marianne Ihlen says with a sigh. There were muses before Marianne in Leonard’s poetry and song and there have been muses since, but if there were a contest, the winner, certainly the people’s choice, would be Marianne. Only two of Leonard’s nonmusician lovers have had their photographs on his album sleeves and Marianne was the first. On the back of the naked, intimate Songs from a Room, Leonard’s second album, there she sat, in a plain white room, at his simple wooden writing table, her fingers brushing his typewriter, her head turned to smile shyly at the camera and wearing nothing but a small white towel. For many of the young people seeing that picture for the first time in 1969—a troubled year, particularly for young people—it captured a moment and a need and longing that has gnawed at them ever since.
Marianne at seventy-five years old has a kind, round face, deeply etched with lines. Like Leonard, she does not enjoy talking about herself but is too considerate to say no; one might imagine that is how she ended up with a Norwegian-language book about her life with Leonard, after agreeing to do an interview for a radio documentary.* She is as modest and apologetic about her English, which is very good, as she once was about her looks. Despite having been a model, she could never understand why Leonard would say she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever met. Fifty-three years before, “twenty-two, blond, young, naïve and in love,” to the chagrin of her traditional Oslo family she had run off with Jensen, traveled around Europe, bought an old Volkswagen in Germany and driven it to Athens. An old woman invited them to stay and let them leave their car in her overgrown garden while they took a trip around the islands. On the ferry they met a fat, handsome Greek named Papas who lived in California, where he had a candy and cookie company that bore his name. They told him they were looking for an island. “He told us to get off at the first stop; it was Hydra.”
It was mid-December, cold and raining hard. There was one café open at the port and they ran for it. It was neon-lit inside and warmed by a stove in the middle of the room. As they sat shivering beside it, a Greek man who spoke a little English came over. He told them of another foreign couple living on the island—George Johnston and Charmian Clift—and offered to take them to their house. And so it all began. Axel and Marianne rented a small house—no electricity, outside toilet—and stayed, Axel writing, Marianne taking care of him. When the season changed, Hydra came alive with visitors, and the two poor, young, beautiful Norwegians found themselves invited to cocktail parties in the mansions of the rich; Marianne recalls, “One of the first people that we met was Aristotle Onassis.” During their time on Hydra, people of every kind drifted by. “There were couples, writers, famous people, homosexuals, people with lots of money who didn’t have to work, young people on their way to India and coming from India, people running away from something or searching for something.” And there was Leonard.
Much had happened in Marianne’s life in the three years between her arrival on Hydra and Leonard’s. She and Axel had broken up, made up, then married. With the advance for his third novel, they bought an old white house on top of the hill at the end of the Road to the Wells. When the rains came, the street became a river that rushed like rapids over the cobblestones down to the sea. Her life with Axel was turbulent. The locals talked about Axel’s heavy drinking, how when he was drunk he would climb up the statue in the middle of the port and dive from the top, headfirst. Marianne, they said, was a hippie and an idealist. She was also pregnant. She went back to Oslo to give birth. When she returned to Hydra with their first child, a boy they named for her husband, she found Axel packing, getting ready to leave with an American woman he told Marianne he had fallen in love with. In the midst of all this, Leonard showed up.
She was shopping at Katsikas’s when a man in the doorway said, “Will you come and join us? We’re sitting outside.” She could not see who it was—he had the sun behind him—but it was a voice, she says, that “somehow leaves no doubt what he means. It was direct and calm, honest and serious, but at the same time a fantastic sense of humor.” She came out to find the man sitting at a table with George and Charmian, waiting for the boat with the mail. He was dressed in khaki trousers and a faded green shirt, “army colors,” and the cheap brown sneakers they sold in Greece. “He looked like a gentleman, old-fashioned—but we were both old-fashioned,” says Marianne. When she looked at his eyes, she knew she “had met someone very special. My grandmother, who I grew up with during the war, said to me, ‘You are going to meet a man who speaks with a tongue of gold, Marianne.’ At that moment she was right.”
They did not become lovers immediately. “Though I loved him from the moment we met, it was a beautiful, slow movie.” They started meeting in the daytime, Leonard, Marianne and little Axel, to go to the beach. Then they would walk back to Leonard’s house, which was much closer than her own, for lunch and a nap. While Marianne and the baby slept, Leonard would sit watching them, their bodies sunburned, their hair white as bone. Sometimes he would read her his poems. In October, Marianne told Leonard that she was going back to Oslo; her divorce proceedings were under way. Leonard told her he would go with her. The three took the ferry to Athens and picked up her car, and Leonard drove them from Athens to Oslo, more than two thousand miles. They stopped off in Paris for a few days en route. Marianne remembers feeling like she was cracking up. Leonard, in turn, recalled “a feeling I think I’ve tried to re-create hundreds of times, unsuccessfully; just that feeling of being grown up, with somebody beautiful that you’re happy to be beside, and all the world is in front of you, where your body is suntanned and you’re going to get on a boat.”11
From Oslo, Leonard flew to Montreal. If he was to stay on his Greek island, cheap as it was, he needed more money. From his rented apartment on Mountain Street he wrote to Marianne telling her of all his schemes. He had applied for another grant from the Canada Council and was confident of getting it. He was also “working very hard,” he said, on some TV scripts with Irving Layton. “Our collaboration is perfect. We want to turn the medium into a real art form. If we begin selling them, and I think we will, there will be a lot of money. And once we make our contacts,” he wrote, “we can write the plays anywhere.” They’d talked about writing years ago, Leonard and Layton, when they sat on the couch with Aviva, watching TV, improvising their own dialogue and scribbling it down on yellow legal pads. Layton was in much the same bind as Leonard, having been fired from his teaching job for one revolutionary comment too far, so they were pursuing the project with particular enthusiasm. “Irving and I think that with three months of intense work we can make enough to last us at least a year. That gives us nine months for pure poetry,” Leonard wrote. As for his second book of poetry, The Spice-Box of Earth, that would be published in the spring; the publicity might help them sell the screenplays. There would be a book tour too, he said, and he wanted Marianne to come with him. “Mahalia Jackson is on the record player, I’m right there with her, flying with you in that glory, pulling away the shrouds from the sun, making music out of everything.” Man, he wrote a mean letter. The telegram he sent was shorter but equally effective: “Have a flat. All I need is my woman and her child.” Marianne packed two suitcases and flew with little Axel to Montreal.12
Six
Enough of Fallen Heroes
It was not easy for Marianne in Montreal. But then, it had not been too easy anywhere for Marianne after one Axel arrived and the other Axel left. Marianne loved Leonard and loved Montreal and got along well with his mother, whom she describes as “a beautiful, strong woman, who was sweet to me and the child.” But she knew no one in Montreal and had nothing to do, be
sides look after her son. Leonard on the other hand seemed to know everyone and had plenty to do. He and Irving Layton had completed two TV plays, Enough of Fallen Heroes and Lights on the Black Water (later retitled Light on Dark Water), which they submitted along with a play Leonard had written alone, titled Trade. They waited expectantly for the dollars and praise they were convinced would arrive by return of post. Nothing came.
Beauty at Close Quarters, the novel Leonard had written in London, fared little better. The editors at McClelland & Stewart, as Leonard reported in a letter he sent the writer and critic Desmond Pacey, judged it “disgusting,” “tedious” and “a protracted love-affair with himself.”1 Jack McClelland appeared to be confused as to what his golden-boy poet had sent him; was it an autobiography? Leonard answered that everything in the book had happened in real life bar one incident (the death of the boy at the summer camp in part 2), but that the protagonist, Lawrence Breavman, wasn’t Leonard. He and Breavman “did a lot of the same things,” he wrote, “but we reacted differently to them and so we became different men.”2 McClelland rejected the novel but remained enthusiastic about Leonard’s second volume of poetry. The Spice-Box of Earth had been scheduled for publication in the spring of 1961. On March 30, the galleys were at the publisher’s, ready for Leonard to look at. Only Leonard wasn’t in Canada, he was in Miami, boarding a plane to Havana.
I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen Page 9