by Ira B. Nadel
One of Cohen’s schemes was to write television dramas with Irving Layton. Every morning Layton came to Cohen’s apartment near Mac-Gregor Street, where the two would work on promising ideas which remained unsold. “We did it simply by prodding each other,” Cohen said. “He’d get off some line and then I would take the part of a character and so on and we found ourselves working very beautifully together.” Titles like “Lights on the Black Water,” “A Man Was Killed,” “Up with Nothing,” and “Enough of Fallen Leaves” caught no one’s imagination. They hoped to write six plays, including “One for the Books,” about a Communist bookseller. But the collaboration of poets failed to produce saleable drama.
Cohen was trying his own hand at playwriting at this time and Layton recalls a visit from Cohen one day in which they read his play “The Whipping:” It was a “macabre, compelling thing,” similar to an earlier work Cohen had written after his return from Hydra entitled The Latest Step. It would later be published as “The New Step (a Ballet-Drama in One Act)” in Flowers for Hitler.
Montreal, like every place he stayed, again began to make Cohen restless. He sought stimulation elsewhere, and the place he chose was Cuba.
5
HOPELESSLY HOLLYWOOD
IN 1957 Cohen’s sister Esther and her husband Victor had gone to Cuba for their honeymoon and came back with reports of glittering nightclubs, casinos, and risqué floorshows. This had been under the auspices of Batista; in 1959 Fidel Castro had come to power and Cohen wanted to see the socialist revolution firsthand. He took a bus to Miami in late March, and then flew to Havana, which was hot and quietly disintegrating. It was 1961 and Castro was facing off with the Americans. “I am wild for all kinds of violence,” Cohen had said before leaving. He later confessed that he went not so much to support Castro as to pursue a fiction: “I had this mythology of this famous civil war in my mind. I thought maybe this was my Spanish civil war, but it was a shabby kind of support. It was really mostly curiosity and a sense of adventure.”
Cohen’s departure created confusion at McClelland & Stewart: “the day you left for Cuba, the page proofs [of Spice-Box] came in, and now I am wondering what we had better do,” wrote his editor. On March 30 Cohen was on a Pan American flight from Miami to Havana. Thirty-one years earlier, almost to the day, García Lorca had made a trip to Cuba, and part of Cohen’s attraction to the country, as it had been with Columbia University, was that it had excited his literary mentor. Lorca’s three-month stay, beginning in April 1930, included lectures, poetry readings, and a crocodile hunt. “The island is a paradise,” Lorca exclaimed to his parents. “Cuba! If you can’t find me, look for me in Andalusia or in Cuba.”
When Cohen arrived, he found a splendid city in decay. The skyscrapers of Vedado, the business center west of the Old City, were falling into disrepair, the façades cracking, windows broken. The bright pastels of the elegant homes in Cubanacan and El Cerro had faded, the houses now inhabited by peasant families. Walls were crumbling, paint was peeling, and weeds were sprouting. Manicured lawns had turned brown and goats grazed alongside the swimming pools. Elegant cars had been replaced by decrepit taxis. The Havana Country Club was the new National School of Art, and the Prado, once an elite Spanish heritage club, was filled with gym mats for its new use as a gymnastics center.
Havana had once been called “the whorehouse of America,” with boatloads of prostitutes greeting tourists as they traveled up the narrow waterway that separates Morro Castle from the city. Under Batista, the government disguised the profitable prostitution rings as dance academies. When Cohen arrived, a program to reform the nearly eleven thousand prostitutes of Havana was underway. The casinos were outlawed and gambling had been reduced to a back-street operation. But the exotic appeal of the sensual Cuban world could not be erased by socialism, and a violent beauty remained. The rhythm of maracas and marimbas playing the rumba, the son, or the cha-cha was heard throughout the city. Sloppy Joe’s bar, at one time Cuba’s most famous drinking establishment, remained open, although it lacked its former glamor. In Old Havana, the walls of La Bodeguita del Medio, a favorite of Hemingway’s, still displayed the signatures of thousands of patrons. Everywhere there was the smell of dust and salt, cigar smoke and cheap perfume.
Despite the new reforms, a certain lasciviousness still hovered about the city, and Cohen rapidly fell into what he referred to as his old bourgeois ways: staying up late to explore the night scene. This teenage habit continued throughout his life and he would often be up writing, drinking, or talking at 3:00 a.m., his favorite morning hour. He soon adopted the fashionable rebel garb: khaki shorts and the fresh stubble of a new beard. But very few citizens were on the streets at that hour and certainly not the East Bloc and Soviet technicians and aides, nor the young female Czech translator he met whose boss would not let her out at night. Only the prostitutes that congregated along the Malecón, the broad boulevard that edged the ocean, or those he met in the Old City kept him company. Of black and Spanish heritage, these chocolate-skinned women with marvelous figures expressed an eroticism that Cohen found irresistible.
Joining the pimps, hookers, gamblers, small-time criminals, and black marketeers who prowled Havana all night, Cohen roamed the urban slums of Jesus del Monte to the swank waterfront suburbs of Miramar. He frequented the back alleys and little bars of Old Havana and the once-renowned Tropicana, which claimed the largest dancehall in the world. Ever since the Shanghai, celebrated for its nude shows, had closed, the Tropicana, with its roulette rooms, cabaret, and open-air dance floor and stage, had flourished. Initially outlawed under Castro, the nightclubs, gambling houses, brothels, casinos, and slot machines soon reappeared. When they were closed, unemployment was too high, compromising the economic goals of the revolution. Cohen imagined himself as “The Only Tourist in Havana,” the title of a later poem.
Late one night a Canadian government official knocked on the door of Cohen’s Havana hotel, politely telling him that his “presence was urgently requested at the Canadian Embassy.” Looking back on the incident, Cohen remembers that he felt apprehensive but excited: “I was Upton Sinclair! I was on an important mission!” Feeling “feisty” and emancipated, Cohen accompanied the dark-suited figure to the embassy. He was immediately ushered into the office of the vice-consul, who took an instant dislike to him, his beard, and his khaki outfit. The official disdainfully conveyed the dramatic news to the pseudo-revolutionary: “Your mother’s very worried about you!” It turned out that because three bombers piloted by revolutionaries had staged a minor attack on the Havana airport, exaggerated in the world press as an all-out war on the country, Cohen’s mother had contacted Laz Phillips, a Canadian senator who happened to be her cousin and asked him to locate her son to make sure he was alive.
The threat of invasion, however, put everyone on alert and eventually led to Cohen’s arrest. Castro had detained nearly one hundred thousand suspected dissidents in the preceding months and Cohen unwittingly joined their ranks. It happened while he was staying at the Hotel Miramar at Playa de Varadero, walking on the famous white sand beach roughly ninety miles east of Havana. Wearing his khakis and carrying a hunting knife, he was suddenly surrounded by twelve soldiers with Czech submachine guns. It was late at night and they thought he was the first of an American landing team. They marched him to the local police station while he repeated the only Spanish he knew, a slogan of Castro’s: Amistad del pueblo, “Friendship of the people.” This made no impression on his captors, but after an hour and a half of interrogation, Cohen convinced them he was not a spy but a fan of the regime who wanted to be there.
Once he had persuaded them that his intentions were innocent, Cohen and his captors embraced, brought out the rum and started a party. The soldiers were militianos, and to confirm their good will, they placed a necklace of shells and a string hung with two bullets around Cohen’s neck. He spent the next day with his captors and rode back to Havana with them. As they were walking down a Havana Street later that
afternoon, a photographer snapped their picture, Cohen wearing his khakis and his new necklace. Afterwards, he stuffed the photograph in his knapsack.
Cohen spent much of his time in the Havana night scene, meeting artists and writers, arguing about artistic freedom and political oppression. He also ran into a number of American Communists. He disagreed with their views and had a violent argument with one of them. The man spat at Cohen and denounced him as bourgeois. The next day Cohen rose to the accusation by shaving his beard and putting on a seersucker suit, confirming their suspicions that he was a “bourgeois individualist.”
In Montreal, Irving Layton, as well as Cohen’s mother, was now worried. Following the attack on the airport on April 15, Layton wrote to Cohen, advising him to leave as soon as possible. “This is no time for a footloose reckless poet to find himself on the island,” Layton told his friend Desmond Pacey. Layton was convinced that within days there would be an invasion and that Cohen was in danger.
Layton was right. The imminent danger was intensified by the January suspension of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba. Anti-imperialist rhetoric increased in intensity and daily life became more perilous for foreigners. The Bay of Pigs invasion of April 17, 1961, confirmed the Cubans’ fear, although Castro’s unexpected success in defeating thirteen hundred U.S.-trained Cuban invaders solidified his power and stature. “Tourists” were arrested daily without explanation, although Cohen found the official attitude of the government “impeccable,” even toward someone as “ambiguous and ambivalent as myself.”
The day after the invasion, Cohen wrote to Jack McClelland, ostensibly to thank him for his first literary contract, adding, “Just think how well the book would sell if I’m hit in an air-raid. What great publicity! Don’t tell me you haven’t been considering it.” He then gives this report of events the night of the invasion:
There was a prolonged round of anti-aircraft fire tonight. An unidentified (but we know Yankee) plane. I think the guns were in the room next door. I looked out the window. Half a platoon running down the Prado [Paseo de Martí], then crouching behind an iron lion. Hopelessly Hollywood.
When Cohen decided to leave Cuba, he discovered that most of Havana’s middle class was trying to leave as well. Daily visits to the shell-struck Jose Martí airport, sixteen miles southwest of the city, became a fruitless ritual. He was unable to get a seat, although he soon befriended others in the waiting line, including the editor of the socialist magazine Monthly Review, who was also eager to escape. Cohen eventually managed to reserve a seat on a flight to Miami. Standing in line on April 26, the day he was to leave, Cohen was surprised to hear an official call the name of the person in front of him and the name of the person behind him, but not his own. Looking at the official’s list, he saw that a line had been drawn through his name. Ordered to go to the security desk, Cohen was informed by a Cuban official that he could not leave the country. The reason? A picture of him dressed as a militiano and standing with two other soldiers had been found in his knapsack and he was thought to be an escaping Cuban. A copy of Castro’s Declaration of Havana, condemning American exploitation of Cuba, in his belongings didn’t help his claim that he was a foreigner. His Canadian passport was thought to have been a forgery.
Cohen was taken to a security area outside the waiting room, where he was guarded by a fourteen-year-old with a rifle. Arguing with the youth about his detention and his rights as a Canadian citizen had no effect. A commotion on the runway distracted the teenaged guard; several Cubans were being evicted from a plane, and when they resisted, an argument broke out. The guard ran to the scene and Cohen was left unguarded. He quickly repacked his bag and nervously walked to the plane, repeating to himself, “It’s going to be OK; they don’t really care about me.” He climbed on board, telling himself not to look back, took a seat and didn’t move. No one asked for tickets. After a few anxious moments, the door shut, the engines started, and the plane began to taxi down the runway. He had escaped.
Eighteen months later during the Cuban missile crisis, Cohen’s brother-in-law, Victor Cohen, accused him of being pro-Castro and anti-American. Cohen responded with a lengthy politicized letter, saying that he opposed all forms of censorship, collectivism, and control and that he rejected all hospitality offered by the Cuban government to visiting writers during his stay. He wanted his brother-in-law to understand that he went to Cuba “to see a socialist revolution,” not “to wave a flag or prove a point.” And although he saw many happy Cubans, he became anxious when he observed the long lines of “scared people outside the secret-police HQ waiting to see relatives, and the sound-trucks blasting the anthem, and the posters everywhere…. I left anti-government poems everywhere I went, I talked to painters and writers about their inevitable clash with Authority … and they dismissed me as a hopelessly bourgeois anarchist bohemian etc.” Although Cohen later suggested that his motives for going to Cuba were personal and slightly shabby, he took a lofty moral stance with his brother-in-law, writing,
I’m one of the few men of my generation who cared enough about the Cuban reality to go and see it, alone, uninvited, very hungry when my money ran out, and absolutely unwilling to take a sandwich from a government which was shooting political prisoners.
When asked why he went to Cuba several years later, Cohen facetiously replied with bravado: a “deep interest in violence … I wanted to kill, or be killed.”
