4
THE KING OF BOHEMIA and William IV welcomed Leonard Cohen to London on a dreary December day in 1959. The two pubs stood adjacent to 19b Hampstead High Street, a small, three-story boardinghouse which, despite its address, was actually tucked around the corner on Gayton Road. Today the unassuming brown and tan brick building is squeezed between Oxfam and the Cafe Rouge. Across the road and next to a post office is the Cafe Zen. When Cohen arrived, a green grocer, an East Indian restaurant, and a laundromat were the main attractions. Two small windows in the front of the boardinghouse let in a muted light.
Jake and Stella Pullman owned it and their home became a haven of sorts for Cohen. Mort Rosengarten, whose parents knew the Pullmans, had stayed there, and two other close friends, Harold Pascal and Nancy Bacal, were still there, eagerly awaiting his arrival. Cohen was told that the only space left was a cot in the sitting room, where all new guests started out; only after someone left did you graduate to an upper floor. He was welcome to it if (a) he tidied the room every morning and (b) he fulfilled his intention of becoming a writer by meeting his announced goal of three pages a day. “As long as you write your three pages every day you can stay with us,” Stella Pullman told him. Cohen agreed to her bargain and got to work, diligently producing at least three pages a day, a practice he followed for years. Stella’s strictness, as well as her generosity, paid off: “She is partly responsible for finishing my book in a way,” Cohen said, referring to the first draft of The Favorite Game. The Pullmans became a new anchor in his life.
Cohen was excited about being in the capital of English literature and felt he was joining Shakespeare, Milton, and Keats. “London is welcoming another great author!” he declared. A visit to Dublin created similar excitement, and he wrote a short play entitled “Sugar Plum Fairies” (an early version of “The New Step”) after visiting the Abbey Theatre and the pubs that Yeats had frequented. But after the initial excitement, Cohen found London dull and its nightlife unpromising. He obtained a “reader’s ticket” to the Hampstead Public Libraries and spent a good deal of time at the William (as the local pub, the William iv, was called). He later discovered a West Indian club called the All-Niter, where he found terrific music, marijuana, and dancing. With Nancy Bacal, who was in London to study classical theatre and begin a career in radio journalism with the CBC, he explored late-night London. They played pinball in East End dives, met pimps, explored the drug culture, went to clubs, and encountered some alternative politics. Nancy was then dating a disciple of Malcolm X named Michael X, who later founded the Black Muslim movement in London. He planned to return to Trinidad, take over the government, and make Cohen part of the ruling party, as “permanent advisor to the Minister of Tourism!” Michael X did return, but he was soon arrested. Cohen, with others, attempted to organize support for him but failed.
On the day he arrived in London, Cohen bought a typewriter, a green Olivetti 22, for £40, which would remain with him for years. He also acquired his “famous blue raincoat,” a Burberry with epaulets. That, too, remained with him until it was stolen from a New York loft in 1968. In London, these objects acted as amulets, arming him to combat the world. His Olivetti broke only once in twenty-six years, when he threw the machine against the wall of his Montreal apartment after an unsuccessful attempt to type underwater. It was eventually repaired, and he used that Olivetti to type most of his best-known songs and novels.
His raincoat was memorialized in the song “Famous Blue Raincoat,” recorded on Songs of Love and Hate, his third album. “The last time we saw you, you looked so much older / Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder” reads two lines of this song that ends enigmatically, “Sincerely, L. Cohen.” The song has become a signature of sorts, the raincoat embodying Cohen’s early image of mystery, travel, and adventure. The coat itself appears in the 1965 NFB film, Ladies and Gentlemen… Mr. Leonard Cohen. Jennifer Warnes titled her 1986 album Famous Blue Raincoat and used a drawing of the coat on the cover.
Cohen quickly established a new social circle in London. Through Tony Graham, a Montrealer who was studying medicine at Cambridge, he met Elizabeth Kenrick, part of a Cambridge set. She, in turn, introduced him to Jacob Rothschild, later Lord Rothschild. Although Kenrick never became Cohen’s girlfriend, he invited her, in jest, to join him when he decided to go to Hydra in March 1960; she declined. Two years later, he was still concerned about her, telling his sister in New York that Kenrick, “very lovely both of flesh and spirit,” would soon be visiting and she should help her if necessary.
Cohen’s principal activity at 19B Hampstead High Street was writing the first draft of his second novel, Beauty at Close Quarters, later published as The Favorite Game. At one point he also considered calling it Stars for Neatness. He began the book almost immediately upon his arrival, working diligently, despite interruptions from David the cat; he loved to scatter the pages. Cohen read passages to Nancy Bacal, who later said she felt that the lengthy first draft possessed a looseness and honesty that the published work lacked.
The first version of the story, completed in the winter of 1959/1960, opens with the self-conscious narrator, Lawrence Breavman, searching in his papers for a passage summarizing the difficulty of beginnings. He wishes he could be known to the reader in a flash but realizes he must unfold himself through exaggeration and distortion, “until by sheer weight of evidence, you will possess me, knowing when I am false and when I am true.” An undisguised autobiographical text follows, with the narrator identifying his birth in Montreal in September 1934, the month and year of Cohen’s birth. Cohen’s family history follows, essentially a semi-fictional summary of adventures, incidents, and interests of his first twenty-five years.
The actual names of several friends appear, including Freda [Guttman] and [Robert] Hershorn; Mort Rosengarten appears as Krantz; Irving Morton, a socialist folksinger, appears as himself. Other names in the final version change: Freda, presented as a politically motivated student, and Louise, a Montreal artist, merge into a single character, Tamara. Stella, the housemaid from the Maritimes that Cohen hypnotized, becomes Heather. Details about the family home appear, including a careful description of the photograph of Cohen’s father that hung in his childhood bedroom. Cohen, through Breavman, narrates his life, including his father’s illness, his early girlfriends, and his mother’s overbearing love.
After completing the first draft of his novel in March 1960, Cohen then revised the typescript of The Spice-Box of Earth and sent it to McClelland & Stewart. Cohen wrote to Claire Pratt, “I’m glad the book is out of my hands. Poetry is so damn self-indulgent. During these past few weeks of intense polishing, I’ve been making nasty faces at myself in all the mirrors I pass.” The work was reduced by the suggested third, while its design became more clarified in the author’s mind: “I wouldn’t like to see these poems rendered in any sort of delicate print. They should be large and black on the page. They should look as if they are meant to be chanted aloud, which is exactly why I wrote them.”
Jack McClelland offered Cohen a choice: he could publish the manuscript in a common edition to appear in the fall of 1960 or do a more expensive and distinctively designed volume for the spring of 1961. In late July, Cohen told McClelland to let Frank Newfeld design the book and publish it the following spring. His choice of the higher-priced, more artistic form for the book contradicted his earlier wish for a mass market paperback. But this format would satisfy his sense of poetry as a formal art that should have an elegant, almost “Westmount” look and feel. The appearance of the volume suited the taste of the author. In his letter to McClelland, he also mentioned that he had almost finished his novel, which he would forward to him. On August 28, 1960, he sent “the only copy in the world,” as he admitted to McClelland, to Toronto.
Earlier in March, when he had completed his manuscripts, Cohen was free to consider his position in London, and he found it wanting. After having a wisdom tooth pulled one day, he wandered about the East End of London on yet another rainy afternoon and noticed a Bank of Greece sign on Bank Street. He entered and saw a teller with a deep tan wearing sunglasses, in protest against the dreary landscape. He asked the clerk what the weather was like in Greece. “Springtime” was the reply. Cohen made up his mind on the spot to depart, and within a day or so he was in Athens. “I said to myself that I should go somewhere completely different in order to see how they live,” he later explained.
It was actually the island of Hydra that attracted Cohen. English was spoken and an artists’ colony was flourishing. He had first heard of Hydra from Jacob Rothschild, whose mother had married Ghikas (Niko Hadjikyriakos), one of modern Greece’s most important painters. They lived in his family’s forty-room seventeenth-century mansion perched on a hill some distance from the port with a striking view of the sea. Jacob Rothschild encouraged Cohen to visit his mother, promising to write to her to say that Cohen was coming. Layton had predicted Cohen’s departure. “I suppose when he’s finished his novel,” he told Desmond Pacey, “he’ll leave London for the Continent, where he’ll make love to all the beautiful French and Italian women, and then leave for Greece and Israel!”
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COHEN ARRIVED in Athens on April 13, 1960, visited the Acropolis, then spent the night in Piraeus, where he was flattered by a homosexual advance (which he rejected) from a hotel floor sweeper. The next morning he began the five-hour steamer journey to Hydra, which took him first to Aegina, Methana, and Poros, and then to Hydra. (Since the seventies, the Russian-built Flying Dolphins hydrofoils have replaced the once-elegant steamers, reducing the traveling time to one and a half hours.) The trip was an opportunity to relax, drink, and meet women.
At Hydra, the small semicircular port is flanked by white houses rising steeply in an orderly manner, like the seats of an amphitheater. A cobbled esplanade runs along the waterfront, harmonizing the cluster of homes that surround it and reach up the hillside. Only the bell tower of the cathedral attached to the Monastery of the Virgin’s Assumption disrupts the horizontal tableau. The structure of the town emulates the classical theater of Epidauros, with the port the equivalent of the orchestra. Access to and from the port follows the theatrical frame of the parodos (side entrances and exits) with the houses mimicking the stepped seats of the theatron. Towering above the port is the two-thousand-foot Mount Ere, and on a high hill just below it, the Monastery of Profitis Elias (the Prophet Elijah).
In the morning the port is the commercial center where boats are unloaded, where fish and vegetables are sold, and donkeys are hired. At midday and into the evening it becomes the social center, the focus turned toward the restaurants and cafes. During religious or public holidays, it is the site of celebration. When Cohen arrived in 1960, only four coffeehouses and one bar ringed the waterfront.
Tradition, rather than a master plan or building code, determined the urban layout and architecture of Hydra. When a child married, a new house was built within the uncovered space of the family lot, treated as a separate unit, and given direct entry from the public street. The result was odd lot shapes and dead ends (most houses are rectangular or “L” shaped and composed of stone walls, timber or tile roofs, and tile floors.) The doorways are unique in that they face downwards to the port, rather than horizontally to the street. Offsetting the whitewashed walls of the homes are the orange tile roofs and the weathered cobblestone steps. It was the anarchy of the homes that prompted Henry Miller to remark on the “wild and naked perfection of Hydra.”
The narrow island was named for water though it actually has little. Rain is rare, the average yearly precipitation being only an inch and a half. When the first home with a swimming pool was built by a Greek American in the late sixties, the owner had to pay for barges of fresh water to be brought in and pumped up the hilly streets. It is little more than a barren rock, four miles wide and nearly eleven miles long, about four miles off the southeast coast of Argolis.
There are no cars or trucks on Hydra, since the land is too steep and the streets too narrow to permit them. Donkeys, which bray in an agonizing manner throughout the night, and occasionally horses, are the only transportation on the steps and ramps. The widest streets were originally designed so that two basket-carrying donkeys could pass each other; secondary streets provide passage for only one. An important site is Kala Pigadia, the Good Wells or Twin Wells. Situated above the port, this is where water was drawn and people gathered to trade news and stories; the two small wells are shaded by several large trees.
When Cohen first arrived on Hydra there was limited electricity, few telephones, and virtually no plumbing. Kerosene or oil lamps lit the homes; cisterns were used to collect water, and no wires obstructed the views. One of the few discos used a battery-operated record player, since the small electrical plant generated power only from sundown to midnight. Except for the kitchen, which was heated by the stove or Turkish copper braziers, rooms were heated with a three-legged tin filled with charcoal embers. Many of the homes were run-down and in desperate need of repair. In 1960, half of the homes were uninhabited, and virtually no new homes had been built for nearly a century.
When Cohen arrived he found temporary accomodation with writers George Johnston and Charmian Clift before renting a house for fourteen dollars a month. After he was settled, Cohen decided to introduce himself to Jacob Rothschild’s mother and hired a guide to take him to Ghikas’ estate. Jacob Rothschild’s sister greeted him but made it clear that no one had heard of him, that her brother hadn’t written, and that Cohen’s type of Jew was not really welcome. Angered by this reception, Cohen left, casting a curse upon the house. Late one evening in 1961, while wandering back and forth on the terrace of his own house above the port, Cohen was startled to hear an explosion and see a fire high up on the mountain. The Ghikas home had exploded! He felt his curse had taken effect. He later learned that a careless watchman, guarding the empty estate, misplaced some kerosene, which had ignited.
There was already a small community of foreign writers and artists on Hydra. The principal figures were the Australian writers George Johnston and Charmian Clift, the English painter Anthony Kingsmill, and the Norwegian writer Axel Jensen, who headed a small Norwegian contingent. Other writers came and went, including John Knowles, William Lederer (author of The Ugly American), Irish poet Paul Desmond, Swedish poet Goron Tunstrom, Israeli journalist Amos Elan, and numerous dancers, artists, and academics. Allen Ginsberg stayed for several nights with Cohen after Cohen hailed him in Syntagma Square in Athens, recognizing him from a photograph. After a lengthy conversation, Ginsberg accepted Cohen’s invitation to visit. Don McGill, Canadian broadcaster and director at the Mountain Playhouse, and American sociologist Rienhart Bendix also visited Hydra. Film stars, including Sophia Loren (who filmed Boy on a Dolphin there) and Brigitte Bardot, began to appear. Jackie Kennedy would visit, and later Edward Kennedy, as well as Jules Dassin, Melina Mercouri, Tony Perkins, and Peter Finch, who was a good friend of the Johnstons. In several of his letters from 1961, Cohen complains about the influx of movie crews, which upset the peace and quiet of the island.
George Johnston and Charmian Clift were Australian journalists who had moved to Hydra in 1955 to write. Peel Me a Lotus is Charmian’s engaging account of their survival on an isolated and uncomfortable island with two small children. By 1958, two years after the birth of their third child, their relationship had begun to fall apart. In his 1960 novel Closer to the Sun, Johnston recounted the jealousies and liaisons of island life. The couple returned to Australia in 1964 after George contracted tuberculosis, shortly before his novel My Brother Jack was published. It was hailed as an outstanding and significant Australian novel. In 1969, Charmian committed suicide, shocking everyone. George died a year later.
Cohen first met George and Charmian at Katsikas’ Bar, which consisted of “six deal tables at the back of Antony and Nick Katsikas’ grocery store at the end of the cobblestoned waterfront by the Poseidon Hotel.” Amid flour sacks, olive jars, and strings of onions, an artist’s club of sorts flourished. Evenings were spent arguing, drinking, and entertaining one another. George, the writer-in-residence, held court, often speaking “in a wild spate of words, punctuated with great shouts of laughter and explosions of obscenity.” Members of the foreign community appeared, withdrew, and reappeared. The port became a “horseshoe-shaped stage” and the Johnston’s circle “the actors of some unbelievable play the intriguing plot of which unrolled in front of the eyes of a totally flabbergasted audience—the locals, who watching it all commented on the side like the chorus of an ancient Greek tragedy.”
Cohen soon joined in, absorbed by the discussions, social relations, and sexual maneuverings of his new crowd. He gave his first formal concert at Katsikas’ grocery and formed an important and lasting friendship with the Johnstons. They gave him a big work table that he used for writing and eating, as well as a bed and pots and pans for his new house.
Cohen and Johnston made a playful bet occasioned by the spring 1961 upheavels in Iran: in May the Shah had dissolved the representative assembly and senate; by July, he imposed new restrictions on political freedom, while arresting generals and civilans for corruption in preparation for rule by decree. The wager reads:
Bet between LC and George Johnston:
“The Peacock Throne will be
a Shit House Commode by
October 16, 1962.”
– G H. Johnston
A bet made between George
H. Johnston (a gentile) and Leonard Cohen
(a Jew) on October 16, 1961, and
renewed October 20, 1961, for
10,000 drachmas.
George Johnston, his Mark,
[large X] Bassanio [Goron Tunstrom]
P. S. Waiting Leonard Cohen [written in Hebrew]
for the trial (Shylock)
yours,
Portia
Prophetically, what was proposed in the wager nearly came true as land-reform brought major riots causing the Iranian prime minister to resign in April 1962 and allowing the National Front, briefly allied with the radical, religious opposition, and labeled reactionary, to gain power.
For better or worse, the Johnstons provided both a literary and domestic model for life on the island. The difficulty of the Johnston marriage, with its threats of breakup and numerous affairs, was intensified by George’s illness and Charmian’s problems in bringing up three children. George shared his ideas, encouraged others, and understood the labor of writing, even if he had difficulty putting it into practice. Charmian was gifted and quite beautiful, but she needed the attention and love of men and her husband was ill and impotent. Cynthia Nolan, wife of the painter Sidney Nolan, remembered there was “a lot of writing talk in the air” around the Johnstons. The island nourished art and destroyed relationships.
Another fixture on the island was the painter, drinker, and gifted conversationalist Anthony Kingsmill, who was to become a close friend of Cohen’s. The adopted son of the English writer Hugh Kingsmill, Anthony was plagued by the unknown origin of his biological father, whom he later discovered was not only Jewish but also named Cohen. Kingsmill ended up on Hydra after going to art school in London and spending some time in Paris. Dapper and short, with soulful gray eyes, he would frequently quote long passages from Tennyson, Wordsworth, or Shakespeare. He would also break out into a little softshoe shuffle whenever he was elated or drunk. To the colony of romantically damaged men on the island, he announced that all sex was metaphysical. “Pull up your sex, and get on with it!” His other expression was “Forget the Grace / Enjoy the Lace / Have some fun and carry on.”
He survived largely on charm and commissions of never-to-be completed work. When he did finish a painting, he would often resell it to someone else. Cohen commissioned a painting from Kingsmill but when he was away from the island, Kingsmill entered Cohen’s house, seized the painting, and resold it. Only years later did he nervously tell Cohen about the ruse. He was expecting the worst from his friend, but Cohen merely laughed. Cohen was constantly commissioning paintings that never materialized, even paying for one painting seven times.
Kingsmill was a difficult and at times exasperating man who drank too much, womanized, and gambled whenever he could. He never had any money but he was always entertaining. By 1964 Kingsmill was having an open affair with Charmian Clift. Island life was intense, and romance was often seasonal: new partnerships would form over the summer, last through the chilly and rainy winter, and then reconfigure themselves in the spring.
But Kingsmill survived his various encounters with women and the bottle. Don Lowe describes Kingsmill as a man with whom you couldn’t win:
He exposed the loser in you. And then took you out, wined and dined you with your own cash, and finally told you that nothing was learned in victories. That it was the losers who proved the most beautiful. So, of course you forgave him. Again and again.
Cohen also forgave Kingsmill again and again, partly because he admired Kingsmill’s storytelling skill and talent for life. But Kingsmill also valued Cohen, remarking to Don Lowe that his voice was like a rabbi’s, resonant, complex, and full of history. “I don’t think he’s my father, but he could be. I’ve tried to tell him that,” Kingsmill said. Kingsmill finally married an American woman named Christina in 1973 in Athens. He seemed reasonably settled until his wife left him for someone else and then suddenly died of cancer. He reasoned that he wasn’t cut out to be wed; it rhymes too much with “dead,” he told everyone. Kingsmill himself died in London in 1993.
George Lialios was another critical figure in Cohen’s island life. Several years older than Cohen, he had studied with the concretist musical movement in Cologne and spoke fluent English, German, and Greek. He came from a distinguished family from Patras and was principally interested in philosophy. He first visited Hydra in 1954 where among others he met Lily Mack, a Russian married to Christian Heidsieck of Reims champagne fame, and Patrick Lee Fermor, a novelist resident in the Ghikas house. Lialios decided to settle there by the fall of 1960, island life being like “living in a past century or in different centuries simultaneously,” he commented. Cohen invited Lialios and his Norwegian girlfriend to his home in 1960, and an intense friendship followed. Lialios explained their compatibility: Cohen’s “origins are truly and deeply rooted in those ancient cultures which flourished in the eastern part of the Mediterranian basin. This, in part, is why we had such a perfect understanding … we could sit together in silence, a virtue which is rare with western people. We never spoke unnecessary words.”
Another Hydra friend was Alexis Bolens, a wealthy Swiss bon vivant who organized legendary poker games on the island. A friend of Brigitte Bardot, among others, he frequently gave lavish parties at his home in the hills. Kingsmill, Cohen, and Johnston frequently played cards there. Demetri Gassoumis, a Greek American painter; Bryce Marsden and his wife Helen, recognized American painters; Pandias Scaramanga, economist and banker; Bill Cunliff, the Englishman who would later run Bill’s Bar, a popular expatriate hangout; Gordon Merrick; and Chuck Hulse rounded out Cohen’s immediate social circle throughout the sixties.
At the center of this circle was Marianne Ihlen. Details vary about how Cohen first met her. A poem romantically describes his seeing her reflection in a bookstore window, and in his poem “Island Bulletin” he describes his instant absorption in her. But he also recalls seeing her in the port once or twice and encountering her with her companion Axel Jensen, Norwegian novelist and a student of Jung and the I Ching. It may have been at Katsikas’, or at the Johnstons’. Cohen’s earliest memory of her was seeing her walk arm in arm with Axel and their child and thinking how fortunate they were to have each other.
But they weren’t as close as Cohen thought. Jensen soon began an affair with an American painter named Patricia Amlin. They left Hydra in Axel’s boat but were soon involved in a car crash in Athens that seriously injured Patricia. She recovered, and they remained together. Cohen took it upon himself to look after Marianne and her child, also named Axel, at first moving into her home:
I used to sit on the stairs while she slept, they were the most neutral part of the house, and they overlooked her sleeping. I watched her a year, by moonlight or kerosene … and nothing that I could not say or form, was lost. What I surrendered there the house has kept, because even torn wordless from me, my own first exclusive version of my destiny, like a minor poem, is too useless and pure to die.
Marianne had modeled both in Oslo and on Hydra and had some test shots taken in Paris. She was beautiful and vivacious and fascinated by Cohen. His graciousness and generosity touched her. When he bought a home for himself on Hydra, Marianne and her son moved in with him. She was quiet, with a domestic bent and Cohen was obsessed with her. She brought order to Cohen’s personal life and encouraged his creativity. On the back cover of Cohen’s album Songs from a Room there is a photograph of Marianne seated at Cohen’s typewriter in the narrow writing room on the second floor of his house. She is deeply tanned and smiles shyly at the camera.
Marianne became both muse and mother for Cohen, fuelling his creative impulse and nurturing his dormant desire for security, home, and purpose. “It wasn’t just that she was the muse, shining in front of the poet. She understood that it was a good idea to get me to my desk,” he said in 1994. “Marianne is perfect,” he wrote to Layton in 1963. “Even the way she demands masterpieces from me is soft and funny and much more subtle than she understands.” Born in 1935 and raised by her grandmother, Marianne had the education of an older generation, Cohen explained. She was “the incarnation of the European woman.” In a BBC interview Cohen said “the way she inhabited a house was very, very nourishing and every morning she put a gardenia on my work table.” Marianne’s son Axel brought out a paternal quality in Cohen. They lived comfortably as a family.
At the beginning of their relationship, “Marianne and I didn’t think there would be a love story,” Cohen has commented. “We thought we would live together,” but it quickly became an intense and enriching relationship. Her presence sustained his work. He was writing new poems and by 1964 was beginning his major prose work, Beautiful Losers:
There was a woman, she had a child, there were meals on the table, order in the upkeep of the house and harmony. It was the perfect moment to start to do some serious work … When there is food on the table, when the candles are lit, when you wash the dishes together and put the child to bed together. That is order, that is spiritual order, there is no other.
Marianne adored him, although she worried about his drug use. On Hydra, drugs, especially hashish, were easily accessible. It became a common practice for Cohen to smoke either hashish or marijuana, which he believed accelerated his imagination. Cohen got security from Marianne and in return she received Cohen’s particular attentions.
“Leonard was unique and amazing,” said a longtime female friend. “Leonard really loved women, although ‘love’ is not the right word. He felt that women had a power and a beauty that most did not even know they possessed. To be with Leonard was to begin to know your own power as a woman.” Another female friend said he honored them and made them beautiful. Although he was with Marianne, Cohen was not exclusive to anyone. “You could not own Leonard,” Nancy Bacal has said.
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ON SEPTEMBER 27, 1960, six days after his twenty-sixth birthday, Cohen bought a house in Hydra for $1500, using a bequest from his recently deceased grandmother. This was a “big deal” in the words of one of his friends, a commitment to a place and a world that was mysterious and unusual. Buying the house was a complicated act, needing the assistance of his friend Demetri Gassoumis as translator, adviser, and witness to the deed. Cohen later said that it was the smartest decision he ever made. The three-story, ancient whitewashed building, with its five rooms on several levels, was run-down and had no electricity, plumbing, or running water. Yet it was a private space where he could work, either on the large tiled terrace or in his music room on the third floor. Cohen described his home to his mother:
It has a huge terrace with a view of a dramatic mountain and shining white houses. The rooms are large and cool with deep windows set in thick walls. I suppose it’s about 200 years old and many generations of sea-men must have lived here. I will do a little work on it every year and in a few years it will be a mansion … I live on a hill and life has been going on here exactly the same for hundreds of years. All through the day you hear the calls of the street vendors and they are really rather musical … I get up around 7 generally and work till about noon. Early morning is coolest and therefore best for work, but I love the heat anyhow, especially when the Aegean Sea is 10 minutes from my door.
In a letter to his sister he recounts the nights:
I wander through the rooms with a candle like Rebecca’s housekeeper, upstairs, downstairs, the scary basement; my land (presently a garbage heap) is home for a couple of mules and the tinkle of their bells as they pick for food can break your heart as it blends with the music of a taverna two o’clock of a Monday morning. The wind brings you the sound, or three young men, their arms about each other’s shoulders, singing magnificent close harmony, nasal[.] Turkish minors fill the street with their shared pain of abandoned love, as they reel past your door.… There are about sixty countries I’ve got to visit and buy houses in.
Cohen also adopted the island tradition of keeping cats, although at first he tried to chase them away: “But they came back. I am told that it is the custom of the island to keep cats, and who am I to defy custom?” He relegated them to the basement, since they might have given him hives.
He knew he had been accepted by the community when he began receiving regular visits from the garbage man and his donkey. “It is like receiving the Legion of Honour.” Cohen’s house gave him a foundation. To a friend he explained that “having this house makes cities seem less frightening. I can always come back and get by. But I don’t want to lose contact with the metropolitan experience.” Buying the house also gave him confidence: “The years are flying past and we all waste so much time wondering if we dare to do this or that. The thing is to leap, to try, to take a chance.”
Greece provided Cohen with a base and an observation post on changing social and sexual mores. “The primitive circumstances of my life on this island [are] a condition I hopefully established to attract an interior purity,” Cohen wrote, celebrating the discipline instilled by the island. He also liked the natural magic of the island, which could transform a person; in certain seasons, one came out of the sea luminous because of the plankton that adhered to the body. On Hydra, he was freed from the social rituals, obligations, and expectations of his Montreal Judaism. He could take responsibility for his own Judaic identity.
Cohen regularly observed Shabbat, lighting candles and saying the blessings at the Friday evening meal. He stopped his work for a day, dressed more formally, and often walked to the port for Shabbat meetings at noon with Demetri Leousi, an islander who spoke a special, Edwardian English learned at Robert College in Istanbul. Leousi, who had had a love affair with a Jewish woman in New York when he worked there, sustained a deep affection for Jews and congratulated Cohen on being “the first Hebrew to own property on the island. We are honored.”
Hydra was also cheap. Cohen could live for as little as a thousand dollars a year, and he quickly worked out a scheme whereby he would return to Canada to earn perhaps two thousand dollars and then race back to Hydra to live for a year or so. And the weather was wonderfully warm. In Hydra, “everything you saw was beautiful: every corner, every lamp, everything you touched, everything you used was in its right place,” Cohen wrote. “You knew everything you used … It was much more animated, much more cosmopolitan. There were Germans, Scandinavians, Australians, Americans, Dutch who you would run into in very intimate settings like the back of grocery stores.” There were no interruptions from work or love. Life was engaging and there was order, but also light:
There’s sun all over my table as I write this, and I’m in love with all the white walls of my house, and anxious to leave them and my stone floored kitchen. I swear I can taste the molecules dancing in the mountains, and I may soon have the privilege of recounting these divine confusions before your fireplace is cold.
The Aegean light had a quality that Cohen felt contributed to his work. “There’s something in the light that’s honest and philosophical,” he told a journalist in 1963, “You can’t betray yourself intellectually, it invites your soul to loaf.” Not surprisingly, Greece began to play a significant part in the poetry which would appear in Flowers for Hitler.
But, just as he felt Montreal both nurtured him and hindered him, Cohen began to feel constrained by Hydra. The attachment to Marianne became both consuming and destroying, a familiar pattern in his later relationships. Island life, with its intense interactions, was becoming difficult. Cohen felt he had to leave for the sake of his art and his peace of mind. The New York poet Kenneth Koch, visiting one summer, reduced the complexities of island life to a single sentence: “Hydra—you can’t live anywhere else in the world, including Hydra.”
By November 1960, Cohen had returned to Montreal. He needed money, and sought to capitalize on the forthcoming publication of his first book with a major publisher. He applied again to the Canada Council for a writing grant and felt he had to make an impression. He borrowed some money, hired a limousine, and with a friend he sang and smoked marijuana on the two-hour drive from Montreal to Ottawa. At the Canada Council offices, he serenaded the secretaries while chasing them in a wheelchair. Whatever impression he made, Cohen received his grant early in the new year, enough to maintain his life on Hydra. Montreal, meanwhile, ambushed him with “all the old potent guilts.”
A month later, the first draft of what would be The Favorite Game was rejected by McClelland & Stewart. Cohen tried to find something positive in the rejection. “Since hearing the news, I have been strangely exultant. I feel free again, the way I felt before a line of mine was ever published…. I can experiment again, try anything, lose everything. I’m alone with myself and the vast dictionaries of language. It’s a joy.”
After returning to Hydra, Cohen began to rewrite the novel, which had also been rejected by the New York firm of Abelard-Schuman, although it had had a positive reading. He wrote to Maryann Greene at Abelard-Schuman, “It took me some time to learn to write a poem. It will take me time to learn to write prose. I don’t know too much about form right now, but I promise you, I intend to become the best architect in the business.” By mid-December 1961, he could tell the Pullmans in London, “I have finished my novel very close to the date at which I began it two years ago in your house.”
McClelland & Stewart had objected to his writing prose in the first place and their editorial comments were discouraging; “a protracted love-affair with himself … very tedious, not to say disgusting … The sex is too damp and morbid.” Jack McClelland’s first letter about the work told him it was a difficult manuscript to evaluate: it was beautifully written, as one would expect, but was it publishable? And to what degree is the work autobiographical? Cohen replied from Paris in October 1960 that, yes, it was autobiographical: “every event described happened with the exception of the death of Robert at the end of the second section.” He “wanted to tell about a certain society and a certain man and reveal insights into the bastard Art of Poetry. I think I know what I’m talking about. Autobiography? Lawrence Breavman isn’t me but we did a lot of the same things. But we reacted differently to them and so we became different men.”
A later letter from McClelland criticized the novel and asked whether Cohen had other publishing contracts. Cohen responded that in December 1961, Lou Schwartz of Abelard-Schuman had offered him an advance for the revised novel in the presence of Layton, his wife, A.J.M. Smith, and F.R. Scott in a room at the Ritz hotel. He insisted that Cohen take cash right there. Cohen refused and said he would go through regular channels; Schwarz then reneged on his offer. “He managed to offend me and, as you know, I have a saintly nature and am not offended easily,” Cohen wrote. McClelland invited Cohen to resubmit the novel, after making editorial changes. “I will always consider you my publisher,” Cohen replied, “and I will never forget the wonderful treatment you gave my book of poems and as far as possible I will always come to you first. But I just signed away Commonwealth Rights to Secker & Warburg. Anyway, there’ll be other better books.” McClelland did remain Cohen’s publisher, an important relationship for both of them.
Cohen was ambivalent about the novel himself, describing it as a “miserable” but “important mess.” It was “a book without lies,” a work with “the atmosphere of a masterpiece; it won’t be a masterpiece, but people will know that guts were strewn on its behalf.” He referred to the revised work as “a book without alibis; not the alibis of the open road or narcotics or engaging crime.”
The ambivalence continued, listing between masterpiece and failure. To Seymour Lawrence of the Atlantic Monthly Press, Cohen explained that “perhaps its only value is that it cleared my mind of dogging autobiographical material,” adding that McClelland & Stewart thought the first draft “disgusting, tedious, and dark and that I should stick to poetry. A New York publisher reports that it is one of the most promising first novels they have ever seen. I withdrew the book and began to revise it. That is the whole song.” On that same day he also wrote to his sister that “my work limps slowly along to immortality. I am in the phase when I detest the book.” A few days later he declared: “It doesn’t matter to me whether it’s published or not, to tell the truth—I learned so much about writing from that, it’s worth it. It makes the next book that much better.”
In mid-1961, in the midst of his re-writing, Cohen showed the novel to George Johnston, who thought it had commercial potential as well as artistic appeal. He offered to put Cohen in touch with his literary agents, David Higham Associates in London, and a long correspondence began between Cohen and his soon-to-be agent Sheila Watson. Their letters carefully detailed the drafts, revisions, and rewrites and included a reader’s report from January 29, 1962:
absolutely beautiful writing in most places [but] some of the book is either obscene or near obscene—that is, in the conventionally accepted sense … This particular novel is redeemed from being merely erotic by the carefully drawn background and the Jewish philosophy of life … The title is terrible, vulgar, and out of keeping with the style of the novel.
Very saleable.
Another complaint was that the book was “too long … for what it is saying,” and that the title, Beauty at Close Quarters: An Anthology, was too awkward. Cohen continued his revisions and proposed a series of alternative titles: Buried Snows, Wandering Fires, Winged with Vain Desires. The Favorite Game was not chosen until November 7, 1962. Secker & Warburg finally published the revised novel in September 1963.
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DURING A VISIT to Montreal in December 1960, Cohen re-encountered what he called classic Montreal nights: “Three in the morning along Pine Avenue. The black fences and trees from all my old poems canyoned with snow.” He was satisfied with his creative life, but had ongoing financial worries. He had a modest yearly annuity of $750, not enough to sustain him. “Except for this tiny desperation about money, I’m happy, productive, and offending all my colleagues with my huge creative joy.”
One of Cohen’s schemes was to write television dramas with Irving Layton. Every morning Layton came to Cohen’s apartment near Mac-Gregor Street, where the two would work on promising ideas which remained unsold. “We did it simply by prodding each other,” Cohen said. “He’d get off some line and then I would take the part of a character and so on and we found ourselves working very beautifully together.” Titles like “Lights on the Black Water,” “A Man Was Killed,” “Up with Nothing,” and “Enough of Fallen Leaves” caught no one’s imagination. They hoped to write six plays, including “One for the Books,” about a Communist bookseller. But the collaboration of poets failed to produce saleable drama.
Cohen was trying his own hand at playwriting at this time and Layton recalls a visit from Cohen one day in which they read his play “The Whipping:” It was a “macabre, compelling thing,” similar to an earlier work Cohen had written after his return from Hydra entitled The Latest Step. It would later be published as “The New Step (a Ballet-Drama in One Act)” in Flowers for Hitler.
Montreal, like every place he stayed, again began to make Cohen restless. He sought stimulation elsewhere, and the place he chose was Cuba.