In his poem “Alexander Trocchi, Public Junkie, Priez Pour Nous,” which would appear in Leonard’s third book of poetry, Flowers for Hitler, Leonard wrote of the outlaw he helped rescue,
Who is purer
more simple than you? . . .
I’m apt to loaf
in a coma of newspapers . . .
I abandon plans for bloodshed in Canada. . . .
You are at work
in the bathrooms of the city
changing the Law . . .
Your purity drives me to work.
I must get back to lust and microscopes
The Spice-Box of Earth, despite its excellence and acclaim, failed to win the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry. According to Irving Layton, this hurt Leonard; whatever else might not work out the way he might like, Leonard could at least rely on being the darling of the Canadian poetry world. Then the Canada Council came through like the cavalry with a grant of $1,000. In August 1961, Leonard was back in Greece, writing.
“It was a good place to work,” says Mort Rosengarten, who stayed with Leonard on Hydra for two months. “It was very special—no electricity, no telephone, no water. It was beautiful and, back then, very inexpensive, so it was the best place for him to be to write. We had a nice routine. We would go to sleep about three in the morning but we’d get up very early, six A.M., and work till noon. I started drawing—in fact the first time I really started drawing was there; I’d studied sculpture but I’d never drawn or painted—and he also got me a bag of plaster so I made some sculptures. At noon we would go down to the beach and swim, then come back, have lunch at the port, and then we would go up to the house, have a siesta for a couple of hours and then start happy hour. It was very good—a lot of fun and very productive. Leonard worked his ass off. But I couldn’t—I’m sure neither of us could—maintain that schedule.”
Leonard had the assistance, or at least the companionship, of a variety of drugs. He had a particular liking for Maxiton, generically dexamphetamine, a stimulant known outside of pharmaceutical circles as speed. He also had a fondness for its sweet counterpoint Mandrax, a hypnotic sedative, part happy pill, part aphrodisiac, very popular in the UK. They were as handsome a pair of pharmaceuticals as a hardworking writer could wish to meet; better yet, in Europe they could still be bought over the counter. Providing backup was a three-part harmony of hashish, opium and acid (the last of these three still legal at that time in Europe and most of North America).
Mandrax I get, but speed? Your songs don’t sound like they come from a man on amphetamines.
“Well, my processes, mental and physical, are so slow that speed brought me up to the normal tempo.”
And acid and the psychedelics?
“Oh, I looked into it quite thoroughly.”
As in studied or dropped a few?
“Of course. A lot more than a few. Fortunately it upset my system, acid—I credit my poor stomach for preventing me from entering into any serious addiction, although I kept on taking it because the PR for it was so prevalent. I took trip after trip, sitting on my terrace in Greece, waiting to see God, but generally I ended up with a very bad hangover. I have a lot of acid stories, as everyone does. At the side of my house there was a kind of garbage heap that during the spring would sprout thousands of daisies, and I was convinced that I had a special communion with the daisies. It seems they would turn their little yellow faces to me whenever I started singing or addressing them in a tender way. They would all turn toward me and smile.”
Is there a Leonard Cohen acid song or poem?
“My novel Beautiful Loser had a bit of acid in it, and a lot of speed.”
“Did he tell you about the writing on the wall?” asks Marianne. “It was in gold paint and it said, ‘I change, I am the same, I change, I am the same, I change, I am the same, I change, I am the same.’ I think it was beautiful.” Steve Sanfield remembers that they “smoked a lot of hashish and began to use LSD and psychotropic drugs more as a spiritual path than recreational.” There was a variety of paths to follow. Hydra, says Richard Vick, a British poet and musician who lived on the island, “always had the odd shaman who came and went and would be the feature of the winter, who would be into the tarot or sandbox play or something.” The I Ching and The Tibetan Book of the Dead were popular. George Lialios was also investigating Buddhism and Jung.
