5
IN 1957 Cohen’s sister Esther and her husband Victor had gone to Cuba for their honeymoon and came back with reports of glittering nightclubs, casinos, and risqué floorshows. This had been under the auspices of Batista; in 1959 Fidel Castro had come to power and Cohen wanted to see the socialist revolution firsthand. He took a bus to Miami in late March, and then flew to Havana, which was hot and quietly disintegrating. It was 1961 and Castro was facing off with the Americans. “I am wild for all kinds of violence,” Cohen had said before leaving. He later confessed that he went not so much to support Castro as to pursue a fiction: “I had this mythology of this famous civil war in my mind. I thought maybe this was my Spanish civil war, but it was a shabby kind of support. It was really mostly curiosity and a sense of adventure.”
Cohen’s departure created confusion at McClelland & Stewart: “the day you left for Cuba, the page proofs [of Spice-Box] came in, and now I am wondering what we had better do,” wrote his editor. On March 30 Cohen was on a Pan American flight from Miami to Havana. Thirty-one years earlier, almost to the day, García Lorca had made a trip to Cuba, and part of Cohen’s attraction to the country, as it had been with Columbia University, was that it had excited his literary mentor. Lorca’s three-month stay, beginning in April 1930, included lectures, poetry readings, and a crocodile hunt. “The island is a paradise,” Lorca exclaimed to his parents. “Cuba! If you can’t find me, look for me in Andalusia or in Cuba.”
When Cohen arrived, he found a splendid city in decay. The skyscrapers of Vedado, the business center west of the Old City, were falling into disrepair, the façades cracking, windows broken. The bright pastels of the elegant homes in Cubanacan and El Cerro had faded, the houses now inhabited by peasant families. Walls were crumbling, paint was peeling, and weeds were sprouting. Manicured lawns had turned brown and goats grazed alongside the swimming pools. Elegant cars had been replaced by decrepit taxis. The Havana Country Club was the new National School of Art, and the Prado, once an elite Spanish heritage club, was filled with gym mats for its new use as a gymnastics center.
Havana had once been called “the whorehouse of America,” with boatloads of prostitutes greeting tourists as they traveled up the narrow waterway that separates Morro Castle from the city. Under Batista, the government disguised the profitable prostitution rings as dance academies. When Cohen arrived, a program to reform the nearly eleven thousand prostitutes of Havana was underway. The casinos were outlawed and gambling had been reduced to a back-street operation. But the exotic appeal of the sensual Cuban world could not be erased by socialism, and a violent beauty remained. The rhythm of maracas and marimbas playing the rumba, the son, or the cha-cha was heard throughout the city. Sloppy Joe’s bar, at one time Cuba’s most famous drinking establishment, remained open, although it lacked its former glamor. In Old Havana, the walls of La Bodeguita del Medio, a favorite of Hemingway’s, still displayed the signatures of thousands of patrons. Everywhere there was the smell of dust and salt, cigar smoke and cheap perfume.
Despite the new reforms, a certain lasciviousness still hovered about the city, and Cohen rapidly fell into what he referred to as his old bourgeois ways: staying up late to explore the night scene. This teenage habit continued throughout his life and he would often be up writing, drinking, or talking at 3:00 a.m., his favorite morning hour. He soon adopted the fashionable rebel garb: khaki shorts and the fresh stubble of a new beard. But very few citizens were on the streets at that hour and certainly not the East Bloc and Soviet technicians and aides, nor the young female Czech translator he met whose boss would not let her out at night. Only the prostitutes that congregated along the Malecón, the broad boulevard that edged the ocean, or those he met in the Old City kept him company. Of black and Spanish heritage, these chocolate-skinned women with marvelous figures expressed an eroticism that Cohen found irresistible.
Joining the pimps, hookers, gamblers, small-time criminals, and black marketeers who prowled Havana all night, Cohen roamed the urban slums of Jesus del Monte to the swank waterfront suburbs of Miramar. He frequented the back alleys and little bars of Old Havana and the once-renowned Tropicana, which claimed the largest dancehall in the world. Ever since the Shanghai, celebrated for its nude shows, had closed, the Tropicana, with its roulette rooms, cabaret, and open-air dance floor and stage, had flourished. Initially outlawed under Castro, the nightclubs, gambling houses, brothels, casinos, and slot machines soon reappeared. When they were closed, unemployment was too high, compromising the economic goals of the revolution. Cohen imagined himself as “The Only Tourist in Havana,” the title of a later poem.
Late one night a Canadian government official knocked on the door of Cohen’s Havana hotel, politely telling him that his “presence was urgently requested at the Canadian Embassy.” Looking back on the incident, Cohen remembers that he felt apprehensive but excited: “I was Upton Sinclair! I was on an important mission!” Feeling “feisty” and emancipated, Cohen accompanied the dark-suited figure to the embassy. He was immediately ushered into the office of the vice-consul, who took an instant dislike to him, his beard, and his khaki outfit. The official disdainfully conveyed the dramatic news to the pseudo-revolutionary: “Your mother’s very worried about you!” It turned out that because three bombers piloted by revolutionaries had staged a minor attack on the Havana airport, exaggerated in the world press as an all-out war on the country, Cohen’s mother had contacted Laz Phillips, a Canadian senator who happened to be her cousin and asked him to locate her son to make sure he was alive.
The threat of invasion, however, put everyone on alert and eventually led to Cohen’s arrest. Castro had detained nearly one hundred thousand suspected dissidents in the preceding months and Cohen unwittingly joined their ranks. It happened while he was staying at the Hotel Miramar at Playa de Varadero, walking on the famous white sand beach roughly ninety miles east of Havana. Wearing his khakis and carrying a hunting knife, he was suddenly surrounded by twelve soldiers with Czech submachine guns. It was late at night and they thought he was the first of an American landing team. They marched him to the local police station while he repeated the only Spanish he knew, a slogan of Castro’s: Amistad del pueblo, “Friendship of the people.” This made no impression on his captors, but after an hour and a half of interrogation, Cohen convinced them he was not a spy but a fan of the regime who wanted to be there.
Once he had persuaded them that his intentions were innocent, Cohen and his captors embraced, brought out the rum and started a party. The soldiers were militianos, and to confirm their good will, they placed a necklace of shells and a string hung with two bullets around Cohen’s neck. He spent the next day with his captors and rode back to Havana with them. As they were walking down a Havana Street later that afternoon, a photographer snapped their picture, Cohen wearing his khakis and his new necklace. Afterwards, he stuffed the photograph in his knapsack.
Cohen spent much of his time in the Havana night scene, meeting artists and writers, arguing about artistic freedom and political oppression. He also ran into a number of American Communists. He disagreed with their views and had a violent argument with one of them. The man spat at Cohen and denounced him as bourgeois. The next day Cohen rose to the accusation by shaving his beard and putting on a seersucker suit, confirming their suspicions that he was a “bourgeois individualist.”
In Montreal, Irving Layton, as well as Cohen’s mother, was now worried. Following the attack on the airport on April 15, Layton wrote to Cohen, advising him to leave as soon as possible. “This is no time for a footloose reckless poet to find himself on the island,” Layton told his friend Desmond Pacey. Layton was convinced that within days there would be an invasion and that Cohen was in danger.
Layton was right. The imminent danger was intensified by the January suspension of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba. Anti-imperialist rhetoric increased in intensity and daily life became more perilous for foreigners. The Bay of Pigs invasion of April 17, 1961, confirmed the Cubans’ fear, although Castro’s unexpected success in defeating thirteen hundred U.S.-trained Cuban invaders solidified his power and stature. “Tourists” were arrested daily without explanation, although Cohen found the official attitude of the government “impeccable,” even toward someone as “ambiguous and ambivalent as myself.”
The day after the invasion, Cohen wrote to Jack McClelland, ostensibly to thank him for his first literary contract, adding, “Just think how well the book would sell if I’m hit in an air-raid. What great publicity! Don’t tell me you haven’t been considering it.” He then gives this report of events the night of the invasion:
There was a prolonged round of anti-aircraft fire tonight. An unidentified (but we know Yankee) plane. I think the guns were in the room next door. I looked out the window. Half a platoon running down the Prado [Paseo de Martí], then crouching behind an iron lion. Hopelessly Hollywood.
When Cohen decided to leave Cuba, he discovered that most of Havana’s middle class was trying to leave as well. Daily visits to the shell-struck Jose Martí airport, sixteen miles southwest of the city, became a fruitless ritual. He was unable to get a seat, although he soon befriended others in the waiting line, including the editor of the socialist magazine Monthly Review, who was also eager to escape. Cohen eventually managed to reserve a seat on a flight to Miami. Standing in line on April 26, the day he was to leave, Cohen was surprised to hear an official call the name of the person in front of him and the name of the person behind him, but not his own. Looking at the official’s list, he saw that a line had been drawn through his name. Ordered to go to the security desk, Cohen was informed by a Cuban official that he could not leave the country. The reason? A picture of him dressed as a militiano and standing with two other soldiers had been found in his knapsack and he was thought to be an escaping Cuban. A copy of Castro’s Declaration of Havana, condemning American exploitation of Cuba, in his belongings didn’t help his claim that he was a foreigner. His Canadian passport was thought to have been a forgery.
Cohen was taken to a security area outside the waiting room, where he was guarded by a fourteen-year-old with a rifle. Arguing with the youth about his detention and his rights as a Canadian citizen had no effect. A commotion on the runway distracted the teenaged guard; several Cubans were being evicted from a plane, and when they resisted, an argument broke out. The guard ran to the scene and Cohen was left unguarded. He quickly repacked his bag and nervously walked to the plane, repeating to himself, “It’s going to be OK; they don’t really care about me.” He climbed on board, telling himself not to look back, took a seat and didn’t move. No one asked for tickets. After a few anxious moments, the door shut, the engines started, and the plane began to taxi down the runway. He had escaped.
Eighteen months later during the Cuban missile crisis, Cohen’s brother-in-law, Victor Cohen, accused him of being pro-Castro and anti-American. Cohen responded with a lengthy politicized letter, saying that he opposed all forms of censorship, collectivism, and control and that he rejected all hospitality offered by the Cuban government to visiting writers during his stay. He wanted his brother-in-law to understand that he went to Cuba “to see a socialist revolution,” not “to wave a flag or prove a point.” And although he saw many happy Cubans, he became anxious when he observed the long lines of “scared people outside the secret-police HQ waiting to see relatives, and the sound-trucks blasting the anthem, and the posters everywhere…. I left anti-government poems everywhere I went, I talked to painters and writers about their inevitable clash with Authority … and they dismissed me as a hopelessly bourgeois anarchist bohemian etc.” Although Cohen later suggested that his motives for going to Cuba were personal and slightly shabby, he took a lofty moral stance with his brother-in-law, writing,
I’m one of the few men of my generation who cared enough about the Cuban reality to go and see it, alone, uninvited, very hungry when my money ran out, and absolutely unwilling to take a sandwich from a government which was shooting political prisoners.
When asked why he went to Cuba several years later, Cohen facetiously replied with bravado: a “deep interest in violence … I wanted to kill, or be killed.”
Cuba was a time for writing as well as revolution, and in addition to poems, Cohen began a novel, of which only five pages survive. At one time called The Famous Havana Diary—although in the text the narrator says it might be titled Havana was no exception—it opens like a Raymond Chandler mystery: “The city was Havana. That’s about all in the way of detail that you’re going to get from me.” It was a comic, largely autobiographical account of his stay. Cohen the moralist is glimpsed and there is evidence of his preoccupation with sex, his only loyalty, the narrator explains, although voyeurism sometimes suffices: “I enjoyed her from a hundred eyes hung all over the room, telescope eyes, wide-angle eyes, close-up eyes, periscope eyes suspended in fluid.”
Cohen’s principal literary response to Cuba was poetic: “All There Is to Know about Adolph Eichmann,” “The Only Tourist in Havana Turns His Thoughts Homeward,” and “Death of a Leader”—all to appear in Flowers for Hitler—were written either in Havana or on the bus back from Miami. The Energy of Slaves contains “It is a Trust to Me,” also written there. Collectively, the poems express disillusionment with Castro as a genuine revolutionary, since his regime had become “oppressive and repugnant.” Cohen declared in September 1963, “Power chops up frightened men. I saw it in Cuba.”
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IN EARLY MAY, Cohen was back in Canada, after stopping in New York to see his friend Yafa Lerner. She remembers him as profoundly changed by the Cuban experience, more aware of his role as a Canadian poet grounded in the international scene. In Montreal, he told Layton that Castro was “a tragic figure.” In a later letter, he noted that “Communism is less sinister under palm trees but Cuba is still no place for men bred in the freedom and corruption of North American cities. They are also too concerned with their artists. It makes you uneasy.”
On May 4 Cohen appeared on stage at the O’Keefe Centre in Toronto as part of the Canadian Conference of the Arts. He read his poetry (and that of Anne Hébert who was too nervous to read in French) surrounded by luminaries: Northrop Frye, Mordecai Richler, Jay Macpherson, Hugh MacLennan, and George Lamming, although Layton took the spotlight with a reading of his new poem about Jacqueline Kennedy, “Why I Don’t Make Love to the First Lady.” Layton reported that Cohen read beautifully and looked quite “Dorian Grayish.”
By mid-May, Cohen was dealing with the publication and sudden fame of The Spice-Box of Earth. Unpacking copies of the book at the McGill bookstore, Marquita de Crevier, at one time romantically linked with Cohen, who gave her a gift of an actual Jewish spice-box, discovered that the books had been mistakenly bound with blank leaves. When Cohen heard of the mix-up, he said that had he been there to witness the event, he would have been unable to continue writing poetry.
Reaction to the finished book was enthusiastic and admiring. To mark its publication, a launch party was held at his mother’s house on May 27, 1961, with Layton and McClelland in attendance. The dustjacket, on what would become Cohen’s first Canadian hit, provided a romantic description of the poet:
Leonard Cohen, 27, McGill graduate, gives his address as Montreal, but as this book was going to press he was enroute to Cuba. He spent last year on the shores of the Aegean Sea, writing as a result of that experience:
I shouldn’t be in Canada at all. Winter is all wrong for me. I belong beside the Mediterranean. My ancestors made a terrible mistake. But I have to keep coming back to Montreal to renew my neurotic affiliations. Greece has the true philosophic climate—you cannot be dishonest in that light. But it’s only in Montreal that you can get beat up for wearing a beard. I love Montreal. I hate the speculators who are tearing down my favourite streets and erecting those prisons built in the habit of boredom and gold.
While he prefers swimming in the Aegean, Leonard Cohen admits a fondness for camping in Northern Quebec. He is currently engaged in writing a novel.
The title, drawn from the spice-box that is blessed and then its contents inhaled after sundown on the Sabbath, marks the boundary between the sacred and the profane. The spice is a fragrant reminder of the link between the religious and the everyday, the holy and the unholy. From the celebration of nature in “A Kite Is a Victim,” the opening poem, to the destructive elements of history in the final “Lines from My Grandfather’s Journal,” the book displayed a joy balanced by tragedy. And the themes that would mark his mature poetry emerged: sexuality, history, Judaism, and love. Whether the subject was fellatio, Jewish mysticism, or death, a vision of promise characterized the work.
Expressing much of the tension found beneath the romanticism of the book is “The Genius.” It is a litany of possible Jews the narrator might become, from ghetto dweller to apostate to banker to Broadway performer to doctor. The poem reserves the most disturbing possibility for last:
For you
I will be a Dachau jew
and lie down in lime
with twisted limbs
and bloated pain
no mind can understand
Adulation greeted the book. The critic Robert Weaver found it powerful and declared that Cohen was “probably the best young poet in English Canada right now.” Cohen’s friends Louis Dudek, Eli Mandel, and Stephen Vizinczey all praised it. Writer Arnold Edinborough suggested that Cohen had taken over from Layton as Canada’s major poet, and the critic Milton Wilson in “Letters in Canada 1961” declared The Spice-Box of Earth a significant book. The title of the review in Canadian Literature summarized the general response: “The Lean and the Luscious.” And Desmond Pacey, in the second edition of his respected Creative Writing in Canada (1961), wrote that Leonard Cohen was “easily the most promising” among a group of younger poets in the country that included Al Purdy and Phyllis Webb.
The Spice-Box of Earth sold out in three months but failed to win the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. The winner that year was Robert Finch’s Acis in Oxford. Irving Layton thought this was an absolute travesty:
There isn’t a single poem in the Finch book that won it. It’s dull, academic stuff with not one alive line that can seriously be called poetry. Exercises, bloody, or rather, bloodless exercises. Nothing else. What an arsehole of a country this is when this sort of crap can win prizes, but Cohen’s genuine lyricism can’t and doesn’t.
He also relates that Cohen was upset at not winning. “Psychologically, I think he’s having a rough time of it,” Layton told Desmond Pacey. “It’s damn hard to be a young poet!” But if the Governor General’s jury wouldn’t acknowledge the power of The Spice-Box of Earth, the public did. The handsomely designed text continued to sell and won its designer, Frank Newfeld, a major publishing award.
A less publicized event that spring was Cohen’s adventure with Alexander Trocchi, a Scottish novelist on the lam from the U.S. for forgery and drug charges. Cohen put him up for a few days and had his first encounter with opium. Trocchi had a wad of it with him and prepared it by cooking it up on Cohen’s stove. Trocchi asked Cohen if he would like to lick the pot. Cohen could not resist but found it had little effect. He and Trocchi then headed out to a Chinese restaurant on Ste-Catherine Street but as they crossed the road, Cohen went blind and clutched at Trocchi before he fainted. Trocchi pulled him to the curb, where Cohen gradually recovered. A few days later, Cohen explained to Robert Weaver that he had just left Trocchi on a British ship bound for Scotland: “His passport was two years expired so it was touch and go all the way. He fixed himself every half-hour … He’s a hell of responsibility. He wants you to feel that. That’s why he turns on in public. He’s a public junkie. I was glad when we got him on the boat.” Cohen’s poem “Alexander Trocchi, Public Junkie, Priez Pour Nous” in Flowers for Hitler celebrates Trocchi’s bohemian flair. Cohen writes: “Your purity”—of a Baudelairian darkness—“drives me to work. / I must get back to lust and microscopes.” A year or so later, Cohen would read Cain’s Book, Trocchi’s once-banned novel of 1960, and it would soon influence Beautiful Losers.
In late May Cohen received his Canada Council Arts Scholarship renewal, although only for one thousand dollars. Cohen told the supervisor of scholarships that the council’s investment would “yield profits far out of proportion to the original risk. Within the year I promise you a book which will have some importance in our national literature.” He then boldly asked for a travel grant, arguing that “distance is essential if I am to get any perspective in this messy semi-autobiography.” Before he left, Cohen acknowledged the planting of a tree in his honor by the local Hadassah Chapter of his synagogue, using the occasion to defend his controversial work: “I remind them [Montreal Jews] that it is an old habit of our people to reject our most honest social critics, at least as old as Moses.”
————
BY AUGUST 1961, Cohen was back in Greece, having spent twenty-one days on a Yugoslavian freighter headed for Genoa. Most of the passengers were retirees returning to Yugoslavia to live on welfare, and he tells his sister that “they weep most of the day and eat large meals. Just like home for me.” He befriended the thirty-three-year-old captain, spending most nights musing on a destiny “that makes one man the master of a ship, the other an itinerant poet, both exiles.” But he knows that he will soon be “rooted on the rock of Hydra, working in that freedom which only an ocean between me and my birthplace can give me.”
On Hydra, “his Gothic insincerities were purged” and his “style purified under the influence of empty mountains and a foreign mate who cherished simple English,” as he would write two years later. “Thank god for hashish, cognac, and neurotic women who pay their debts with flesh,” he wrote McClelland, adding that the products of the island are “sponges, movies, nervous breakdowns, and divorces.” He wrote Layton that he had seen corpses in the sea and witnessed “assassins’ drugs.” Layton was uncharacteristically indifferent: “I gather the Greek wines are too strong for him,” he commented to a friend. Meanwhile, Cohen was still seeking extra funds, this time from an advance on royalties of The Spice-Box of Earth, encouraging McClelland to “dig deep to keep Cohen out of the Clothing Business.”
Cohen was offered six thousand dollars for the house he had paid fifteen hundred for. But the house had given him roots, he later explained, and he was not ready to sell. Hydra freed Cohen from the inhibitions (and intrusions) of Montreal and made his writing less competitive and academic. He realized, however, the price of such isolation:
I chose a lonely country
broke from love
scorned the fraternity of war
I polished my tongue against the pumice moon.
In Greece, he explained years later, you “just felt good, strong, ready for the task” of writing. This last remark is a key to Cohen’s method of composition, whether in verse or in song. He cannot work unless he is “ready for the task,” in a state of creative concentration and well-being. Fasting often generated this state, and various friends recall his periods of almost week-long fasts while writing. Fasting also suited the holiness of his dedication to his work, supplemented by his desire for discipline.
Although Cohen experienced long fallow periods of nonproductivity, he retained a rigid daily schedule. Every morning, Cohen worked either on his terrace or in the long, low-ceilinged basement study of his home. Only the midday heat interrupted his work; he would then read, swim, and then return to his writing. In Greece, he wrote to Robert Weaver, “there is my beautiful house, and sun to tan my maggot-coloured mind.”
A prose poem entitled “Here Was the Harbour” suggests the purity of life on Hydra that appealed so strongly to Cohen. Describing the harbor and the intense blue of the sky, he proclaims, “Of men the sky demands all manner of stories, entertainments, embroideries, just as it does of its stars and constellations.” “The sky,” he continues, “wants the whole man lost in his story, abandoned in the mechanics of action, touching his fellows, leaving them, hunting the steps, dancing the old circles.” In the silence of Hydra, Cohen found his muse, although Greece plays a surprisingly small part in his writing as a subject or scene. Occasional poems describe his life there, but it has no direct presence in his fiction and appears only sporadically in his songs.
He could not escape politics, however. In October 1961 he provided this analysis of the political situation to his sister:
everywhere is going Communist and cleaning up corruption and poverty and charm. And the West is too expensive, rigid, and hysterical. What chance has a decent fun-loving literary parasite got in this world? Anyways, your cheque will keep me in hashish yet a little longer.
Drugs on Hydra were becoming increasingly evident and could be obtained without much difficulty—often from a local who regularly made trips to Athens, although marijuana was grown on the island. Cohen soon found himself dependent on the drugs for quickening his imagination and often became desperate when they were not available, as his poem “Indictment of the Blue Hole” makes clear. It reads in part:
January 28, 1962
My abandoned narcotics have
abandoned me
January 28, 1962
7: 30 must have dug its
pikes into your blue wrist
“The Drawer’s Condition on November 28, 1961” begins with this question: “Is there anything emptier / than the drawer where / you used to store your opium?”
The most popular drug was hashish, but acid and marijuana were also readily available. Initially, the pharmacist supplied opiates and other drugs, but soon other sources were needed. To a French-Canadian friend he wrote, “I’ve smoked quite a lot of hash and eaten a fair amount of opium. None of it’s any good really, and the O is quite dangerous. Work is better than both—and work is hell.” He later relied on a speed-like drug, Maxiton, which could be bought over the counter. He became known to his close friends as Captain Mandrax, Mandrax being an English brand name for quaaludes. By 1964 he found that hashish and amphetamines assisted him greatly in completing Beautiful Losers, in a marathon writing session.
A passage from an unpublished essay of 1965 clarifies the nature of drug use on the island. Cohen writes:
In this part of the planet men have smoked and cooked hashish for many centuries, and as countless American and European homosexuals can testify, without sacrificing any of the vigourous qualities we would associate with a people so crucial to history, a continuous seminal history including not only the classical and Byzantine periods, but also, and perhaps most important, our own time. We who are here today believe that these lands of the Eastern Mediterranean are still the glistening alembic in which the happiest and purest synthesis of the West and Orient must occur. Islanders brew a tea from the wild narcotic poppies which is served to restless children and rebellious mules….
We smoke the occasional common cigarette into which we have introduced a few crumbs of hashish. We cannot rely on this crude device to secure us the visions and insights we hunger for, but it has its use as an agent of relaxation and receptivity. On the recreational side I might say that erotic and musical experience is enhanced under its influence. My wife would not listen to Bach without it, nor I to the cicadas at sundown. … The lyrics of many bazouki tunes celebrate the aromatic generosity of the leaf as it turns to ash.
In September 1961 a confident Cohen wrote to the editor of the New York Times to tell him that he was sending him a new sonnet, written a few days earlier. He believed it to be one of his best poems: “I write a year’s verse to keep in training for a poem like this.” He titled it “On His Twenty Seventh Birthday.” The Times did not print it.
He reported to Claire Pratt in Toronto that he was continuing to work on his self-indulgent novel, which nobody, he was sure, would want. He predicted that “the next book will be so orderly that people will mistake it for a geometry theorem.” He was also busy with his poetry, saying it was “clearing the mind for some splendid Greek pentalic constructions.”
Cohen was living with Marianne again and maintained a six-and-a-half-year relationship with her. Her penetrating blue eyes, high cheekbones, and inquisitive mouth captivated him. Once, when Marianne modeled for a friend’s boutique in Hydra, she looked so marvelous in the borrowed clothes and sunglasses that people stopped her in the port for her autograph, assuming she must be a movie star. On one occasion Cohen himself distracted her by asking for her signature on a menu as she crossed the port. For Cohen, Marianne presented an attenuated, lyrical beauty:
It’s so simple
to wake up beside your ears
and count the pearls
with my two heads
… let’s go to bed
right after supper
Let’s sleep and wake up
all night
Cohen sought to protect her, as he would seek to protect other women throughout his life, one source of his immense appeal. When Marianne returned to Oslo to visit relatives, Cohen followed. Marianne, he wrote to Layton, “seems to have endured and ruined the women I’ve known after her and I’ve got to confront her mystery in the snow. She is so blonde in my heart!” He had to pursue her and while in Oslo wrote a poem: “Lead me … into families, cities, congregations: / I want to stroll down the arteries invisible / as the multitudes I cannot see from here.”
While Marianne was visiting her mother, Cohen listened to Greek records, smoked cigars, and enjoyed the clean northern beauty of Norway. “Something in the air takes no notice whatsoever of our miniature suffering and invites us, commands us, to join in the insane eternal laughter. Today I’m rolling in the aisles.” He enjoyed the contrast of the northern ethic, the cold air and forthright diet. “I’ve been working on my new book but today I feel like giving up writing. The air is too sweet for all this working of the mind, the herrings are too tasty. When I am not watching blonde girls I am eating herring and sometimes I do both.”
Learning that his novel was to be published in Swedish, Cohen told Esther that his book would certainly appeal to the Swedes because “it’s so melancholy, and neurotic and dirty.” To Stephen Vizicenzy he wrote that he had abandoned himself entirely to oral gratification: “Eating and kissing. Frankly, I hate to get out of bed. I don’t think I’m a poet maudit after all. Maybe I’ll receive my sense of loss tomorrow.” A month later he wrote to Robert Weaver that “Norway is blonde and glorious and I am popular as a negro with my dark nose. I’ll travel forever.” He danced by himself, listening to Radio Luxembourg. “I can be seen Twisting alone, not even missing London marijuana.”
His novel was finished in the spring, and Cohen had a feeling of completion and ennui. He told Yafa Lerner:
Strange to find myself absolutely lustless. It makes me have to begin everything all over again, find a new structure to hang myself on. Lustless. It’s like a kind of amnesia. It leaves me with too much spare time and forces me into metaphysics.
I never thought desire was so frail.
Write.
He also wrote to a Mr. Dwyer at the Canada Council to report that his manuscript had been accepted by the literary agents David Higham Associates. “This is the same novel I’ve been working on for two years, the one Jack [McClelland] hates.” Quoting the readers’ reports, he noted their praise and claimed that if the writing had been any less imaginative, it would have made the “countless passages of remarkable sexual description” inappropriate. He thanked Dwyer for the council’s support “and for having created an atmosphere of concern about my work.” He added that he was working on a “surrealistic sound poem on the Underground System for Project ’62” of the CBC and is getting “into another novel set in the Eastern Townships.” (Only a few pages of this projected work exist.) He closed with a request to inform him about any suitable jobs for him in Canada.
————
IN MARCH of 1962 Cohen returned to 19b Hampstead High Street in London to work on revisions for his novel. He wrote Jack McClelland to see if he would “be interested in publishing a book of offensive instant poems of mine called Flowers for Hitler.” Thesame day he wrote to Rabbi Cass, in charge of the McGill B’nai Brith Hillel organization, thanking him for a copy of a review of The Spice-Box of Earth. He noted that the reviewer had rewritten the first stanza of one of his poems—but “it’s the kind of chutzpa I enjoy and indulge in secretly myself, so convey to him my congratulations.” The final letter that day was to Robert Weaver of the CBC. He told Weaver that he met the critic Nathan Cohen in Paris and together they had spent an evening praising him. He promised to write a piece on Greece for Weaver but was too busy just then with revisions. “London is horrible,” he concluded, “and I long for the honest, brutal massacre of a Canadian winter.”
Several days later, Cohen wrote to his Montreal friend Daniel Kraslavsky, complaining about the small amount of money he received for his novel:
Over two years on that book in which I invite the whole world to share my glorious youth and what do I get?
Cashmere? What’s cashmere?
I’ve got to go back to the Greek island. I have reports that my house is crumbling there. I’m meeting a Norwegian girl and her baby there. I shall become a husband and father in one fell swoop. I have no money to live anywhere else. I love it there but it cuts me off from my cultural Roots and the Mainstream. I still have illusions that there are Roots and Mainstreams.
Did I plan it this way?
At the end of the letter he wrote he didn’t understand his “blonde woman,” adding, “why have I become Scott Fitzgerald but without any loot or social connections?”
In another letter Cohen was darker, complaining that he was working slowly, “twice as slowly as I should be, wasting time in severe depressions, bad dreams, maniacal poems. I am almost paralyzed by indecision.” London brought out his vivid dichotomies. After all his praise of Marianne, he admitted to some ambivalence about their relationship. They had seen each other so little that he was “terrified of waking up to find myself broke and stranded on a Greek island with a woman I can’t contact and a child to whom I can’t even talk in English. I can’t help feeling there’s some disaster waiting for me if I act in that direction.” He wrote that he would probably have to go back to Montreal and “fight for some tiny income … otherwise I’ll be forced into journalism and all sorts of other excuses for not creating a masterpiece.” Loneliness overpowered him:
I feel I’ve lost Montreal and not only am I lonely but alone. I am like an eye dangling by a few nerves from a man’s socket, and I long for detachment or to be part of the body whole, anything but blind useless pain.
I have not given up by any means so don’t let me depress you. There are insights to be gained from the tedious chaos. I could do without such an education but since I have no choice I might as well learn. Laughter is a fist in the face of the gods and I will make those heavenly faces bloody and blue.
A letter to Marianne confirms his romantic vacillation: “There are a million things I want to talk about with you,” Cohen wrote, “things I’m frightened about … and oceans between us distort things that become very simple when we are together.” He reports that he has asked Mort Rosengarten to get him some land on a remote Canadian island, Bonaventure, where they can all live a natural life. He misses everything that he loves, beginning with her:
I long for you and blind love, brown bodies that speak to one another in a language we don’t want to understand, I long for readers to devour my soul at a feast, I long for health in the sun, woods I know, tables of meat and fruit and bread, children shattering the monarch of the home, I long for cities of preserved elegance and the chaotic quarters of modern cities where the village persists, for loyal restaurants, for parks and battles. I have so much affection for the world and you shall be my interpreter.
I want to get back to Canada and rob a bank.
On the same day that he wrote to Marianne, he wrote to his mother and told her that he always knew that his book would be published, “just as I always knew I wanted to be a writer even when this ambition was discouraged by so-called sensible people and every obstacle of provincialism and caution put in my way.” He has also learned that “the things which are given you mean nothing, only what we achieve by struggle and suffering have any value … I have no more or less illusions about writing than I had eleven years ago [in 1951] when I began … I will continue to fight for the kind of life I want, continue to fight the weakness in myself.” He explained that “the secret of my triumph is that I expect nothing, expect to change nothing, expect to leave nothing behind.” He said he planned to return to Canada after he completed his revisions in the summer, possibly buy a small house in the country, and return to Greece in the fall.
The dampness and cold of London made him miserable but Secker & Warburg had asked that he stay in London to do revisions. “I want to tear at everything that nourishes me,” he wrote to Irving Layton on March 23. “Can I help it if she [Marianne] is a priestess whose nature it is to make everything difficult and prosaic?” He also told Layton that “I’ve been working on my novel with a scalpel. I won’t be able to save it, but it’s one of the most interesting corpses I’ve ever seen.”
Another letter to his sister noted his disappointment at not winning the Governor General’s Award for The Spice-Box of Earth: “Too bad because Spice-Box was the last book anyone will understand. I am now running three and a half years ahead of enlightened poetic taste and the time-lag is increasing daily.” And Secker, he explained, took his manuscript because they wanted his next book and that his manuscript is a “beautiful book that will be misunderstood as a self-indulgent childish autobiography, disordered and overlong…. In actuality,” he tells her, “it’s an extremely subtly balanced description of a sensibility, the best of its kind since James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I am perfectly prepared to be ignored or slaughtered by stupid men of letters.” He ends with an indictment:
What a joyless farce we make out of our lives, especially the cautious, especially them because what they hoard is leaking away day-by-day. Give me a war, give me complicated divorces and disgrace, give me broken lives and alcoholic fantasy, give me anything but pettiness and safety.
A final passage in the letter records his enjoyment of the Twist, danced at a West Indian club called the All-Niter, where the marijuana smoke was so thick, he reported, that you could get high without taking a puff. “It’s the first time I’ve really enjoyed dancing. I sometimes even forget I belong to an inferior race. Their stuff compares very favorably with Greek hashish. The Twist is the greatest ritual since circumcision—and there you can choose between the genius of two cultures. Myself, I prefer the Twist.”