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LEONARD COHEN buried the first thing he ever wrote. After his father died, he cut open one of his formal bow ties, sewed a message into it, then buried it in the snow in the small garden behind his Montreal home. For a nine-year-old boy, it was a powerful and symbolic gesture. In effect, Cohen conducted his own private burial, substituting prose for an outward expression of grief. The message also preserved a link with his father which was re-enacted each time he composed. Art and sacrament, ritual and writing, became fused.
The day of the funeral was also his sister’s birthday, but no one mentioned it. Only later that night, when the two children tearfully confided to one another that they had glimpsed their father in the open coffin at the funeral service, was it noted. Cohen asked his sister not to cry because it was to be a day of celebration, but neither could escape the dominating image of the day: the face of their father, as stern in death as it had been in life.
His father’s death in January 1944 was the central event of Cohen’s youth and provided a rationale for his art. As he explained in The Favorite Game: “deprivation is the mother of poetry.” It also sent him on a quest for a series of father/teachers, a quest he pursues to this day. Psychologically, the death of his father freed Cohen by allowing him to pursue his own interests unobstructed, but it also imprisoned him by forcing upon him the role of compromised patriarch, responsible for the welfare of the family, yet entirely dependent on his uncles.
“What was it like to have no father? It made you more grown up. You carved the chicken, you sat where he sat,” the narrator answers in The Favorite Game. As with much of his work, Cohen transforms the psychological into the spiritual: “His father’s death gave him a touch of mystery, contact with the unknown. He could speak with extra authority on God and Hell.” The loss of his father left a lasting scar, one that Cohen defined in his first novel as “what happens when the word is made flesh.” The note in the bow tie has been the talisman he has carried for a lifetime: “I’ve been digging in the garden for years, looking for it. Maybe that’s all I’m doing, looking for the note.”
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LEONARD COHEN grew up in Westmount, the upper-middle-class Montreal neighborhood on the slope of Mount Royal. The semidetached, two-story brick house backs onto Murray Hill Park, an open space which connects the mansions to Côte-St-Antoine, where the Shaar Hashomayim Synagogue commands most of a city block. The park provides a view of the St. Lawrence River to the south and downtown Montreal to the east. From the enclosed second-story porch at the rear of the house, Cohen could see the city in the distance or spy on the lovers below him in the park. The park, he later wrote, “nourished all the sleepers in the surrounding houses. It was the green heart” that gave the playing children “heroic landscapes … the nurses and maids winding walks so they could imagine beauty.”
Until 1950, Cohen had the small back bedroom that faced the park. When Cohen’s mother Masha remarried in 1950 and a stepdaughter joined the family, Cohen gave up his small room and moved into what had once been the library. The room still contains his bed, dresser, two walls of crammed bookcases, and a desk facing the side window.
On the walls are a portrait of his father and photographs of Cohen and his sister Esther in their graduation robes from McGill. There is also one of Cohen praying in tallit (prayer shawl) and tefillin (symbolic representations of the commandments, actually leather straps attached to two small boxes containing portions of the Torah and worn at daily prayer) at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Leather sets of Chaucer, Milton, Byron, Scott, Longfellow, Wordsworth, and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury sit on the bookshelves. The books were given to his father for his bar mitzvah and inherited by the son. The Daily Prayer Book of the United Hebrew Congregations, given to his mother, rests on the top shelf of one bookcase, alongside Ozar Taamei Hazal, Thesaurus of Talmudical Interpretations, a seven-hundred-page volume compiled by Cohen’s maternal grandfather, Rabbi Solomon Klinitsky-Klein.
There are poems by A.M. Klein, Canadian Constitutional Law by Bora Laskin, the Writers Market 1957, The Criminal Code of Canada, 1953–54, the collected poems of Marianne Moore, Harmonium by Wallace Stevens, the collected shorter poems of Auden, A History of Sexual Customs by Richard Lewinsohn, and Torture of the Christian Martyrs by A.R. Allinson, as well as Matthew Arnold’s poems, Scott’s The Lady of the Lake, Whitman’s Poems, Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, Memoirs of Napoleon, and, in white leather, Dante’s Divine Comedy. Some of Cohen’s diverse influences and budding ambitions are glimpsed, including his early interest in becoming a lawyer.
There is also a portrait of Cohen’s father Nathan that reveals a well-dressed, serious looking man with slicked-back hair, a groomed moustache, and large, penetrating eyes. Known in the family as Nat, he affected Edwardian attire and in the picture wears an English suit with “all the English reticence that can be woven into the cloth.” The portrait suggests nothing of his disability or poor health, the result of the war. He looks solid and middle class. But he had high blood pressure and would become flushed when angry, which was often. His sense of foreboding was great, and Edgar Cohen, Leonard Cohen’s second cousin, twenty years his senior, recalled that once in synagogue, Nathan Cohen turned around and said to him, “My son, Leonard, I’ll never see his bar mitzvah.” He was right. Another time, when the youthful Cohen mistakenly recited the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, instead of the Kiddush, the blessing over wine at the dinner table, his father did not interrupt him but with resignation murmured, “Let him go on; he will have to say it soon enough.”
Nathan Cohen was trained as an engineer, but played an important role in the family’s clothing manufacturing business. Cohen admired him, but within the Cohen family, Nathan was, in Cohen’s words, “the persecuted brother, the near-poet, the innocent of machine toys, the sighing judge who listens but does not sentence.” When he died, he threw the stable life of the family into turmoil: “He died ripe for myths and revenge, survived by a son who already believed in destiny-election. He died spitting blood, wondering why he wasn’t president of the synagogue. One of the last things he said to his wife was: ‘You should have married an Ambassador.’”
A photograph of Cohen’s mother and father in a garden shows a smiling woman in an elegant dress, slightly taller than her husband. Husband and wife stare proudly at the camera, the mother with an inquisitive, suspicious glance, the father with a more imposing, slightly rigid demeanor. Nathan looks dapper with a cigar, boutonniere, and spats. They were married in 1927.
Cohen’s mother was of Russian descent and exemplified the national character: by turns melancholic, emotional, romantic, and vital. Suzanne Elrod, the mother of Cohen’s two children, remembers her as Cohen’s “most dreamy spiritual influence.” According to Masha’s stepdaughter Roz Van Zaig, Masha “had the flair to be bohemian.” She was quite musical and often sang European folksongs in Russian and Yiddish around the house. When her son learned to play the guitar, she sang with him in a magnificent contralto voice. She was dramatic and heavyset, with a flair for cooking. Masha’s personality initially clashed with the quiet formality of the Cohens. Her English was poor and she always spoke in a deep voice with a Russian accent; some Cohens thought that Nathan had married beneath him. She had trained as a nurse and her caring manner, essential for her physically ailing husband, soon made her acceptable to the larger family. Her zestful behavior, however, unsettled some of the more demure aunts and uncles.
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THE ARRIVAL of Lazarus Cohen to rural Ontario in 1869 followed the arc of nineteenth-century Jewish immigration to Canada. He established himself in Maberly and after two years sent for his family who were still living in what was then Lithuania. By 1883, he had moved to Montreal, where his son had been going for religious training and where Jewish settlement was expanding. Lazarus was from a devout and scholarly family, a rabbi who reinvented himself as a businessman in the new world. His younger brother Hirsch was also a rabbi and later became the Chief Rabbi of Canada, celebrated for his powerful, rumbling, resonant voice, perhaps the source of Cohen’s own unique sound. Lazarus proved to have a talent for business and in 1895, after he had moved to Montreal, became president of W.R. Cuthbert & Company, brass founders who, between 1896 and 1906, formed the first Jewish dredging firm in Canada. They had a fleet of dredges and a government contract to deepen almost every tributary of the St. Lawrence River between Lake Ontario and Quebec.
Lazarus was intensely involved in the Jewish community and in 1893 visited Palestine on behalf of a Jewish settlement group, the first direct contact by Canadian Jews with their homeland. He also became chairman of the Jewish Colonisation Committee of the Baron de Hirsch Institute, which had been organized to settle Jewish immigrants in Western Canada. In 1896 he became president of Shaar Hashomayim Congregation, a post he held until 1902. He wore a flowing white beard, favored cultured English to Yiddish, and spoke with a slight Scottish brogue, since he had first settled in the county of Glengarry before coming to Canada. He died on November 29, 1914, at age seventy, two weeks after he had been re-elected president of his synagogue. He was eulogized for being conversant with both the Talmud and English literature and for harmonizing the ancient traditions with modern culture.
In 1891 Lyon Cohen, eldest son of Lazarus, married Rachel Friedman and they had four children: Nathan, Horace, Lawrence, and Sylvia. Like his father, Lyon contributed to the foundation of Canadian Jewish life in Montreal. With Samuel William Jacobs, he began the first Jewish paper in Canada, The Jewish Times. In 1904, at only age thirty-five, he was elected president of Shaar Hashomayim, the largest and most prominent congregation in Canada. He was also a member of the Board of Governors of the Baron de Hirsch Institute of Montreal and became president of the institute in 1908. He transformed its building into the first active Jewish Community Centre of Montreal and established the first Hebrew Free Loan Society and the Mount Sinai Sanatorium in Ste-Agathe. In 1922 he became chairman of the Montreal Jewish Community Council, which he had helped to found. He was an “uptown” English-speaking Jew from Westmount, a stark contrast to the Yiddish-speaking “downtown Jews” of St-Lawrence and St-Urbain streets.
In 1900, Montreal was populated mostly by francophones but controlled largely by anglophones. Two thirds of the population was French, concentrated east of St. Lawrence Boulevard or “The Main,” as it is called. The English lived on the west side of the city, in the mansions of the Golden Square Mile, in Westmount, and in the working class Irish ghetto, Griffintown. Jewish settlement was concentrated along The Main, the dividing line between English and French, the conciliatory geographic division of the two solitudes. St-Urbain was the enclave’s western border, and it ran east to St. Denis, south to Craig and north to Duluth. Jewish immigration became significant only near the end of the nineteenth century; the number of Jews in Montreal more than quadrupled from roughly 16,400 in 1901 to 74,564 in 1911. Most remained traders, commission agents, or manufacturers.
Lazarus Cohen eschewed the traditional demographics and eventually settled in Westmount. The stone houses reflected those of Mayfair or Belgravia, incorporating Tudor, Gothic, and Rennaisance designs on the same block, occasionally in the same house. It was architecturally, geographically, and spiritually removed from francophone Montreal, from what would later be termed the French Fact.
In The Favorite Game, Cohen underscores the insularity of Westmount by contrasting it with the immigrant character of Montreal and the way the city constantly reminded its inhabitants of their past. The city he writes, perpetuates a “past that happened somewhere else”:
This past is not preserved in the buildings or monuments, which fall easily to profit, but in the minds of her citizens. The clothes they wear, the jobs they perform are only the disguises of fashion. Each man speaks with his father’s tongue.
Just as there are no Canadians, there are no Montrealers. Ask a man who he is and he names a race … In Montreal there is no present tense, there is only the past claiming victories.
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LYON COHEN strongly believed that a knowledge of Jewish history was necessary for self-respect, a belief passed on to his son Nathan and grandson Leonard. Knowledge of the Torah was indispensable, and performing mitzvot (good deeds) was essential. Aristocratic and urbane, conciliatory yet pragmatic, Lyon Cohen was a formidable presence in local Jewish life, particularly in the war effort.
Lyon devoted himself to the recruitment of Jewish men for the armed services and saw two of his own sons, Nathan and Horace, go off to fight in the Royal Montreal Regiment (the third, Lawrence, did not). He was president of a new, national relief body which sent aid to European Jews who had been victimized by the pogroms and he became chairman of the National Executive Committee of the Canadian Jewish Congress, inaugurated in March 1919 in Montreal. His home on Rose-mount Avenue contained books of Jewish learning and proudly displayed a Star of David on the front. He frequently entertained Jewish leaders like Chaim Weizmann, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and Solomon Schecter. In addition to being scholarly, Lyon was a bit of a dandy; he used an expensive cane, always dressed in the finest suits, and lived comfortably with the assistance of servants.
In 1906 he organized the Freedman Company, a wholesale clothing manufacturer, and it became the major business of his sons Nathan and Horace (Lawrence would operate W.R. Cuthbert, a brass and plumbing foundry, taking over from their uncle, Abraham Cohen, who died prematurely at fifty-seven). In the late fifties, Lyon’s grandson Leonard briefly worked at the foundry and in the shipping department of the Freedman Company. In 1919, Lyon organized and became president of the Canadian Export Clothiers Ltd.; later he became president of the Clothing Manufacturers Association of Montreal and a director of the Montreal Life Insurance Company. He was to be presented to the Pope during a European trip in 1924, but the day before the scheduled meeting he had a heart attack. He was taken to a sanatorium in Switzerland, where he recovered. He died on August 15, 1937 and one of the pall bearers at the funeral was liquor magnate Samuel Bronfman. Leonard Cohen was three years old.
Leonard’s maternal grandfather, Rabbi Solomon Klinitsky-Klein, was a rabbinic scholar. He was known as Sar ha Dikdook, the Prince of Grammarians, for writing an encyclopedic guidebook to talmudic interpretations, A Treasury of Rabbinic Interpretations, and a dictionary of synonyms and homonyms, Lexicon of Hebrew Homonyms, praised by the poet A.M. Klein. Rabbi Klein was something of a confrontational teacher, noted for his disputations.
A disciple of Yitzhak Elchanan, a great rabbinic teacher, Rabbi Klein was born in Lithuania, and became the principal of a yeshiva in Kovno. He and his family escaped the pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe, fleeing first to England and then emigrating to Canada in 1923. He first stayed in Halifax, and then moved to Montreal, where he had been corresponding with Lyon Cohen about resettlement. A friendship with the Cohen family led to the marriage in 1927 of his daughter Masha and Lyon’s son Nathan.
Rabbi Klein made lengthy visits to Atlanta, Georgia, to be with his other daughter Manya, who had married into the Alexander family of Georgia. He found the trips stressful because there were few Jews in the South to share life with, although the Alexander family retained its orthodox practices, to the point of having their black servants wear skullcaps. Their large ante-bellum mansion on Peachtree Street became an unusual expression of Conservative Jewish life in Atlanta. It was presided over by Manya, who spoke English with a Russian accent highlighted by a southern drawl.
Rabbi Klein finally settled in New York where he became part of the crowd of European Jewish intellectuals centered at The Forward, the leading Yiddish paper in America, with contributors such as Isaac Bashevis Singer. But grammatical and talmudic studies absorbed Rabbi Klein, and he spent most of his time in study at the synagogue or in the library. He often visited his daughter Masha in Montreal and came to live with the family for about a year in the early fifties. Young Cohen would often sit with the “rebbe” and study the Book of Isaiah. Already quite elderly, the rabbi would read a passage with Cohen, explain it in a combination of English and Yiddish, nod off, then suddenly awake and repeat himself. “He’d read it again with all the freshness of the first reading and he’d begin the explanation over again, so sometimes the whole evening would be spent on one or two lines,” Cohen recalled. “He swam in it so he could never leave it. He happened to be in a kind of confrontational, belligerent stance regarding the rabbinical vision.”
Cohen sat and studied not because he was a devoted biblical scholar but “because I wanted the company of my grandfather. [And] I was interested in Isaiah for the poetry in English more than the poetry in Hebrew.” The Book of Isaiah, with its combination of poetry and prose, punishment and redemption, remained a lasting influence on Cohen’s work and forms one of several core texts for his literary and theological development. His reliance on images of fire for judgment and the metaphor of the path as the way to redemption derive from this central text. The prophetic tone of destruction in Isaiah, “the Lord is going to lay waste the earth / and devastate it” (24: 1), manifests itself repeatedly throughout Cohen’s work in personal and political terms. Isaiah also sets out an edict Cohen has followed: dispense with illusions, reject oppression, eliminate deceit.
Rabbi Klein had a sharp, Talmudic mind, the kind that could put a pin through the pages of a book and know every letter that it touched, Cohen recalled. Even when elderly and living with Masha and her family during a second period in the late fifties, Rabbi Klein exhibited a powerful, although not always concentrated, knowledge. He knew that he had published books in the past, and that Cohen had also published a work: Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956). But occasionally, when the rabbi met Cohen in the upstairs hall of the house, he would become confused and ask his grandson if he was the writer or not. When Cohen published the Spice-Box of Earth in 1961, he dedicated it to the memory of his grandfather and paternal grandmother. At the time of his death in Atlanta, Rabbi Klein was writing a dictionary without the use of reference books. Cohen inherited his tefillin as well as a reverence for prophetic Judaism. His grandfather became the first of a series of powerful teachers in his life who filled the role of his absent father.
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LEONARD NORMAN COHEN was born on September 21, 1934, a Friday. In the Jewish religion it is said that those born on a Friday are marked for special piety. His chosen names reflected a family tradition of L’s, in Hebrew, the “Lamed,” beginning with Lazarus and Lyon and continuing with Cohen’s daughter Lorca. He was also thought to look more like his grandfather Lyon than his father Nathan. His Hebrew name, Eliezer, means “God is my help.” Norman is the anglicized form of Nehemiah, the rebuilder. The names were significant because in Hebrew, words embody divine attributes.
Born in the year 5695 in the month of Tishri, according to the Hebrew calendar, Cohen entered a family that retained its Jewish traditions. His place in the synagogue was prominent (the family had the third row) as the grandson and great-grandson of two presidents, and early in his youth he participated in the daily prayers and weekly celebrations. Each Friday night the family observed Shabbat. “Religion structured our life,” Cohen has remarked.
Nathan Cohen, with his brother Horace, ran the Freedman Company, by now a successful mid-priced men’s clothing manufacturer. The company specialized in suits and topcoats, which were distributed throughout the country. At one time it was considered to be the largest men’s clothing manufacturer in Canada. Most of the workers were French Canadian or Italian; the managers were mostly Jewish. Nathan, known as N.B., dealt with the factory, the workers, the machinery, and the suppliers. Horace, or H.R., ran the front office. He was the principal contact for the buyers and store owners and had all the qualities of a front man: charming, articulate, lazy, and pompous. He eventually received an O.B.E., Order of the British Empire. Although Nathan’s semi-invalid state limited his participation, he remained active in the company. But he resented being second-in-command to his younger brother, a resentment that may have been passed on to Cohen who later questioned his relationship with the family.
Beauty at Close Quarters, the title of the first-draft of The Favorite Game, elaborates this disenfranchisement. The hero’s father was “a fat man who laughed easily with everybody but his brothers,” the narrator writes, but explains that the “others” all “walked ahead of his father into public glory.”
Nathan wasn’t given to ostentation but the family had the perquisites of the upper-middle class, employing a maid, a chauffeur-gardener, and an Irish-Catholic nanny named Ann who was devoted to Cohen and had a special influence. She often took him to church, and Cohen grew up respecting rather than fearing the dominating presence of the Catholic church in Montreal. He would often go to her home to celebrate Christmas and recalled that he was brought up “part Catholic in a certain way.” The church represented romance to Cohen and he saw “Christianity as the great missionary arm of Judaism. So I felt a certain patronizing interest in this version of the thing. I didn’t have to believe in it.”
The Cohen household reflected his father’s formality rather than his mother’s earthy personality. Nathan always dressed in a suit and occasionally wore a monocle and spats. Cohen rarely saw him without a suit jacket on. In Tarpon Springs, Florida, where his father vacationed, he was photographed in a suit against informal backdrops of fishing boats and sponge fishermen. Cohen, too, was expected to wear a suit to dinner, or at the very least, a sports jacket. His sister Esther would argue with her father about her habit of only partially unfolding her napkin; Nathan insisted that it be completely unfolded. He also became upset when the family’s shoes and slippers were not carefully arranged under their respective beds. Decorum dictated the family, business, and communal life of the Cohens.
Although not a man of letters, Nathan recognized the value of books and gave his son an uncut set of leatherbound English poetry. His mother was not a great reader either, and Cohen recalls only a Russian volume of Gogol on her shelf. Nathan read aloud to his children, although he didn’t have a gift for it. Cohen thought his father was reticent, withdrawn, and introspective. His enthusiasms were concert hall music—Sir Harry Lauder was a favorite, as well as Gilbert and Sullivan—and photography. An amateur filmmaker, Nathan Cohen documented the lives of his children on film. Some of the footage was excerpted in Ladies and Gentlemen, … Mr. Leonard Cohen, a 1965 National Film Board documentary on Cohen. The father’s interest instilled in his son an early fascination with photography and the pleasure of being photographed. In the 1951 Westmount High School Yearbook, Cohen lists photography as his hobby, an interest represented in The Favorite Game and Beautiful Losers.
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AS A CHILD, Cohen had a small Scottish terrier, nicknamed Tinkie for the tinkle of his license and identification tags. His parents surprised him with the dog as a gift, the scene described in Beauty at Close Quarters. His mother had actually named the dog Tovarishch, but his father disliked the reminder of the site of the Russo-German treaties. Tinkie disappeared in a snowstorm fifteen years later and was found dead under a neighbor’s porch the next spring. The dog had been one of Cohen’s closest childhood companions; Cohen still keeps a picture of Tinkie in his Los Angeles home. To this day he refuses to get another dog, although he had guppies, chicks, mice, turtles, and even a rescued pigeon during his childhood.
For his seventh birthday Cohen’s father bought him a Chemcraft chemistry set and built a laboratory in the basement. With an alcohol lamp and chemicals, Cohen produced dyes, invisible inks, and other concoctions. His friends would join him in the basement, creating new colors and liquids.
Cohen’s secure, comfortable childhood was unsettled by his father’s poor health and premature death. A poignant scene in Beauty at Close Quarters narrates the impact of the illness as the father climbs the stairs in his home, pausing a minute or so at each step. With his son often by his side, the father “would continue the story he was telling and never stop to complain how difficult the ascent was. Very soon, however, he could spare no breath at all and they would climb in silence.” In the funeral scene in The Favorite Game, Cohen recounts his anger at the loss of his father who died at the age of fifty-two, the solemnity of his uncles, the horror of an open coffin, and his mother’s inability to face the tragedy. For his part, Cohen later recalled that “there was repression … I did not discover my feelings until my late thirties. I had to adopt the aspect of receptivity. I was very receptive to the Bible, authority. … Having no father I tried to capitalize [on his absence], resolve the Oedipal struggle, [create] good feelings.”
Following his father’s death, Cohen won a significant dispute with his mother over custody of Nathan’s pistol, a military souvenir. Cohen had been fascinated by his father’s military exploits and at one time Nathan had spoken of sending Cohen to a military college, an idea Cohen eagerly accepted. The Favorite Game describes the dispute over the gun, presented as an important talisman: a “huge .38 in a thick leather case … Lethal, angular, precise, it smoldered in the dark drawer with dangerous potential. The metal was always cold.”
Cohen has always been fascinated by weapons, reflected in his novel Beautiful Losers. “I loved the magic of guns,” the character F. declares. For several years Cohen himself kept a gun. In her lyrics to “Rainy Night House,” Joni Mitchell describes how she and Cohen took a taxi to his mother’s house in Westmount during her absence: “she went to Florida and left you with your father’s gun alone.” In “The Night Comes On,” from Cohen’s album Various Positions (1985), a wounded father tells his son:
Try to go on
Take my books, take my gun
And remember, my son, how they lied
And the night comes on
And it’s very calm
I’d like to pretend that my father was wrong
But you don’t want to lie to the young.
The gun remained in the house until vandals stole it in 1978, the night before Masha Cohen died. Its disappearance meant the loss of protection, Cohen once reflected. But its importance was clear, as the narrator explains in The Favorite Game: “The gun proved [the dying father] was once a warrior.”
Cohen handled the pain of his father’s death stoically. “I didn’t feel a profound sense of loss, maybe because he was very ill throughout my entire childhood,” he later said. In an unpublished poem that celebrates his father, written on the Greek island of Hydra, Cohen writes:
No one looks like my father
but me
In the world I alone
wear his face
And here I am in places
he never would have travelled
among men
who think I am myself….
Following the death of Nathan Cohen, Masha’s status in the family altered. Her financial situation changed and the loss of her husband and security threw her into uncertainty. Cohen found himself in an awkward position, relying on his uncles for employment and the family for income. This change in status was subtle but profound and it was felt by everyone. Masha’s suffering was the most intense and obvious, manifested by mood swings and the occasional depression.
Thirteen years later Cohen dedicated his first book, Let Us Compare Mythologies, to his father, whose death he confronts in the poem “Rites.” The work castigates the failure of his uncles to allow his father a peaceful death by unrealistically prophesying his recovery as he lay dying. Unsurprisingly, death is the topic of one of Cohen’s essays from McGill. It emphasizes the scar that is “always left on one of the survivors—a scar that does not heal quickly.”
At the time of his father’s death, Cohen was attending Roslyn School, a nearby elementary school. Academically he did well but didn’t distinguish himself. The school stressed extracurricular activities, including art classes and sports, and Cohen enjoyed both. Two afternoons a week and Sunday mornings, he attended the Hebrew School at the synagogue. Expectations of him, as a Cohen, were greater and the work harder, but as early as age six he was familiar with Hebrew and basic Judaism. Miss Gordon and Mr. Lerner, his teachers, were important influences, but neither of them, nor anyone else, ever sat him down and explained what God wanted from him. No theology was offered. In a sense it was atheistic, Cohen has said.
Regular Shabbat attendance with the family at Shaar Hashomayim reinforced his Judaism, and he vividly remembers sitting in the third row of the synagogue with:
my uncle Horace and my cousin David and then me, and then Uncle Lawrence and then the cousins and then Uncle Sidney and the other cousins. There was a whole string of Cohens standing up there in the front line and singing our hearts out.
Still, it was a solemn occasion; one came to pray in a formal manner, with reverence but not feeling. Cohen’s knowledge of Hebrew was limited to the liturgy: “I knew how to address the Almighty in Hebrew as long as it was exclusively concerned with redemption!”
In 1945 at age eleven, Cohen began an education of another sort when he first saw pictures from the concentration camps. This was the true beginning of his education as a Jew, he has said, and the realization that Jews are “the professionals in suffering.” This view was later reinforced by his sister’s trip to Israel in 1949 with a group of Jewish students. Cohen had become politicized by the suffering of the Jews at an early age.
In 1947 Cohen had his bar mitzvah, marking full acceptance into Judaism with his reading of the Torah. But the event was marred by his father’s absence; the traditional prayer of release recited by the father (ending a father’s responsiblity for his son) was missing from the ceremony. A celebration at the synagogue only partially alleviated the sadness of the event.
He began attending Westmount High in 1948, where he was elected to the Student Council. He later became its president and proved to be a convincing politician, persuasive, seductive, and showing a gift for organization. In Beauty at Close Quarters, he added a fictional reason for seeking the presidency: attraction to the beautiful outgoing president from whom he would have to receive hours of instruction. Cohen was also a member of the Board of Publishers, which oversaw the student paper and yearbook. He was a surprisingly avid athlete, involved in cycling, cross-country skiing, swimming, sailing, and was an unlikely member of the school hockey team. He was also chairman of Student Productions, the drama club, and soon had his first printed work appear: a homeroom Christmas skit for a holiday assembly, which was mimeographed and distributed to the cast. His “ambition,” as described beneath his graduation photograph in the Westmount High School Yearbook for 1951, reads “World famous orator.” His “pastime” was “Leading sing-songs at intermissions.” But he also found time for girls: on the back of his 1950–51 Student Council card are the hastily written names and phone numbers of two female students.
Cohen’s high school English teacher, Mr. Waring, encouraged his interest in literature, and writing began to play a larger part in Cohen’s life. Increasingly, he sought solitude, rushing home to write rather than socialize with friends. Most of his early efforts were short poems, short stories, and effusive journal entries.
Yet he had a large group of buddies, which included his cousins and Mort Rosengarten. “FSOTC and Rosengarten, Too” was a popular rallying cry for him and his cousins: it meant “The Fighting Spirit of the Cohens and Rosengarten, Too.” He enlarged his circle when he began university; it soon included Henry Zemel, Mike Doddman, Derrik Lyn, Robert Hershorn, Harold Pascal, and Lionel Tiger. One of his best friends at the time was Danny Usher, and the two of them would often walk around Murray Park in their raincoats reading and talking. They could always be identified: Danny tall and angular, Cohen short and intense.
At the same time, Cohen “swam in a Jewish world,” studying the religion, remaining observant but debating its customs. His later departure from Judaic practice stemmed not from its tradition, which he loved, but from concern about its “methods and meditations” about which no one talked. Reflecting a lifetime interest in discipline and order and a desire to understand process, Cohen rationalized his interest in other spiritual investigations as wanting “to go into a system a little more thoroughly.”
Music supplemented his Judaic and secular studies. Esther had started studying piano, and Cohen followed her, taking instruction from a Miss McDougall. Progress was slow, and he practiced in a desultory manner in a small basement room where the piano was kept. He preferred the spontaneity of playing melodies on a penny-whistle, which he always carried. He studied the clarinet and learned to play well enough to join the school band, but the guitar soon took over his musical interests.
As a high school student Cohen also became interested in hypnotism, which he discovered through the father of one of his first girlfriends. The father had tried to put Cohen under. He failed but Cohen was fascinated and he continued to study hypnotism, reading M. Young’s 25 Lessons in Hypnotism, How to Become an Expert Operator (1899). Cohen’s only prop was a yellow pencil, slowly waved back and forth in front of his subject’s eyes. It worked well enough to hypnotize the family maid and so Cohen undressed her, an adolescent fantasy come to life. He had less success bringing her out of the trance, though. Worried that his mother would come home, Cohen tried slapping the maid but it didn’t have much effect. He referred to his book and was finally able to guide her out of the trance before he was discovered. During a summer spent as a counsellor at Camp Sunshine, a camp for disturbed children, Cohen also hypnotized one of the counsellors, revealing to the willing subject aspects of her life she herself had forgotten.
Cohen’s interest in hypnotism was ongoing and had to do with its transcendent powers. In Beauty at Close Quarters, he writes: “he wanted to touch people like a magician, to change them or hurt them, leave his brand on them, to make them beautiful. He wanted to be the hypnotist who takes no chances of falling asleep himself. He wanted to kiss with one eye open.”
To transform people, to make them “beautiful” while watching the process, was Cohen’s ambition. Like his hero Breavman, he believed that “there [was] some tangent from the ordinary cycles of daily life, a formula not to change debris to gold, but to make debris beautiful.” Cohen sought to be a “magic priest.” Hypnotism was the earliest manifestation of this goal; poetry and music would become its later forms.
Cohen’s fascination with the streets and the downtown nightlife also emerged during his adolescence. Around the age of thirteen or fourteen he began to sneak out of the house at night, walking around downtown and observing the junkies, prostitutes, cafe life, the buzz of the city. He would buy a sandwich at a cafeteria and listen to the jukebox, one of his great pleasures. He also hoped to meet girls.
He generally made these excursions alone, although occasionally his friend Mort Rosengarten would join him. Sometimes Cohen returned home to find his mother on the phone describing his coat to the police after checking his room and finding it empty. She would send Cohen to bed and rage outside the closed door, “calling on his dead father to witness his delinquency, calling on God to witness her ordeal in having to be both a father and mother to him.” Part of what drove him downtown was a heroic vision of himself with “a history of injustices in his heart … followed by the sympathy of countless audiences,” an idealistic description not very far from the situation of his early musical career.
In 1949, when he was fifteen, two important events occurred: he purchased a guitar and discovered Lorca. Moved by musical curiosity and the possibility that girls would be more interested in a guitar player than a clarinetist, pianist, or ukulele player, Cohen bought a secondhand guitar for twelve dollars from a pawn shop on Craig Street. Its steel strings made it “a ferocious instrument,” Cohen has said. There was no guitar culture going on at the time, and it was generally thought that only Communists played the instrument. But Cohen discovered nylon strings and then flamenco when he met a nineteen-year-old Spanish immigrant playing for some young women in Murray Hill Park.
Dark, handsome, passionate, and lonely, the Spaniard embodied a culture as well as a musical talent and Cohen was impressed by both. After three lessons, Cohen learned a few chords and some flamenco. When the young man failed to show for the fourth lesson, Cohen called his boarding house and discovered that his teacher had committed suicide. He never learned his story but Cohen was grateful for his teaching, which became the basis of his musical composition and chord structure. He sang with Mort Rosengarten, who had learned to play the banjo, and his mother frequently joined them. “I’m a lot better than what I was described as for a long, long time,” Cohen has remarked: “People said I only knew three chords when I knew five.”
That year, Cohen also unexpectedly came upon Selected Poems, by Federico García Lorca, a writer about whom he knew nothing. Cohen has ironically said that Lorca “ruined” his life with his brooding vision and powerful verse. In a way, he later explained, Lorca:
led me into the racket of poetry. He educated me. [Lorca] taught me to understand the dignity of sorrow through flamenco music, and to be deeply touched by the dance image of a Gypsy man and woman. Thanks to him, Spain entered my mind at fifteen, and later I became inflamed by the civil war leftist folk song movement.
In print and at concerts, Cohen has repeated the lines that first led to the destruction of his purity: “Through the Arch of Elvira / I want to see you go, / so that I can learn your name / and break into tears,” lines from Lorca’s poem “The Divan at Tamarit.” Lorca was a seminal influence on Cohen, as poet, performer, and artist. He was the first of a series of representative poets for Cohen. Louis Dudek, F.R. Scott, A.M. Klein, and Irving Layton would follow, but Lorca was his first poetic model.
Federico García Lorca was executed by Granadian Falangists on August 19, 1936, shortly after his return to Spain to aid in the Spanish Civil War. Cohen identified with Lorca’s fanciful belief that he possessed the blood of gypsies and Jews and shared his elegiac tone and faith in a spiritual absolute. Three questions by Lorca anticipate themes that animate Cohen’s work:
Am I to blame for being a Romantic and a dreamer in a life that is all materialism and stupidity?
Am I to blame for having a heart, and for having been born among people interested only in comfort and in money?
What stigma has passion placed on my brow?
————
LEONARD COHEN began to write poetry seriously in 1950 at the age of sixteen, a year after he discovered Lorca. He recalls:
I was sitting down at a card table on a sun porch one day when I decided to quit a job. I was working in a brass foundry [W.R. Cuthbert] at the time and one morning I thought, I just can’t take this any more, and I went out to the sun porch and I started a poem. I had a marvelous sense of mastery and power, and freedom, and strength, when I was writing this poem.
Another explanation was his desire for women:
I wanted them and couldn’t have them. That’s really how I started writing poetry. I wrote notes to women so as to have them. They began to show them around and soon people started calling it poetry. When it didn’t work with women, I appealed to God.
Dionysus not Apollo reigned.
From his earliest efforts with poetry, Cohen was committed to the discipline, the task. In contrast to the casual activities of his friends, he was absorbed by his work. Cohen’s stepsister remembers that he often worked late into the night. One product of those late nights is an essay entitled “Murray Park at 3 a.m.” in which he recounts his “possession” of the park: “It is my domain because I love it best.” He narrates the forms of his control, from fictitious assaults on the tennis players to his control of the floundering sailing vessels in the pond. The cement pools, sunken “in stone plazas of different levels joined by stone steps and bordered by clipped hedges, appear like the prospect to some mist-obscured exotic house of worship or love palace.” And listening to his own footsteps walking home, he thinks, “You [an early love] brought me into the light. I was in the darkness.”
Cohen’s friends understood that his commitment to writing was genuine, and he recalled a game they played with an anthology of English poetry. His friends would open it at random, read him a line, and expect him to complete the poem.
Cohen and his friends were movie fans and often went to Ste-Catherine Street movie houses on Saturday afternoons. But a Montreal bylaw prevented children under sixteen from entering alone. Cohen overcame this problem by altering streetcar passes to show an earlier birthdate. But the forged passes couldn’t disguise the fact that he was simply too short to be sixteen. The tallest boy would buy the tickets then they would nervously walk down a long hall to the ticket usher where Cohen was often turned away. His success rate was only about twenty percent. A strict code of conduct was observed: every boy for himself. If one of them couldn’t get in, the group wasn’t expected to forfeit the movie in sympathy.
Cohen’s height was enough of a problem that for his bar mitzvah he needed a footstool to see over the bimah or lecturn. After reading in Reader’s Digest that pituitary injections of a hormone were guaranteed to make you taller, Cohen consulted the family doctor about getting the shots. The treatment was experimental and Cohen’s doctor dissuaded him from trying it. He also tried stuffing Kleenex in his shoes, but the disadvantages soon became apparent and painful at a school dance and Cohen abandoned his search for height.
For several summers Cohen participated in the ritual of camp, beginning in 1944 at Camp Hiawatha in the Laurentians, where he met his life-long friend, Mort Rosengarten. A report of August 26, 1949, from Camp Wabi-Kon in northern Ontario cited Cohen’s abilities as a leader, although it also noted his dislike of routine. At these and later camps, Cohen learned more about the guitar, and when he became a counsellor he frequently led singalongs when not instituting new games such as a haiku contest.
At Camp Sunshine, a Jewish Community Camp where he became a counsellor in 1950, Cohen met Jews unlike himself: they were extravagant and emotional and had an earnestness grounded in necessity, not fantasy. Their high schools were almost entirely Jewish, unlike Westmount High. Whereas Cohen’s family liked “to think of themselves as Victorian gentlemen of Hebraic persuasion,” the counsellors at camp recognized that they were Jews above all. Irving Morton, the director, was a twenty-seven-year-old intellectual, a socialist, and a folksinger. He had a large catalogue of folk songs that celebrated workers, from a Jewish collective in the Crimea, Zhan Koye, to the desperate struggle of miners.
He also believed in “creative camping”: no regimentation, virtually no discipline, and no competition.
In 1950 at Camp Sunshine, Alfie Magerman, one of Cohen’s closest friends, introduced him to The People’s Songbook; his father, it turned out, was involved in union organization and the two sang from the book every morning. The People’s Songbookrepresented a new folk culture of high moral and political content, “homemade songs of protest and affirmation.” It was the time of the Weavers, who made their debut at the Village Vanguard in 1949, of Woody Guthrie, and of Josh White. Each song, whether a German anti-fascist song, a French partisan song, or “Viva la Quince Brigada,” the historic song of the 15th or International Brigade of the Spanish Republican Army, reflected politics, patriotism, or protest. Israeli pioneer songs, Chinese resistance songs, a German solidarity song with words by Brecht (printed across the page from “The Star Spangled Banner”), all demonstrated to Cohen that songs could be about protest, freedom, and resistance. Cohen’s “The Old Revolution,” “The Partisan,” and “The Traitor” all reflect what he learned from The People’s Songbook. From that songbook, he said, he “developed a curious notion that the Nazis were overthrown by music.”
He now understood that songs could convey social thought as well as personal hope, taking examples from Woody Guthrie, Brecht, and Earl Robinson (composer of “Joe Hill”). The People’s Songbook introduced Cohen to the potential of folk music, confirmed when he heard Josh White perform at Ruby Foo’s Chinese restaurant in 1949. Although Cohen found the burgeoning pop music world fascinating, hustling quarters around his house to sneak out at night and listen to jukeboxes, folk music was his first love. “Through my interest in folk music, I discovered what a lyric is and that led me to a more formal study of poetry.”
Cohen thought of himself as a singer then, not a songwriter, although in 1951 he wrote his first song. He and another counsellor worked on a tune all summer and when it was done, they went to a local restaurant to celebrate. Unexpectedly, the very song they sweated over was heard from the jukebox. They had incorporated a pop song of the day, “Why, Oh Why,” into their now dismal effort which they had to abandon. But Cohen soon made another attempt titled “Twelve O’Clock Chant,” which he sings in the 1965 NFBfilm about him. The syncopation, lyrics, subject matter, and emotion expressed in the folk song underlie Cohen’s later structures, melodies, and lyrics.
In 1950 Cohen’s mother married Harry Ostrow, a Montreal pharmacist. Shortly after they were married, Ostrow was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and there was some question as to whether or not he had hidden the knowledge of the disease from Masha before they were married. She had been a nurse with Nathan and that role was now being repeated. Masha had been trained as a nurse, but she didn’t want it to become a way of life. A palpable tension developed between Cohen’s mother and stepfather. Despite the presence of an older man in the household, Cohen still conducted the rituals for the festivals and high holidays. By 1957, Masha and Harry had separated, and Harry moved to Florida hoping that the climate would ease his illness.
After his father’s death, Cohen felt detached from his family. He spent a great deal of time in his room reading and writing, developing a sense of his own private life at an early age. It was a time for exploration, experiment, and imaginary expeditions. The family indulged his solitary efforts and no one ever asked him how he felt about matters. If his grades slipped during these periods of familial disinterest, there was still a determination to do better: “There were no cries for help in those days. You just did it. You got the grades.”
He maintained a good if distant relationship with his sister Esther, though. Four-and-a-half years older than Cohen, she had little contact with him growing up. Her friends were older and her interests different. There was little sense of co-education at home; their lives at synagogue, Hebrew school, music lessons, swimming lessons, and B’nai B’rith activities didn’t intersect. However, Esther encouraged Cohen’s efforts at writing and he shared his attempts at poetry and song with her. They became closer as they grew older, after Esther moved to New York and married Victor Cohen.
In his late teens, Cohen began a series of significant relationships with women. Yafa (“Bunny”) Lerner was one of the first, a young woman from Montreal who was interested in dance. His first serious love interest was Freda Guttman, a seventeen-year-old art student whom Cohen met when he was sixteen. Freda attended McGill for one year and then transferred to the Rhode Island School of Design. For the next three or four years, she and Cohen continued to see each other, the relationship fuelled by both sexual and artistic excitement. Cohen read his new work to her, sang for her, and took her to parties. In the summer of 1955 he arranged for them to be counsellors together at a B’nai B’rith camp near Ottawa in the Gatineau hills. He and his girlfriend were unusual figures at the Jewish camp, he a poet and she an artist; one remembered anecdote was his preference for quoting Yeats while rowing campers about. He describes Freda in “The Fly,” in his first book, Let Us Compare Mythologies, for which she provided the cover illustration and five interior sketches. When they broke up, Cohen wrote a short essay about Freda and the meaning of love, the first of many works dealing with women he has known.
In his essay, Cohen describes Freda as a slender and narrow-hipped woman with “especially beautiful thighs and that is why, I suppose, the word occurs so frequently in my verse.” He was attracted to her mouth, her black hair, her long fingers, and to her movements: “She moved with her own kind of logic, more graceful than any woman I have ever seen.” Sometimes, he writes, she was his closest comrade, but at other times her observations seemed trite. “A smothering sense of intimacy” soon enveloped him. He rejected this intimacy on the grounds that he did not love her, that he, in fact, knew “almost nothing about love.” Such intimacy, he believed, “has something to do with mutual destruction.” Cohen writes:
I have never loved a woman for herself alone, but because I was caught up in time with her, between train arrivals and train departures and other commitments. I have loved because she was beautiful and we were two humans lying in the forest at the edge of a dark lake or because she was not beautiful and we were two humans walking between buildings who understood something about suffering. I have loved because so many loved her or because so many were indifferent to her, or to make her believe that she was a girl in a meadow upon whose aproned knees I laid my head or to make her believe that I was a saint and that she had been loved by a saint. I never told a woman I loved her and when I wrote the words “My love,” I never meant it to mean “I love you.”
This unusual paragraph, most likely written in 1956, forms an Ars Amatoria which outlines Cohen’s attitude toward love, one that has remained consistent throughout his life. There is a studied schizophrenia, the seeking and rejecting of each love in turn.
“I have never thought of women as a medicine for loneliness.” he writes,
And I do not think that humans are so unique, one from the other, that there exists among the living only one special, perfect lover for each special, perfect beloved, to be pressed and fit together by Fate like jigsaw pieces. Each person we want to love takes us on a different path to love, and they change us and we change them as we all move together, and love offers as many alternate paths as any landscape.
Such views actually protect his easily broken heart. The title of a notebook from the mid-fifties, containing lyrical poems of desire and fear of loss, reads, “Leonard Cohen / Poems Written / While dying of love.”
Cohen’s fundamental position on love is that it is essential but redefines itself with each individual. One requires a variety of lovers to suit a variety of stages in one’s life. “Love generally,” he warns,
but do not commit yourself to a particular love. You will become known as a sympathetic friend and a faithful lover because you never really permit these roles to seize your heart, you can practise and perfect them. But the heart is guarded, kept free and untarnished by any simple human affiliation so that it will reflect in glorious accuracy all the charts of the stars which the clouds one day will part to reveal. The important thing is not to approach anyone too close because tomorrow you may have become pure light.
Despite his resistance to love, or perhaps because of it, Cohen was a “charismatic” figure, Freda Guttman recalled. Although his origins were conservative, middle class and very Westmount, he drew people into his world of poetry and desire. His determination to be a poet and his early efforts at songwriting and singing were a source of fascination. He encouraged this image by showing up at parties with his guitar and offering a song whenever asked. As a Westmount bohemian, Cohen was something of an enigma but he has retained the trappings of both throughout his life. The bourgeois and bohemian co-exist in harmonious counterpoint. Unlike one of his closest friends at the time, Robert Hershorn, who was troubled by obligations to carry on his family’s business, Cohen never seriously considered joining his uncles’ businesses, although he was occasionally pressured to do so.
Cohen did not so much rebel against his Westmount life as follow an alternative path. He felt that his family, for all its prominence, lacked an ideology or dogma:
life was purely made up of domestic habits and affiliations with the community. Aside from that, there were no pressures on the individual. I never knew of rebellions or conflicts because there was nothing to rebel against. I didn’t have anything to renounce my family for. Because in a sense nothing was solid. I have no urge to struggle with this world, to take a position.
Freda Guttman recalls that Masha was obsessed with Cohen’s well-being and frequently tried to make him feel guilty for being too independent. Proud of her cooking, she would often get up when Cohen came home at 2:00 a.m. with friends and cook for them. But Masha was prone to depression, the likely source of Cohen’s own depressive states, and could be imperious. She once ordered Cohen not to leave the house with a cold: “I’ve nursed you back from the brink of the grave and this is how you treat me?” Guttman remembers her shouting. She and Cohen laughed at his mother’s outbursts because this was how they expected a “Jewish mother” to act. Cohen defended himself with his wit and the secure knowledge that Masha loved him.
His friend Nancy Bacal, whom he first met in high school, said Cohen was “always feeling like his own person;” unlike others, he had a sense of direction, perceived by some as the need for control. But he also developed some unusual habits, one of them an obsession with his weight. His mother constantly pushed food on him and Cohen rebelled. “He seemed like a woman with food,” Guttman said. Although he loved sweets, she recalls that he once refused to enter a Greek pastry shop in Montreal, as if the mere sight of any pastry would make him fat.
In his last year of high school, life became more complicated for Cohen. He chose to go on to McGill, the expected step for the Jewish middle-class youth of Westmount. But he felt the tensions between a bourgeois life defined by Westmount expectations and the emerging demands of an artist. Nancy Bacal explained that he was the only one she knew who could “contain and survive elements of pain in the dark. He was in touch with matters of the soul and heart.” He would eventually resolve these tensions, drawing from the best of each world. But in university, the two sides of his personality began to clash.