Leonard continued to fast, as he had in Montreal. The discipline of a week of fasting appealed to him, as did the spiritual element of purging and purification and the altered mental state that it produced. Fasting focused his mind for writing, but there was vanity in it also; it kept his body thin and his face gaunt and serious (although the amphetamines helped with that too). There seemed to be a deep need in Leonard for self-abnegation, self-control and hunger. In Beautiful Losers he would write, “Please make me empty, if I’m empty then I can receive, if I can receive it means it comes from somewhere outside of me, if it comes from outside of me I’m not alone. I cannot bear this loneliness. . . . Please let me be hungry. . . . Tomorrow I begin my fast.” The hunger he wrote of appeared to be all-encompassing. In the Spice-Box of Earth poem “It Swings Jocko,” a bebop song to his prick, he wrote,
I want to be hungry,
hungry for food,
for love, for flesh.
Leonard abstained from eating meat, but he was less restrained when it came to his appetite “for the company of women and the sexual expression of friendship.”12 Sit in a taverna by the harbor in Hydra long enough and you could compile quite a catalog of who slept with whom and marvel at the complexity of it all and that so little blood was spilled. You might hear a tale of a woman, an expat, so distressed when Leonard left on the ferry that she threw herself into the sea after it, even though she could not swim; the man who dived in and rescued her, they say, became her new partner. “Everyone was in everyone else’s bed,” says Richard Vick. Leonard too, although compared to other islanders he was, according to Vick, “very discreet as a whole.” Vick recalls one evening in a bar in Kamini where he was drinking with his then-girlfriend and her female friend. Leonard and Marianne showed up. During the course of the evening it came out that both of the women with Vick knew Leonard intimately. The women, says Vick, told Leonard genially, “You know, Leonard, we were never in love with you.” Leonard replied equally genially, “Well, me too.” “Those were innocent times,” remarks Vick, but they could be difficult for Marianne. “Yes, he was a ladies’ man,” says Marianne. “I could feel my jealousy arousing. Everybody wanted a bit of my man. But he chose to live with me. I had nothing to worry about.” It did not stop her worrying, but she was not one to complain, and she loved him.
In March 1962, two years after he had left London for Hydra, Leonard made the return journey and moved back into Mrs. Pullman’s boardinghouse in Hampstead. He had found a London publisher—Secker & Warburg—for the novel he had begun writing there. At the publishers’ urging, he was in London to revise it. For someone who described the writing process as being “scraped” and “torn from his heart,” the cutting and revising of a manuscript he thought finished was torturous. He wrote to Irving Layton about wielding “a big scalpel” and how he had “torn apart orchestras to arrive at my straight melodic line.”13 The operation was performed with the aid of amphetamines and the pain eased by Mandrax and hashish. But still, it was difficult going back over something he’d been happy with, like being locked in a room with an old love he had once considered beautiful but could now see only her flaws. He wrote to friends about his dark dreams, his panic and depression. The flat gray sky over London did not help. The King William IV pub was not the Bodeguita del Medio, and Hampstead wasn’t Hydra. He wrote a letter to Marianne telling her how much he longed for her. In his novel he wrote how “he needed to be by himself so he could miss her, to get perspective.”
As he had during his last stay in Londo
n, Leonard spent time with Nancy Bacal, who had since moved out of the Pullmans’ house. Through Bacal, he came to know an Afro-Caribbean man from Trinidad named Michael X. Like Trocchi, Michael X was a complex, charismatic and troubled man. “Leonard was fascinated with Michael,” says Nancy Bacal. “Everyone was. He was an intriguing man, all things to all people. He was a poet and rabble-rouser and a charmer and a bullshitter and a lovely, joyous, marvelous man and a potentially dangerous man. And so Leonard was drawn to him, as I was obviously.” Before Nancy and Michael X became lovers in 1962, Michael de Freitas, as he was then named, had been a hustler whose résumé included working as an enforcer for Peter Rachman, a London slum landlord so notoriously iron-fisted that his last name has entered the lexicon.* Over time, Michael de Freitas had amassed his own little empire of music clubs and hookers. But Michael X, the man Bacal lived with, was a civil rights activist, an articulate man and a bridge between London’s black underground and the white proto-hippie community. Together, Michael and Nancy founded the London Black Power Movement. They “churned out pamphlets on Xerox machines aimed to change the world for the better.” On this and subsequent trips to London, Leonard got to know Michael “very well.” He, Nancy, Michael and Robert Hershorn, when he was in London, would spend evenings in Indian restaurants, deep in discussions about art and politics.
