by Ira B. Nadel
Throughout the spring and summer Cohen would appear at Dunn’s, performing with a jazz band. He also performed on the McGill campus and in Toronto, honing the musical element that would later eclipse his poetry. It was a fresh genre for Montreal audiences and Cohen established a local reputation as a performer.
In June of 1958, Cohen wrote a short essay that defined his aesthetic, a declaration of poetic intent:
Whatever I have written about I have tried to remember the violence and destruction and passion of our century. I want my poems to be informed by a sensibility which comprehends the bombing of cities, concentration camps and human infidelity. I do not mean that every poem must have in it a swollen body or a crematoriam[;] most of my poems do not, but a love poem, for instance, must be about a love that encounters and comes to terms with the kind of violence and despair and courage and to which we have been exposed.
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THE WORLDLY twenty-four-year-old poet and folk singer spent the summer of 1958 as a counsellor at Pripstein’s Camp Mishmar. Pripstein’s was started by a Hebrew schoolteacher and educator, Hayim (Chuck) Pripstein, and grew out of a children’s camp that was once attached to a Jewish hotel in Filion, Quebec, known for its literary gatherings (Isaac Bashevis Singer, among others, read there). When the river behind the hotel became polluted, the hotel closed and Pripstein transported some of the buildings to a new site in St-Adolphe-de-Howard, north of Montreal. The camp’s philosophy was to take children of varying abilities, background, and behavior and integrate them.
When other camps would reject disturbed or difficult childen, Pripstein’s took them in. The counsellors attended weekly Saturday afternoon seminars on child psychology, mental health, and Judaism to help them handle the problems. The majority of campers were the children of the middle class and most of the counsellors were McGill students. Instead of a bugle to awaken campers in the morning, the opening bars of Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto were played on the public address system. A camp photograph from 1958 shows a robust Leonard Cohen standing in the back row amid a group of healthy campers. Among the graduates were literary critic Ruth Wisse, pianist Robert Silverman, and sociologist Lionel Tiger. Many of the counsellors and campers went on to become psychiatrists, social workers, and child analysts. At Pripstein’s Cohen organized folksinging and haiku contests and also took an interest in a young camper named Robert Elkin, an autistic idiot savant who had an extraordinary facility with numbers. Elkin appears as the ill-fated Martin Stark in The Favorite Game.
The fourth book of The Favorite Game carefully recounts Cohen’s experiences at Pripstein’s, although not his turning up a week late and in shorts for the wedding of Moishe Pripstein (son of the founder) and Florence Sherman. He does describe, however, his emergence from the boathouse in the early morning with a female counsellor, under the watchful eye of Mrs. Pripstein, whose house surveyed the camp from a hilltop perch. Cohen found camp a fertile ground for romance. One close friend was Fran Dropkin, a gorgeous dancer from Brooklyn with thick dark braids who had come to Pripstein’s as an art counsellor. Another woman, the camp nurse, became the muse for one of his best early poems, “As the Mist Leaves No Scar.” A camper who ran the darkroom at Pripstein’s recalls printing a roll of film for Cohen. They turned out to be a series of photos of nude females.
The camp was a cultural mecca and long hours were spent among counsellors and campers in stimulating discussions of poetry, history, and drama. Life in Israel, the status of Jews in Quebec, and the nature of Montreal were also analyzed. It was a time of intense self-expression and Cohen, whose talent was acknowledged, was the leading nonconformist. The counsellor’s lounge, underneath the dining hall, became the center for most of these debates.
Part of that year was also devoted to visiting his mother, who was being treated for depression in the Allan Memorial Institute, a psychiatric hospital in Montreal. The depression was triggered by inappropriately prescribed drugs for a skin disease brought on by the stress caused by the return of the now senile Rabbi Klein to the Cohen household. During visits to the hospital, Masha often accused Cohen and his sister of neglecting her and Cohen found the encounters difficult. Once her medication changed, however, she regained her mental balance and was quickly released. But his familial links withered further when he failed to return to the family business at the end of the summer. When asked by his cousin Edgar Cohen why he left the Freedman Company, Cohen replied, “Edgar, I had no choice.”
In the December 1958 issue of Culture there was a surprising attack on Cohen from his former mentor, Louis Dudek. The newest generation of poets, Dudek stated, is “not even capable of social anger or of pity.” Cohen was criticized for his “obscure cosmological imagery … a confusion of symbolic images, often a rag-bag of classical mythology.” Layton was suitably incensed, calling Dudek’s attitude “as stupid as it is false. Cohen is one of the purest lyrical talents this country has ever produced. He hates the mythologizing school of Macpherson, Reaney and Daryl Hine.” Cohen overlooked the charges and accompanied Dudek and F.R. Scott to a January 1959 party for Ralph Gustafson at the Montreal Press Club.
In April 1959 Cohen and Layton both received Canada Council grants. Cohen’s proposed project was to write a novel drawn from visits to the ancient capitals of Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem. Because he had the support of writers like Layton and Scott, and was gaining attention in reviews from Margaret Avison, Desmond Pacey, Milton Wilson, and Northrop Frye, the Canada Council decided to fund his request. A number of Canadian writers were living overseas at the time: Dorothy Livesay and Mordecai Richler were in London, Mavis Gallant was in Paris, and Margaret Laurence was in Africa. According to Layton, this was to be expected because “the Canadian poet … is an exile condemned to live in his own country” without a public or following; hence, one might as well depart to a region where art was at least respected. The arts grant of two thousand dollars made it possible for Cohen to leave Montreal.
That June, Layton introduced Cohen to A.M. Klein who was to become an instrumental figure in Cohen’s life. Klein was the seminal Jewish Montreal poet and had been the editor of the Canadian Jewish Chronicle from 1938–55. He had won a Governor General’s Award for poetry in 1949 and had been the leader of the Jewish literati until his nervous breakdown and withdrawal from writing in the mid-fifties. Cohen grew up reading Klein and Klein had reviewed Cohen’s grandfather’s book in The Canadian Jewish Chronicle. Klein remembered both the book and the rabbi. After their visit, Cohen told Layton that he thought “the fires had been banked” but that Klein was still witty and eager to talk about poetry. Cohen had already written two poems about Klein: “To a Teacher” and “Song for Abraham Klein,” later to appear in The Spice-Box of Earth.
Cohen interpreted Klein’s breakdown as the result of being exiled by his community. In a December 1963 talk by Cohen at the Jewish Public Library of Montreal, Cohen said, “Klein chose to be a priest though it was as a prophet that we needed him, as a prophet he needed us and he needed himself …” To avoid such a split himself, Cohen attempts to collapse the divide between prophet and priest and to join them throughout his work—or at least give them equal time. The prophet, Cohen notes, is the visionary; the priest his disciple.
Cohen learned from both Klein and Layton, combining Klein’s priestly mien with the prophetic energy of Layton to reformulate the voice of the Jewish poet. Cohen examined Judaism within a broader context, one that allowed the incorporation of Zen Buddhism and traditional Jewish orthodoxy. Cohen’s poetic world became a complex mix of tradition and experimentation, conservatism and propheticism. What he called the Montreal tradition was “a certain Hebraic sense connected with Layton and A.M. Klein, and it connected me in a certain way with Scott, whose father was a minister. I’m attracted to a priesthood.” But Klein stood out:
His fate was very important to me, what happened to and what would happen to a Jewish writer in Montreal who was writing in English, who was not totally writing from a Jewis
h position. … Klein came out of the Jewish community of Montreal, but [he] had a perspective on it and on the country, and on the province. He made a step outside the community. He was no longer protected by it.
Such a move established a paradigm for Cohen, who would himself step outside the Montreal poetry scene. “I always was more interested in the exile,” Cohen has commented, “somebody who can’t claim the entire landscape as his own.”
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ON MAY 5, 1959, Cohen wrote an important letter from his Mountain Street apartment:
Dear Mr. McClelland:
I spoke with you on the telephone a few months ago when I was in Toronto and you said that I may send you my manuscript.
Here it is. I hope you like it.
Sincerely,
Leonard Cohen
The manuscript was The Spice-Box of Earth, and its arrival marked the beginning of Cohen’s long-term relationship with one of Canada’s leading publishers. Jack McClelland recalls the young poet self-confidently striding into his office earlier that spring wearing a jacket and tie, carrying a manuscript of poems. McClelland quickly scanned Cohen’s poetry, which had been recommended by Irving Layton. In an unprecedented move, McClelland accepted Cohen’s manuscript on the spot, without consulting any of his editors. “I think it’s the only time I ever—without reading a manuscript or without having it read—made the publishing commitment…. I said OK, we’re going to publish this guy; I don’t give a shit whether the poetry’s good, although I did look at a couple of the poems and thought they were pretty good.”
In mid-July Cohen received a letter from Claire Pratt, an associate editor at McClelland & Stewart and daughter of E.J. Pratt. It said that the manuscript had been accepted on the condition that certain revisions be made, including reducing its length. She also enclosed a reader’s report, which criticized some poems as “too slight to be committed to book form,” and suggested lessening the number of erotic poems. But “no other poet can quite match the imagery and expressiveness of these poems” the reader concluded. Pratt anticipated publishing in the spring of 1960.
Cohen was ecstatic with the news, replying,
I have bought several people several rounds of drinks since your generous and historic letter arrived. One of my uncles smiled, one disturbed relative had an instant of lucidity, the Board of Elders of my family’s synagogue has convened to reopen discussion on my occupancy of my father’s pew, from which I have been disallowed on account of my last book, which was discovered to be lewd, offensive, and full of christological implications.
Rather than see the book in the McClelland & Stewart “Indian File” series, an expensive hardcover line, as Pratt suggested, Cohen had another idea. He explained that costly, hard-bound poetry books were obsolete. The public wouldn’t buy them. He thought that a brightly colored paperback would sell better: “Please understand I want an audience. I am not interested in the Academy. There are places where poems are being bought and embraced.” He offered to work with their designer on a format that would appeal to a wide following: “inner-directed adolescents, lovers in all degrees of anguish, disappointed Platonists, pornography-peepers, hair-handed monks and Popists, French-Canadian intellectuals, unpublished writers, curious musicians, etc., all that holy following of my Art.” Cohen’s preference for a paperback with a potentially large audience contradicts his decision to print his first book in hardcover, the price limiting readership. He concluded his letter with an open and genuine statement: “Thank you for treating me like a professional and making me feel like a Writer.”
Pratt and McClelland soon discovered that Cohen operated in an unusual manner, declining to sign contracts for his work after The Spice-Box of Earth. As a matter of form, a contract would always be sent, but Cohen would never return it. With the exception of his first book for McClelland & Stewart (and his most recent, Stranger Music), this became Cohen’s unorthodox procedure. Jack McClelland chose to ignore this aspect of Cohen’s behavior, despite his anxiety over certain legal matters, including the right of Cohen, rather than the firm, to control his material.
By September, Cohen had decided to leave the clothing business: “Can’t take it anymore. Will try the CBC,” which he did briefly, supporting himself by writing reviews and attempting some radio journalism. He continued to experiment with drugs “to liberate spiritual energy;” at least that was the excuse, he later remarked. “Thanks to drugs,” he has sarcastically noted, “for at least fifteen minutes I could consider myself as the Great Evangelist of the New Age!” His role as Evangelist took an unusual form when in early September he joined Layton, Al Purdy, and John Mills at the Ph.D defense of George Roy at the University of Montreal on “Symbolism in Canadian Poetry 1880–1939.” Despite the celebrity audience, the candidate passed.
On November 12, 1959, Cohen accompanied Scott and Layton in a poetry reading at the Young Mens’ Hebrew Association on 92nd Street in New York, by all accounts a great success. Introduced by Kenneth McRobbie, the trio was in good voice, with Scott possessing “enough Anglo-Saxon dignity to cover the rest of us.” A few weeks after the reading at the YMHA, Cohen departed for London. Following his habit of marking a departure or change, Cohen offered a comic farewell:
An All-Season Haiku for my friends
Who are leaving and who have decided
not to leave, who are putting clean
pressed handkerchiefs in their battered
baggage and thinking about trains
chariots and even nobler
wagons only they know about, and
to those who have no clean linen at
all but have to use sleeves or even bare
arms and walk where ever they go
Goodbye
On October 29, 1959, Cohen was issued his first passport. It is a well-used document, with stamps that record his wanderings over the following decade: Greece, France, Britain, the United States, Morocco, Cuba, and Norway. The accompanying photo shows a serious young man in jacket, tie, and vest, the embodiment of Westmount success.
4
MOLECULES DANCING IN THE MOUNTAINS
THE KING OF BOHEMIA and William IV welcomed Leonard Cohen to London on a dreary December day in 1959. The two pubs stood adjacent to 19b Hampstead High Street, a small, three-story boardinghouse which, despite its address, was actually tucked around the corner on Gayton Road. Today the unassuming brown and tan brick building is squeezed between Oxfam and the Cafe Rouge. Across the road and next to a post office is the Cafe Zen. When Cohen arrived, a green grocer, an East Indian restaurant, and a laundromat were the main attractions. Two small windows in the front of the boardinghouse let in a muted light.
Jake and Stella Pullman owned it and their home became a haven of sorts for Cohen. Mort Rosengarten, whose parents knew the Pullmans, had stayed there, and two other close friends, Harold Pascal and Nancy Bacal, were still there, eagerly awaiting his arrival. Cohen was told that the only space left was a cot in the sitting room, where all new guests started out; only after someone left did you graduate to an upper floor. He was welcome to it if (a) he tidied the room every morning and (b) he fulfilled his intention of becoming a writer by meeting his announced goal of three pages a day. “As long as you write your three pages every day you can stay with us,” Stella Pullman told him. Cohen agreed to her bargain and got to work, diligently producing at least three pages a day, a practice he followed for years. Stella’s strictness, as well as her generosity, paid off: “She is partly responsible for finishing my book in a way,” Cohen said, referring to the first draft of The Favorite Game. The Pullmans became a new anchor in his life.
Cohen was excited about being in the capital of English literature and felt he was joining Shakespeare, Milton, and Keats. “London is welcoming another great author!” he declared. A visit to Dublin created similar excitement, and he wrote a short play entitled “Sugar Plum Fairies” (an early version of “The New Step”) after visiting the Abbey Theatre and the pubs that Yeats ha
d frequented. But after the initial excitement, Cohen found London dull and its nightlife unpromising. He obtained a “reader’s ticket” to the Hampstead Public Libraries and spent a good deal of time at the William (as the local pub, the William iv, was called). He later discovered a West Indian club called the All-Niter, where he found terrific music, marijuana, and dancing. With Nancy Bacal, who was in London to study classical theatre and begin a career in radio journalism with the CBC, he explored late-night London. They played pinball in East End dives, met pimps, explored the drug culture, went to clubs, and encountered some alternative politics. Nancy was then dating a disciple of Malcolm X named Michael X, who later founded the Black Muslim movement in London. He planned to return to Trinidad, take over the government, and make Cohen part of the ruling party, as “permanent advisor to the Minister of Tourism!” Michael X did return, but he was soon arrested. Cohen, with others, attempted to organize support for him but failed.
On the day he arrived in London, Cohen bought a typewriter, a green Olivetti 22, for £40, which would remain with him for years. He also acquired his “famous blue raincoat,” a Burberry with epaulets. That, too, remained with him until it was stolen from a New York loft in 1968. In London, these objects acted as amulets, arming him to combat the world. His Olivetti broke only once in twenty-six years, when he threw the machine against the wall of his Montreal apartment after an unsuccessful attempt to type underwater. It was eventually repaired, and he used that Olivetti to type most of his best-known songs and novels.