by Ira B. Nadel
The “personal truth” Dudek cited in 1992 is evident in the forty-four poems of Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956). The themes are remarkable for a twenty-two-year-old encountering the power of romantic love and shattered by the reality of loss. “Elegy,” a poem marking the death of his father, is the first poem in the text; “Beside the Shepherd,” a poem celebrating the resurrection of life, is the last. Patrimony, inheritance, history, and desire emerge as the dominant themes, united by an absorption in myth and integrated with religious sensuality.
A prose statement dated December 27, 1956, written during his year at Columbia, contains Cohen’s explanation of the importance of myth in his work. He begins with a declaration:
I want to continue experimenting with the myth applying it to contemporary life, and isolating it in contemporary experience, thus making new myths and modifying old ones. I want to put mythic time into my poems, so they can be identified with every true fable ever sung, and still be concerned with our own time, and the poems hanging in our own skies.
Cohen cites marriage and adultery as major themes that he will likely explore and then goes on to name poems that illustrate how myth can control poetic image and development. The poems deal exclusively with betrayal or adultery, his third example being the most self-defining, since it narrates the betrayal of the speaker. It reads in part:
I know all about passion and honour
but unfortunately this had really nothing to do with either;
oh there was passion I’m only too sure
and even a little honour
but the important thing was to cuckold Leonard Cohen.
Enlarging his sense of myth is his belief that what he does is linked to the folk song. His ballads, Cohen once explained, “strive for folk-song simplicity and the fable’s intensity.”
Cohen’s interest in myth coincided with a shift in literary studies, summarized by the work of the Canadian critic Northrop Frye. In 1957, the year after Let Us Compare Mythologies, Frye published his encyclopedic treatment of myth and literature, Anatomy of Criticism, initiating a new paradigm for the study of literature via archetypes. Frye reviewed Cohen’s first book in the University of Toronto Quarterly, providing restrained praise and acknowledgment of a minor talent. During this period, Canadian writers like James Reaney, Eli Mandel, and Jay Macpherson were also turning to myth as a narrative device. Cohen’s book became part of the unconscious but unified development of mythopoetic studies that was evolving in Canada.
Let Us Compare Mythologies contains several other themes that would inform Cohen’s later poetry: history, especially related to Jewish persecution, and the Holocaust; sexuality and attraction to women; lyrical sensuality; anger; cultural stereotypes; religion; and frustration with art or history as a means of solving personal crises. It is a young poet’s work designed to shock as well as excite (“The moon dangling wet like a half-plucked eye.”) One sees his early use of poetry as a form of prayer and the role of the poet as a sacred voice. And it exhibits confidence, demonstrating what Layton said was essential for a young poet: arrogance and inexperience. When asked in 1994 about the quality of his work in those days, Cohen quipped, “It’s been downhill ever since. Those early poems are pretty good.” Cohen had no strategy for becoming a public figure like Layton. “Mostly what I was trying to do was get a date. That was the most urgent element in my life.”
Women were becoming a dominant interest at this time, as an essay from the mid-fifties confirms. The topic was breasts, or as he preferred, “tits,” a word he did not use carelessly: “Breasts, in my mind at least, divide, they turn the mind one way and then another.” The terminology was significant: “bosom” belonged to the world of feminine hygiene. “Women who have popularity problems talk about their bosoms,” he writes. Other terms seem too flippant, “so back to tits which are nothing more than what they are, human and real, the form, the swell, the rosy corrugated nipples all carried plainly in the sound of the word.” One particular girl possessed “magic tits” which enraptured him, although he tries to explain that he is not a breast man. The tits of this particular woman deserved a poem, Cohen felt, but who would write it?
Layton would at once attach them to one of his wives or perhaps appropriate the whole body to be mutilated on some fierce landscape. Dudek would spurn them, or if he dared to examine them at all, would compose a travelogue, cataloguing every pore and hair, and having done this thing he’d praise them. Hine does not believe in them. Reaney or Macpherson would turn them to silver, that dear flesh to metal, and etch on them hieroglyphs to prove some current theory of their master who is a Professor of English Literature. Leonard Cohen would embarrass us all by caressing them publically under the guise of praying to a kind of Oriental-eyed suffering Jehova.
