by Ira B. Nadel
His raincoat was memorialized in the song “Famous Blue Raincoat,” recorded on Songs of Love and Hate, his third album. “The last time we saw you, you looked so much older / Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder” reads two lines of this song that ends enigmatically, “Sincerely, L. Cohen.” The song has become a signature of sorts, the raincoat embodying Cohen’s early image of mystery, travel, and adventure. The coat itself appears in the 1965 NFB film, Ladies and Gentlemen… Mr. Leonard Cohen. Jennifer Warnes titled her 1986 album Famous Blue Raincoat and used a drawing of the coat on the cover.
Cohen quickly established a new social circle in London. Through Tony Graham, a Montrealer who was studying medicine at Cambridge, he met Elizabeth Kenrick, part of a Cambridge set. She, in turn, introduced him to Jacob Rothschild, later Lord Rothschild. Although Kenrick never became Cohen’s girlfriend, he invited her, in jest, to join him when he decided to go to Hydra in March 1960; she declined. Two years later, he was still concerned about her, telling his sister in New York that Kenrick, “very lovely both of flesh and spirit,” would soon be visiting and she should help her if necessary.
Cohen’s principal activity at 19B Hampstead High Street was writing the first draft of his second novel, Beauty at Close Quarters, later published as The Favorite Game. At one point he also considered calling it Stars for Neatness. He began the book almost immediately upon his arrival, working diligently, despite interruptions from David the cat; he loved to scatter the pages. Cohen read passages to Nancy Bacal, who later said she felt that the lengthy first draft possessed a looseness and honesty that the published work lacked.
The first version of the story, completed in the winter of 1959/1960, opens with the self-conscious narrator, Lawrence Breavman, searching in his papers for a passage summarizing the difficulty of beginnings. He wishes he could be known to the reader in a flash but realizes he must unfold himself through exaggeration and distortion, “until by sheer weight of evidence, you will possess me, knowing when I am false and when I am true.” An undisguised autobiographical text follows, with the narrator identifying his birth in Montreal in September 1934, the month and year of Cohen’s birth. Cohen’s family history follows, essentially a semi-fictional summary of adventures, incidents, and interests of his first twenty-five years.
The actual names of several friends appear, including Freda [Guttman] and [Robert] Hershorn; Mort Rosengarten appears as Krantz; Irving Morton, a socialist folksinger, appears as himself. Other names in the final version change: Freda, presented as a politically motivated student, and Louise, a Montreal artist, merge into a single character, Tamara. Stella, the housemaid from the Maritimes that Cohen hypnotized, becomes Heather. Details about the family home appear, including a careful description of the photograph of Cohen’s father that hung in his childhood bedroom. Cohen, through Breavman, narrates his life, including his father’s illness, his early girlfriends, and his mother’s overbearing love.
After completing the first draft of his novel in March 1960, Cohen then revised the typescript of The Spice-Box of Earth and sent it to McClelland & Stewart. Cohen wrote to Claire Pratt, “I’m glad the book is out of my hands. Poetry is so damn self-indulgent. During these past few weeks of intense polishing, I’ve been making nasty faces at myself in all the mirrors I pass.” The work was reduced by the suggested third, while its design became more clarified in the author’s mind: “I wouldn’t like to see these poems rendered in any sort of delicate print. They should be large and black on the page. They should look as if they are meant to be chanted aloud, which is exactly why I wrote them.”
Jack McClelland offered Cohen a choice: he could publish the manuscript in a common edition to appear in the fall of 1960 or do a more expensive and distinctively designed volume for the spring of 1961. In late July, Cohen told McClelland to let Frank Newfeld design the book and publish it the following spring. His choice of the higher-priced, more artistic form for the book contradicted his earlier wish for a mass market paperback. But this format would satisfy his sense of poetry as a formal art that should have an elegant, almost “Westmount” look and feel. The appearance of the volume suited the taste of the author. In his letter to McClelland, he also mentioned that he had almost finished his novel, which he would forward to him. On August 28, 1960, he sent “the only copy in the world,” as he admitted to McClelland, to Toronto.
