by Ira B. Nadel
Expressing much of the tension found beneath the romanticism of the book is “The Genius.” It is a litany of possible Jews the narrator might become, from ghetto dweller to apostate to banker to Broadway performer to doctor. The poem reserves the most disturbing possibility for last:
For you
I will be a Dachau jew
and lie down in lime
with twisted limbs
and bloated pain
no mind can understand
Adulation greeted the book. The critic Robert Weaver found it powerful and declared that Cohen was “probably the best young poet in English Canada right now.” Cohen’s friends Louis Dudek, Eli Mandel, and Stephen Vizinczey all praised it. Writer Arnold Edinborough suggested that Cohen had taken over from Layton as Canada’s major poet, and the critic Milton Wilson in “Letters in Canada 1961” declared The Spice-Box of Earth a significant book. The title of the review in Canadian Literature summarized the general response: “The Lean and the Luscious.” And Desmond Pacey, in the second edition of his respected Creative Writing in Canada (1961), wrote that Leonard Cohen was “easily the most promising” among a group of younger poets in the country that included Al Purdy and Phyllis Webb.
The Spice-Box of Earth sold out in three months but failed to win the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. The winner that year was Robert Finch’s Acis in Oxford. Irving Layton thought this was an absolute travesty:
There isn’t a single poem in the Finch book that won it. It’s dull, academic stuff with not one alive line that can seriously be called poetry. Exercises, bloody, or rather, bloodless exercises. Nothing else. What an arsehole of a country this is when this sort of crap can win prizes, but Cohen’s genuine lyricism can’t and doesn’t.
He also relates that Cohen was upset at not winning. “Psychologically, I think he’s having a rough time of it,” Layton told Desmond Pacey. “It’s damn hard to be a young poet!” But if the Governor General’s jury wouldn’t acknowledge the power of The Spice-Box of Earth, the public did. The handsomely designed text continued to sell and won its designer, Frank Newfeld, a major publishing award.
A less publicized event that spring was Cohen’s adventure with Alexander Trocchi, a Scottish novelist on the lam from the U.S. for forgery and drug charges. Cohen put him up for a few days and had his first encounter with opium. Trocchi had a wad of it with him and prepared it by cooking it up on Cohen’s stove. Trocchi asked Cohen if he would like to lick the pot. Cohen could not resist but found it had little effect. He and Trocchi then headed out to a Chinese restaurant on Ste-Catherine Street but as they crossed the road, Cohen went blind and clutched at Trocchi before he fainted. Trocchi pulled him to the curb, where Cohen gradually recovered. A few days later, Cohen explained to Robert Weaver that he had just left Trocchi on a British ship bound for Scotland: “His passport was two years expired so it was touch and go all the way. He fixed himself every half-hour … He’s a hell of responsibility. He wants you to feel that. That’s why he turns on in public. He’s a public junkie. I was glad when we got him on the boat.” Cohen’s poem “Alexander Trocchi, Public Junkie, Priez Pour Nous” in Flowers for Hitler celebrates Trocchi’s bohemian flair. Cohen writes: “Your purity”—of a Baudelairian darkness—“drives me to work. / I must get back to lust and microscopes.” A year or so later, Cohen would read Cain’s Book, Trocchi’s once-banned novel of 1960, and it would soon influence Beautiful Losers.
In late May Cohen received his Canada Council Arts Scholarship renewal, although only for one thousand dollars. Cohen told the supervisor of scholarships that the council’s investment would “yield profits far out of proportion to the original risk. Within the year I promise you a book which will have some importance in our national literature.” He then boldly asked for a travel grant, arguing that “distance is essential if I am to get any perspective in this messy semi-autobiography.” Before he left, Cohen acknowledged the planting of a tree in his honor by the local Hadassah Chapter of his synagogue, using the occasion to defend his controversial work: “I remind them [Montreal Jews] that it is an old habit of our people to reject our most honest social critics, at least as old as Moses.”