The woman with the “magic tits” would not stand out in a crowd, Cohen goes on to say, although while wandering on the “dark southern slope of Mount Royal … thinking about all the injustices that had been done me,” his heroine suddenly appears and to his astonishment uncovers her “tits.”
And at that moment I knew that upon how I understood and met these tits rested my whole life, that I would climb down to the city from that mountain an empty man or a great one. My heart became a battlefield where compassion struggled with contempt.
It was around this time that Cohen began to experience depression, and also began using drugs. Cohen’s depression initially took the form of withdrawl and solitude. He found he had less, not more, in common with his Westmount friends and the feeling of being an outsider began to alter his outlook. It was not so much a conflict as a challenge between alternately attractive ways of living. Nancy Bacal recalls a night in Cohen’s fraternity room drinking Armagnac, sitting under an umbrella before a fire with all his typewritten poems spread about, seriously debating whether to burn them. Fortunately, they decided it would be unwise.
Drugs, the panacea of the sixties, began to attract Cohen in the mid-fifties, principally marijuana and lsd. A musician in Montreal provided an introduction to the former; writerly colleagues and hipsters the latter. As he and the times changed, so too did his pharmaceuticals, and he began to favor amphetamines, acid, and hashish. High on lsd or marijuana, Cohen found the freedom to experiment poetically and to attempt new forms for his songwriting. Friends in the artistic community shared in this exploration of hallucinogens. For Cohen, drugs also substituted for religion; the ecstasy and belief that mystical or prophetic religion once held for him was gone. He felt it had been institutionalized and subsequently had lost its magic. But drugs could provide an alternative sacred path. In “Song of Patience,” from his first book, Cohen outlines the replacement of religious fervor with the frenzy of art, a theme echoed throughout the text. The visions that came from drugs were both an escape from depression and a release of the imagination.
One night in 1957, Cohen walked to the top of Mount Royal, the hill that juts up in the center of Montreal, and took peyote, the preferred drug of South American Indians. He had always understood drugs to be sacramental and ceremonial, not recreational. Under their influence, he felt he was able to explore psychological and creative states that were otherwise unavailable. In the tradition of Rimbaud, Verlaine, Coleridge, and De Quincey, Cohen sought the expansion of his imagination. He eventually quit drugs because they didn’t expand the mind in the way he had hoped, and they were taking a toll on his body.
Initially though, drugs were a sacramental focus in his landscape of religious exploration. There were moments of perception; while writing Beautiful Losers on Hydra in 1965 he took acid and wrote on a wall in gold paint, “I am change / I am the same.” On an opposite wall he wrote, “Our song led us to the ovens.”
Cohen’s tendency to depression was exacerbated by the conflict between his desire to be an artist and the obligations of a middle-class life. His two worlds soon became incompatible. A series of destabilizing elements in his personal history contributed to his moods: his father’s early death, his mothe
r’s depressions, and the suicide of his first guitar teacher among them. “The nightmares do not suddenly / develop happy endings,” he wrote in Parasites of Heaven, “I merely step out of them.” Becoming a writer, stereotypically defined by irregular work, numerous sexual partners, and an uncertain income, created resistance from family and furthered Cohen’s inner conflicts.
As he matured, Cohen began to display the characteristics of manic-depressiveness. These symptoms usually first appear around the age of eighteen or nineteen; cyclic and recurrent shifts from manic creativity, sociability, and sexual activity on one hand, and intense lassitude, withdrawal, and anxiety on the other. In addition, victims tend to be obsessive and extremely organized. Cohen was, and is, absorbed by his writing and music, and is unusually tidy and concerned with detail. His homes have all been spotless and almost bare in their furnishings; his notebooks are all ordered by year, and his work habits reflect his concern with discipline and precision. He does not consider a work complete until he is satisified that the lyric, the sound, or the word is absolutely right. He explained this approach in a March 1967 notebook entry: “In principle, everything stands systematized, and it is only in regard to details that success is still to be achieved.” Yet he recognizes his own laziness, “which is famous to me, although I have convinced many of my diligence.” Nonetheless, his quest for perfection and order characterizes all of his actions: his work, his loves, and his search for spiritual satisfaction.
Cohen would occasionally rent a room in a seedy downtown hotel for three dollars a night, initiating a fascination with hotel rooms. In the 1965 NFB film Ladies and Gentlemen … Mr. Leonard Cohen, Cohen is seen waking up in a Ste-Catherine Street hotel, staring out the window in his underwear at the bleak, wintry landscape, and lyrically celebrating the release from responsibility that a hotel provides. Two influential hotels for him were the Chelsea and the Royalton, both in New York; each provided creative stimulation and refuge. Epitomizing his identity with the transient hotel world is his 1984 video “I Am A Hotel,” in which he dramatizes numerous stories among the hotel’s inhabitants. When asked why he found hotels so fascinating, he replied, “My personality cannot go anywhere else. Where else shall a guy like me go?”
Cohen continued to get exposure. In 1956 the CBC recorded Six Montreal Poets, which Folkways Records released in the United States in 1957 and which placed Cohen in the company of some of his mentors: Layton, F.R. Scott, A.M. Klein, A.J.M. Smith, and Dudek. Produced by Sam Gesser, an impresario who had brought acts like Pete Seeger and the Weavers to Montreal, the album singled Cohen out as the most important young poet in the city. He appeared on side one, after Smith and before Layton, reading six poems from Let Us Compare Mythologies, including “The Sparrows” and “Elegy.”
Cohen had now established a local reputation as a poet and was gaining a following from his singing in various coffeehouses. But he was becoming dissatisfied with Montreal and its bourgeois climate. He felt he needed a freer artistic world, one without boundaries or roots. He found it in New York.
3
PASSION WITHOUT FLESH
LEONARD COHEN attended the School of General Studies at Columbia University in 1956–57. García Lorca had briefly studied English at Columbia in 1929, and Louis Dudek had received his Ph.D there in 1951. Cohen followed his mentors. His courses included a survey of seventeenth-century English literature, a course on the Romantic movement, Literature in Contemporary America, Contemporary Texts, and Introduction to Literary Research. Graduate school, however, was “passion without flesh,” he thought, “love with no climax.” His notebooks from that time are filled with drawings and caricatures of his professors and fellow students. In one of them he wrote: “I feel lonely for my uncreated works.” He continued the casual study habits he had developed at McGill.
When Professor William York Tindall allowed Cohen to write a term paper on his own book, Let Us Compare Mythologies, Cohen was hard on himself, writing a scathing critique. But he was dismayed by the general absence of rigor in the study of literature. There was no gravity, he felt, evidenced by Tindall’s decision to let him review his own work. Cohen finally quit the program and worked briefly as an elevator operator, but was dismissed because he refused to wear a uniform.
Cohen lived at International House, the dormitory for foreign students located on Riverside Drive, close to the Hudson River. But he spent most of his time in the fledgling bohemian scene around the Columbia campus and downtown in the Village. The Beats were emerging and Allen Ginsberg, a graduate of Columbia, had captured national attention with his famous reading of Howl in March 1955 at the Six Gallery in San Francisco (memorialized in Kerouac’s Dharma Bums). Jack Kerouac, who himself had attended Columbia on a sports scholarship, was also part of the Village scene. Cohen recalls hearing him read at the Village Vanguard (with musical accompaniment) and later meeting him at Ginsberg’s apartment: “He was lying under a dining room table, pretending to listen to some jazz record while the party swirled on ’round him.” Kerouac’s novel On the Road would appear to great acclaim in September 1957 from Viking, who would go on to publish The Favorite Game. Cohen appreciated Kerouac’s work, calling him “a certain kind of genius who was able to spin it out that way like some great glistening spider.” What Kerouac was “really spinning was the great tale of America.” Counterculture writing from Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, and William S. Burroughs shaped a new world of literary recklessness. In New York, Cohen found confirmation of his anti-establishment stance, although he was never accepted by the Beats. “I was always only on the fringe. I liked the places they gathered, but I was never accepted by the bohemians because it was felt that I came from the wrong side of the tracks. I was too middle-class … I didn’t have the right credentials to be at the center table in those bohemian cafes.”