Cuba was a time for writing as well as revolution, and in addition to poems, Cohen began a novel, of which only five pages survive. At one time called The Famous Havana Diary—although in the text the narrator says it might be titled Havana was no exception—it opens like a Raymond Chandler mystery: “The city was Havana. That’s about all in the way of detail that you’re going to get from me.” It was a comic, largely autobiographical account of his stay. Cohen the moralist is glimpsed and there is evidence of his preoccupation with sex, his only loyalty, the narrator explains, although voyeurism sometimes suffices: “I enjoyed her from a hundred eyes hung all over the room, telescope eyes, wide-angle eyes, close-up eyes, periscope eyes suspended in fluid.”
Cohen’s principal literary response to Cuba was poetic: “All There Is to Know about Adolph Eichmann,” “The Only Tourist in Havana Turns His Thoughts Homeward,” and “Death of a Leader”—all to appear in Flowers for Hitler—were written either in Havana or on the bus back from Miami. The Energy of Slaves contains “It is a Trust to Me,” also written there. Collectively, the poems express disillusionment with Castro as a genuine revolutionary, since his regime had become “oppressive and repugnant.” Cohen declared in September 1963, “Power chops up frightened men. I saw it in Cuba.”
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IN EARLY MAY, Cohen was back in Canada, after stopping in New York to see his friend Yafa Lerner. She remembers him as profoundly changed by the Cuban experience, more aware of his role as a Canadian poet grounded in the international scene. In Montreal, he told Layton that Castro was “a tragic figure.” In a later letter, he noted that “Communism is less sinister under palm trees but Cuba is still no place for men bred in the freedom and corruption of North American cities. They are also too concerned with their artists. It makes you uneasy.”
On May 4 Cohen appeared on stage at the O’Keefe Centre in Toronto as part of the Canadian Conference of the Arts. He read his poetry (and that of Anne Hébert who was too nervous to read in French) surrounded by luminaries: Northrop Frye, Mordecai Richler, Jay Macpherson, Hugh MacLennan, and George Lamming, although Layton took the spotlight with a reading of his new poem about Jacqueline Kennedy, “Why I Don’t Make Love to the First Lady.” Layton reported that Cohen read beautifully and looked quite “Dorian Grayish.”
By mid-May, Cohen was dealing with the publication and sudden fame of The Spice-Box of Earth. Unpacking copies of the book at the McGill bookstore, Marquita de Crevier, at one time romantically linked with Cohen, who gave her a gift of an actual Jewish spice-box, discovered that the
books had been mistakenly bound with blank leaves. When Cohen heard of the mix-up, he said that had he been there to witness the event, he would have been unable to continue writing poetry.
Reaction to the finished book was enthusiastic and admiring. To mark its publication, a launch party was held at his mother’s house on May 27, 1961, with Layton and McClelland in attendance. The dustjacket, on what would become Cohen’s first Canadian hit, provided a romantic description of the poet:
Leonard Cohen, 27, McGill graduate, gives his address as Montreal, but as this book was going to press he was enroute to Cuba. He spent last year on the shores of the Aegean Sea, writing as a result of that experience:
I shouldn’t be in Canada at all. Winter is all wrong for me. I belong beside the Mediterranean. My ancestors made a terrible mistake. But I have to keep coming back to Montreal to renew my neurotic affiliations. Greece has the true philosophic climate—you cannot be dishonest in that light. But it’s only in Montreal that you can get beat up for wearing a beard. I love Montreal. I hate the speculators who are tearing down my favourite streets and erecting those prisons built in the habit of boredom and gold.
While he prefers swimming in the Aegean, Leonard Cohen admits a fondness for camping in Northern Quebec. He is currently engaged in writing a novel.
The title, drawn from the spice-box that is blessed and then its contents inhaled after sundown on the Sabbath, marks the boundary between the sacred and the profane. The spice is a fragrant reminder of the link between the religious and the everyday, the holy and the unholy. From the celebration of nature in “A Kite Is a Victim,” the opening poem, to the destructive elements of history in the final “Lines from My Grandfather’s Journal,” the book displayed a joy balanced by tragedy. And the themes that would mark his mature poetry emerged: sexuality, history, Judaism, and love. Whether the subject was fellatio, Jewish mysticism, or death, a vision of promise characterized the work.