“Michael said to me he was completely against arming the blacks in America,” Leonard told a journalist in 1974. “He said it was crazy, they would never be able to resist that machine. They own the bullets and the armaments factories and the guns. So you give the blacks a few guns and have them against armies? He was even against knives. He said we should use our teeth, something everybody has. That was his view of the thing. It was a different kind of subversion. The subversion of real life to implant black fear.”14 Leonard recalled going to Michael’s house and complimenting him on a drink he’d given him. “God, how do you make this?” Leonard asked. Michael replied, “You don’t expect me to tell you. If you know the secrets of our food, you know the secrets of our race and the secrets of our strength.”
As Bacal says, “These were very outrageous times. It was as if everything was and wasn’t political. You never knew how far it would go or how dangerous it would get or how effective it would be or if it was just another flower [power] episode. Michael was one of these people who might say something as a joke but you never really knew what was truth and what wasn’t—which made him fascinating, because we don’t really know in life what is truth and what is fabrication or a dream. He just lived like that, openly. It was very lively.”*
Rather too lively as it turned out. In 1967, when things started getting too dark, Bacal left Michael. That same year, her former partner became the first black person to be imprisoned under Britain’s Race Relations Act—a statute originally passed to protect immigrants from racism—after calling for the shooting of any black woman seen with a white man; Bacal is white. On his release from prison, now using the name Michael Abdul Malik, he founded a Black Power commune run from a storefront in North London, supported and funded by wealthy, often celebrated white people. John Lennon and Yoko Ono donated a bag of their hair to auction. Lennon also paid Michael’s bail when he was arrested for murder. The killing took place in Trinidad, Michael’s home country, where he had returned to start another revolutionary commune. Two of the commune’s members, one the daughter of a British politician, were found hacked to death, reportedly for disobeying Michael’s orders to attack a police station.
In London Michael X had told Leonard—perhaps in jest, perhaps not—that he planned to take over the government of Trinidad. When he did, he said, he would appoint Leonard minister of tourism. An odd office, you might think, to choose for Leonard; he might have made a better minister of arts. “I thought it was rather odd too,” said Bacal, “but for some reason Leonard thought it was marvelous.” In some ways Michael X had him nailed; from Michael’s point of view, as a black man in London involved in revolutionary politics, Leonard was a tourist, just as he had been in Havana. “I remember them shaking hands on it,” said Bacal. “Leonard was very, very pleased and happy, and that was the end of that story.” The end of De Freitas/X/Malik’s story came in 1975, when he was hanged for murder. The Trinidad government ignored pleas for clemency from people in the U.S., UK and Canada, many of them celebrities. They included Angela Davis, Dick Gregory, Judy Collins and Leonard Cohen.
In London in 1962, Leonard continued to turn out pages for Stella Pullman. He stayed in London for as long as he could stand to—four months, which was four weeks more than he managed the first time. He did not quite finish the revisions to his novel, but he was making great inroads into a new book of poetry. By the summer he was back in his house on Hydra, playing host to his mother. Masha still fretted that her boy wasn’t looking after himself, but this time, rather than send in the consulate, she decided to go there and check on him herself. Marianne and little Axel moved in with a friend for the duration of her visit. Although Masha knew Marianne in Montreal and was aware that she was living with Leonard, there was a strong sense that she would not have been comfortable being under the same roof with her son and his Scandinavian, non-Jewish girlfriend.
Forsaken by one woman who loved him—if only temporarily and with his collusion—and engulfed by another, Leonard was unable to write. Masha stayed with him for a month. When she left, Leonard returned gratefully, joyfully, to his life with Marianne, little Axel and his Olivetti, and finished the novel he had variously retitled The Mist Leaves No Scar, No Flesh So Perfect, Fields of Hair, The Perfect Jukebox and, finally, The Favorite Game.
Seven
Please Find Me, I Am Almost 30
A biography is considered complete,” Virginia Woolf wrote in Orlando, “if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand.” True, if not words to warm the heart of a biographer. Autobiographers have it easy; they can stand in front of the mirror and wear any mask they fancy. The Favorite Game is a sort of autobiography, though more accurately it’s a sort of biography. A sort of biography of Leonard Cohen written, and at the same time ghostwritten, by Leonard Cohen. It recounts Leonard’s life from childhood to early manhood through an alter ego named Lawrence Breavman, who looks like Leonard and has (name changes aside) the same family, friends, lovers and accumulation of experiences, to which he may or may not have reacted in the exact same way as Leonard did. Or as Leonard believed, or might like to think he did, autobiography, even sort of autobiography, can be one of the most fictional of genres. First novels often have a good deal of autobiography, but to complicate matters further, The Favorite Game was not technically Leonard’s first novel. Before that there was the unpublished Ballet of Lepers, the unfinished Famous Havana Diary, and all those unpublished or unfinished, to some degree, autobiographical short stories, stacked up like mirror-lined Leonard Cohen Russian dolls reflecting, and deflecting, ad infinitum.
It is a beautifully written book and very funny in a dark, wry, incisive, exuberant, erotic, self-aware, playful, Cohenesque kind of way. It opens with scars: scars of beauty (his lover’s pierced ear), scars of war (his father’s battle wound), the scar from a fight with a boyhood friend over aesthetics (the correct style for a snowman’s clothes). And it ends with a scar, the indelible memory of a game he played as a child and the mark a body leaves in the snow. In between, our self-inflated yet self-mocking, scarred hero chronologically contends with his father’s death, Jewish summer camp, the synagogue, sexual longing, getting laid, and becoming a writer—“blackening pages,” possibly the debut of Leonard’s much-used line to describe his work. Although it irked Leonard that some reviewers dealt with the book as if it were autobiography, not a work of art, and though the contents of the novel might not stand up in court, it still provides useful evidence on Leonard’s life for a biographer tired of digging in the trenches, who fancies a few hours in a comfy chair in the ivory tower.
> The unconventional form in which Leonard arranges his “life” resembles a film more than a novel—more specifically an art-house coming-of-age film and a buddy movie, in which Breavman/Leonard and Krantz/Mort play the “two Talmudists delighting in their dialectic, which was a disguise for love.” Each chapter of his account of how his life led to his becoming the writer of this story is presented as a separate scene, which he scripts, directs, stars in, and at the same time observes from the back row, smiling, while perfectly executing the popcorn-box trick on the girl in the next seat.
The Favorite Game was published in September 1963 in the UK by Secker & Warburg, and in the U.S. the following year by Viking. Reviews on both sides of the Atlantic were positive. The U.S. Saturday Review described it as “interior-picaresque, extraordinarily rich in language, sensibility and humour.” The Guardian newspaper in the UK called it “a song of a book, a lyrical and exploratory bit of semiautobiography.” It even made it into Britain’s esteemed Times Literary Supplement, earning a short yet favorable critique in an “Other New Novels” roundup. The Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje praised its “tightly edited, elliptical poetic style”1 and pointed out connections with James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist. (There were indeed several, and Leonard did study Joyce at McGill University with Louis Dudek.) Some years later, writer T. F. Rigelhof made comparisons with Hungarian-Canadian writer Stephen Vizinczey’s In Praise of Older Women, likewise “poignant, hilarious and erotically-charged.” Both novels, Rigelhof wrote, “were too brave and unbridled for Jack McClelland.”2 McClelland might have been slow to warm to a book that would become a cult classic, but he was by no means conservative in his tastes. According to the writer and editor Dennis Lee, who later worked for him, McClelland was a flamboyant man, “a real wild man, who kept pace with some of the wilder writers he was publishing.” If he had an issue with Leonard’s book, it was less likely to be its sexual content than that it was not poetry, and he had signed Leonard, personally and at first sight, as a poet. McClelland did eventually publish The Favorite Game, seven years behind the British. Until that time, Leonard’s first novel was available in Canada only on import.
I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen Page 11