————
BY AUGUST 1961, Cohen was back in Greece, having spent twenty-one days on a Yugoslavian freighter headed for Genoa. Most of the passengers were retirees returning to Yugoslavia to live on welfare, and he tells his sister that “they weep most of the day and eat large meals. Just like home for me.” He befriended the thirty-three-year-old captain, spending most nights musing on a destiny “that makes one man the master of a ship, the other an itinerant poet, both exiles.” But he knows that he will soon be “rooted on the rock of Hydra, working in that freedom which only an ocean between me and my birthplace can give me.”
On Hydra, “his Gothic insincerities were purged” and his “style purified under the influence of empty mountains and a foreign mate who cherished simple English,” as he would write two years later. “Thank god for hashish, cognac, and neurotic women who pay their debts with flesh,” he wrote McClelland, adding that the products of the island are “sponges, movies, nervous breakdowns, and divorces.” He wrote Layton that he had seen corpses in the sea and witnessed “assassins’ drugs.” Layton was uncharacteristically indifferent: “I gather the Greek wines are too strong for him,” he commented to a friend. Meanwhile, Cohen was still seeking extra funds, this time from an advance on royalties of The Spice-Box of Earth, encouraging McClelland to “dig deep to keep Cohen out of the Clothing Business.”
Cohen was offered six thousand dollars for the house he had paid fifteen hundred for. But the house had given him roots, he later explained, and he was not ready to sell. Hydra freed Cohen from the inhibitions (and intrusions) of Montreal and made his writing less competitive and academic. He realized, however, the price of such isolation:
I chose a lonely country
broke from love
scorned the fraternity of war
I polished my tongue against the pumice moon.
In Greece, he explained years later, you “just felt good, strong, ready for the task” of writing. This last remark is a key to Cohen’s method of composition, whether in verse or in song. He cannot work unless he is “ready for the task,” in a state of creative concentration and well-being. Fasting often generated this state, and various friends recall his periods of almost week-long fasts while writing. Fasting also suited the holiness of his dedication to his work, supplemented by his desire for discipline.
Although Cohen experienced long fallow periods of nonproductivity, he retained a rigid daily schedule. Every morning, Cohen worked either on his terrace or in the long, low-ceilinged basement study of his home. Only the midday heat interrupted his work; he would then read, swim, and then return to his writing. In Greece, he wrote to Robert Weaver, “there is my beautiful house, and sun to tan my maggot-coloured mind.”
A prose poem entitled “Here Was the Harbour” suggests the purity of life on Hydra that appealed so strongly to Cohen. Describing the harbor and the intense blue of the sky, he proclaims, “Of men the sky demands all manner of stories, entertainments, embroideries, just as it does of its stars and constellations.” “The sky,” he continues, “wants the whole man lost in his story, abandoned in the mechanics of action, touching his fellows, leaving them, hunting the steps, dancing the old circles.” In the silence of Hydra, Cohen found his muse, although Greece plays a surprisingly small part in his writing as a subject or scene. Occasional poems describe his life there, but it has no direct presence in his fiction and appears only sporadically in his songs.
He could not escape politics, however. In October 1961 he provided this analysis of the political situation to his sister:
everywhere is going Communist and cleaning up corruption and poverty and charm. And the West is too expensive, rigid, and hysterical. What chance has a decent fun-loving literary parasite got in this world? Anyways, your cheque will keep me in hashish yet a little
longer.
Drugs on Hydra were becoming increasingly evident and could be obtained without much difficulty—often from a local who regularly made trips to Athens, although marijuana was grown on the island. Cohen soon found himself dependent on the drugs for quickening his imagination and often became desperate when they were not available, as his poem “Indictment of the Blue Hole” makes clear. It reads in part:
January 28, 1962
My abandoned narcotics have
abandoned me
January 28, 1962
7: 30 must have dug its
pikes into your blue wrist
“The Drawer’s Condition on November 28, 1961” begins with this question: “Is there anything emptier / than the drawer where / you used to store your opium?”
The most popular drug was hashish, but acid and marijuana were also readily available. Initially, the pharmacist supplied opiates and other drugs, but soon other sources were needed. To a French-Canadian friend he wrote, “I’ve smoked quite a lot of hash and eaten a fair amount of opium. None of it’s any good really, and the O is quite dangerous. Work is better than both—and work is hell.” He later relied on a speed-like drug, Maxiton, which could be bought over the counter. He became known to his close friends as Captain Mandrax, Mandrax being an English brand name for quaaludes. By 1964 he found that hashish and amphetamines assisted him greatly in completing Beautiful Losers, in a marathon writing session.
A passage from an unpublished essay of 1965 clarifies the nature of drug use on the island. Cohen writes:
In this part of the planet men have smoked and cooked hashish for many centuries, and as countless American and European homosexuals can testify, without sacrificing any of the vigourous qualities we would associate with a people so crucial to history, a continuous seminal history including not only the classical and Byzantine periods, but also, and perhaps most important, our own time. We who are here today believe that these lands of the Eastern Mediterranean are still the glistening alembic in which the happiest and purest synthesis of the West and Orient must occur. Islanders brew a tea from the wild narcotic poppies which is served to restless children and rebellious mules….
We smoke the occasional common cigarette into which we have introduced a few crumbs of hashish. We cannot rely on this crude device to secure us the visions and insights we hunger for, but it has its use as an agent of relaxation and receptivity. On the recreational side I might say that erotic and musical experience is enhanced under its influence. My wife would not listen to Bach without it, nor I to the cicadas at sundown. … The lyrics of many bazouki tunes celebrate the aromatic generosity of the leaf as it turns to ash.
In September 1961 a confident Cohen wrote to the editor of the New York Times to tell him that he was sending him a new sonnet, written a few days earlier. He believed it to be one of his best poems: “I write a year’s verse to keep in training for a poem like this.” He titled it “On His Twenty Seventh Birthday.” The Times did not print it.
He reported to Claire Pratt in Toronto that he was continuing to work on his self-indulgent novel, which nobody, he was sure, would want. He predicted that “the next book will be so orderly that people will mistake it for a geometry theorem.” He was also busy with his poetry, saying it was “clearing the mind for some splendid Greek pentalic constructions.”
Cohen was living with Marianne again and maintained a six-and-a-half-year relationship with her. Her penetrating blue eyes, high cheekbones, and inquisitive mouth captivated him. Once, when Marianne modeled for a friend’s boutique in Hydra, she looked so marvelous in the borrowed clothes and sunglasses that people stopped her in the port for her autograph, assuming she must be a movie star. On one occasion Cohen himself distracted her by asking for her signature on a menu as she crossed the port. For Cohen, Marianne presented an attenuated, lyrical beauty:
It’s so simple
to wake up beside your ears
and count the pearls
with my two heads
… let’s go to bed
right after supper
Let’s sleep and wake up
all night
Cohen sought to protect her, as he would seek to protect other women throughout his life, one source of his immense appeal. When Marianne returned to Oslo to visit relatives, Cohen followed. Marianne, he wrote to Layton, “seems to have endured and ruined the women I’ve known after her and I’ve got to confront her mystery in the snow. She is so blonde in my heart!” He had to pursue her and while in Oslo wrote a poem: “Lead me … into families, cities, congregations: / I want to stroll down the arteries invisible / as the multitudes I cannot see from here.”
While Marianne was visiting her mother, Cohen listened to Greek records, smoked cigars, and enjoyed the clean northern beauty of Norway. “Something in the air takes no notice whatsoever of our miniature suffering and invites us, commands us, to join in the insane eternal laughter. Today I’m rolling in the aisles.” He enjoyed the contrast of the northern ethic, the cold air and forthright diet. “I’ve been working on my new book but today I feel like giving up writing. The air is too sweet for all this working of the mind, the herrings are too tasty. When I am not watching blonde girls I am eating herring and sometimes I do both.”