Earlier in March, when he had completed his manuscripts, Cohen was free to consider his position in London, and he found it wanting. After having a wisdom tooth pulled one day, he wandered about the East End of London on yet another rainy afternoon and noticed a Bank of Greece sign on Bank Street. He entered and saw a teller with a deep tan wearing sunglasses, in protest against the dreary landscape. He asked the clerk what the weather was like in Greece. “Springtime” was the reply. Cohen made up his mind on the spot to depart, and within a day or so he was in Athens. “I said to myself that I should go somewhere completely different in order to see how they live,” he later explained.
It was actually the island of Hydra that attracted Cohen. English was spoken and an artists’ colony was flourishing. He had first heard of Hydra from Jacob Rothschild, whose mother had married Ghikas (Niko Hadjikyriakos), one of modern Greece’s most important painters. They lived in his family’s forty-room seventeenth-century mansion perched on a hill some distance from the port with a striking view of the sea. Jacob Rothschild encouraged Cohen to visit his mother, promising to write to her to say that Cohen was coming. Layton had predicted Cohen’s departure. “I suppose when he’s finished his novel,” he told Desmond Pacey, “he’ll leave London for the Continent, where he’ll make love to all the beautiful French and Italian women, and then leave for Greece and Israel!”
————
COHEN ARRIVED in Athens on April 13, 1960, visited the Acropolis, then spent the night in Piraeus, where he was flattered by a homosexual advance (which he rejected) from a hotel floor sweeper. The next morning he began the five-hour steamer journey to Hydra, which took him first to Aegina, Methana, and Poros, and then to Hydra. (Since the seventies, the Russian-built Flying Dolphins hydrofoils have replaced the once-elegant steamers, reducing the traveling time to one and a half hours.) The trip was an opportunity to relax, drink, and meet women.
At Hydra, the small semicircular port is flanked by white houses rising steeply in an orderly manner, like the seats of an amphitheater. A cobbled esplanade runs along the waterfront, harmonizing the cluster of homes that surround it and reach up the hillside. Only the bell tower of the cathedral attached to the Monastery of the Virgin’s Assumption disrupts the horizontal tableau. The structure of the town emulates the classical theater of Epidauros, with the port the equivalent of the orchestra. Access to and from the port follows the theatrical frame of the parodos (side entrances and exits) with the houses mimicking the stepped seats of the theatron. Towering above the port is the two-thousand-foot Mount Ere, and on a high hill just below it, the Monastery of Profitis Elias (the Prophet Elijah).
In the morning the port is the commercial center where boats are unloaded, where fish and vegetables are sold, and donkeys are hired. At midday and into the evening it becomes the social center, the focus turned toward the restaurants and cafes. During religious or public holidays, it is the site of celebration. When Cohen arrived in 1960, only four coffeehouses and one bar ringed the waterfront.
Tradition, rather than a master plan or building code, determined the urban layout and architecture of Hydra. When a child married, a new house was built within the uncovered space of the family lot, treated as a separate unit, and given direct entry from the public street. The result was odd lot shapes and dead ends (most houses are rectangular or “L” shaped and composed of stone walls, timber or tile roofs, and tile floors.) The doorways are unique in that they face downwards to the port, rather than horizontally to the street. Offsetting the whitewashed walls of the homes are the orange tile roofs and the weathered cobblestone steps. It was the a
narchy of the homes that prompted Henry Miller to remark on the “wild and naked perfection of Hydra.”
The narrow island was named for water though it actually has little. Rain is rare, the average yearly precipitation being only an inch and a half. When the first home with a swimming pool was built by a Greek American in the late sixties, the owner had to pay for barges of fresh water to be brought in and pumped up the hilly streets. It is little more than a barren rock, four miles wide and nearly eleven miles long, about four miles off the southeast coast of Argolis.
There are no cars or trucks on Hydra, since the land is too steep and the streets too narrow to permit them. Donkeys, which bray in an agonizing manner throughout the night, and occasionally horses, are the only transportation on the steps and ramps. The widest streets were originally designed so that two basket-carrying donkeys could pass each other; secondary streets provide passage for only one. An important site is Kala Pigadia, the Good Wells or Twin Wells. Situated above the port, this is where water was drawn and people gathered to trade news and stories; the two small wells are shaded by several large trees.
When Cohen first arrived on Hydra there was limited electricity, few telephones, and virtually no plumbing. Kerosene or oil lamps lit the homes; cisterns were used to collect water, and no wires obstructed the views. One of the few discos used a battery-operated record player, since the small electrical plant generated power only from sundown to midnight. Except for the kitchen, which was heated by the stove or Turkish copper braziers, rooms were heated with a three-legged tin filled with charcoal embers. Many of the homes were run-down and in desperate need of repair. In 1960, half of the homes were uninhabited, and virtually no new homes had been built for nearly a century.
When Cohen arrived he found temporary accomodation with writers George Johnston and Charmian Clift before renting a house for fourteen dollars a month. After he was settled, Cohen decided to introduce himself to Jacob Rothschild’s mother and hired a guide to take him to Ghikas’ estate. Jacob Rothschild’s sister greeted him but made it clear that no one had heard of him, that her brother hadn’t written, and that Cohen’s type of Jew was not really welcome. Angered by this reception, Cohen left, casting a curse upon the house. Late one evening in 1961, while wandering back and forth on the terrace of his own house above the port, Cohen was startled to hear an explosion and see a fire high up on the mountain. The Ghikas home had exploded! He felt his curse had taken effect. He later learned that a careless watchman, guarding the empty estate, misplaced some kerosene, which had ignited.
There was already a small community of foreign writers and artists on Hydra. The principal figures were the Australian writers George Johnston and Charmian Clift, the English painter Anthony Kingsmill, and the Norwegian writer Axel Jensen, who headed a small Norwegian contingent. Other writers came and went, including John Knowles, William Lederer (author of The Ugly American), Irish poet Paul Desmond, Swedish poet Goron Tunstrom, Israeli journalist Amos Elan, and numerous dancers, artists, and academics. Allen Ginsberg stayed for several nights with Cohen after Cohen hailed him in Syntagma Square in Athens, recognizing him from a photograph. After a lengthy conversation, Ginsberg accepted Cohen’s invitation to visit. Don McGill, Canadian broadcaster and director at the Mountain Playhouse, and American sociologist Rienhart Bendix also visited Hydra. Film stars, including Sophia Loren (who filmed Boy on a Dolphin there) and Brigitte Bardot, began to appear. Jackie Kennedy would visit, and later Edward Kennedy, as well as Jules Dassin, Melina Mercouri, Tony Perkins, and Peter Finch, who was a good friend of the Johnstons. In several of his letters from 1961, Cohen complains about the influx of movie crews, which upset the peace and quiet of the island.
George Johnston and Charmian Clift were Australian journalists who had moved to Hydra in 1955 to write. Peel Me a Lotus is Charmian’s engaging account of their survival on an isolated and uncomfortable island with two small children. By 1958, two years after the birth of their third child, their relationship had begun to fall apart. In his 1960 novel Closer to the Sun, Johnston recounted the jealousies and liaisons of island life. The couple returned to Australia in 1964 after George contracted tuberculosis, shortly before his novel My Brother Jack was published. It was hailed as an outstanding and significant Australian novel. In 1969, Charmian committed suicide, shocking everyone. George died a year later.
Cohen first met George and Charmian at Katsikas’ Bar, which consisted of “six deal tables at the back of Antony and Nick Katsikas’ grocery store at the end of the cobblestoned waterfront by the Poseidon Hotel.” Amid flour sacks, olive jars, and strings of onions, an artist’s club of sorts flourished. Evenings were spent arguing, drinking, and entertaining one another. George, the writer-in-residence, held court, often speaking “in a wild spate of words, punctuated with great shouts of laughter and explosions of obscenity.” Members of the foreign community appeared, withdrew, and reappeared. The port became a “horseshoe-shaped stage” and the Johnston’s circle “the actors of some unbelievable play the intriguing plot of which unrolled in front of the eyes of a totally flabbergasted audience—the locals, who watching it all commented on the side like the chorus of an ancient Greek tragedy.”
Cohen soon joined in, absorbed by the discussions, social relations, and sexual maneuverings of his new crowd. He gave his first formal concert at Katsikas’ grocery and formed an important and lasting friendship with the Johnstons. They gave him a big work table that he used for writing and eating, as well as a bed and pots and pans for his new house.
Cohen and Johnston made a playful bet occasioned by the spring 1961 upheavels in Iran: in May the Shah had dissolved the representative assembly and senate; by July, he imposed new restrictions on political freedom, while arresting generals and civilans for corruption in preparation for rule by decree. The wager reads:
Bet between LC and George Johnston:
“The Peacock Throne will be
a Shit House Commode by
October 16, 1962.”
– G H. Johnston
A bet made between George
H. Johnston (a gentile) and Leonard Cohen
(a Jew) on October 16, 1961, and
renewed October 20, 1961, for
10,000 drachmas.
George Johnston, his Mark,
[large X] Bassanio [Goron Tunstrom]
P. S. Waiting Leonard Cohen [written in Hebrew]
for the trial (Shylock)
yours,
Portia
Prophetically, what was proposed in the wager nearly came true as land-reform brought major riots causing the Iranian prime minister to resign in April 1962 and allowing the National Front, briefly allied with the radical, religious opposition, and labeled reactionary, to gain power.
For better or worse, the Johnstons provided both a literary and domestic model for life on the island. The difficulty of the Johnston marriage, with its threats of breakup and numerous affairs, was intensified by George’s illness and Charmian’s problems in bringing up three children. George shared his ideas, encouraged others, and understood the labor of writing, even if he had difficulty putting it into practice. Charmian was gifted and quite beautiful, but she needed the attention and love of men and her husband was ill and impotent. Cynthia Nolan, wife of the painter Sidney Nolan, remembered there was “a lot of writing talk in the air” around the Johnstons. The island nourished art and destroyed relationships.
Another fixture on the island was the painter, drinker, and gifted conversationalist Anthony Kingsmill, who was to become a close friend of Cohen’s. The adopted son of the English writer Hugh Kingsmill, Anthony was plagued by the unknown origin of his biological father, whom he later discovered was not only Jewish but also named Cohen. Kingsmill ended up on Hydra after going to art school in London and spending some time in Paris. Dapper and short, with soulful gray eyes, he would frequently quote long passages from Tennyson, Wordsworth, or Shakespeare. He would also break out into a little softshoe shuffle whenever he was elat
ed or drunk. To the colony of romantically damaged men on the island, he announced that all sex was metaphysical. “Pull up your sex, and get on with it!” His other expression was “Forget the Grace / Enjoy the Lace / Have some fun and carry on.”
He survived largely on charm and commissions of never-to-be completed work. When he did finish a painting, he would often resell it to someone else. Cohen commissioned a painting from Kingsmill but when he was away from the island, Kingsmill entered Cohen’s house, seized the painting, and resold it. Only years later did he nervously tell Cohen about the ruse. He was expecting the worst from his friend, but Cohen merely laughed. Cohen was constantly commissioning paintings that never materialized, even paying for one painting seven times.
Kingsmill was a difficult and at times exasperating man who drank too much, womanized, and gambled whenever he could. He never had any money but he was always entertaining. By 1964 Kingsmill was having an open affair with Charmian Clift. Island life was intense, and romance was often seasonal: new partnerships would form over the summer, last through the chilly and rainy winter, and then reconfigure themselves in the spring.
But Kingsmill survived his various encounters with women and the bottle. Don Lowe describes Kingsmill as a man with whom you couldn’t win:
He exposed the loser in you. And then took you out, wined and dined you with your own cash, and finally told you that nothing was learned in victories. That it was the losers who proved the most beautiful. So, of course you forgave him. Again and again.
Cohen also forgave Kingsmill again and again, partly because he admired Kingsmill’s storytelling skill and talent for life. But Kingsmill also valued Cohen, remarking to Don Lowe that his voice was like a rabbi’s, resonant, complex, and full of history. “I don’t think he’s my father, but he could be. I’ve tried to tell him that,” Kingsmill said. Kingsmill finally married an American woman named Christina in 1973 in Athens. He seemed reasonably settled until his wife left him for someone else and then suddenly died of cancer. He reasoned that he wasn’t cut out to be wed; it rhymes too much with “dead,” he told everyone. Kingsmill himself died in London in 1993.