I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

by Sylvie Simmons

  Still, life continued to lead Leonard back to Montreal, as it would for periods in the early and midsixties. “We didn’t have any money so he went to Montreal. He left because he had to,” said Marianne, who mostly stayed behind on Hydra, “not because he wanted to. He had to make money.” The checks that arrived for him on the ferry rarely amounted to more than $20 at a time. Marianne helped out where she could. She sold her house at the top of the hill, took modeling assignments, and, when the annual dividend arrived from a small inheritance she had, she paid the tab that they had run up at Katsika’s. Leonard and Marianne did not spend much on themselves, but there was the child to feed and clothe. They simply did not have enough. So, in order to keep the dream alive of living as a writer on an island for another year, Leonard hustled for money in Montreal. It became an increasingly tiring enterprise. It did not help when, in 1964, George Johnston and Charmian Clift, the first to show Leonard the possibility of leading such a life, decided to leave Hydra and move back to Australia. Johnston’s latest book, My Brother Jack, was a bestseller—something that all the expat writers were hoping for to solve their financial problems.* But Johnston, in his fifties now, was suffering from tuberculosis. He wanted to go home for medical treatment and to capitalize on his success.

  Leonard, no youngster himself by the standards of the sixties with his thirtieth birthday approaching, soldiered on, applying for grants and taking the odd job. He looked into the possibility of selling movie rights to The Favorite Game, but there were no takers until 2003, when the Canadian filmmaker Bernar Hébert made a film of it, curiously turning it into more of a conventional narrative on-screen than it was in the novel. Leonard also approached a Montreal book dealer with his archive of manuscripts, this time with more success. In 1964 the director of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, Marian Brown, purchased the first of its collection of the Cohen papers.

  It would be wrong though to picture Leonard plodding woefully through his hometown, black cloud above his head, begging bowl in hand. Although he often felt the need to escape from Montreal, he loved the place. Montreal for Leonard was much like Dublin was to Joyce. He immersed himself in the city, luxuriating in the company of friends. Lovers also. Leonard was devoted to women, and they returned the sentiment in numbers that increased with his renown. As Leonard saw it, he had slaved for years trying to write “the perfect sonnet to attract the girl,”3 then he had looked up from his “blackened pages” to find that women were making themselves sexually available. It had happened on Hydra, and now it was happening in Montreal. “It was terrific,” he said. “It was a moment where everybody was giving to the other person what they wanted. The women knew that’s what the men wanted.”4 Asked whether having so much of what he wanted devalued it for him, he said, “Nobody gets the right amount in terms of what they think their appetite deserves. But it lasted just a few moments, and then it was back to the old horror story. . . . I’ll give you this if you give me that. You know, sealing the deal: what do I get, what do you get. It’s a contract.”5 Leonard did not like contracts. He did not have one with McClelland; it was a handshake, a gentleman’s agreement. It was not a question of loyalty for Leonard but of having freedom, control and an escape hatch.

  Leonard had rented a furnished duplex in the west of Montreal, an old stagecoach house. Once again Marianne flew out to join him. The house was within walking distance of McGill University, and on warm days Leonard would go there and sit in the spot in front of the Arts Building where the grass curved down like a bowl and where people played guitar and sang. It was here that Erica Pomerance first saw him. Like most McGill art students, she knew who Leonard was and counted herself among the “circle of admirers” that surrounded him on the grass on the campus or in “the continental hipness of Le Bistro. If you were looking for Leonard,” says Pomerance, “Le Bistro was the first place you would go.”

  Le Bistro looked like someone had smuggled it in from Paris, with its zinc-topped horseshoe bar, blackboard menu and long mirror along one wall. On another wall, Leonard had scribbled a poem:

  MARITA

  PLEASE FIND ME

  I AM ALMOST 30

  “Marita,” SELECTED POEMS 1956–1968

  He had written it in response to having had his advances spurned by Marita La Fleche, a Montreal boutique owner, who told him to come back when he had grown up. Le Bistro was the meeting place of choice for both French- and English-speaking artists and intelligentsia, who would sit there, talking, long into the night, drinking red wine and smoking French cigarettes. On any given night you might see Leonard, Irving Layton, Mort Rosengarten, Derek May, Robert Hershorn, the sculptor Armand Vaillancourt and Pierre Trudeau, the socialist writer and law professor who would go on to become prime minister of Canada and whose beige Humphrey Bogart raincoat became as famous as Leonard’s blue one.

  Another regular haunt was the 5th Dimension, a coffee bar and folk club on Bleury Street. Leonard was with Hershorn the night he first met Pomerance there. Leonard remarked to Hershorn that she reminded him of Freda Guttman, his old girlfriend at McGill, and introduced himself. Pomerance says, “He was a ladies’ man, an extremely magnetic personality, someone with a special aura, even before he burst on the music scene. I was eighteen and very impressed by these people. They were very sophisticated and very much into their own style in the way they dressed—black, very simple—and in what they talked about, art and literature mostly, not so much politics. They just seemed to have a handle on life. They were so sure of themselves and where they were going, and at the same time not too focused on any specific thing except creativity and art. As a younger girl I guess they were my ideal, particularly Leonard and Derek May. Leonard seemed to be the epitome of cool.”

  For a while, Leonard courted her. “He didn’t seduce you in the typical way; he was very obtuse, very laid back. You felt drawn to him on some sort of spiritual level.” He took her to the house on Belmont Avenue, where his mother still kept his bedroom. “There were photographs of his dad and of him as a boy. We smoked hash and he nearly seduced me in that room. But I was still a virgin, and I remember thinking that even though he was hard to resist I didn’t want to make love for the very first time with someone who was living with another woman.” She was referring to Marianne.

  Leonard introduced the young woman to his mother. “A very attractive woman, very strong face, strong features, with steely gray hair and dressed like a high-class Westmount Jewish woman who had means,” recalls Pomerance, herself a Montreal Jew. “She was halfway in the old world and halfway in the new. She ruled the roost; she was what you would call now a domineering mother. My feeling was that she was thirsty. She wanted to be let into Leonard’s life and his successes.” Leonard, though, “was like quicksilver, a free spirit who looked like he was doing just what he wanted and you couldn’t tie him down anywhere. I think she would have liked to have had more of a piece of the pie in terms of having more time with him, but Leonard would come and go. When he’d enough of her he escaped, but he always remained close to her.”

  After dispensing with her virginity elsewhere, Pomerance “did not remain resistant forever” to Leonard’s charms. “He took me to all the haunts where he took most of his paramours, like the Hotel de France, which was this seedy hotel which he loved, on Saint Laurent Street on the corner of Saint Catherine, and we went for walks in the mountains. At one point he took me to his house,” she says, referring to where Leonard was living with Marianne. “That’s where I heard him play guitar for the first time. We sat around and smoked a bit, because Leonard was into pot and hash, and we’d jam.” Pomerance played guitar and sang. “I remember Leonard liking a western style of music.”

  Leonard also introduced her to Marianne. “She seemed so cool and beautiful and calm,” says Pomerance. “Everything I wasn’t was this woman. I think they must have had an understanding. He probably brought other women there he was having casual
relationships with, and then when you were there it was obvious Marianne was his common-law wife, his muse, the queen, and that she had a tremendous amount of respect and they seemed to be on an equal footing. She was very nice and warm and very accepting—you didn’t feel that she was jealous or anything—but I think that she probably put up with a lot to remain with him, because he was moody and he had his own rules and needed his freedom. I remember one day, it was his birthday, we went back to his room in his mother’s house and he was lying down on his bed, and he had this yellow rose on his chest and he was just being very, very passive and Buddha-like, inviolable and untouchable, in some remote area.

  “You could only get so much of him that he was willing to give at the moment. He was somebody who was not trying to fill up the spaces of silence with idle chatter; everything he did had to have meaning and importance. But on the other hand you got the feeling from him that time was seamless, that he didn’t run on the same time or rhythm as other people. He didn’t run after journalists, getting himself publicized; his magnetism is such that it’s like a boat creating a wake and people are drawn to him and his ideas. For me what he emanated was model of creativity and freedom to explore and express.”*

  Throughout everything Leonard was writing, typing pages, filling notebooks. He was working on a new volume of poetry to follow up the successful Spice-Box of Earth, to which he had given the title Opium and Hitler. He sent the manuscript to Jack McClelland. His publisher objected to the title and, judging by the long correspondence between them, seemed not entirely convinced by the content. Michael Ondaatje, who, like Leonard, was published by Jack McClelland, wrote that McClelland was “uncertain of Cohen’s being a genius, yet rather delighted at its possibility, and so constantly presenting him to the public as one.”6

  This would have been a comfortable position for someone of Leonard’s sensibilities, able to float contentedly on a sea of praise while all the time shrugging modestly. But Jack McClelland could be far more critical in his letters to Leonard than he was when he talked about him to other people. He told Leonard he would publish his book anyway, “because you are Leonard Cohen”7—which was in many ways the inverse of a famous incident that would occur twenty years later, when the head of Leonard’s U.S. record company, having heard Leonard’s seventh album, would tell him, “Leonard, we know you’re great, but we don’t know if you’re any good,”8 and refused to release it.

  Leonard’s reply to McClelland contained none of his usual humor and mock braggadocio; it was angry, honest and sure of itself. He knew his book to be “a masterpiece,” he wrote. “There has never been a book like this, prose or poetry, written in Canada.” Yes he could write another Spice-Box and make everyone happy, himself included, since he had nothing against flattering reviews. But he had moved on. “I’ve never written easily: most of the time I detest the process. So try and understand that I’ve never enjoyed the luxury of being able to choose between the kinds of books I wanted to write, or poems, or women I wanted to love, or lives to lead.”9

  Leonard also argued to keep the title. It would appeal, he wrote, to “the diseased adolescents who compose my public.”10 But when it came down to it, Leonard was a practical man. He agreed to many of the revisions McClelland called for, saying, “I’ll carve a little here and there, as long as I don’t touch the bone.”11 He ended up sending McClelland fifty new poems. He also gave the book a new name, Flowers for Hitler, and removed the dedication, which McClelland had disliked:

  With scorn, love, nausea, and above all,

  a paralysing sense of community

  this book is dedicated

  to the teachers, doctors, leaders of my parents’ time:

  THE DACHAU GENERATION

  This bitter moniker had been taken from the poem Leonard wrote to Alexander Trocchi, his “public junkie” friend. In it, Leonard made excuses for his own inability to take such a committed stance:

  I tend to get distracted . . .

  by Uncle’s disapproval

  of my treachery

  to the men’s clothing industry.

  I find myself . . .

  taking advice

  from the Dachau generation . . .

  Leonard had already felt his uncles’ disapproval of The Favorite Game; they had been not well pleased, he said, with his description of them as having betrayed their priestly name of Cohen and pledged themselves only to financial success. (Nor for that matter had his uncles approved of his having written about Masha’s stay in a mental hospital.)

  The book was now dedicated not to the Dachau generation but to Marianne. He also wrote “A Note on the Title,” which, like the original dedication, was arranged in the form of a poem:

  A

  while ago

  this book would

  have been called

  SUNSHINE FOR NAPOLEON

  and earlier still it

  would have been

  called

  WALLS FOR GENGHIS KHAN

  In turn, McClelland agreed to some of Leonard’s requests, in particular that the original design for the front cover be scrapped—Leonard’s face, superimposed on a woman’s naked body. “Nobody is going to buy a book the cover of which is a female body with my face for tits,” Leonard wrote in September 1964 in a long, heated letter to McClelland. “The picture is simply offensive. It is dirty in the worst sense. It hasn’t the sincerity of a stag movie or the imagination of a filthy postcard or the energy of real surrealist humor.” He told McClelland that he would not be returning to Canada to promote the book. “I’d really be ashamed to stand beside a stack of them at a cocktail party. . . . So why don’t we forget about the whole thing? You never liked the book very much.”12

  Flowers for Hitler was published in the autumn of 1964. The dust jacket, which bore a different design, contained an excerpt from one of Leonard’s letters to McClelland. “This book,” it read, “moves me from the world of the golden-boy poet into the dung pile of the front-line writer. I didn’t plan it this way. I loved the tender notices Spice-Box got but they embarrassed me a little. Hitler won’t get the same hospitality from the papers. My sounds are too new, therefore people will say: this is derivative, this is slight, his power has failed. Well, I say that there has never been a book like this, prose or poetry, written in Canada. All I ask is that you put it in the hands of my generation and it will be recognized.”13

  Thematically, Flowers for Hitler “was not entirely new for Leonard; there had been sex, violence, murder and the Holocaust in his first two books of poems, as well as songs to lovers and celebrations of teachers and friends. What was different was its style. It was much less formal and its language freer and more contemporary, which made the darkness and torture it described seem more personal—self-torture, the darkness within—and the love it expressed, for Marianne, for Irving Layton, more heartfelt. As an epigraph Leonard chose the words of Primo Levi, a concentration camp survivor: “Take care not to suffer in your own homes what is inflicted on us here.” A warning not so much that history can repeat itself but that history is not something frozen in some other place and time; it’s the nature of humanity.

  In a 1967 interview in the University of British Columbia student paper the Ubyssey, Leonard explained, “[Levi is] saying, what point is there to a political solution if, in the homes, these tortures and mutilations continue? That’s what Flowers for Hitler is all about. It’s taking the mythology of the concentration camps and bringing it into the living room and saying, ‘This is what we do to each other.’ We outlaw genocide and concentration camps and gas and that, but if a man leaves his wife or they are cruel to each other, then that cruelty is going to find a manifestation if he has a political capacity; and he has. There’s no point in refusing to acknowledge the wrathful deities. That’s like putting pants on the legs of pianos like the Victorians did. The fact is that we all succumb to lu
stful thoughts, to evil thoughts, to thoughts of torture.”14

  His interviewer, literary professor Sandra Djwa, asked Leonard if he wasn’t mining the same seams as William Burroughs, Günter Grass and Jean-Paul Sartre in Nausea. He answered, “The only thing that differs in those writers and myself is that I hold out the idea of ecstasy as the solution. If only people get high, they can face the evil part. If a man feels in his heart it’s only going to be a mundane confrontation with feelings, and he has to recite to himself Norman Vincent Peale slogans, ‘Be better, be good,’ he hasn’t had a taste of that madness. He’s never soared, he’s never let go of the silver thread and he doesn’t know what it feels to be like a god. For him, all the stories about holiness and the temple of the body are meaningless. . . . The thing about Sartre is that he’s never lost his mind. . . . The thing that people are interested in doing now is blowing their heads off and that’s why the writing of schizophrenics like myself will be important.”15

  It was a curious answer. It appeared to be equal parts megalomania and madness, anti–New Age yet Newer Age, though with an Old Age patina. Or quite possibly he was high. Leonard clearly considered Flowers for Hitler an important book; in 1968 he would choose around half its content for his anthology Selected Poems. If Leonard truly believed, though, that Flowers for Hitler would prove too provocative for the literati and strip him of his “golden-boy poet” status, he would have been disappointed with the favorable reaction it received. It prompted the critic Milton Wilson to write in the Toronto Quarterly that Leonard was “potentially the most important writer that Canadian poetry has produced since 1950,” adding, “not merely the most talented, but also, I would guess, the most professionally committed to making the most of his talent.”16 (Somewhat prophetic, since one of its poems, “New Step,” would be staged as a theatrical ballet on CBC TV in 1972, and another poem, “Queen Victoria and Me,” would become a song on his 1973 album Live Songs.)