Learning that his novel was to be published in Swedish, Cohen told Esther that his book would certainly appeal to the Swedes because “it’s so melancholy, and neurotic and dirty.” To Stephen Vizicenzy he wrote that he had abandoned himself entirely to oral gratification: “Eating and kissing. Frankly, I hate to get out of bed. I don’t think I’m a poet maudit after all. Maybe I’ll receive my sense of loss tomorrow.” A month later he wrote to Robert Weaver that “Norway is blonde and glorious and I am popular as a negro with my dark nose. I’ll travel forever.” He danced by himself, listening to Radio Luxembourg. “I can be seen Twisting alone, not even missing London marijuana.”
His novel was finished in the spring, and Cohen had a feeling of completion and ennui. He told Yafa Lerner:
Strange to find myself absolutely lustless. It makes me have to begin everything all over again, find a new structure to hang myself on. Lustless. It’s like a kind of amnesia. It leaves me with too much spare time and forces me into metaphysics.
I never thought desire was so frail.
Write.
He also wrote to a Mr. Dwyer at the Canada Council to report that his manuscript had been accepted by the literary agents David Higham Associates. “This is the same novel I’ve been working on for two years, the one Jack [McClelland] hates.” Quoting the readers’ reports, he noted their praise and claimed that if the writing had been any less imaginative, it would have made the “countless passages of remarkable sexual description” inappropriate. He thanked Dwyer for the council’s support “and for having created an atmosphere of concern about my work.” He added that he was working on a “surrealistic sound poem on the Underground System for Project ’62” of the CBC and is getting “into another novel set in the Eastern Townships.” (Only a few pages of this projected work exist.) He closed with a request to inform him about any suitable jobs for him in Canada.
————
IN MARCH of 1962 Cohen returned to 19b Hampstead High Street in London to work on revisions for his novel. He wrote Jack McClelland to see if he would “be interested in publishing a book of offensive instant poems of mine called Flowers for Hitler.” The same day he wrote to Rabbi Cass, in charge of the McGill B’nai Brith Hillel organization, thanking him for a copy of a review of The Spice-Box of Earth. He noted that the reviewer had rewritten the first stanza of one of his poems—but “it’s the kind of chutzpa I enjoy and indulge in secretly myself, so convey to him my congratulations.” The final letter that day was to Robert Weaver of the CBC. He told Weaver that he met the critic Nathan Cohen in Paris and together they had spent an evening praising him. He promised to write a piece on Greece for Weaver but was too busy just then with revisions. “London is horrible,” he concluded, “and I
long for the honest, brutal massacre of a Canadian winter.”
Several days later, Cohen wrote to his Montreal friend Daniel Kraslavsky, complaining about the small amount of money he received for his novel:
Over two years on that book in which I invite the whole world to share my glorious youth and what do I get?
Cashmere? What’s cashmere?
I’ve got to go back to the Greek island. I have reports that my house is crumbling there. I’m meeting a Norwegian girl and her baby there. I shall become a husband and father in one fell swoop. I have no money to live anywhere else. I love it there but it cuts me off from my cultural Roots and the Mainstream. I still have illusions that there are Roots and Mainstreams.
Did I plan it this way?
At the end of the letter he wrote he didn’t understand his “blonde woman,” adding, “why have I become Scott Fitzgerald but without any loot or social connections?”
In another letter Cohen was darker, complaining that he was working slowly, “twice as slowly as I should be, wasting time in severe depressions, bad dreams, maniacal poems. I am almost paralyzed by indecision.” London brought out his vivid dichotomies. After all his praise of Marianne, he admitted to some ambivalence about their relationship. They had seen each other so little that he was “terrified of waking up to find myself broke and stranded on a Greek island with a woman I can’t contact and a child to whom I can’t even talk in English. I can’t help feeling there’s some disaster waiting for me if I act in that direction.” He wrote that he would probably have to go back to Montreal and “fight for some tiny income … otherwise I’ll be forced into journalism and all sorts of other excuses for not creating a masterpiece.” Loneliness overpowered him: