by Ira B. Nadel
I feel I’ve lost Montreal and not only am I lonely but alone. I am like an eye dangling by a few nerves from a man’s socket, and I long for detachment or to be part of the body whole, anything but blind useless pain.
I have not given up by any means so don’t let me depress you. There are insights to be gained from the tedious chaos. I could do without such an education but since I have no choice I might as well learn. Laughter is a fist in the face of the gods and I will make those heavenly faces bloody and blue.
A letter to Marianne confirms his romantic vacillation: “There are a million things I want to talk about with you,” Cohen wrote, “things I’m frightened about … and oceans between us distort things that become very simple when we are together.” He reports that he has asked Mort Rosengarten to get him some land on a remote Canadian island, Bonaventure, where they can all live a natural life. He misses everything that he loves, beginning with her:
I long for you and blind love, brown bodies that speak to one another in a language we don’t want to understand, I long for readers to devour my soul at a feast, I long for health in the sun, woods I know, tables of meat and fruit and bread, children shattering the monarch of the home, I long for cities of preserved elegance and the chaotic quarters of modern cities where the village persists, for loyal restaurants, for parks and battles. I have so much affection for the world and you shall be my interpreter.
I want to get back to Canada and rob a bank.
On the same day that he wrote to Marianne, he wrote to his mother and told her that he always knew that his book would be published, “just as I always knew I wanted to be a writer even when this ambition was discouraged by so-called sensible people and every obstacle of provincialism and caution put in my way.” He has also learned that “the things which are given you mean nothing, only what we achieve by struggle and suffering have any value … I have no more or less illusions about writing than I had eleven years ago [in 1951] when I began … I will continue to fight for the kind of life I want, continue to fight the weakness in myself.” He explained that “the secret of my triumph is that I expect nothing, expect to change nothing, expect to leave nothing behind.” He said he planned to return to Canada after he completed his revisions in the summer, possibly buy a small house in the country, and return to Greece in the fall.
The dampness and cold of London made him miserable but Secker & Warburg had asked that he stay in London to do revisions. “I want to tear at everything that nourishes me,” he wrote to Irving Layton on March 23. “Can I help it if she [Marianne] is a priestess whose nature it is to make everything difficult and prosaic?” He also told Layton that “I’ve been working on my novel with a scalpel. I won’t be able to save it, but it’s one of the most interesting corpses I’ve ever seen.”
Another letter to his sister noted his disappointment at not winning the Governor General’s Award for The Spice-Box of Earth: “Too bad because Spice-Box was the last book anyone will understand. I am now running three and a half years ahead of enlightened poetic taste and the time-lag is increasing daily.” And Secker, he explained, took his manuscript because they wanted his next book and that his manuscript is a “beautiful book that will be misunderstood as a self-indulgent childish autobiography, disordered and overlong…. In actuality,” he tells her, “it’s an extremely subtly balanced description of a sensibility, the best of its kind since James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I am perfectly prepared to be ignored or slaughtered by stupid men of letters.” He ends with an indictment:
What a joyless farce we make out of our lives, especially the cautious, especially them because what they hoard is leaking away day-by-day. Give me a war, give me complicated divorces and disgrace, give me broken lives and alcoholic fantasy, give me anything but pettiness and safety.
A final passage in the letter records his enjoyment of the Twist, danced at a West Indian club called the All-Niter, where the marijuana smoke was so thick, he reported, that you could get high without taking a puff. “It’s the first time I’ve really enjoyed dancing. I sometimes even forget I belong to an inferior race. Their stuff compares very favorably with Greek hashish. The Twist is the greatest ritual since circumcision—and there you can choose between the genius of two cultures. Myself, I prefer the Twist.”
6
COCKTAILS IN THE SHAVING KIT
BACK ON HYDRA, two distractions interrupted Cohen from the strenuous effort of rewriting The Favorite Game: the first was the arrival of his mother; the second, the arrival of many so-called friends. Since he had bought his house, Cohen’s mother had remained unconvinced that his life was secure, that he was eating well, and that he knew what he was doing. Through letters at first to his sister and then to his mother, Cohen stressed the regularity of his life: he had a cleaning lady, caring friends, and a well-looked-after home. He sent his mother recipes, described social events and chronicled his literary progress. But nothing would substitute for a visit, and in the summer of 1962, in the midst of work on his novel, Cohen had to prepare for his mother’s arrival.
First he had to placate his mother’s fears. Masha was worried about rain, about dampness, and cold. “In the last six thousand years it hasn’t rained once on the island during the summer, so I doubt if it will begin in 1962,” he assured her, telling her to bring light clothes because it was hot. “You would suffocate under a mink jacket, and if you didn’t suffocate you’d be eaten by several thousand cats who have never seen a mink jacket and would suppose you to be some new kind of animal.”
It was unthinkable that she stay at a hotel. Why be uncomfortable and hot in their rooms when she could be uncomfortable and hot in his, he asked. Cohen wrote, “My house is big and you won’t interfere with my work or my several wives, mistresses, and children.” The house, he explained, was being whitewashed, some rotten wood replaced, stones repaired, and despite the absence of running water and electricity, she would find it clean and private. “Buying this house was the wisest move of my life. I think you and Esther will probably settle here.”
Masha Cohen’s visit precipitated some drastic changes, the most important being Marianne’s removal from the house. According to Jewish law, a Cohen (member of a priestly caste) cannot marry a divorced woman, and living with a divorced woman and her child would have been even more upsetting to his mother. So Marianne had to disappear from Cohen’s daily life. This upset Cohen as much as it did Marianne, who found temporary lodging elsewhere. The visit, meanwhile, was a disaster. The heat bothered his mother, she felt unwell, and Cohen didn’t do any writing for a month. “She’s a little overwhelmed,” he wrote his sister, “and I’m expecting disaster from moment to moment. My own routine has been completely wrecked, of course.” His mother brought with her “all the old chaos…. She exists on my energy. I have nothing left for anything, books or humans,” he told a friend, adding:
A nomadic animal should sleep in hidden places. Once he digs a permanent home and the hunter learns where it is, he invites destruction. It’s my own fault for not moving light. It’s strange to be trapped in the house I built for freedom.
Cohen had an obligation to revise his novel. He had assured his editor Roland Gant at Secker & Warburg that the new version would be much, much better. Half of the original first section had been eliminated, and the book would be a third shorter. He proposed several titles: The Mist Leaves No Scar or Mist Leaves No Scar, Only Give a Sound, Only Strangers Travel, or No Flesh So Perfect, though felt “nothing sounds any good … THE MOVING TOYSHOP isn’t bad, but this isn’t just a book about youth, it’s an allegory for a lost perfect dim impossible body, the one that escapes us when we kiss, the one that hovers over the best dancer and ruins her dance or makes it sad.” Other possibilities he listed were Fields of Hair, The Perfect Jukebox, The Moonlight Sponge, and The Original Air-Blue Gown (from Hardy’s poem “The Voice”).
Visitors from Montreal became another nuisance and disruption. They relied on him to make hotel arrangemen
ts, find restaurants, and act as interpreter. To Esther he announced:
I don’t intend to open my gates to Everybody whose only excuse for bothering me is that they can afford the fare and know my name … My commitment here is serious and they are on holiday. They want their kicks out of every moment while I am here for work and order. This is a workshop.
In the same letter he complained about Tony Perkins, Melina Mercouri, and Jules Dessin, who were shooting a movie on “the very spot where I happen to swim.” He received surprise visits from people like his witty cousin Alan Golden, “whom I had never spoken to except over my shoulder at shul … In fact, had he not come, all the Goldens would be to me is a row of blurred faces arranged above a Freedman Company shoulder pad.”
He and Marianne began to avoid people and the port: “I’ve greeted people so fiercely that nobody dares to drop in. I’ve got a notice DO NOT DISTURB nailed on the front door,” he told his sister. Occasionally an encounter proved interesting, as when he met a troupe of Russian dancers from the Bolshoi Ballet and compared notes with them on the status of artists in Russia and Canada. But soon he and Marianne prepared to visit Kiparissi on the Peloponnesus because Hydra had become “intolerably touristic which is fine for one’s real estate but bad for Canadian Literature.” He also admitted, “It is hard to be a poet maudit when you have a good tan.”
But a poet with a good tan is an attractive commodity, and women sought Cohen out. There was Astrid, a tall, stunning redhead from Germany; a willowy blonde from Australia who typed the manuscript of his novel; Phyllis, an American who was in love with his songs; and another Australian, who climbed over his daunting wall to get to him. Some of these women were welcomed, some were passed on to other willing hosts, such as Don Lowe or Anthony Kingsmill.
With his mother gone and the tourists and the women deflected, Cohen could get back to writing. By August he told Roland Gant that he had “eliminated a kind of self-conscious melancholy that is fine for a ‘first-novel’—but I want to put a polished and precise weapon on the market. The new book is tough. The author isn’t sticking his personal pain at you in every chapter; that’s why the new version hurts more. Mostly it’s a question of cutting away the blubber and letting the architecture of bone show through.” He finished the work in October, cutting the book virtually in half, confessing to a friend that “I think I have rewritten myself, and like the book, I’m not sure I admire the product. We all have several images of ourselves. It is a surprise to see which one we assume.”
His self-assessment was unsparing:
One day I found that I was a man leading a sunny uncluttered life with a very beautiful woman. The man was poor, all his clothes were worn and faded, he had no Sunday suit, he was happy much of the time, happier than I ever thought he could be, but tougher, crueller, and lonelier than I had ever planned.
To Layton he wrote that he was not entirely satisfied with this rewritten version, but “anyone with an ear will know I’ve torn apart orchestras to arrive at my straight, melodic line … In a way that means more to me than the achievement itself. I walk lighter and carry a big scalpel. Everything I’ve read in the past week is too long … I don’t know anything about people—that’s why I have this terrible and irresistible temptation to be a novelist.”
November gave Cohen an unexpected opportunity to travel. The CBC invited him to Paris to participate in a panel with Malcolm Muggeridge, Mary McCarthy and Romain Gary. To Robert Weaver he exclaimed, “Has the world gone completely mad? Also fee and expenses!” The hour-long radio program, which he would moderate for a fee of six hundred dollars, would address the question “Is there a Crisis in Western Culture?” It was to be recorded in the Hotel Napoleon. Cohen arrived two days early for the taping, and settled into a “coffin-colored room in the Hotel Cluny Square” on the left bank, to read the work of the other participants. A short story, “Luggage Fire Sale,” published in Partisan Review (1969) narrates his adventure, including picking up a female medical student at 2: 00 a.m. in a Boulevard St Michel cafe and writing on his hotel wall “change is the only aphrodisiac.” The story also hints at his pleasure at being away from Hydra and from “a couple of women who knew me too well.” He arrived in Paris with a small piece of Lebanese hashish “and a complete suntan which recorded my major life success, the discovery of hot beaches where I could live naked with someone worth watching.” He added that “the sweetest aspect” of this unnamed woman of Hydra “was the way she let me know that I could neither hurt nor miss her.”
Before the taping, the participants shared an expensive dinner at the Hotel Napoleon where the principal topic was marijuana. During the taping, Muggeridge stressed culture as embellishing the human condition, and McCarthy allowed that culture was integral to society. Cohen, wondering why he was getting paid, threw in Russia as a topic. They agreed on the existence of a new world culture that encompassed both China and Russia, but could not agree on the issue of greatness in contemporary culture. Cohen reported that the discussion had been neither witty nor profound. The reason, Cohen felt, was that they had been too well fed: “Cultural crises, especially permanent ones, have little effect on bodies so recently nourished on expensive French food and liquor. We should have been starved three or four days.”
By February of 1963 he was back in North America, partly to replenish his bank account, but partly to celebrate the forthcoming publication of The Favorite Game by Viking in New York. “It’s a perfect little machine,” Cohen said of the book, “not spectacular, but new and nothing sticks out, and it even sprays a shower of sparks from time to time.”
Cohen began a long and satisfying association with Cork Smith, his new editor at Viking, who had accepted The Favorite Game. In May, when Viking received the corrected galleys of the book (it had been published in London in October), Cohen told Smith that the possibility of an epigraph by Yeats was unthinkable.
[Yeats] has had too much already and what have I had? Do you see my poems in the front of every book? … No, no, I refuse, I resist, must we be forever blackmailed by the Irish merely because a few hundred thousand perished of starvation? … No Yeats, no Wilde, Behan, Thomas. And don’t try and tell me he wasn’t an R.C. Oh no. And I suppose Roosevelt wasn’t Jewish? I’m on to you. The book will be bare.
A perceptive editor, Smith would play a critical role in the development of Beautiful Losers, guiding the publication of that difficult novel. Cohen sent the final revisions of The Favorite Game to Smith, and included a poem:
Tell all your gold friends
that Cohen has been struck down by their melting beauty
that he no longer contends with desire
but lies stricken under Law.
Cohen of Mountain Street
Cohen of Juke Boxes
Cohen The Moonlight Sponge
Cohen The Jewish Keats
has tied it with a string.
Could this austere historian be he who once succumbed
like a public epileptic
to pretty faces in every window
Yes
Cohen has been struck down
He lies on a couch of snow
Therefore blonde dancers
do not expect him to rise for an introduction.
In July, after he had returned the galleys, Cohen received a copy of the book jacket and quickly wrote to Cork Smith to express his dismay at the author photo:
The photograph is of a first novelist I never wanted to be: over-shaven, pale, collector of fellowships, self-indulgent, not mad enough for an insane asylum, not tough enough for alcoholism, the face that haunts Hadassah meetings. But I swear to you I am cruel-eyed, hard, brown. In the mountains they call me Leonardos the Skull.
Cohen was restless in New York where he stayed with his sister. He wrote to Sheila Watson:
I haven’t been to sleep for a long time. I wear sunglasses along Park Avenue at four in the morning…. I have spent my advance on escargots. I have a plastic Edgar Allen Poe doll. Finland ca
res nothing for me. The gypsies on Eighth Avenue are breaking up that old gang of mine. There is a cocktail party in my shaving kit and it threatens me with Arizonian wastes. I didn’t mean the old guy any harm when I spoke with the tongues of angels.
Jack McClelland had not been keen to publish The Favorite Game, saying that Cohen did not have to write such a “first novel” work, both autobiographical and egotistical. Cohen responded by declaring it “a third novel disguised as a first novel…. I use the first novel form the way a good technician uses the first person.” (He actually had written two others: A Ballet of Lepers and Beauty at Close Quarters, both never published.)
For his next novel, Cohen predicted, “I will write a book about pure experience which will make THE FAVORITE GAME look like a grotesque gimmick. You will have to come to my cell to pick up the manuscript.” McClelland thought The Favorite Game was “a beautiful book,” but it was still “a first novel” and not what he should have done. McClelland forecasted that the book would be a critical but not a commercial success, adding that “one of the great dangers of staying in this business is that you begin to think you know something about books. My greatest virtue as a publisher for years was that I knew nothing about books.” In response to McClelland’s criticism, Cohen explained that:
I’ve never written easily: most of the time I detest the process. So try and understand that I’ve never enjoyed the luxury of being able to choose between the kinds of books I wanted to write, or poems, or women I wanted to love, or lives to lead.
————
FOLLOWING THE REVISION of his novel, Cohen returned to writing poems. They became the core of Flowers for Hitler, which Cohen had originally titled Opium and Hitler. The book drew together a series of new and immediate themes: Hydra, history, and politics. He considered the poems radical and challenging, and anticipated the negative reception they would receive from McClelland & Stewart. The poems, he told Jack McClelland, “will speak to nobody because nobody enjoys my grotesque kind of health. I would have rather read these poems than have written them. Enjoy your authoritarian life.” He closed the letter with, “Goodbye forever / Leonard Cohen / The Jewish Keats.”