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LEONARD COHEN attended the School of General Studies at Columbia University in 1956–57. García Lorca had briefly studied English at Columbia in 1929, and Louis Dudek had received his Ph.D there in 1951. Cohen followed his mentors. His courses included a survey of seventeenth-century English literature, a course on the Romantic movement, Literature in Contemporary America, Contemporary Texts, and Introduction to Literary Research. Graduate school, however, was “passion without flesh,” he thought, “love with no climax.” His notebooks from that time are filled with drawings and caricatures of his professors and fellow students. In one of them he wrote: “I feel lonely for my uncreated works.” He continued the casual study habits he had developed at McGill.
When Professor William York Tindall allowed Cohen to write a term paper on his own book, Let Us Compare Mythologies, Cohen was hard on himself, writing a scathing critique. But he was dismayed by the general absence of rigor in the study of literature. There was no gravity, he felt, evidenced by Tindall’s decision to let him review his own work. Cohen finally quit the program and worked briefly as an elevator operator, but was dismissed because he refused to wear a uniform.
Cohen lived at International House, the dormitory for foreign students located on Riverside Drive, close to the Hudson River. But he spent most of his time in the fledgling bohemian scene around the Columbia campus and downtown in the Village. The Beats were emerging and Allen Ginsberg, a graduate of Columbia, had captured national attention with his famous reading of Howl in March 1955 at the Six Gallery in San Francisco (memorialized in Kerouac’s Dharma Bums). Jack Kerouac, who himself had attended Columbia on a sports scholarship, was also part of the Village scene. Cohen recalls hearing him read at the Village Vanguard (with musical accompaniment) and later meeting him at Ginsberg’s apartment: “He was lying under a dining room table, pretending to listen to some jazz record while the party swirled on ’round him.” Kerouac’s novel On the Road would appear to great acclaim in September 1957 from Viking, who would go on to publish The Favorite Game. Cohen appreciated Kerouac’s work, calling him “a certain kind of genius who was able to spin it out that way like some great glistening spider.” What Kerouac was “really spinning was the great tale of America.” Counterculture writing from Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, and William S. Burroughs shaped a new world of literary recklessness. In New York, Cohen found confirmation of his anti-establishment stance, although he was never accepted by the Beats. “I was always only on the fringe. I liked the places they gathered, but I was never accepted by the bohemians because it was felt that I came from the wrong side of the tracks. I was too middle-class … I didn’t have the right credentials to be at the center table in those bohemian cafes.”
Nevertheless, Cohen drew from this world (and later took back to Montreal) not only a new way of presenting his poetry, reciting it with jazz accompaniment, but also a new realization that spontaneous prose, “UNINTERRUPTED AND UNREVISED FULL CONFESSIONS ABOUT WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED IN REAL LIFE,” could both liberate the language and present a genuine account of reality. This would be a key concept nine years later when he wrote Beautiful Losers.
Caught up in the mood of literary revolution, Cohen began a shortlived magazine, The Phoenix. In his editorial statement, Cohen wrote:
This magazine intends to publish honest poems, stories and articles of high quality. We intend to make it a vital organ of the community which it represents. We want experiment. We want controversy. We want ideas and song. We invite craftsmen.
Leonard Cohen
Editor
The issue included poetry by the known and unknown: Louis Dudek, Anne Ruden, Lee Usher, Mimi Hayes, Leigh Van Valen, and Leonard Cohen. Cohen had a series of poems in The Phoenix: “Go by brooks, love,” “Whatever cliffs are brought down” (to be retitled “You All in White” and published with variant lines in The Spice-Box of Earth), “You tell me that silence,” “What shadows the pendulum sun,” “Perfumed Pillows of night,” and most important, “Poem for Marc Chagall,” retitled “Out of the Land of Heaven” in The Spice-Box of Earth. All six poems reappeared in The Spice-Box of Earth four years later. The Phoenix only survived one issue, April 1957. But Cohen had again taken control of the means of production, as he had done with his book Let Us Compare Mythologies.
Cohen continued to write in New York, occasionally finding New York subjects, like the nearby Riverside Church. An unpublished poem reads:
Riverside Church frightens tourists
with a giant carillion
but is less successful with God
whose ear grew deaf after
a century of martyrs and Bach in bells is dubious
It is a stunned Babel
I told this to a small carved monk
who held a bent stone.
The key event of his year in New York was meeting Anne Sherman, a tall, dark-haired woman whom he first encountered at International House. Cohen was immediately struck by her beauty. She possessed a grace that originated in something “durable, disciplined and athletic.” She became the model for the divorcée Shell in The Favorite Game and occupied Cohen’s erotic and literary imagination. Her beauty devastated him, a beauty that broke down “old rules of light and cannot be interpreted or compared. They [such women] make every room original;” she was, as the novel describes, “formal” and well-educated, and she always presented “the scene the heart demanded.” But if she taught Cohen about love and behavior, he taught her “about her body and her beauty.”
But the relationship with Sherman didn’t last. She was older than Cohen, she wasn’t Jewish, and she evidently chose not to continue the affair, although Cohen frequently expressed his love for her after their relationship ended. She had become friends with Cohen’s sister and with his friend Yafa Lerner, both of whom were then living in New York. Those close to Cohen at the time believed he wanted to marry Anne but she sought a stability that Cohen could not provide. He wanted her to come to Greece after he settled there in 1960 but she remained in New York, eventually marrying a prominent restaurateur.
Sherman embodied all of the sexual freedom and guiltless love that Cohen had had difficulty finding in other women. For the next five or six years, Cohen continued to write about her in both poetry and prose. A notebook from the summer of 1958 contains a series of references to Sherman as well as the poem “To Anne in the Window Seat,” which expresses his grief over having to live without her. In a white notebook from Greece dated September 1961, there is a poem entitled “To Anne”:
I’d no sooner forget you
than pretty houses or legends
or success
But sometimes Meadowheart
is lost, Isolde is lost,
the new apartment is lost
and I’m invisible
in the cold machines of universe
that won’t stop
or slow to let you kiss.
In the same notebook he adds:
Reader, I am anxious about
your discipline
are you constant as me?
Otherwise, burn this book
Go to the movies
if you aren’t doubled up with laughing.
If Freda Guttman was the muse for Let Us Compare Mythologies, Anne Sherman was the inspiration for Beauty at Close Quarters, the unpublished version of The Favorite Game, as well as for The Spice-Box of Earth, which has its origin in Jewish tradition and contemporary love. “For Anne,” a brief poem in The Spice-Box of Earth, records this appreciation and her departure. In a letter of July 1961 to his sister, Cohen writes, “I would appreciate hearing any news about Anne. If you are in contact with her and she is interested please make a book available to her. It is sad, absurd and understandable, that the ‘onlie begetter’ of these poems should not have a volume in her possession.” His sister wrote back in November, saying that Anne was well. “Your report that Anne is happy delighted me. Besides being an extraordinary beauty, she is an extraordinary person and such people often have great difficulty adjusting to the bleak terms that any life presents, no matter how rich and glamourous.”
Cohen still expresses affection for Anne Sherman, and as with virtually all of his women, he maintained good relations with her after their association ended. Cohen’s lovers have tended to remain his friends, the result of a continued respect, universal graciousness and carefully orchestrated breakups. And with the exception of Book of Mercy, which originated in the rediscovery of a spiritual self at fifty, all of Cohen’s books are in response to women he has known.
For many years after, Anne Sherman remained in his mind as the image of beauty and love, as a letter to her from the winter of 1961 illustrates. Written from Montreal in a seriocomic style, he asks her to join him:
Let’s run away to Lachine. Let’s hide out in Snowdon. Let’s go native in Ottawa. Let’s meet in Central Station and kiss shamelessly in front of all the trains.
I want to go back to Westmount with you and live on the polished floors of my father’s house. I want you beside me when I wear a gold chain and am stoned by the workers. I want your dignity for my scorn.
I will send you flowers when I get some money. You are so beautiful I can be foolish.
I wish you good appetite, peaceful sleep, Happy Easter, easy Lent, hello, sunny weather, new poems, intelligent tv. Be noble, cold, wild.
I urge you to join me in my celebrations.
By the summer of 1957, Cohen was back in Montreal. He had enjoyed the beat culture of New York, but he realized that he would always be an outsider; his roots were in Montreal. As he later explained to an officer of the Canada Council, “Don’t worry about me becoming an expatriate. I could never stay away from Montreal. I am a Citizen of Mountain Street.” During this time, he worked intermittently at Cuthbert & Co., his uncle’s foundry, as a lathe operator, brass die-casting machine operator, and a time-and-motion study assistant. He was faced with a dilemma: would he join his uncles at the Freedman Company, settling down to a life of respectability and responsibility, or would he pursue his creative interests and commit himself to his art? He was plagued with the same ambivalence he had faced at McGill. The poem “Priests 1957” describes his situation and suggests a course of action. The work points to the unhappiness of his uncles and their stunted imaginations, the incompleteness of his father’s life as measured by the unread books he owned, and the general unhappiness of his cousins. At the end of the poem he expresses his sense of ironic disappointment: “Must we find all work prosaic / because our grandfather built an early synagogue?”
By the next year, while Cohen was living in Montreal, he worked at the Freedman Company hanging coats, and then as a bundle boy (one who carries bundles of material from one stage of production to another). Layton comically described Cohen’s switch from art to manufacturing:
Now Leonard Cohen has decided to bemuse all our wits by entering the family business, the making of suits for unpoetic characters across the land to buy and wear. Our great lyricist is now a shipping clerk, penning odes to wrapping-paper and string. A handsome way of living brought him to this pass, debt. He puts a good face on the whole affair and mutters something through his strong clenched teeth. If you put your ear close enough you’ll make out the words “discipline,” “good for my character,” and many other sub edifying sounds. May the gods, kind to the erratic ways of poets, be merciful to the three [Dudek, Layton, and Cohen] of us.
Eleven days later, the critic Desmond Pacey responded to Layton’s lament: “What will become of Montreal’s bohemia now that all of its leaders are becoming tame and respectable?”
Cohen, along with Mort Rosengarten and Lenore Schwartzman, also ran the Four Penny Art Gallery. It was located in a boarding house on Stanley Street, and for effect they painted every picture frame a different color. They exhibited the work of figurative painters, unusual in Montreal at the time, when the abstract expressionism of Riopelle and others was in vogue. They were the first to show the work of Louise Scott, and they also showed the works of Betty Sutherland, Layton’s wife, and of Vera Frenkel. A fire, however, destroyed a good many of these works, and because of a technicality there was no insurance coverage. Yet Cohen found the gallery an exhuberant, magical space, as the opening of “Last Dance At the Four Penny” makes clear:
Layton, when we dance our freilach
under the ghostly handkerchief,
the miracle rabbis of Prague and Vilna
resume their sawdust thrones,
and angels and men, asleep so long
in the cold palaces of disbelief,
gather in sausage-hung kitchens
to quarrel deliciously and debate
the sounds of the Ineffable Name.
Cohen was also working on various pieces of fiction at this time, including an unusual short story about his now senile grandfather, Rabbi Klein. The impact of the elderly Rabbi’s illness led Cohen to write an unpublished short story entitled “A Hundred Suits from Russia.” A grandfather, living with his daughter’s family, accuses his daughter of stealing his suits. The grandson, unable to face the shouting and madness because he can’t write, prepares to leave. “Work,” his mother mocks, “fine work. In his room all day listening to records. A poet? A deserter.” The grandfather becomes incontinent, and the son tells his mother that the grandfather is not a great Talmudist but senile and must go to a home. One evening the son hears the grandfather sing the most beautiful song. His mother announces that the grandfather has agreed to be quiet so that the son can write and that “one day you would be a great writer and that all the world would know. He [also] said that people would come from miles to hear you speak.” The story ends with the grandfather banging his fist on a table for each syllable as he shouts, “One hundred suits from Russia!”
In this early effort, Cohen expresses his frustration with his grandfather’s deterioration, a man he adored and recognized as the catalyst for much of his writing. This attachment to the man continued with Cohen’s unpublished novel, A Ballet of Lepers. The book begins, “My grandfather came to live with me. There was nowhere else for him to go. What had happened to all his children? Death, decay, exile—I hardly know.”
The ninety-one-page typescript of A Ballet of Lepers tells the story of a thirty-five-year-old sales clerk who takes in his elderly grandfather. They live in a cramped Stanley Street rooming house. The grandfather is given to fits of violence, and the narrator (who remains unnamed) finds an awakening violence within himself. When the narrator discovers a baggage clerk masturbating in a train station washroom, he begins slapping him, reveling in his power: “Defeated he stood before me. I hated him because he would not resist me. I loved him because he was my victim. I slapped him again. He put a freckled chubby hand against his cheek.” As the narrator escapes to the street, he concludes that “each of us had his secret art. I embraced the noon-time throngs with a smile.” The portrait of the grandfather reflects the difficulties that Cohen faced with his own senile grandfather, although without the degree of violence. Cohen still remembers his grandfather’s words to him when he would visit him in the rest home: “Flee from this place, flee from this place!”
A Ballet of Lepers was Cohen’s first extended work of fiction, completed in July 1957. He sent the manuscript out to Pocketbooks and to Ace Publications, but both rejected it. In a 1990 interview, Cohen remembers the writing process: “I had a clock on my desk, and I forced myself to write a certain number of hours every day and I watched this clock. It had no glass on it and I always thought I could just move the hand with my finger. I remember writing on the face of the clock the word ‘help.’” When an interviewer asked some years later about his productivity, Cohen replied that what an artist really requires is staying power and intransigence and cited Woody Allen’s quip that “eighty percent of life is just showing up!”
The theme of the novel anticipates many of Cohen’s later works, especially Beautiful Losers and The Energy of Slaves. There is, for example, the perverse symbiosis that links people, whether lovers or family:
How sad and beautiful we were, we humans, with our suffering and our torturing. I, the torturer, he the tortured, we the sufferers. I, suffering in the clear speared fire of purity, burning, agonized and strangely calm. He, suffering in the dark flames of humiliation, and beginning the journey to purity. I the instrument of his delivery and he the instrument of mine.
Could it be that the reward of the degraded is to degrade others? Could that be the painful chain toward salvation, because I know there is a chain.
In A Ballet of Lepers, Cohen also demonstrated a growing sense of Jewish history and tragedy, a theme that would develop in his next three books of poetry: The Spice-Box of Earth, Flowers for Hitler, and Parasites of Heaven. Explaining his violent acts, the narrator says:
It happened, that is all. It happened, just as Buchenwald happened, and Belsen and Auschwitz, and it will happen again, it will be planned, it will happen again and we will discover the atrocities, the outrages, the humiliations and we will say that it is the plan of a madman, the idea of a madman, but the madman is ourselves, the violent plans the cruelties and indignities, they are all our own, and we are not mad, we are crying for purity and love.
A fundamental artistic theme of Cohen’s is the necessary cruelty of love. “We are not mad, we are human, we want to love, and someone must forgive us for the paths we take to love, for the paths are many and dark, and we are ardent and cruel in our journey.” The predatory nature of love and the need for compassion were explored repeatedly in Cohen’s published works, as well as the need to “learn betrayal so that you may not betray.” It is also necessary “to learn shame, remember humiliation, be diligent in your recollection of guilt. … Understand contamination so you may be pure, violence so you may be peaceful.”
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COHEN INTENSIFIED his attachment to Layton at this time, acting as best man at the poet’s faux wedding in Montreal in the spring of 1958. Incapable of asking his wife, Betty Sutherland Layton, for a divorce, Layton wanted to buy his current love, Aviva Cantor, a wedding ring. Cohen joined Layton and Aviva for lunch and in the afternoon they went to a jewelry shop on Mountain Street, where Aviva looked at gold bands. Layton neglected her, however, and instead bought a chunky silver bracelet for Betty. It was left to Cohen to choose a gold band and he placed it on Aviva’s finger, standing in for the ambivalent Layton. Remembering the incident, Cohen said that Layton “probably felt like living with both women. I think he could have handled them both, too. It was the womenwho demanded a resolution.” To Layton’s mixed pleasure, Aviva Cantor called herself Mrs. Layton from that moment on.
By day, Cohen was still working in the shipping department or office of his uncles’ clothing company; at night he would write poems. Sometimes he read the poems in coffeehouses with names like the Pam-Pam or the Tokay. At the Pam-Pam, he and Stephen Vizinczey, a Hungarian writer who would later edit the short-lived magazine Exchange, would often spend an evening seated near the door rating the women who entered, issuing invitations to the finalists.
At this time Cohen often projected a mood of despair and angst, especially and perhaps only with women. Vera Frenkel recalled an incident at the Tokay when after a conversation with Cohen about a lost suitcase she telephoned a close friend to express her concern about his state of mind. “Don’t worry,” her friend remarked, “he often becomes this way with women. He needs to experience this condition in order to work.” Such repeated “torment on the bed of love,” as Frenkel described it, became a frequent condition for Cohen, which some thought to be theatrics and others a genuine crisis. “Leonard,” Frenkel added, “always needed to be saved and lost in the same breath.”
Cohen sometimes played host to visiting Canadian writers. Al Purdy recalls a visit with Milton Acorn in the late fifties and the stark contrast between the two poets, Acorn intensely political, “a red fire hydrant in blue denims,” Cohen giving “the impression of elegant aristocracy, wearing a fancy dressing gown to putter around the kitchen in … perfectly self-aware.” Cohen moved “within a slight but perceptible aura of decadence … of standing aside in slight weariness, of having been through life before and found it rather boring.”
Cohen accompanied Irving Layton to a meeting with another icon of Canadian poetry, E.J. Pratt. Earle Birney had arranged for Layton and Cohen to lunch with Pratt and himself. A photograph commemorating the event shows a businesslike Pratt in suit and hat, Birney casual in jacket and pants, and Layton and Cohen dressed as kibbutzim in slacks and white shirts with their sleeves rolled up. The sartorial clash was mirrored in conversational styles. Layton noted Birney’s “sad Duke of Windsor face” and Pratt’s formal anecdotes, explaining to Desmond Pacey that when he and Leonard drove back, “we had lots of impressions to compare and analyze. We haven’t stopped talking about it yet.”
As Cohen was meeting with his peers and elders, his friends were leaving. He wrote a short story entitled “Goodbye, Old Rosengarten” that describes the last night with his friend Mort Rosengarten before Mort left Montreal to study art in London. The two revisit their favorite locales, including a bistro called The Shrine, their nickname for the Cafe Andre on Victoria Street. Cohen, unnamed in the story, tries to convince Rosengarten of the virtues of Montreal “on the threshold of greatness, like Athens, like New Orleans.” At the Shrine, all has changed: the bohemians have abandoned the place, the furniture has been replaced. The story is an apologia for altered lives and an altered city, which both Cohen and Rosengarten must escape to fulfil their promise of greatness. A year later, Cohen also left.
Cohen was adding music to his poetry readings, though not necessarily his own guitar. In February 1958, Layton reported to the critic Desmond Pacey that Cohen was bringing a new Beat style from New York and San Francisco to Montreal: “He’s currently reading poetry while a jazz orchestra fills in with strophes of its own.” Dudek also tried it one evening but without success, according to Layton, “but Cohen is really laying them in the aisles. A new development in the Montreal School?” Cohen began to appear often at downtown clubs like Birdland, and in March 1958, Layton, Jonathan Williams (an American poet and printer), and Daryl Hine witnessed Cohen’s reading accompanied by a jazz ensemble, and then the three joined in.
In April of that year, Cohen gave his first professional poetry recital at Dunn’s Progressive Jazz Parlour, a room above Dunn’s Famous Steak House on Ste-Catherine Street. Working with pianist and arranger Maury Kay, who usually had a twelve- or fifteen-piece band on stage, Cohen recited his poetry, starting at midnight, often improvising while Kay played piano. Cohen read his poem “The Gift” (which appeared in The Spice-Box of Earth), introducing it by saying, “It was written for a girl for whom I had given too many poems and she asked me to refrain. So I wrote her this poem. And it’s a serious poem, so don’t cackle just because I told you I needed the money.”
After Cohen’s reading there was a short interview that began with the question, “I wonder how a poet who’s meant to be a recluse in his room feels about being a nightclub celebrity?” Cohen responds by saying, “Well, ah, this isn’t quite being a nightclub celebrity. What we’re really doing is bringing poetry to where it belongs…”
“To the people?”
“No, no, no, not to the people. To the hipsters, to the boozers. No really, ah, back to music and back to an informality, away from the classroom.”
One night in the spring of 1958, Morley Callaghan visited Dunn’s, invited by Cohen. Callaghan had read of “the nightclub poets of San Francisco and Greenwich Village,” and was interested in seeing Cohen’s work performed. Dunn’s, Callaghan writes, “is a kind of triple-decked club, something for the boys on each floor, and naturally the poet is in the attic.” Around midnight:
a waiter placed a high stool near the bandstand and the young poet, Leonard Cohen, black haired and pale, perching himself on the stool, bantered a little with the customers to get everyone and himself cool and relaxed; and at the piano the bandleader too made nice cool sounds. The poet began to read and he read well, just like a pro. In the main he read love poems and the jazz rhythms seemed to give them a little edge and impact. I was watching the faces of the customers. You might say that of all people those in a night club are the least likely to become candidates for listening at a poetry recital. Yet, when you sit around in a night club you are ready for anything, disillusioned, often a little beat. As the boys say, you are down enough to get with it. The poetry mixed with the jazz hits right at the bottom of your spirit. When Cohen sat down with us he said that business had been good or he wouldn’t still be there. Even the waiters listened to him he said. What more could any poet ask in a night club. Anyway, we liked it.
Throughout the spring and summer Cohen would appear at Dunn’s, performing with a jazz band. He also performed on the McGill campus and in Toronto, honing the musical element that would later eclipse his poetry. It was a fresh genre for Montreal audiences and Cohen established a local reputation as a performer.
In June of 1958, Cohen wrote a short essay that defined his aesthetic, a declaration of poetic intent:
Whatever I have written about I have tried to remember the violence and destruction and passion of our century. I want my poems to be informed by a sensibility which comprehends the bombing of cities, concentration camps and human infidelity. I do not mean that every poem must have in it a swollen body or a crematoriam[;] most of my poems do not, but a love poem, for instance, must be about a love that encounters and comes to terms with the kind of violence and despair and courage and to which we have been exposed.
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THE WORLDLY twenty-four-year-old poet and folk singer spent the summer of 1958 as a counsellor at Pripstein’s Camp Mishmar. Pripstein’s was started by a Hebrew schoolteacher and educator, Hayim (Chuck) Pripstein, and grew out of a children’s camp that was once attached to a Jewish hotel in Filion, Quebec, known for its literary gatherings (Isaac Bashevis Singer, among others, read there). When the river behind the hotel became polluted, the hotel closed and Pripstein transported some of the buildings to a new site in St-Adolphe-de-Howard, north of Montreal. The camp’s philosophy was to take children of varying abilities, background, and behavior and integrate them.
When other camps would reject disturbed or difficult childen, Pripstein’s took them in. The counsellors attended weekly Saturday afternoon seminars on child psychology, mental health, and Judaism to help them handle the problems. The majority of campers were the children of the middle class and most of the counsellors were McGill students. Instead of a bugle to awaken campers in the morning, the opening bars of Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto were played on the public address system. A camp photograph from 1958 shows a robust Leonard Cohen standing in the back row amid a group of healthy campers. Among the graduates were literary critic Ruth Wisse, pianist Robert Silverman, and sociologist Lionel Tiger. Many of the counsellors and campers went on to become psychiatrists, social workers, and child analysts. At Pripstein’s Cohen organized folksinging and haiku contests and also took an interest in a young camper named Robert Elkin, an autistic idiot savant who had an extraordinary facility with numbers. Elkin appears as the ill-fated Martin Stark in The Favorite Game.
The fourth book of The Favorite Game carefully recounts Cohen’s experiences at Pripstein’s, although not his turning up a week late and in shorts for the wedding of Moishe Pripstein (son of the founder) and Florence Sherman. He does describe, however, his emergence from the boathouse in the early morning with a female counsellor, under the watchful eye of Mrs. Pripstein, whose house surveyed the camp from a hilltop perch. Cohen found camp a fertile ground for romance. One close friend was Fran Dropkin, a gorgeous dancer from Brooklyn with thick dark braids who had come to Pripstein’s as an art counsellor. Another woman, the camp nurse, became the muse for one of his best early poems, “As the Mist Leaves No Scar.” A camper who ran the darkroom at Pripstein’s recalls printing a roll of film for Cohen. They turned out to be a series of photos of nude females.
The camp was a cultural mecca and long hours were spent among counsellors and campers in stimulating discussions of poetry, history, and drama. Life in Israel, the status of Jews in Quebec, and the nature of Montreal were also analyzed. It was a time of intense self-expression and Cohen, whose talent was acknowledged, was the leading nonconformist. The counsellor’s lounge, underneath the dining hall, became the center for most of these debates.
Part of that year was also devoted to visiting his mother, who was being treated for depression in the Allan Memorial Institute, a psychiatric hospital in Montreal. The depression was triggered by inappropriately prescribed drugs for a skin disease brought on by the stress caused by the return of the now senile Rabbi Klein to the Cohen household. During visits to the hospital, Masha often accused Cohen and his sister of neglecting her and Cohen found the encounters difficult. Once her medication changed, however, she regained her mental balance and was quickly released. But his familial links withered further when he failed to return to the family business at the end of the summer. When asked by his cousin Edgar Cohen why he left the Freedman Company, Cohen replied, “Edgar, I had no choice.”
In the December 1958 issue of Culture there was a surprising attack on Cohen from his former mentor, Louis Dudek. The newest generation of poets, Dudek stated, is “not even capable of social anger or of pity.” Cohen was criticized for his “obscure cosmological imagery … a confusion of symbolic images, often a rag-bag of classical mythology.” Layton was suitably incensed, calling Dudek’s attitude “as stupid as it is false. Cohen is one of the purest lyrical talents this country has ever produced. He hates the mythologizing school of Macpherson, Reaney and Daryl Hine.” Cohen overlooked the charges and accompanied Dudek and F.R. Scott to a January 1959 party for Ralph Gustafson at the Montreal Press Club.
In April 1959 Cohen and Layton both received Canada Council grants. Cohen’s proposed project was to write a novel drawn from visits to the ancient capitals of Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem. Because he had the support of writers like Layton and Scott, and was gaining attention in reviews from Margaret Avison, Desmond Pacey, Milton Wilson, and Northrop Frye, the Canada Council decided to fund his request. A number of Canadian writers were living overseas at the time: Dorothy Livesay and Mordecai Richler were in London, Mavis Gallant was in Paris, and Margaret Laurence was in Africa. According to Layton, this was to be expected because “the Canadian poet … is an exile condemned to live in his own country” without a public or following; hence, one might as well depart to a region where art was at least respected. The arts grant of two thousand dollars made it possible for Cohen to leave Montreal.
That June, Layton introduced Cohen to A.M. Klein who was to become an instrumental figure in Cohen’s life. Klein was the seminal Jewish Montreal poet and had been the editor of the Canadian Jewish Chronicle from 1938–55. He had won a Governor General’s Award for poetry in 1949 and had been the leader of the Jewish literati until his nervous breakdown and withdrawal from writing in the mid-fifties. Cohen grew up reading Klein and Klein had reviewed Cohen’s grandfather’s book in The Canadian Jewish Chronicle. Klein remembered both the book and the rabbi. After their visit, Cohen told Layton that he thought “the fires had been banked” but that Klein was still witty and eager to talk about poetry. Cohen had already written two poems about Klein: “To a Teacher” and “Song for Abraham Klein,” later to appear in The Spice-Box of Earth.
Cohen interpreted Klein’s breakdown as the result of being exiled by his community. In a December 1963 talk by Cohen at the Jewish Public Library of Montreal, Cohen said, “Klein chose to be a priest though it was as a prophet that we needed him, as a prophet he needed us and he needed himself …” To avoid such a split himself, Cohen attempts to collapse the divide between prophet and priest and to join them throughout his work—or at least give them equal time. The prophet, Cohen notes, is the visionary; the priest his disciple.
Cohen learned from both Klein and Layton, combining Klein’s priestly mien with the prophetic energy of Layton to reformulate the voice of the Jewish poet. Cohen examined Judaism within a broader context, one that allowed the incorporation of Zen Buddhism and traditional Jewish orthodoxy. Cohen’s poetic world became a complex mix of tradition and experimentation, conservatism and propheticism. What he called the Montreal tradition was “a certain Hebraic sense connected with Layton and A.M. Klein, and it connected me in a certain way with Scott, whose father was a minister. I’m attracted to a priesthood.” But Klein stood out:
His fate was very important to me, what happened to and what would happen to a Jewish writer in Montreal who was writing in English, who was not totally writing from a Jewish position. … Klein came out of the Jewish community of Montreal, but [he] had a perspective on it and on the country, and on the province. He made a step outside the community. He was no longer protected by it.
Such a move established a paradigm for Cohen, who would himself step outside the Montreal poetry scene. “I always was more interested in the exile,” Cohen has commented, “somebody who can’t claim the entire landscape as his own.”
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ON MAY 5, 1959, Cohen wrote an important letter from his Mountain Street apartment:
Dear Mr. McClelland:
I spoke with you on the telephone a few months ago when I was in Toronto and you said that I may send you my manuscript.
Here it is. I hope you like it.
Sincerely,
Leonard Cohen
The manuscript was The Spice-Box of Earth, and its arrival marked the beginning of Cohen’s long-term relationship with one of Canada’s leading publishers. Jack McClelland recalls the young poet self-confidently striding into his office earlier that spring wearing a jacket and tie, carrying a manuscript of poems. McClelland quickly scanned Cohen’s poetry, which had been recommended by Irving Layton. In an unprecedented move, McClelland accepted Cohen’s manuscript on the spot, without consulting any of his editors. “I think it’s the only time I ever—without reading a manuscript or without having it read—made the publishing commitment…. I said OK, we’re going to publish this guy; I don’t give a shit whether the poetry’s good, although I did look at a couple of the poems and thought they were pretty good.”
In mid-July Cohen received a letter from Claire Pratt, an associate editor at McClelland & Stewart and daughter of E.J. Pratt. It said that the manuscript had been accepted on the condition that certain revisions be made, including reducing its length. She also enclosed a reader’s report, which criticized some poems as “too slight to be committed to book form,” and suggested lessening the number of erotic poems. But “no other poet can quite match the imagery and expressiveness of these poems” the reader concluded. Pratt anticipated publishing in the spring of 1960.
Cohen was ecstatic with the news, replying,
I have bought several people several rounds of drinks since your generous and historic letter arrived. One of my uncles smiled, one disturbed relative had an instant of lucidity, the Board of Elders of my family’s synagogue has convened to reopen discussion on my occupancy of my father’s pew, from which I have been disallowed on account of my last book, which was discovered to be lewd, offensive, and full of christological implications.
Rather than see the book in the McClelland & Stewart “Indian File” series, an expensive hardcover line, as Pratt suggested, Cohen had another idea. He explained that costly, hard-bound poetry books were obsolete. The public wouldn’t buy them. He thought that a brightly colored paperback would sell better: “Please understand I want an audience. I am not interested in the Academy. There are places where poems are being bought and embraced.” He offered to work with their designer on a format that would appeal to a wide following: “inner-directed adolescents, lovers in all degrees of anguish, disappointed Platonists, pornography-peepers, hair-handed monks and Popists, French-Canadian intellectuals, unpublished writers, curious musicians, etc., all that holy following of my Art.” Cohen’s preference for a paperback with a potentially large audience contradicts his decision to print his first book in hardcover, the price limiting readership. He concluded his letter with an open and genuine statement: “Thank you for treating me like a professional and making me feel like a Writer.”
Pratt and McClelland soon discovered that Cohen operated in an unusual manner, declining to sign contracts for his work after The Spice-Box of Earth. As a matter of form, a contract would always be sent, but Cohen would never return it. With the exception of his first book for McClelland & Stewart (and his most recent, Stranger Music), this became Cohen’s unorthodox procedure. Jack McClelland chose to ignore this aspect of Cohen’s behavior, despite his anxiety over certain legal matters, including the right of Cohen, rather than the firm, to control his material.
By September, Cohen had decided to leave the clothing business: “Can’t take it anymore. Will try the CBC,” which he did briefly, supporting himself by writing reviews and attempting some radio journalism. He continued to experiment with drugs “to liberate spiritual energy;” at least that was the excuse, he later remarked. “Thanks to drugs,” he has sarcastically noted, “for at least fifteen minutes I could consider myself as the Great Evangelist of the New Age!” His role as Evangelist took an unusual form when in early September he joined Layton, Al Purdy, and John Mills at the Ph.D defense of George Roy at the University of Montreal on “Symbolism in Canadian Poetry 1880–1939.” Despite the celebrity audience, the candidate passed.
On November 12, 1959, Cohen accompanied Scott and Layton in a poetry reading at the Young Mens’ Hebrew Association on 92nd Street in New York, by all accounts a great success. Introduced by Kenneth McRobbie, the trio was in good voice, with Scott possessing “enough Anglo-Saxon dignity to cover the rest of us.” A few weeks after the reading at the YMHA, Cohen departed for London. Following his habit of marking a departure or change, Cohen offered a comic farewell:
An All-Season Haiku for my friends
Who are leaving and who have decided
not to leave, who are putting clean
pressed handkerchiefs in their battered
baggage and thinking about trains
chariots and even nobler
wagons only they know about, and
to those who have no clean linen at
all but have to use sleeves or even bare
arms and walk where ever they go
Goodbye
On October 29, 1959, Cohen was issued his first passport. It is a well-used document, with stamps that record his wanderings over the following decade: Greece, France, Britain, the United States, Morocco, Cuba, and Norway. The accompanying photo shows a serious young man in jacket, tie, and vest, the embodiment of Westmount success.