Nevertheless, Cohen drew from this world (and later took back to Montreal) not only a new way of presenting his poetry, reciting it with jazz accompaniment, but also a new realization that spontaneous prose, “UNINTERRUPTED AND UNREVISED FULL CONFESSIONS ABOUT WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED IN REAL LIFE,” could both liberate the language and present a genuine account of reality. This would be a key concept nine years later when he wrote Beautiful Losers.
Caught up in the mood of literary revolution, Cohen began a shortlived magazine, The Phoenix. In his editorial statement, Cohen wrote:
This magazine intends to publish honest poems, stories and articles of high quality. We intend to make it a vital organ of the community which it represents. We want experiment. We want controversy. We want ideas and song. We invite craftsmen.
Leonard Cohen
Editor
The issue included poetry by the known and unknown: Louis Dudek, Anne Ruden, Lee Usher, Mimi Hayes, Leigh Van Valen, and Leonard Cohen. Cohen had a series of poems in The Phoenix: “Go by brooks, love,” “Whatever cliffs are brought down” (to be retitled “You All in White” and published with variant lines in The Spice-Box of Earth), “You tell me that silence,” “What shadows the pendulum sun,” “Perfumed Pillows of night,” and most important, “Poem for Marc Chagall,” retitled “Out of the Land of Heaven” in The Spice-Box of Earth. All six poems reappeared in The Spice-Box of Earth four years later. The Phoenix only survived one issue, April 1957. But Cohen had again taken control of the means of production, as he had done with his book Let Us Compare Mythologies.
Cohen continued to write in New York, occasionally finding New York subjects, like the nearby Riverside Church. An unpublished poem reads:
Riverside Church frightens tourists
with a giant carillion
but is less successful with God
whose ear grew deaf after
a century of martyrs and Bach in bells is dubious
It is a stunned Babel
I told this to a small carved monk
who held a bent stone.
The key event of his year in New York was meeting Anne Sherman, a tall, dark-haired w
oman whom he first encountered at International House. Cohen was immediately struck by her beauty. She possessed a grace that originated in something “durable, disciplined and athletic.” She became the model for the divorcée Shell in The Favorite Game and occupied Cohen’s erotic and literary imagination. Her beauty devastated him, a beauty that broke down “old rules of light and cannot be interpreted or compared. They [such women] make every room original;” she was, as the novel describes, “formal” and well-educated, and she always presented “the scene the heart demanded.” But if she taught Cohen about love and behavior, he taught her “about her body and her beauty.”
But the relationship with Sherman didn’t last. She was older than Cohen, she wasn’t Jewish, and she evidently chose not to continue the affair, although Cohen frequently expressed his love for her after their relationship ended. She had become friends with Cohen’s sister and with his friend Yafa Lerner, both of whom were then living in New York. Those close to Cohen at the time believed he wanted to marry Anne but she sought a stability that Cohen could not provide. He wanted her to come to Greece after he settled there in 1960 but she remained in New York, eventually marrying a prominent restaurateur.
Sherman embodied all of the sexual freedom and guiltless love that Cohen had had difficulty finding in other women. For the next five or six years, Cohen continued to write about her in both poetry and prose. A notebook from the summer of 1958 contains a series of references to Sherman as well as the poem “To Anne in the Window Seat,” which expresses his grief over having to live without her. In a white notebook from Greece dated September 1961, there is a poem entitled “To Anne”: