2
LEONARD COHEN entered McGill University on September 21, 1951, his seventeenth birthday, and graduated on October 6, 1955, shortly after his twenty-first. Academically, his university career was undistinguished but he continued the extracurricular zeal of high school, becoming president of both the Debating Society and of his fraternity, ZBT. Initially, Cohen embodied the Westmount Jew destined for professional success, fulfilling a Westmount creed: “If you did things right, you would have all the riches life had to offer.” But during his years at McGill, sporadically attending lectures, reading in the Gothic Redpath Library, writing poetry, Cohen distanced himself from that creed.
McGill was and still is the premier English-speaking university in Quebec. Situated on Sherbrooke Street in the center of Montreal, it commanded both an important social and physical position. It was the training ground for leading professionals, businessmen, doctors, economists, and professors, reflecting the interests of McGill’s founder, the merchant and fur trader James McGill. Writers, artists, and musicians were of secondary importance. Stephen Leacock, humorist and writer, justified his attachment to McGill as an economist, not as an author. In the early fifties, McGill still maintained a careful eye on the number of Jews it admitted.
Cohen’s average on the entrance exam was 74.1%. Ironically, his lowest mark was in English literature; math was his strongest subject. His actual undergraduate marks at McGill were less impressive: he graduated with an overall average of 56.4%. He studied arts his first year, commerce his second (with courses in accounting, commercial law, political science, and math), and then arts for years three and four, continuing with political science and adding zoology. English was his favorite subject. He attended lectures infrequently though and squeaked through McGill only with supplemental examinations. He explained that his completion of the program was “paying off old debts to my family and to my society.”
Cohen introduced new ideas and radical policies to his fraternity. Drinking on the lawn and in the fraternity house was encouraged, leading to Cohen’s impeachment. But he brought life to the institution, leading house meetings with his songs and guitar playing, and often unexpectedly promoting surprising moments such as the time a friend and female guest appeared at lunch sharing one overcoat which had difficulty staying closed. To his fraternity brothers Cohen brought “limitless space” and the gift of possibilities. He was a popular member.
Cohen was active in the Debating Union, first as secretary and later as president. In his first year at McGill, he won the Bovey Shield for Public Speaking, represented McGill in Burlington, Vermont, and at the end of the year received a Gold A award for Debating. In his second year he was corresponding secretary of the society, winning the Annual Raft Debate, and represented McGill at Osgoode Hall in Toronto. During his third year (1953–4), he was vice-president of the Union and was elected president in his fourth year. His presidential nomination speech began with Burke and moved on to a rejection of the “ineffectual shower curtains of political modesty.”
Cohen participated in national and international debates, engaging diverse opponents that ranged from two Cambridge students to a team of convicts from the Norfolk Penitentiary outside Boston (with whom he debated the negative moral impact of tv on society). Cohen had been introduced to the convicts as a poet and he first clarified his position:
My colleague has promised you a poet, but I am afraid that you will be disappointed. I do not converse in rhyming couplets, nor do I wear a cape or walk brooding over the moor or drink wine from a polished human skull or stride frequently into the cosmic night. I am never discovered sitting amid Gothic ruins in moonlight clutching in my pale hand a dying medieval lily and sighing over virgins with bosoms heaving like the sea. In fact I wouldn’t recognize a dying medieval lily if I fell over one, [and] hardly think I could do better with a virgin, and I’ll drink out of anything that has a bottom to it.
Cohen lost to the inmates, who had not been defeated in twenty-four years. Impatient with the prolonged, ineffectual executive meetings of the Debating Union, Cohen moved to ban any further meetings. The Debating Union was a suitable apprenticeship for a budding lawyer, a career that Cohen was then considering.
Cohen also joined Hillel, the Jewish students’ organization. He organized a Hillel band and participated in a Hillel play directed by Bernie Rothman. The cast included Yafa Lerner; Eddie Van Zaig (later to marry Roz Ostrow, Cohen’s stepsister, also in the production); Freda Guttman, in charge of properties; Robert Hershorn, who was part of the stage crew; and “Lenny Cohen” as second guard. Law, the courts, and freedom were the focus of the work.
Before the start of his second year at McGill, Cohen and two friends formed the Buckskin Boys, a country and western band. The choice was not entirely a surprise since he had long admired country and western music, listening for hours to the musical narratives on radio stations from the states. They chose their name because all three band members had buckskin jackets, Cohen having inherited his from his father. The Buckskin Boys performed at square dances, in high schools, and in church basements, playing pop and country favorites. The group survived through the McGill years, and Cohen discovered that he liked to perform, although he admitted to being nervous on stage. Something of an instrumentalist at this time, he played backstage guitar for the dramatic society’s production of Twelfth Night.
Walking along Sherbrooke Street late one afternoon in the fall of 1954, Cohen came upon a group of students celebrating a victory of the McGill football team. They were rocking several buses and the police had been summoned. While he was watching, Cohen was shoved by a policeman and told to move along. Cohen tried to explain that he was only watching, but the policeman grabbed Cohen’s shoulder and told him to move. Cohen knocked the policeman’s hand away and received an unexpected rabbit punch on the back of his neck. He regained consciousness in the “Black Maria,” the police wagon, and was driven to station Number 10, charged, and released.
Several days later, Cohen appeared in juvenile court with a lawyer, his mother, and his sister. The charges included refusing to circulate, disturbing the peace, obstructing justice, blocking a public path, and resisting arrest. When they were read, Cohen’s sister broke into hysterical laughter and had to be escorted from the court. Cohen received a suspended sentence. Several years later the episode resurfaced when Cohen applied for a job as a Pinkerton detective. He wasn’t granted a second interview because Pinkerton’s discovered that he had been charged with a criminal offense and had failed to note it on his application. He also applied for a position with the Hong Kong police force, which was advertising in the Montreal English language papers (only apparent requirement: a college degree). In 1957, he wrote to the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs inquiring about teaching jobs. They replied that jobs were scarce and thanked him for his inquiry.
Cohen’s career interests vacillated widely during his university years, from law, to teaching, to police work. But three influential teachers, all writers, galvanized him: Louis Dudek, a poet/critic; Hugh MacLennan, a novelist; and F.R. Scott, a constitutional lawyer who was also a writer. Later, Cohen encountered a fourth literary mentor, Irving Layton, who became the most important. In the fall of 1954 Cohen took Dudek’s poetry course which focused on the modernists, including Ezra Pound, with whom Dudek was corresponding.
Born in the east end of Montreal of Polish immigrant parents, Dudek was a poet and critic who held a Ph.D in literature from Columbia University. In the first weeks of the modern poetry course, Cohen showed Dudek some of his writing, which Dudek thought had little value. Two weeks later, Cohen offered more of his work and this time Dudek spotted “The Sparrows,” a five-stanza poem with an elaborate metaphoric scheme. Dudek responded at once: as they walked down a corridor of the arts faculty building discussing the poem, he suddenly stopped and commanded Cohen to kneel. With the manuscript, he knighted him “poet” and bade him rise and join the as-yet-undefined ranks of Canadian poets. Continuity had been established, tradition enacted, and acceptance granted. “The Sparrows” went on to win the 1954 Literary Contest sponsored by the McGill Daily which printed the poem on the front page of its December 7 issue.
Cohen’s first published works, “An Halloween Poem to Delight my Younger Friends,” and “Poem en Prose,” appeared in CIV/n, a literary magazine started in January 1953 with two hundred and fifty mimeographed copies. Initiated by four recent university graduates, led by Aileen Collins (later to marry Dudek), with Dudek and Layton joining as editorial advisers, it derived its unusual title from Ezra Pound’s statement, “CIV/n: not a one-man job,” “CIV/n” being Pound’s abbreviation for civilization. Its stated goal was to present poetry that would be “a vital representation of what things are, done in strong language (if necessary) or any language, but it [would] rouse the reader to see just what the world around him [was] like.” Poets in Canada, Collins added, were “forced to write with maple syrup on birch bark,” and this needed to change. The energetic editorial meetings, attended by Layton, Dudek, and Collins, often at Layton’s Montreal home, led to the appearance of new and unorthodox writing: it was frank, colloquial, unselfconscious, and experimental. To get the Canadian mind out of storage, CIV/n proposed the following new standard:
For Kulchur’s sake, at least, let’s have a lot of bad good poetry in future, instead of more good bad poetry—and let the dead-head critics hold their peace until the call of the last moose.
In a letter to Robert Creeley, Layton comically summarized the completion of the inaugural issue: “Last night we celebrated CIV/n with an orgy and to give the issue the proper send-off we all undressed and sat about holding each other’s privates (sounds gruesome now).”
Pound was sent copies of the magazine and replied to Dudek that he found it unpolemical and too local. He questioned whether the magazine had any interest in “standing for maximum awareness.” The fourth issue of CIV/n, which included Cohen’s first effort, was more broadly based. The issue also contained work by both Creeley and Corman; a long article on Pound by Camillo Pellizzi, an Italian author/critic; and an editorial by Dudek on why Pound was being held in a Washington, D.C., mental hospital. It also contained contributions from Phyllis Webb, Raymond Souster, and Irving Layton. Cohen’s author’s note reveals that “Leonard N. Cohen … composes poetry to the guitar; now studying at McGill.”
The second poem by Cohen in the issue alludes to his experiences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the summer of 1953. That summer Cohen had gone to Harvard, ostensibly to take a poetry course from the experimental French poet Pierre Emmanuel, who was teaching a course on the nature of modern poetry. Cohen convinced his mother that the enterprise would be worth a month or so in Cambridge, though he spent most of his time listening to folk music from the world-famous John Lennox Collection at the Widener Library. In the poem, he describes how the “secret undulations” of the River Charles “swarmed the shadows of ten dozen streetlamps and a moon.” The poem appears retitled and revised as “Friends” in Let Us Compare Mythologies. Four other poems by Cohen appeared in CIV/n before publication ceased in 1955.
The literary environment of CIV/n was as important as the publication itself, and through CIV/n Cohen came into contact with older, more experienced writers who sought to challenge the poetic orthodoxy of the country. Aileen Collins later characterized this challenge as the effort, at least in Montreal, to contradict the Canadian Authors Association’s notion of poetry as effusive expressions of emotional states, similar in form and taste to a blend of maple syrup; hence her comment about maple syrup on birch bark.
The CIV/n circle included Layton, Betty Sutherland (sister of the McGill poet John Sutherland and Layton’s companion from the mid-1940s; they married in 1948), the sculptor Buddy Rozynski, art director of the magazine, his wife Wanda, and later, Doug Jones, Phyllis Webb, Eli Mandel, F.R. Scott, Cid Corman, Raymond Souster, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson. Aileen Collins and the Rozynskis handled the production and distribution of the magazine, as well as the finances, and also took charge of the correspondence, accounting, art-work, and circulation.
Cohen was soon participating in the group’s discussions, debates, and informal readings, often bringing his guitar to accompany his poetry. These gatherings were actually workshops, and Cohen recalls that even an experienced poet like Scott was shaken by some of the candid reactions to his work. There was, Cohen recalls, a “savage integrity” to the Montreal group. Phyllis Webb recollects meeting Cohen in late 1955 when he was preparing to publish his first book with Dudek. Dudek brought him to Layton’s house, and she remembers her surprise at learning that this young poet was “voluntarily studying the Bible as an informal on-going project.” That evening, as usual, poems “got battered about,” but Cohen’s was “the most freshly lyrical and genuinely sensuous.” Arguments, insults, and praise characterized these meetings, and provided a sounding board for Cohen. The importance of CIV/n, said Dudek, was its role in stimulating a vital Montreal literary environment.
The emergence of the CIV/n group also confirmed the move of new poetry from Toronto to Montreal. Raymond Souster’s Contact, from which the Contact Press emerged, had ended, and the new CIV/n, in Montreal, had begun. In addition, the magazine solidified the union of Souster, Layton, and Dudek, which had begun with the publication of their co-authored project Cerberus (1952). Canadian Poems, 1850–1952, an anthology edited by Dudek and Layton, signaled a break from poetry shaped strictly by narrative, exhibiting a modern lyricism. CIV/n was more challenging than the other small magazines in Canada, such as First Statement, Contact, or later, Delta, and certainly fostered Cohen’s early work.
The best-known writer on the faculty at the time was the Governor General’s Award winner Hugh MacLennan, whose Two Solitudes had startled the country when it appeared in 1945. MacLennan joined McGill in 1951 to teach a course on the modern novel and to run an advanced creative writing seminar. Cohen met MacLennan through Tony Graham, son of the novelist Gwethalyn Graham, who had achieved notoriety with her best-selling novel Earth and High Heaven (1944), about the love affair between a young Jewish lawyer and a Gentile from Westmount. While at McGill, MacLennan drafted what would become The Watch that Ends the Night (1957), also destined to win a Governor General’s Award.
The reading list of MacLennan’s novel course, which Cohen attended, included James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This work had a powerful effect on Cohen, especially the impressionistic “bird girl” section where Stephen Dedalus poetically describes a young woman on the beach. It demonstrated to Cohen how lyrical prose could become within the novel form.
Enrollment in the advanced creative writing course required a submission of material, which Cohen presented and MacLennan approved. Cohen found that he liked MacLennan as a person as well as an instructor. “That’s where my life has been mostly,” Cohen has said. “I’ve only gone on these kinds of adventures where there was a personal relationship involved.” He remembers MacLennan as a beautiful teacher: “the more restrained he was, the more emotional was the atmosphere in the classroom.” For a time afterwards, they continued to exchange letters, and MacLennan expressed interest in Cohen’s developing career as a writer. When two of Cohen’s poems were published in the February 1954 issue of Forge, a student publication at McGill, MacLennan provided an introduction.
F.R. Scott was another influential figure at McGill. An eminent constitutional historian, he was also a noted poet who was able to straddle both the earlier generation of The McGill Fortnightly Review and Preview, as well as the new efforts of the innovative CIV/n. Cohen studied commercial law with him and briefly entered law school, admiring the apparent ease with which Scott could balance poetry and the law. Scott encouraged Cohen’s literary efforts and Cohen recalled that visits to the Scotts’ were “warm and wonderful [with] a very open, fluid atmosphere; lots of fun; drinking; and talk of politics and poetry.”
Several years later, Scott and his wife Marian, a painter, would venture into downtown Montreal to hear Cohen read and sing in the various clubs and coffeehouses. Cohen, in turn, often received invitations to North Hatley, where the Scotts had their summer cottage. He wrote in a lean-to cabin belonging to Scott’s brother Elton, which the Scotts made available to Cohen. He began to write The Spice-Box of Earth there in 1957 and a year later he returned to work on early versions of The Favorite Game. To show his gratitude, he wrote “Summer Haiku for Frank and Marian Scott,” which Mort Rosengarten carved on a rock. The Scotts put it to use as a doorstop; the poem also appears in The Spice-Box. Scott later wrote a recommendation for Cohen for a Canada Council grant.
Of all Cohen’s mentors at McGill, however, Irving Layton was unquestionably the most influential. Layton forced a new vitality into moribund poetic forms and linked the prophetic with the sexual. In Layton’s work, Cohen discovered a Judaic voice of opposition, energy, and passion. Who, Layton asked with a flourish, will read the “castratos,” the critics? “What race will read what they have said / Who have my poems to read instead?” Northrop Frye, among others, tried to diminish Layton’s sexuality: “One can get as tired of buttocks in Mr. Layton as of buttercups in the Canadian Poetry Magazine,” he remarked in the University of Toronto Quarterly in April 1952, when reviewing The Black Huntsmen.
In addition to a great and energetic teacher, Cohen found in Layton Judaic prophecy and Hebrew thunder. Layton brought the full force of Jewish identity to bear on his work. He also brought politics to poetry and Cohen absorbed Layton’s stance in later works of his own, notably Flowers for Hitler and Parasites of Heaven. Cohen met Layton briefly in 1949 and again in 1954 when he invited Layton, who had just published The Long Pea-Shooter, to read at Cohen’s fraternity at McGill. An aggressive figure with two books to his credit, Layton was then juggling a career as a part-time lecturer in literature at Sir George Williams University and as a teaching assistant in political science at McGill.
Layton’s ego was relentlessly public. He challenged the entire country to rise to his forthright statements and sexuality. From Layton, Cohen learned to value the excesses of the Dionysian style, to accept the power of prophetic visions, and to extend the poetic to include the Judaic. Layton defiled the sanitary classrooms of poetry in the name of poetry: “with a happy / screech he bounded from monument to monument,” wrote Cohen in his poem “For My Old Layton.” If Dudek knighted him, Layton took him out on the town. The influence was immense, but over the years, reciprocal: “I taught him how to dress; he taught me how to live forever,” Cohen has remarked.
Layton frequently brought Cohen along on reading or promotional tours. On one of their frequent car trips to Toronto, they became so engrossed in talking about poetry that they didn’t notice they were running out of gas. Fortunately, they were not far from a farmhouse, where they found help. Several years later they were again driving to Toronto and again ran out of gas. Uncannily, it was in front of the same farmhouse. They sheepishly told their story to the woman in the farmhouse who remembered them from years past. She summed up the entire episode with one word: “Poets!” Cohen and Layton read together at the old Greenwich Gallery on Bay Street, where Don Owen, the filmmaker, remembered that Cohen “always seemed to leave the gallery with the most intesting woman there, the one I’d spent all evening trying to get up enough nerve to say hello to.” Cohen was in his pudgy phase at this time, Owen noted, but the extra weight did not deter him from his pursuit of women.
Layton commanded the attention of a public unaccustomed to Whitmanesque gestures and outlandish posturings. With flowing hair, Layton shouted and raved from the heights, addressing crucial subjects. “Poised on a rope stretched tautly between sex and death,” the poet, Layton affirmed, can find salvation only in sexual love, a message that strongly appealed to the young Cohen. Layton was responsible for strong-arming Cohen into the wonderful, boisterous, in-your-face world of serious poetry, where dedication to the art was all, and all of you had to be put into the work. The quest for bold experiences was the poet’s finest teacher, Layton preached, and in Cohen he had a willing disciple.
No gathering Layton and Cohen attended was more important than the Canadian Writers’ Conference held from July 28–31, 1955, at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Organized by F.R. Scott, and supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, the first major gathering of Canadian writers included the established: A.J.M. Smith, Morley Callaghan, Dorothy Livesay, Desmond Pacey, Louis Dudek, Ralph Gustafson, James Reaney, John Sutherland, Earle Birney, Malcolm Ross, and Scott; and the new: Al Purdy, Jay Macpherson, Eli Mandel, Phyllis Webb, and Miriam Waddington. According to Doug Jones, Layton arrived in staid Kingston “in a car full of women. I guess it was probably Cohen and various friends, but it was like the sultan coming with his harem.”
Cohen took his guitar, read in the impromptu poetry sessions and listened to the arguments between the writers, who claimed that the mass media were doing little to promote their work, and the mass media, who claimed that the writers were getting what they deserved, especially the poets whose work was intentionally obscure. Layton argued that poets wrote for the public, not for other poets. The poet was part of the proletariat, not the elite. Layton constantly battled journalists and others at the conference in his conviction that the poet was essential for society and that society had a duty to support its writers through foundations or grants. It resulted in a set of resolutions to formalize the study of Canadian literature, recognizing the need to provide a more prominent place for Canadian writing in schools and libraries.
Attending the Kingston Conference in the summer of 1955 was a heady experience for Cohen. He met the major poets and heard new voices. His career was shaped in response to many of the issues that were discussed and the decisions that were made through the workshops, meetings, and resolutions. A new range of publications soon appeared: Canadian Literature, Prism, the McGill Poetry series and the New Canadian Library.
————
COHEN GRADUATED from McGill in October 1955, one of only five arts students to receive B.A. degrees. He had established himself as a literary figure and campus voice, winning the Chester MacNaughton Prize for Creative Writing for his series “Thoughts of a Landsman,” which was made up of four poems, three of which would later appear in his first book. He also won the Peterson Memorial Prize in literature, publicly confirming his talent and renewing his determination to pursue a creative life. The caption under his 1955 McGill Yearbook picture reads “You have discovered of course only the ship of fools is making the voyage this year…”
“I yearned to live a semi-bohemian lifestyle,” Cohen said of his McGill years, “an unstructured life; but a consecrated one; some kind of calling.” In the fall of 1953, at the beginning of his third year at McGill, Cohen and Mort Rosengarten had taken several rooms on Stanley Street in a rooming house. They had hoped to pursue a modestly bohemian life and to break free of the confines of Westmount. It was a decision that upset Cohen’s mother and angered his uncles. His father had lived with his parents until the day of his marriage at age thirty-nine. Cohen’s move was seen as a break with tradition and an abandonment of his mother. But its rewards were too seductive. Cohen invited women to his new rooms, serenaded them, and read them poems. As the narrator of Beauty at Close Quarters reports, “He knew what minor chords went with what hours of the morning, which poems were too vicious, which too sweet…. He wasn’t so much trying to accumulate women as he was ideal episodes.”
After Cohen graduated, he began law school for a term but his real interest was still in writing. At this time, Layton, Souster, and Dudek created the McGill Poetry Series to provide a new outlet for young poets. Works by Pierre Coupey, David Solway, Daryl Hine, and Cohen appeared. But when Dudek offered the first volume in the series to Cohen, he was, in Dudek’s words, “slow and reluctant to present his manuscript for editing.” Dudek, in fact, didn’t see the completed manuscript of Let Us Compare Mythologiesuntil the book was published. Part of the reason for Cohen’s reluctance was Dudek’s rejection of “the sentimental late-romantic tradition in poetry” to which Cohen was partial. Upholding this tradition was itself a form of rebellion against the modernism of Dudek and others, vividly seen in the work of Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Charles Olson.
Let Us Compare Mythologies contains poems written largely when Cohen was between the ages of fifteen and twenty and went through four drafts before he felt it could be printed. Cohen masterminded the entire publication, assuming responsiblity for the design, typesetting, production, and paper. His friend Freda Guttman prepared illustrations, and he paid the $300 cost to have the work produced in hardcover, rather than paperback, as Dudek had originally planned. Ruth Wisse, then feature editor of the McGill Daily, headed the so-called sales team which operated by advance subscription only. She alone sold over two hundred advance copies. Cohen also distributed order forms for the book in campus cafes and bookstores. He sold out the approximately four hundred printed copies.
The book appeared in May with a statement about the series on the back jacket emphasizing its uniqueness and Dudek’s role. The inscription on the copy presented to Dudek by Cohen reads:
To Louis Dudek, teacher and friend, who more than anyone wanted me to bring out this book, and whose encouragement and help is deeply appreciated by every young person writing at McGill—
Leonard Cohen
May 1956
Despite increasing differences with Dudek, whose own poetry of ideas and championing of Pound contradicted Cohen’s pull toward romanticism, metaphysics, and sensuality, and despite Dudek’s later belief that becoming a singer undermined Cohen’s talents as a writer, Cohen always valued Dudek’s contribution to his work. He knew that Dudek understood him. “Leonard always had an image of himself as a rabbi,” Dudek has said. Cohen unexpectedly appeared at Dudek’s retirement party in the mid-eighties and was delighted that it was Dudek who presented him to the McGill Chancellor for his honorary doctorate in June 1992. At the ceremony, Dudek summarized Cohen’s McGill years with a gentle jibe: “I was fortunate to see him occasionally in my classes in his young days at McGill.” He closed with a fatherly question about Cohen’s status as a celebrity: “But Leonard, is all this fame really good for you?” After praising Cohen’s integrity and search for personal truth, Dudek concluded, “He has won through, so far as anyone can win through, in this difficult struggle of life.”
The “personal truth” Dudek cited in 1992 is evident in the forty-four poems of Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956). The themes are remarkable for a twenty-two-year-old encountering the power of romantic love and shattered by the reality of loss. “Elegy,” a poem marking the death of his father, is the first poem in the text; “Beside the Shepherd,” a poem celebrating the resurrection of life, is the last. Patrimony, inheritance, history, and desire emerge as the dominant themes, united by an absorption in myth and integrated with religious sensuality.
A prose statement dated December 27, 1956, written during his year at Columbia, contains Cohen’s explanation of the importance of myth in his work. He begins with a declaration:
I want to continue experimenting with the myth applying it to contemporary life, and isolating it in contemporary experience, thus making new myths and modifying old ones. I want to put mythic time into my poems, so they can be identified with every true fable ever sung, and still be concerned with our own time, and the poems hanging in our own skies.
Cohen cites marriage and adultery as major themes that he will likely explore and then goes on to name poems that illustrate how myth can control poetic image and development. The poems deal exclusively with betrayal or adultery, his third example being the most self-defining, since it narrates the betrayal of the speaker. It reads in part:
I know all about passion and honour
but unfortunately this had really nothing to do with either;
oh there was passion I’m only too sure
and even a little honour
but the important thing was to cuckold Leonard Cohen.
Enlarging his sense of myth is his belief that what he does is linked to the folk song. His ballads, Cohen once explained, “strive for folk-song simplicity and the fable’s intensity.”
Cohen’s interest in myth coincided with a shift in literary studies, summarized by the work of the Canadian critic Northrop Frye. In 1957, the year after Let Us Compare Mythologies, Frye published his encyclopedic treatment of myth and literature, Anatomy of Criticism, initiating a new paradigm for the study of literature via archetypes. Frye reviewed Cohen’s first book in the University of Toronto Quarterly, providing restrained praise and acknowledgment of a minor talent. During this period, Canadian writers like James Reaney, Eli Mandel, and Jay Macpherson were also turning to myth as a narrative device. Cohen’s book became part of the unconscious but unified development of mythopoetic studies that was evolving in Canada.
Let Us Compare Mythologies contains several other themes that would inform Cohen’s later poetry: history, especially related to Jewish persecution, and the Holocaust; sexuality and attraction to women; lyrical sensuality; anger; cultural stereotypes; religion; and frustration with art or history as a means of solving personal crises. It is a young poet’s work designed to shock as well as excite (“The moon dangling wet like a half-plucked eye.”) One sees his early use of poetry as a form of prayer and the role of the poet as a sacred voice. And it exhibits confidence, demonstrating what Layton said was essential for a young poet: arrogance and inexperience. When asked in 1994 about the quality of his work in those days, Cohen quipped, “It’s been downhill ever since. Those early poems are pretty good.” Cohen had no strategy for becoming a public figure like Layton. “Mostly what I was trying to do was get a date. That was the most urgent element in my life.”
Women were becoming a dominant interest at this time, as an essay from the mid-fifties confirms. The topic was breasts, or as he preferred, “tits,” a word he did not use carelessly: “Breasts, in my mind at least, divide, they turn the mind one way and then another.” The terminology was significant: “bosom” belonged to the world of feminine hygiene. “Women who have popularity problems talk about their bosoms,” he writes. Other terms seem too flippant, “so back to tits which are nothing more than what they are, human and real, the form, the swell, the rosy corrugated nipples all carried plainly in the sound of the word.” One particular girl possessed “magic tits” which enraptured him, although he tries to explain that he is not a breast man. The tits of this particular woman deserved a poem, Cohen felt, but who would write it?
Layton would at once attach them to one of his wives or perhaps appropriate the whole body to be mutilated on some fierce landscape. Dudek would spurn them, or if he dared to examine them at all, would compose a travelogue, cataloguing every pore and hair, and having done this thing he’d praise them. Hine does not believe in them. Reaney or Macpherson would turn them to silver, that dear flesh to metal, and etch on them hieroglyphs to prove some current theory of their master who is a Professor of English Literature. Leonard Cohen would embarrass us all by caressing them publically under the guise of praying to a kind of Oriental-eyed suffering Jehova.
The woman with the “magic tits” would not stand out in a crowd, Cohen goes on to say, although while wandering on the “dark southern slope of Mount Royal … thinking about all the injustices that had been done me,” his heroine suddenly appears and to his astonishment uncovers her “tits.”
And at that moment I knew that upon how I understood and met these tits rested my whole life, that I would climb down to the city from that mountain an empty man or a great one. My heart became a battlefield where compassion struggled with contempt.
It was around this time that Cohen began to experience depression, and also began using drugs. Cohen’s depression initially took the form of withdrawl and solitude. He found he had less, not more, in common with his Westmount friends and the feeling of being an outsider began to alter his outlook. It was not so much a conflict as a challenge between alternately attractive ways of living. Nancy Bacal recalls a night in Cohen’s fraternity room drinking Armagnac, sitting under an umbrella before a fire with all his typewritten poems spread about, seriously debating whether to burn them. Fortunately, they decided it would be unwise.
Drugs, the panacea of the sixties, began to attract Cohen in the mid-fifties, principally marijuana and lsd. A musician in Montreal provided an introduction to the former; writerly colleagues and hipsters the latter. As he and the times changed, so too did his pharmaceuticals, and he began to favor amphetamines, acid, and hashish. High on lsd or marijuana, Cohen found the freedom to experiment poetically and to attempt new forms for his songwriting. Friends in the artistic community shared in this exploration of hallucinogens. For Cohen, drugs also substituted for religion; the ecstasy and belief that mystical or prophetic religion once held for him was gone. He felt it had been institutionalized and subsequently had lost its magic. But drugs could provide an alternative sacred path. In “Song of Patience,” from his first book, Cohen outlines the replacement of religious fervor with the frenzy of art, a theme echoed throughout the text. The visions that came from drugs were both an escape from depression and a release of the imagination.
One night in 1957, Cohen walked to the top of Mount Royal, the hill that juts up in the center of Montreal, and took peyote, the preferred drug of South American Indians. He had always understood drugs to be sacramental and ceremonial, not recreational. Under their influence, he felt he was able to explore psychological and creative states that were otherwise unavailable. In the tradition of Rimbaud, Verlaine, Coleridge, and De Quincey, Cohen sought the expansion of his imagination. He eventually quit drugs because they didn’t expand the mind in the way he had hoped, and they were taking a toll on his body.
Initially though, drugs were a sacramental focus in his landscape of religious exploration. There were moments of perception; while writing Beautiful Losers on Hydra in 1965 he took acid and wrote on a wall in gold paint, “I am change / I am the same.” On an opposite wall he wrote, “Our song led us to the ovens.”
Cohen’s tendency to depression was exacerbated by the conflict between his desire to be an artist and the obligations of a middle-class life. His two worlds soon became incompatible. A series of destabilizing elements in his personal history contributed to his moods: his father’s early death, his mother’s depressions, and the suicide of his first guitar teacher among them. “The nightmares do not suddenly / develop happy endings,” he wrote in Parasites of Heaven, “I merely step out of them.” Becoming a writer, stereotypically defined by irregular work, numerous sexual partners, and an uncertain income, created resistance from family and furthered Cohen’s inner conflicts.
As he matured, Cohen began to display the characteristics of manic-depressiveness. These symptoms usually first appear around the age of eighteen or nineteen; cyclic and recurrent shifts from manic creativity, sociability, and sexual activity on one hand, and intense lassitude, withdrawal, and anxiety on the other. In addition, victims tend to be obsessive and extremely organized. Cohen was, and is, absorbed by his writing and music, and is unusually tidy and concerned with detail. His homes have all been spotless and almost bare in their furnishings; his notebooks are all ordered by year, and his work habits reflect his concern with discipline and precision. He does not consider a work complete until he is satisified that the lyric, the sound, or the word is absolutely right. He explained this approach in a March 1967 notebook entry: “In principle, everything stands systematized, and it is only in regard to details that success is still to be achieved.” Yet he recognizes his own laziness, “which is famous to me, although I have convinced many of my diligence.” Nonetheless, his quest for perfection and order characterizes all of his actions: his work, his loves, and his search for spiritual satisfaction.
Cohen would occasionally rent a room in a seedy downtown hotel for three dollars a night, initiating a fascination with hotel rooms. In the 1965 NFB film Ladies and Gentlemen … Mr. Leonard Cohen, Cohen is seen waking up in a Ste-Catherine Street hotel, staring out the window in his underwear at the bleak, wintry landscape, and lyrically celebrating the release from responsibility that a hotel provides. Two influential hotels for him were the Chelsea and the Royalton, both in New York; each provided creative stimulation and refuge. Epitomizing his identity with the transient hotel world is his 1984 video “I Am A Hotel,” in which he dramatizes numerous stories among the hotel’s inhabitants. When asked why he found hotels so fascinating, he replied, “My personality cannot go anywhere else. Where else shall a guy like me go?”
Cohen continued to get exposure. In 1956 the CBC recorded Six Montreal Poets, which Folkways Records released in the United States in 1957 and which placed Cohen in the company of some of his mentors: Layton, F.R. Scott, A.M. Klein, A.J.M. Smith, and Dudek. Produced by Sam Gesser, an impresario who had brought acts like Pete Seeger and the Weavers to Montreal, the album singled Cohen out as the most important young poet in the city. He appeared on side one, after Smith and before Layton, reading six poems from Let Us Compare Mythologies, including “The Sparrows” and “Elegy.”
Cohen had now established a local reputation as a poet and was gaining a following from his singing in various coffeehouses. But he was becoming dissatisfied with Montreal and its bourgeois climate. He felt he needed a freer artistic world, one without boundaries or roots. He found it in New York.