Various Positions

by Ira B. Nadel

  Cohen’s first published works, “An Halloween Poem to Delight my Younger Friends,” and “Poem en Prose,” appeared in CIV/n, a literary magazine started in January 1953 with two hundred and fifty mimeographed copies. Initiated by four recent university graduates, led by Aileen Collins (later to marry Dudek), with Dudek and Layton joining as editorial advisers, it derived its unusual title from Ezra Pound’s statement, “CIV/n: not a one-man job,” “CIV/n” being Pound’s abbreviation for civilization. Its stated goal was to present poetry that would be “a vital representation of what things are, done in strong language (if necessary) or any language, but it [would] rouse the reader to see just what the world around him [was] like.” Poets in Canada, Collins added, were “forced to write with maple syrup on birch bark,” and this needed to change. The energetic editorial meetings, attended by Layton, Dudek, and Collins, often at Layton’s Montreal home, led to the appearance of new and unorthodox writing: it was frank, colloquial, unselfconscious, and experimental. To get the Canadian mind out of storage, CIV/n proposed the following new standard:

  For Kulchur’s sake, at least, let’s have a lot of bad good poetry in future, instead of more good bad poetry—and let the dead-head critics hold their peace until the call of the last moose.

  In a letter to Robert Creeley, Layton comically summarized the completion of the inaugural issue: “Last night we celebrated CIV/n with an orgy and to give the issue the proper send-off we all undressed and sat about holding each other’s privates (sounds gruesome now).”

  Pound was sent copies of the magazine and replied to Dudek that he found it unpolemical and too local. He questioned whether the magazine had any interest in “standing for maximum awareness.” The fourth issue of CIV/n, which included Cohen’s first effort, was more broadly based. The issue also contained work by both Creeley and Corman; a long article on Pound by Camillo Pellizzi, an Italian author/critic; and an editorial by Dudek on why Pound was being held in a Washington, D.C., mental hospital. It also contained contributions from Phyllis Webb, Raymond Souster, and Irving Layton. Cohen’s author’s note reveals that “Leonard N. Cohen … composes poetry to the guitar; now studying at McGill.”

  The second poem by Cohen in the issue alludes to his experiences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the summer of 1953. That summer Cohen had gone to Harvard, ostensibly to take a poetry course from the experimental French poet Pierre Emmanuel, who was teaching a course on the nature of modern poetry. Cohen convinced his mother that the enterprise would be worth a month or so in Cambridge, though he spent most of his time listening to folk music from the world-famous John Lennox Collection at the Widener Library. In the poem, he describes how the “secret undulations” of the River Charles “swarmed the shadows of ten dozen streetlamps and a moon.” The poem appears retitled and revised as “Friends” in Let Us Compare Mythologies. Four other poems by Cohen appeared in CIV/n before publication ceased in 1955.

  The literary environment of CIV/n was as important as the publication itself, and through CIV/n Cohen came into contact with older, more experienced writers who sought to challenge the poetic orthodoxy of the country. Aileen Collins later characterized this challenge as the effort, at least in Montreal, to contradict the Canadian Authors Association’s notion of poetry as effusive expressions of emotional states, similar in form and taste to a blend of maple syrup; hence her comment about maple syrup on birch bark.

  The CIV/n circle included Layton, Betty Sutherland (sister of the McGill poet John Sutherland and Layton’s companion from the mid-1940s; they married in 1948), the sculptor Buddy Rozynski, art director of the magazine, his wife Wanda, and later, Doug Jones, Phyllis Webb, Eli Mandel, F.R. Scott, Cid Corman, Raymond Souster, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson. Aileen Collins and the Rozynskis handled the production and distribution of the magazine, as well as the finances, and also took charge of the correspondence, accounting, art-work, and circulation.

  Cohen was soon participating in the group’s discussions, debates, and informal readings, often bringing his guitar to accompany his poetry. These gatherings were actually workshops, and Cohen recalls that even an experienced poet like Scott was shaken by some of the candid reactions to his work. There was, Cohen recalls, a “savage integrity” to the Montreal group. Phyllis Webb recollects meeting Cohen in late 1955 when he was preparing to publish his first book with Dudek. Dudek brought him to Layton’s house, and she remembers her surprise at learning that this young poet was “voluntarily studying the Bible as an informal on-going project.” That evening, as usual, poems “got battered about,” but Cohen’s was “the most freshly lyrical and genuinely sensuous.” Arguments, insults, and praise characterized these meetings, and provided a sounding board for Cohen. The importance of CIV/n, said Dudek, was its role in stimulating a vital Montreal literary environment.

  The emergence of the CIV/n group also confirmed the move of new poetry from Toronto to Montreal. Raymond Souster’s Contact, from which the Contact Press emerged, had ended, and the new CIV/n, in Montreal, had begun. In addition, the magazine solidified the union of Souster, Layton, and Dudek, which had begun with the publication of their co-authored project Cerberus (1952). Canadian Poems, 1850–1952, an anthology edited by Dudek and Layton, signaled a break from poetry shaped strictly by narrative, exhibiting a modern lyricism. CIV/n was more challenging than the other small magazines in Canada, such as First Statement, Contact, or later, Delta, and certainly fostered Cohen’s early work.

  The best-known writer on the faculty at the time was the Governor General’s Award winner Hugh MacLennan, whose Two Solitudes had startled the country when it appeared in 1945. MacLennan joined McGill in 1951 to teach a course on the modern novel and to run an advanced creative writing seminar. Cohen met MacLennan through Tony Graham, son of the novelist Gwethalyn Graham, who had achieved notoriety with her best-selling novel Earth and High Heaven (1944), about the love affair between a young Jewish lawyer and a Gentile from Westmount. While at McGill, MacLennan drafted what would become The Watch that Ends the Night (1957), also destined to win a Governor General’s Award.

  The reading list of MacLennan’s novel course, which Cohen attended, included James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This work had a powerful effect on Cohen, especially the impressionistic “bird girl” section where Stephen Dedalus poetically describes a young woman on the beach. It demonstrated to Cohen how lyrical prose could become within the novel form.

  Enrollment in the advanced creative writing course required a submission of material, which Cohen presented and MacLennan approved. Cohen found that he liked MacLennan as a person as well as an instructor. “That’s where my life has been mostly,” Cohen has said. “I’ve only gone on these kinds of adventures where there was a personal relationship involved.” He remembers MacLennan as a beautiful teacher: “the more restrained he was, the more emotional was the atmosphere in the classroom.” For a time afterwards, they continued to exchange letters, and MacLennan expressed interest in Cohen’s developing career as a writer. When two of Cohen’s poems were published in the February 1954 issue of Forge, a student publication at McGill, MacLennan provided an introduction.

  F.R. Scott was another influential figure at McGill. An eminent constitutional historian, he was also a noted poet who was able to straddle both the earlier generation of The McGill Fortnightly Review and Preview, as well as the new efforts of the innovative CIV/n. Cohen studied commercial law with him and briefly entered law school, admiring the apparent ease with which Scott could balance poetry and the law. Scott encouraged Cohen’s literary efforts and Cohen recalled that visits to the Scotts’ were “warm and wonderful [with] a very open, fluid atmosphere; lots of fun; drinking; and talk of politics and poetry.”

  Several years later, Scott and his wife Marian, a painter, would venture into downtown Montreal to hear Cohen read and sing in the various clubs and coffeehouses. Cohen, in turn, often received invitations to North Hatley, where the Scotts had their summer cotta
ge. He wrote in a lean-to cabin belonging to Scott’s brother Elton, which the Scotts made available to Cohen. He began to write The Spice-Box of Earth there in 1957 and a year later he returned to work on early versions of The Favorite Game. To show his gratitude, he wrote “Summer Haiku for Frank and Marian Scott,” which Mort Rosengarten carved on a rock. The Scotts put it to use as a doorstop; the poem also appears in The Spice-Box. Scott later wrote a recommendation for Cohen for a Canada Council grant.

  Of all Cohen’s mentors at McGill, however, Irving Layton was unquestionably the most influential. Layton forced a new vitality into moribund poetic forms and linked the prophetic with the sexual. In Layton’s work, Cohen discovered a Judaic voice of opposition, energy, and passion. Who, Layton asked with a flourish, will read the “castratos,” the critics? “What race will read what they have said / Who have my poems to read instead?” Northrop Frye, among others, tried to diminish Layton’s sexuality: “One can get as tired of buttocks in Mr. Layton as of buttercups in the Canadian Poetry Magazine,” he remarked in the University of Toronto Quarterly in April 1952, when reviewing The Black Huntsmen.

  In addition to a great and energetic teacher, Cohen found in Layton Judaic prophecy and Hebrew thunder. Layton brought the full force of Jewish identity to bear on his work. He also brought politics to poetry and Cohen absorbed Layton’s stance in later works of his own, notably Flowers for Hitler and Parasites of Heaven. Cohen met Layton briefly in 1949 and again in 1954 when he invited Layton, who had just published The Long Pea-Shooter, to read at Cohen’s fraternity at McGill. An aggressive figure with two books to his credit, Layton was then juggling a career as a part-time lecturer in literature at Sir George Williams University and as a teaching assistant in political science at McGill.

  Layton’s ego was relentlessly public. He challenged the entire country to rise to his forthright statements and sexuality. From Layton, Cohen learned to value the excesses of the Dionysian style, to accept the power of prophetic visions, and to extend the poetic to include the Judaic. Layton defiled the sanitary classrooms of poetry in the name of poetry: “with a happy / screech he bounded from monument to monument,” wrote Cohen in his poem “For My Old Layton.” If Dudek knighted him, Layton took him out on the town. The influence was immense, but over the years, reciprocal: “I taught him how to dress; he taught me how to live forever,” Cohen has remarked.

  Layton frequently brought Cohen along on reading or promotional tours. On one of their frequent car trips to Toronto, they became so engrossed in talking about poetry that they didn’t notice they were running out of gas. Fortunately, they were not far from a farmhouse, where they found help. Several years later they were again driving to Toronto and again ran out of gas. Uncannily, it was in front of the same farmhouse. They sheepishly told their story to the woman in the farmhouse who remembered them from years past. She summed up the entire episode with one word: “Poets!” Cohen and Layton read together at the old Greenwich Gallery on Bay Street, where Don Owen, the filmmaker, remembered that Cohen “always seemed to leave the gallery with the most intesting woman there, the one I’d spent all evening trying to get up enough nerve to say hello to.” Cohen was in his pudgy phase at this time, Owen noted, but the extra weight did not deter him from his pursuit of women.

  Layton commanded the attention of a public unaccustomed to Whitmanesque gestures and outlandish posturings. With flowing hair, Layton shouted and raved from the heights, addressing crucial subjects. “Poised on a rope stretched tautly between sex and death,” the poet, Layton affirmed, can find salvation only in sexual love, a message that strongly appealed to the young Cohen. Layton was responsible for strong-arming Cohen into the wonderful, boisterous, in-your-face world of serious poetry, where dedication to the art was all, and all of you had to be put into the work. The quest for bold experiences was the poet’s finest teacher, Layton preached, and in Cohen he had a willing disciple.

  No gathering Layton and Cohen attended was more important than the Canadian Writers’ Conference held from July 28–31, 1955, at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Organized by F.R. Scott, and supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, the first major gathering of Canadian writers included the established: A.J.M. Smith, Morley Callaghan, Dorothy Livesay, Desmond Pacey, Louis Dudek, Ralph Gustafson, James Reaney, John Sutherland, Earle Birney, Malcolm Ross, and Scott; and the new: Al Purdy, Jay Macpherson, Eli Mandel, Phyllis Webb, and Miriam Waddington. According to Doug Jones, Layton arrived in staid Kingston “in a car full of women. I guess it was probably Cohen and various friends, but it was like the sultan coming with his harem.”

  Cohen took his guitar, read in the impromptu poetry sessions and listened to the arguments between the writers, who claimed that the mass media were doing little to promote their work, and the mass media, who claimed that the writers were getting what they deserved, especially the poets whose work was intentionally obscure. Layton argued that poets wrote for the public, not for other poets. The poet was part of the proletariat, not the elite. Layton constantly battled journalists and others at the conference in his conviction that the poet was essential for society and that society had a duty to support its writers through foundations or grants. It resulted in a set of resolutions to formalize the study of Canadian literature, recognizing the need to provide a more prominent place for Canadian writing in schools and libraries.

  Attending the Kingston Conference in the summer of 1955 was a heady experience for Cohen. He met the major poets and heard new voices. His career was shaped in response to many of the issues that were discussed and the decisions that were made through the workshops, meetings, and resolutions. A new range of publications soon appeared: Canadian Literature, Prism, the McGill Poetry series and the New Canadian Library.

  ————

  COHEN GRADUATED from McGill in October 1955, one of only five arts students to receive B.A. degrees. He had established himself as a literary figure and campus voice, winning the Chester MacNaughton Prize for Creative Writing for his series “Thoughts of a Landsman,” which was made up of four poems, three of which would later appear in his first book. He also won the Peterson Memorial Prize in literature, publicly confirming his talent and renewing his determination to pursue a creative life. The caption under his 1955 McGill Yearbook picture reads “You have discovered of course only the ship of fools is making the voyage this year…”

  “I yearned to live a semi-bohemian lifestyle,” Cohen said of his McGill years, “an unstructured life; but a consecrated one; some kind of calling.” In the fall of 1953, at the beginning of his third year at McGill, Cohen and Mort Rosengarten had taken several rooms on Stanley Street in a rooming house. They had hoped to pursue a modestly bohemian life and to break free of the confines of Westmount. It was a decision that upset Cohen’s mother and angered his uncles. His father had lived with his parents until the day of his marriage at age thirty-nine. Cohen’s move was seen as a break with tradition and an abandonment of his mother. But its rewards were too seductive. Cohen invited women to his new rooms, serenaded them, and read them poems. As the narrator of Beauty at Close Quarters reports, “He knew what minor chords went with what hours of the morning, which poems were too vicious, which too sweet…. He wasn’t so much trying to accumulate women as he was ideal episodes.”

  After Cohen graduated, he began law school for a term but his real interest was still in writing. At this time, Layton, Souster, and Dudek created the McGill Poetry Series to provide a new outlet for young poets. Works by Pierre Coupey, David Solway, Daryl Hine, and Cohen appeared. But when Dudek offered the first volume in the series to Cohen, he was, in Dudek’s words, “slow and reluctant to present his manuscript for editing.” Dudek, in fact, didn’t see the completed manuscript of Let Us Compare Mythologies until the book was published. Part of the reason for Cohen’s reluctance was Dudek’s rejection of “the sentimental late-romantic tradition in poetry” to which Cohen was partial. Upholding this tradition was itself a form of rebellion again
st the modernism of Dudek and others, vividly seen in the work of Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Charles Olson.

  Let Us Compare Mythologies contains poems written largely when Cohen was between the ages of fifteen and twenty and went through four drafts before he felt it could be printed. Cohen masterminded the entire publication, assuming responsiblity for the design, typesetting, production, and paper. His friend Freda Guttman prepared illustrations, and he paid the $300 cost to have the work produced in hardcover, rather than paperback, as Dudek had originally planned. Ruth Wisse, then feature editor of the McGill Daily, headed the so-called sales team which operated by advance subscription only. She alone sold over two hundred advance copies. Cohen also distributed order forms for the book in campus cafes and bookstores. He sold out the approximately four hundred printed copies.

  The book appeared in May with a statement about the series on the back jacket emphasizing its uniqueness and Dudek’s role. The inscription on the copy presented to Dudek by Cohen reads:

  To Louis Dudek, teacher and friend, who more than anyone wanted me to bring out this book, and whose encouragement and help is deeply appreciated by every young person writing at McGill—

  Leonard Cohen

  May 1956

  Despite increasing differences with Dudek, whose own poetry of ideas and championing of Pound contradicted Cohen’s pull toward romanticism, metaphysics, and sensuality, and despite Dudek’s later belief that becoming a singer undermined Cohen’s talents as a writer, Cohen always valued Dudek’s contribution to his work. He knew that Dudek understood him. “Leonard always had an image of himself as a rabbi,” Dudek has said. Cohen unexpectedly appeared at Dudek’s retirement party in the mid-eighties and was delighted that it was Dudek who presented him to the McGill Chancellor for his honorary doctorate in June 1992. At the ceremony, Dudek summarized Cohen’s McGill years with a gentle jibe: “I was fortunate to see him occasionally in my classes in his young days at McGill.” He closed with a fatherly question about Cohen’s status as a celebrity: “But Leonard, is all this fame really good for you?” After praising Cohen’s integrity and search for personal truth, Dudek concluded, “He has won through, so far as anyone can win through, in this difficult struggle of life.”