It is no great surprise that Leonard should have wanted to see Cuba. Lorca, his favorite poet, had spent three months there when the country was America’s playground, calling it “a paradise” and extolling its virtues and vices.3 The recent revolution had made it even more irresistible to Leonard, with his interest in socialism, war and utopias. What was puzzling about the trip was the timing. Leonard had gone to Montreal to make money, not spend it; after a two-year wait his second book was at last coming out, with its attendant publicity; and he was leaving behind the woman who had only recently, at his behest, moved continents to be with him. It was a dangerous time to visit too. Relations between America and Cuba had been tense since Castro’s forces ousted the U.S.-friendly Batista government. When Leonard checked into his room in the Hotel Siboney in Havana, Castro and President Kennedy were in a face-off. There was talk of war. But this only added to the attraction.
So, you went there looking for a war?
“Yes, I did. Just because of the sense of cowardice that drives people to contradict their own deepest understanding of their own natures, they put themselves in dangerous situations.”
As a test?
“A kind of test, and hoping for some kind of contradiction about your own deepest conviction.”
Sounds like a male thing.
“Yeah. A stupid male treat.”
In Havana Leonard dressed as a revolutionary soldier: baggy, mud-green trousers; khaki shirt; beret. In tribute to Che Guevara, he grew a beard. It was an incongruous look. In one of four poems Leonard wrote in Cuba, he described himself, with some justification, as the sole tourist in Havana (“The Only Tourist in Havana Turns His Thoughts Homeward” in Flowers for Hitler). In the song he wrote twelve years later about his Cuban experiences, “Field Commander Cohen,” he described himself, with no justification whatever, as
our most important spy
wounded in the line of duty
parachuting acid into diplomatic cocktail parties.
He also began work on a new novel, to which he gave the title The Famous Havana Diary.
Two years into the new regime, the city was already fraying at the edges. There were broken windows in the modern offices of downtown Havana and cracks in the concrete through which weeds grew. The grand colonial houses where millionaires once lived were now home to peasants whose goats chewed lazily at brown stubble recognizable only to professional botanists as having once been lawn. But despite Castro’s having overturned the moneylenders’ tables, closed the casinos, rounded up the hookers and sent them off for retraining, there was still a nightlife in Havana and plenty of women to be found. Leonard found them. He drank into the early hours of the morning at La Bodeguita del Medio, one of Hemingway’s favorite bars, and, following his routine in Montreal, New York and London, wandered the alleys of the old town, a notebook in one pocket, a hunting knife in the other.
Leonard spoke in an interview a year later of his “deep interest in violence.” “I was very interested in what it really meant for a man to carry arms and kill other men,” he said, “and how attracted I was exactly to that process. That’s getting close to the truth. The real truth is I wanted to kill or be killed.”4 There was not much violence or killing to be had, but he did succeed in getting arrested by a small troop of armed Cuban soldiers on a day trip to the seaside town of Varadero. Dressed in his army fatigues, he was taken for part of an American invasion force. After finally persuading them of his Canadian-ness, his socialist credentials and his support for Cuban independence, he posed smiling with two of his captors for a photograph, which they gave him as a souvenir.
Like a good tourist, Leonard wrote postcards. In the card he sent Jack McClelland, he joked about how good it would be for publicity if he should be killed in Cuba. He sent three cards to Irving Layton, including one with a picture of Munch’s The Scream and a quip about another man who had fled from a woman, screaming. If this was a reference to himself and Marianne it was a curious one, since it was he who had asked her to come to Montreal, and their relationship was not over. But if Leonard sometimes appeared to court domesticity, he also ran from it. It was so much more exquisite to long for somebody than to have her there beside him.
On April 15 a group of eight Cubans exiled in the U.S. led bomber raids on three Cuban airfields. A couple of days later, late at night, writing at the table beside the window in the room of his Havana hotel, Leonard was surprised by a knock at the door. In the corridor was a man wearing a dark suit. He told Leonard that his “presence was urgently requested at the Canadian embassy.”5 Leonard, still in his military khakis, accompanied the official; finally, Field Commander Cohen was being called to action.
At the embassy, Leonard was led into the vice consul’s office. The vice consul did not seem impressed to see him. He told Leonard, “Your mother’s very worried about you.”6 Having heard the reports of the bomb attacks and talk of war, Masha got on the phone to a cousin, a Canadian senator, and urged him to call the embassy in Cuba and have them track Leonard down and send him home. Of all the reasons for this summons that had gone through Leonard’s mind on the drive to the embassy, this was not one of them. At twenty-six years old he was long past the age of having his mother tug at his leash. At the same time he was rather on the old side for swashbuckling and dressing up. It was understandable that Masha would be concerned; war held little romance for her, since she had witnessed one and nursed one wounded veteran, Leonard’s father. But Leonard chose to stay.
He was in Havana on the day of the Bay of Pigs invasion, April 17, 1961. From his hotel room he could hear antiaircraft fire and see troops running through the streets. He did not leave the city until April 26. Although he admired the revolutionaries and had seen many happy Cubans, he had also seen the long lines of people waiting anxiously outside police headquarters, trying to get news of relatives who had been rounded up by Castro’s forces and imprisoned, artists and writers among them. Nothing was straightforward; “I felt that I was defending the island against an American invasion and planning that invasion at the same time,” he said. “I was behind everything. I couldn’t see the megalomania that made up my perspective at that time.”7 He admitted that he had “no faith” in his political opinions and that “they changed often,” saying, “I was never really passionate about my opinions even back then.” He was attracted to Communist ideas, but in much the same way as he was “attracted to the messianic ideas in the Bible,” he said: “the belief in a human brotherhood, in a compassionate society, in people who lived for something more than their own guilt.” He had gone to Cuba feeling “that the whole world was functioning for the benefit of [his] personal observation and education.”8 Having observed, it was time to leave.
José Martí Airport swarmed with foreign nationals trying to get a seat on one of the few planes out of Havana. Leonard joined one long queue after another, finally procuring a ticket. When he stood in the last line at the departure gate, he heard his name called. He was wanted at the security desk. Officials had gone through his bag and found the photograph in which he posed with the revolutionary soldiers. With his black hair and sun-darkened skin, perhaps they thought he might have been a Cuban trying to escape. Leonard was taken to a back room and left in the charge of a teenage guard with a rifle. Leonard tried, unsuccessfully, to engage the young man in conversation. He told him he was Canadian and pleaded his case, but the boy just looked bored—the kind of boredom that might possibly be alleviated by shooting somebody. So Leonard sat quietly and stared out of the window at the plane he was supposed to be on. All of a sudden a tussle broke out on the runway. Armed guards rushed out onto the tarmac, including Leonard’s, who in his enthusiasm failed to lock the door behind him. Leonard slipped out. Walking as calmly as he could, he headed for the departure gate and, unchallenged, went outside and up the steps into the plane.
Back in Canada, and back in civilian clothes, Leonard spent barely a week i
n Montreal before taking off again, this time for Toronto. He and Irving Layton had been invited to read at the Canadian Conference of the Arts on May 4. A clean-shaven Leonard read from The Spice-Box of Earth. Three weeks later, at 599 Belmont Avenue, the book was launched with a party over which Masha presided—a peace offering to her from Leonard, perhaps, for the Cuban escapade.
This was not the budget paperback Leonard had originally proposed to Jack McClelland but an elegant hardback, containing eighty-eight poems. Six of them dated back to Leonard’s Columbia University days and had had their first printing in his literary magazine, The Phoenix. The book was dedicated jointly to the memory of his maternal grandfather, Rabbi Kline, and his paternal grandmother, Mrs. Lyon Cohen. On the dust jacket were comments from the literary critic H. N. Frye and the poet Douglas Lochhead, the first commenting that “his outstanding poetic quality, so far, is a gift for macabre ballad reminding one of Auden, but thoroughly original, in which the chronicles of tabloids are celebrated in the limpid rhythms of folksong,” and the second describing Leonard’s poetry as “strong, intense and masculine,” with “a brawling spirit and energy.” There was also a paragraph about Leonard that appeared to have been written by Leonard himself in the third person. It painted a romantic picture of the author, mentioning his trip to Cuba and the year he spent writing on a Greek island. He quoted himself saying, in his familiar partly humorous, partly truthful fashion, “I shouldn’t be in Canada at all. I belong beside the Mediterranean. My ancestors made a terrible mistake. But I have to keep coming back to Montreal to renew my neurotic affiliations.”9 Clearly though, his roots were more important to him than that. He ended with an unexpected attack on the modern buildings that were taking over his favorite streets in Montreal. This might well have been ironic; Leonard knew his old neighborhood had more serious things to worry about, now that its grand residences had become the target of militant French separatists and mailbox bombs. But Leonard was genuinely fond of the old Victorian houses, and if, for now at least, he seemed to have soured on change, it was understandable so soon after his experience in Havana, where he saw for himself that life post-revolution was no less desperate than it had been before.
The position Leonard occupied on the conservative-modernist scale was an ambiguous one. A CBC TV presenter, curious to know where he thought he stood as a writer, asked Leonard if he considered himself a “modern poet.” His answer was deflective. “I always describe myself as a writer rather than a poet, and the fact that the lines I write don’t come to the end of the page doesn’t qualify me as a poet. I think the term ‘poet’ is a very exalted term and should be applied to a man at the end of his work. When you look back over the body of his work and he has written poetry,” Leonard said, “then let the verdict be that he’s a poet.”
The Spice-Box of Earth is the work of a major poet, profound, confident and beautifully written. The title makes reference to the ornate wooden box of fragrant spices used in the Jewish ceremony marking the end of the Sabbath and the beginning of the secular week, but this spice box is of earth. The poems dance back and forth across the border between the holy and the worldly, the elevated and the carnal. The opening poem, “A Kite Is a Victim,” presents the poet as a man with some control over the heightened world but whose creative work is also subject to strictures and restraints, just as the kite, though it appears to fly freely, is tethered like a fish on a line. The poet makes a contract in the poem with both God and nature and keeps it throughout the book, which abounds in orchards, parks, rivers, flowers, fish, birds, insects. The killing of a man (“If It Were Spring”) is romanticized through images from nature; “Beneath My Hands” likens Marianne’s small breasts to upturned, fallen sparrows. In “Credo,” the grasshoppers that rise from the spot where a man and his lover have just had sex leads to thoughts on biblical plagues. Sex and spirituality share a bed in several poems. In “Celebration,” the orgasm from oral sex is likened to the gods falling when Samson pulled down their temples.
There are poems about lovers (Georgianna Sherman was the muse for “I Long to Hold Some Lady” and “For Anne,” the latter singled out for praise by critics) and about angels, Solomon’s adulterous wives and a sex doll made for an ancient king (“The Girl Toy”). Irving Layton, Marc Chagall and A. M. Klein are the subjects of other poems; Leonard’s father and uncles appear in “Priests 1957.” The masterful prose poem that ends the book, “Lines from My Grandfather’s Journal,” is one of three about Leonard’s late grandfather. Rabbi Kline was a scholar and mystic, a holy man, a man of conviction; Leonard considered him the ideal Jew, someone who did not struggle with ambiguities as Leonard did. From Leonard’s description of himself in “The Genius” (“For you / I will be a banker Jew . . . / For you / I will be a Broadway Jew,” etc.) he was less sure what kind of Jew he was himself. And yet, in “Lines from My Grandfather’s Journal,” there are passages that might apply to Leonard as much as to his grandfather: “It is strange that even now prayer is my natural language. . . . The black, the loss of sun: it will always frighten me. It will always lead me to experiment. . . . O break down these walls with music. . . . Desolation means no angels to wrestle. . . . Let me never speak casually.”
As in Let Us Compare Mythologies, there are poems that are called “songs.” When Leonard became a songwriter, some of their content would be taken up in actual songs. Fans of his music will recognize King David and the bathing woman seen from the roof in “Before the Story” in the song “Hallelujah,” the “turning into gold” in “Cuckold’s Song” in the song “A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes,” and the poem “As the Mist Leaves No Scar” as the song “True Love Leaves No Traces.”
Critical reaction to The Spice-Box of Earth was for the most part very positive. Louis Dudek, who two years earlier had taken Leonard to task in print, applauded the volume unconditionally. Robert Weaver wrote in the Toronto Daily Star that Leonard was “probably the best young poet in English Canada right now.”10 Arnold Edinborough, reviewing for the Canadian Churchman, concurred, stating that Leonard had taken Irving Layton’s crown as Canada’s leading poet. Stephen Scobie would later describe the book in The Canadian Encyclopedia as the one that established Leonard’s reputation as a lyric poet. There were a few barbs; David Bromige, in Canadian Literature, had problems with “the ornateness of the language” and felt that Leonard should “write less about love, and think about it longer,” but concluded that “the afflictions mentioned here are curable, and once Cohen has freed his sensibility from ‘the thick glove of words’ he will be able to sing as few of his contemporaries can.”11 The first edition of the book sold out in three months.
Looking back, it is curious to see how this mature, important book sat between two incongruously immature incidents. Just prior to publication there had been his adventure in Havana. Postpublication there was a stranger and even riskier episode, involving a junkie Beat novelist, a rescue mission and an opium overdose. Alexander Trocchi was a tall, charismatic Scotsman of Italian descent, nine years Leonard’s senior. In the fifties he had moved into a cheap hotel in Paris, where he founded the literary magazine Merlin, published Sartre and Neruda, wrote pornographic novels and espoused his own Beat-meets-early-hippie interpretation of Situationism. An enthusiast for drugs, he turned his heroin addiction into Dadaist performance art; Trocchi, as Leonard would describe him in verse, was a “public junkie.”
Trocchi moved to New York in 1956, the same year that Leonard went there to attend Columbia University, and took a job working on a tugboat on the Hudson River. He spent his nights, as Leonard did, in Greenwich Village, before taking over a corner of Alphabet City and founding the “Amphetamine University.” “Trocchi and a bunch of his friends painted bits of driftwood, mainly, in psychedelic colors, really bright. With all this high-intensity speed going on, they were painting away in the most minute little detail,” says the British author and sixties counterculture figure Barry Miles. “Allen Ginsberg took Norman Mailer t
here because it was just amazing to see.” In this drab, run-down part of the Lower East Side, it looked like somebody had bombed a rainbow. Trocchi named these artworks “futiques”—antiques of the future. It’s easy to see why Leonard was drawn to Trocchi.
In the spring of 1961, still a cheerleader for heroin, Trocchi gave some to a sixteen-year-old girl. “He wasn’t a dealer; he had this absurd, fairly sick thing that he just loved turning people on to smack,” explains Miles, “but it was a capital offense in New York.” Trocchi was arrested. Facing the possibility of the electric chair, or at least a very long prison term, he went on the run. Nancy Bacal, whom Leonard introduced to Trocchi when she was making a program for CBC about drug use in London, says, “Alex was a strange, brilliant, one-of-a-kind person. Leonard was extremely fond of him.” Evidently so. Leonard arranged to meet Trocchi at the Canadian border, then took him to Montreal and put him up in his apartment. The Scotsman did not like to visit empty-handed; he brought some opium with him and set to cooking it up on Leonard’s stove. When he was done, he handed Leonard the pan with the leftovers. Apparently he left a little too much. When they set off on foot to find a place to eat, Leonard collapsed as they crossed Saint Catherine Street. He had gone blind. Trocchi dragged him out of the way of the passing cars. They sat together on the curb until Leonard came round. He seemed none the worse for wear. For the next four days Leonard played host to Trocchi until someone—some say George Plimpton, others Norman Mailer—came up with false papers for Trocchi to travel by ship from Montreal to Scotland. Alighting in Aberdeen, Trocchi made his way to London, where he registered as a heroin addict with the National Health Service and obtained his drug legally.
I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen Page 10