6
BACK ON HYDRA, two distractions interrupted Cohen from the strenuous effort of rewriting The Favorite Game: the first was the arrival of his mother; the second, the arrival of many so-called friends. Since he had bought his house, Cohen’s mother had remained unconvinced that his life was secure, that he was eating well, and that he knew what he was doing. Through letters at first to his sister and then to his mother, Cohen stressed the regularity of his life: he had a cleaning lady, caring friends, and a well-looked-after home. He sent his mother recipes, described social events and chronicled his literary progress. But nothing would substitute for a visit, and in the summer of 1962, in the midst of work on his novel, Cohen had to prepare for his mother’s arrival.
First he had to placate his mother’s fears. Masha was worried about rain, about dampness, and cold. “In the last six thousand years it hasn’t rained once on the island during the summer, so I doubt if it will begin in 1962,” he assured her, telling her to bring light clothes because it was hot. “You would suffocate under a mink jacket, and if you didn’t suffocate you’d be eaten by several thousand cats who have never seen a mink jacket and would suppose you to be some new kind of animal.”
It was unthinkable that she stay at a hotel. Why be uncomfortable and hot in their rooms when she could be uncomfortable and hot in his, he asked. Cohen wrote, “My house is big and you won’t interfere with my work or my several wives, mistresses, and children.” The house, he explained, was being whitewashed, some rotten wood replaced, stones repaired, and despite the absence of running water and electricity, she would find it clean and private. “Buying this house was the wisest move of my life. I think you and Esther will probably settle here.”
Masha Cohen’s visit precipitated some drastic changes, the most important being Marianne’s removal from the house. According to Jewish law, a Cohen (member of a priestly caste) cannot marry a divorced woman, and living with a divorced woman and her child would have been even more upsetting to his mother. So Marianne had to disappear from Cohen’s daily life. This upset Cohen as much as it did Marianne, who found temporary lodging elsewhere. The visit, meanwhile, was a disaster. The heat bothered his mother, she felt unwell, and Cohen didn’t do any writing for a month. “She’s a little overwhelmed,” he wrote his sister, “and I’m expecting disaster from moment to moment. My own routine has been completely wrecked, of course.” His mother brought with her “all the old chaos…. She exists on my energy. I have nothing left for anything, books or humans,” he told a friend, adding:
A nomadic animal should sleep in hidden places. Once he digs a permanent home and the hunter learns where it is, he invites destruction. It’s my own fault for not moving light. It’s strange to be trapped in the house I built for freedom.
Cohen had an obligation to revise his novel. He had assured his editor Roland Gant at Secker & Warburg that the new version would be much, much better. Half of the original first section had been eliminated, and the book would be a third shorter. He proposed several titles: The Mist Leaves No Scar or Mist Leaves No Scar, Only Give a Sound, Only Strangers Travel, or No Flesh So Perfect, though felt “nothing sounds any good … THE MOVING TOYSHOP isn’t bad, but this isn’t just a book about youth, it’s an allegory for a lost perfect dim impossible body, the one that escapes us when we kiss, the one that hovers over the best dancer and ruins her dance or makes it sad.” Other possibilities he listed were Fields of Hair, The Perfect Jukebox, The Moonlight Sponge, and The Original Air-Blue Gown (from Hardy’s poem “The Voice”).
Visitors from Montreal became another nuisance and disruption. They relied on him to make hotel arrangements, find restaurants, and act as interpreter. To Esther he announced:
I don’t intend to open my gates to Everybody whose only excuse for bothering me is that they can afford the fare and know my name … My commitment here is serious and they are on holiday. They want their kicks out of every moment while I am here for work and order. This is a workshop.
In the same letter he complained about Tony Perkins, Melina Mercouri, and Jules Dessin, who were shooting a movie on “the very spot where I happen to swim.” He received surprise visits from people like his witty cousin Alan Golden, “whom I had never spoken to except over my shoulder at shul … In fact, had he not come, all the Goldens would be to me is a row of blurred faces arranged above a Freedman Company shoulder pad.”
He and Marianne began to avoid people and the port: “I’ve greeted people so fiercely that nobody dares to drop in. I’ve got a notice DO NOT DISTURB nailed on the front door,” he told his sister. Occasionally an encounter proved interesting, as when he met a troupe of Russian dancers from the Bolshoi Ballet and compared notes with them on the status of artists in Russia and Canada. But soon he and Marianne prepared to visit Kiparissi on the Peloponnesus because Hydra had become “intolerably touristic which is fine for one’s real estate but bad for Canadian Literature.” He also admitted, “It is hard to be a poet maudit when you have a good tan.”
But a poet with a good tan is an attractive commodity, and women sought Cohen out. There was Astrid, a tall, stunning redhead from Germany; a willowy blonde from Australia who typed the manuscript of his novel; Phyllis, an American who was in love with his songs; and another Australian, who climbed over his daunting wall to get to him. Some of these women were welcomed, some were passed on to other willing hosts, such as Don Lowe or Anthony Kingsmill.
With his mother gone and the tourists and the women deflected, Cohen could get back to writing. By August he told Roland Gant that he had “eliminated a kind of self-conscious melancholy that is fine for a ‘first-novel’—but I want to put a polished and precise weapon on the market. The new book is tough. The author isn’t sticking his personal pain at you in every chapter; that’s why the new version hurts more. Mostly it’s a question of cutting away the blubber and letting the architecture of bone show through.” He finished the work in October, cutting the book virtually in half, confessing to a friend that “I think I have rewritten myself, and like the book, I’m not sure I admire the product. We all have several images of ourselves. It is a surprise to see which one we assume.”
His self-assessment was unsparing:
One day I found that I was a man leading a sunny uncluttered life with a very beautiful woman. The man was poor, all his clothes were worn and faded, he had no Sunday suit, he was happy much of the time, happier than I ever thought he could be, but tougher, crueller, and lonelier than I had ever planned.
To Layton he wrote that he was not entirely satisfied with this rewritten version, but “anyone with an ear will know I’ve torn apart orchestras to arrive at my straight, melodic line … In a way that means more to me than the achievement itself. I walk lighter and carry a big scalpel. Everything I’ve read in the past week is too long … I don’t know anything about people—that’s why I have this terrible and irresistible temptation to be a novelist.”
November gave Cohen an unexpected opportunity to travel. The CBC invited him to Paris to participate in a panel with Malcolm Muggeridge, Mary McCarthy and Romain Gary. To Robert Weaver he exclaimed, “Has the world gone completely mad? Also fee and expenses!” The hour-long radio program, which he would moderate for a fee of six hundred dollars, would address the question “Is there a Crisis in Western Culture?” It was to be recorded in the Hotel Napoleon. Cohen arrived two days early for the taping, and settled into a “coffin-colored room in the Hotel Cluny Square” on the left bank, to read the work of the other participants. A short story, “Luggage Fire Sale,” published in Partisan Review (1969) narrates his adventure, including picking up a female medical student at 2: 00 a.m. in a Boulevard St Michel cafe and writing on his hotel wall “change is the only aphrodisiac.” The story also hints at his pleasure at being away from Hydra and from “a couple of women who knew me too well.” He arrived in Paris with a small piece of Lebanese hashish “and a complete suntan which recorded my major life success, the discovery of hot beaches where I could live naked with someone worth watching.” He added that “the sweetest aspect” of this unnamed woman of Hydra “was the way she let me know that I could neither hurt nor miss her.”
Before the taping, the participants shared an expensive dinner at the Hotel Napoleon where the principal topic was marijuana. During the taping, Muggeridge stressed culture as embellishing the human condition, and McCarthy allowed that culture was integral to society. Cohen, wondering why he was getting paid, threw in Russia as a topic. They agreed on the existence of a new world culture that encompassed both China and Russia, but could not agree on the issue of greatness in contemporary culture. Cohen reported that the discussion had been neither witty nor profound. The reason, Cohen felt, was that they had been too well fed: “Cultural crises, especially permanent ones, have little effect on bodies so recently nourished on expensive French food and liquor. We should have been starved three or four days.”
By February of 1963 he was back in North America, partly to replenish his bank account, but partly to celebrate the forthcoming publication of The Favorite Game by Viking in New York. “It’s a perfect little machine,” Cohen said of the book, “not spectacular, but new and nothing sticks out, and it even sprays a shower of sparks from time to time.”
Cohen began a long and satisfying association with Cork Smith, his new editor at Viking, who had accepted The Favorite Game. In May, when Viking received the corrected galleys of the book (it had been published in London in October), Cohen told Smith that the possibility of an epigraph by Yeats was unthinkable.
[Yeats] has had too much already and what have I had? Do you see my poems in the front of every book? … No, no, I refuse, I resist, must we be forever blackmailed by the Irish merely because a few hundred thousand perished of starvation? … No Yeats, no Wilde, Behan, Thomas. And don’t try and tell me he wasn’t an R.C. Oh no. And I suppose Roosevelt wasn’t Jewish? I’m on to you. The book will be bare.
A perceptive editor, Smith would play a critical role in the development of Beautiful Losers, guiding the publication of that difficult novel. Cohen sent the final revisions of The Favorite Game to Smith, and included a poem:
Tell all your gold friends
that Cohen has been struck down by their melting beauty
that he no longer contends with desire
but lies stricken under Law.
Cohen of Mountain Street
Cohen of Juke Boxes
Cohen The Moonlight Sponge
Cohen The Jewish Keats
has tied it with a string.
Could this austere historian be he who once succumbed
like a public epileptic
to pretty faces in every window
Yes
Cohen has been struck down
He lies on a couch of snow
Therefore blonde dancers
do not expect him to rise for an introduction.
In July, after he had returned the galleys, Cohen received a copy of the book jacket and quickly wrote to Cork Smith to express his dismay at the author photo:
The photograph is of a first novelist I never wanted to be: over-shaven, pale, collector of fellowships, self-indulgent, not mad enough for an insane asylum, not tough enough for alcoholism, the face that haunts Hadassah meetings. But I swear to you I am cruel-eyed, hard, brown. In the mountains they call me Leonardos the Skull.
Cohen was restless in New York where he stayed with his sister. He wrote to Sheila Watson:
I haven’t been to sleep for a long time. I wear sunglasses along Park Avenue at four in the morning…. I have spent my advance on escargots. I have a plastic Edgar Allen Poe doll. Finland cares nothing for me. The gypsies on Eighth Avenue are breaking up that old gang of mine. There is a cocktail party in my shaving kit and it threatens me with Arizonian wastes. I didn’t mean the old guy any harm when I spoke with the tongues of angels.
Jack McClelland had not been keen to publish The Favorite Game, saying that Cohen did not have to write such a “first novel” work, both autobiographical and egotistical. Cohen responded by declaring it “a third novel disguised as a first novel…. I use the first novel form the way a good technician uses the first person.” (He actually had written two others: A Ballet of Lepers and Beauty at Close Quarters, both never published.)
For his next novel, Cohen predicted, “I will write a book about pure experience which will make THE FAVORITE GAME look like a grotesque gimmick. You will have to come to my cell to pick up the manuscript.” McClelland thought The Favorite Game was “a beautiful book,” but it was still “a first novel” and not what he should have done. McClelland forecasted that the book would be a critical but not a commercial success, adding that “one of the great dangers of staying in this business is that you begin to think you know something about books. My greatest virtue as a publisher for years was that I knew nothing about books.” In response to McClelland’s criticism, Cohen explained that:
I’ve never written easily: most of the time I detest the process. So try and understand that I’ve never enjoyed the luxury of being able to choose between the kinds of books I wanted to write, or poems, or women I wanted to love, or lives to lead.
————
FOLLOWING THE REVISION of his novel, Cohen returned to writing poems. They became the core of Flowers for Hitler, which Cohen had originally titled Opium and Hitler. The book drew together a series of new and immediate themes: Hydra, history, and politics. He considered the poems radical and challenging, and anticipated the negative reception they would receive from McClelland & Stewart. The poems, he told Jack McClelland, “will speak to nobody because nobody enjoys my grotesque kind of health. I would have rather read these poems than have written them. Enjoy your authoritarian life.” He closed the letter with, “Goodbye forever / Leonard Cohen / The Jewish Keats.”
Unlike the lyrical Spice-Box of Earth, Flowers for Hitler, with its tough, unpleasant topics, would offend people, but he accepted responsibility, telling Cork Smith that “I accept the hemlock for the evils it will work against established order, for I will turn son against father, beloved against lover, apostle against guru, pedestrian against traffic light, eater against waitress, waitress against maitre d’, and they will all lie down, unconnected and free and loving as mating flowers.” He celebrated the importance of the poems as “a fairly original study of Authority,” writing to his sister that the collection would be complete in a couple of weeks and that the last ten days had been one of his “best creative periods ever: I’ve really put the book into wild, evil, and revolutionary working order. I imagine it is the best study of the authoritarian psychology ever written.”
In June Cohen submitted a selection of the poems to a CBC poetry contest for poets under thirty. In the covering letter he wrote that Opium and Hitler was a collection of “prose poems which studies the totalitarian spirit of our century.” Several months later he said to his U.S. agent Marian McNamara, “I gave my mental health to that book and hereafter I am released from the bondage of logic and sanity. It feels good.” Yet the real challenge came from finding a means to express his revised values. He admitted to Cork Smith, “So many of my values have been challenged and strengthened or destroyed. I want to say something but every form I use seems to cramp, or limps under a kind of self-indulgence which I have to clean out of my system.”
Jack McClelland’s response, though negative, surprised Cohen. He thought that the uneven quality of the poems would harm Cohen’s reputation. But then he added: “Because you are Leonard Cohen, we will publish the book as is without concern or apology.” Cohen took offense, telling McClelland that he did not want the book published, “feeling as you do, so cautiously honoring my place in Canadian letters.” He added that he had ten more poems to include, as well as a verse play. And yes, he was willing to make changes, although his confidence in the work was unchanged:
I know this book is a masterpiece, a hundred times better than Spice-Box. I also know that there is no one in the country that can evaluate these poems. My sounds are too new… Jack, there has never been a book like this, prose or poetry written in Canada … Believe me, I could produce another Spice-Box and everyone would be happy. I know the formula. But I’m moving into new territory.
Cohen emphasized the language of his new work, telling McClelland that various young writers had read it:
they’ve been staggered … This book moves me from the world of the golden-boy poet into the dung-pile of the front-line writer. I didn’t plan it this way. I loved the tender notices Spice-Box got but they embarrassed me a little. HITLER won’t get the same hospitality from the papers.
Publication was delayed by last-minute revisions. The title and the so-called “gas-chamber” poems, works dealing with the Nazis and the Holocaust, received the most severe criticism. One reader’s report begins, “This is a manuscript which I find on the whole to be disappointing. After a while it has the same effect as a dentist’s drill, and I have to stop reading.” Cohen’s “natural, sensuous gifts as a poet don’t shine through.” Another reader begins with “This poetry is full of bitterness and hate … How marketable is hate?” The same reader declares that Cohen is being “immature,” but “if he intends to go on endlessly and tiresomely parading the same old theme, then by all means make the most of him while he’s still saleable.”
The original manuscript had a scornful dedication, which was also offensive to readers. Cohen agreed to remove it, although it revealed his current state of mind:
With scorn, love, nausea, and above all,
a paralysing sense of community,
this book is dedicated
to the teachers, doctors, leaders of my parents’ time:
THEDACHAU GENERATION
Asked to revise the manuscript, Cohen worked on it during his winter 1963–64 visit to Canada and added new work. “I was ambushed by fifty new poems which I had to integrate into the book,” he wrote, following a triumphant reading tour of Western Canada in March. In May, he was still arguing about the title with McClelland, wishing to keep Opium and Hitler: “The title is damn intriguing and the diseased adolescents who compose my public will love it.” What disturbed Cohen most was the proposed cover, again by designer Frank Newfeld, which was a drawing of a female body “with my face for tits … It doesn’t matter what the title is now because the picture is simply offensive … It hasn’t the sincerity of a stag movie or the imagination of a filthy postcard or the energy of real surrealist humor.”
Cohen ended up designing six covers of his own. The final jacket cover amalgamated these images into nine separate boxes, containing drawings of a dog, a parachutist, a house, two roses, and a baby-faced Hitler. A heart is the principal motif, evoking the romance implicit in the reference to flowers in the title. The cover is printed in red with a white background, suggesting a Valentine’s Day card of sorts. “The whole point of the title is that the word HITLER has to be set against a domestic background, and that’s the point of the book too. Nothing scary, arty, or fearsome. Just let people see the word without all the tympani and squeaky doors and the effect is powerful,” Cohen explained. On the half-title page of the printed book the reader encounters this enigmatic “Note on the Title”: “A while ago this book would have been called SUNSHINE FOR NAPOLEON, and earlier still it would have been called WALLS FOR GENGHIS KHAN.”
Cohen actually suggested canceling the project, since McClelland & Stewart was not incorporating his changes into the galleys, including a new dedication, replacing the Dachau reference with “FOR MARIANNE.” He added an epigraph, a sentence taken from Italian writer Primo Levi’s memoir Survival in Auschwitz, which reminded readers to resist the destruction of one’s conscience and the creation of evil.
It turned out that the book had already been printed by the time McClelland had received Cohen’s letter, but the sheets were unbound. They agreed to scrap that printing, make his changes, and reprint. McClelland had not actually read the full manuscript, only a few of the poems: “I don’t profess to be a lover of poetry … I’m flattered to think that you think that I have read your goddam poetry. Heh! When we have the Beatles we sure as hell don’t need poets.”
Cohen eventually agreed to change the title to Flowers for Hitler. But the jacket copy, which Cohen had asked to be suppressed, “has made me and the book a hell of a lot of enemies. It was very important that a Jew’s book about Hitler be free from arrogant personal promotion.” The blurb, taken from a September letter to McClelland, stressed his move from romantic lyricism to history in all of its horror. Cohen also objected to the austerity of the book’s production, especially in the paperback edition; he thought that the book looked cheap and that the poems were mutilated by their awkward placement on the page.
Earlier, in the summer of 1963, Cohen had tried to place portions of his The Favorite Game in various magazines. Playboy said no, but Cavalier said yes. Encouraged, Cohen wrote to his New York agent that the novel could easily become a movie and that she should pitch it to Hollywood. Unfortunately, a series of studios turned it down.
————
PUBLICLY, their lives appeared rich: Cohen was preparing for the publication of his novel, Marianne was modeling for a chic island boutique run by Magda-Slovak. Privately, their lives were falling apart. A short vacation in late July 1963 attempted to patch things up but a letter to Irving Layton in August suggests that the difficulties remained. “The Mediterranean doesn’t help,” Cohen wrote. “Everything breaking up here. … Gurdjieff was right when he shouted from his deathbed to all his teary followers: ‘Abandon the System!’” Cohen’s idyllic relationship with Marianne was unraveling.
Travel and contact with others stimulated his creativity but dimmed his love. His song “So Long, Marianne,” expresses these sentiments:
Well, you know that I love to live with you
But you make me forget so very much
I forget to pray for the angel
And then the angels forget to pray for us.
For now I need your hidden love
I’m cold as a new razor blade
You left when I told you I was curious
I never said that I was brave.
To renew the “holiness” of his work, he had to pursue his artistic quest, as he would summarize in Death of A Lady’s Man several years later: “I had the woman I loved. I wanted to end it, but it would not end: my life in art.”
A letter of September 1963 to a New York editor stressed “a violent disintegration that lets me catch fewer and fewer bright sparks … I can go for a week without feeling anything.” The time is “filled not so much with violence as with lies … I feel deprived, and I want even ugly women, I want nakedness, I don’t want to talk to anyone who isn’t naked.” A note of self-criticism creeps in: “What I want from people, mostly women, is outrageous, and I begin to see how hilarious and just it is that no one gives it to me. To Cork Smith Cohen wrote, The further a writer gets from his malice, his bitterness, his selfish problems, the more full of wounding pain his writing becomes.”
Cohen’s personal life was in turmoil but visitors continued to appear on the island: John Knowles, novelist and author of A Separate Peace; Howard Bacal, Nancy Bacal’s brother, who was training to become a psychiatrist; Marcelle Maltais, a French-Canadian painter; Sharona Aaron, an Israeli folksinger; and others: “A tall blonde girl who wears Oriental robes and carries a book called The Mystery of Life came here with my name.”
He continued to monitor the sexual scene on Hydra, writing to his sister in late August:
Lots of French lesbians here this week…. Perverts of both sexes tell me that this was not a good sexual season, nothing compared to last year. Police beat up an elderly homosexual for sport and two masochists left the island in indignation at having been overlooked!
He also added that “from a sexual point of view,” he was completely
obsolete … and I’ve just got to face the facts. Mother doesn’t realize what a freak I am, a real live artist living with an actual woman, Christian or not.
That summer one of his close friends was arrested for drug possession, taken off the island, and beaten in a prison in Piraeus. The event became the catalyst for his poem, “I Threw Open the Shutters.”
In September his novel appeared in New York and by October, Cohen returned to Canada to accept a five-hundred-dollar first prize in the CBC competition for new Canadian poets. Prompted by the attention his novel was receiving, Holiday magazine suggested that he write a story about pianist Glenn Gould. The idea was to interview Gould and record his impressions about a series of cities. The editor was concerned that Gould and Cohen would be recognized and suggested that they wear false beards as they walked around Montreal, the first proposed site. Cohen actually met Gould in the basement of the Hotel Bonaventure in Ottawa to begin the piece but became so enthralled by Gould’s conversation that he forgot to pursue the line of questioning he had prepared. For months afterward he avoided answering the phone, convinced that the caller was the disgruntled editor waiting for his story.
In mid-October, Cohen participated in the Foster Conference, an informal gathering of poets and critics, held in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. The major speakers were John Glassco, A.J.M. Smith, Irving Layton, F.R. Scott, Milton Wilson, Louis Dudek, and George Whalley. Delegates included Ralph Gustafson, Eli Mandel, Seymour Mayne, Henry Moscovitch, Ronald Sutherland, and Leonard Angel. Cohen’s presence signaled his involvement with the emerging Canadian literary scene.
Following Layton’s address, entitled “The Creative Process,” Cohen announced that “there were thousands of poems and thousands of poets in the world and that most of the poems don’t get written down. The poets are specifically anal characters who like to collect it all.” Layton took a different view, describing poetry as “a self-authenticated speaking, a reaching down into the roots of one’s being … doubts, perplexities, inner conflicts, joy, desire, chagrin—the terror and ecstasy of living daily beyond one’s psychic means. The major poets have large-sized, terrifying demons inside their psyches.”
In response to Louis Dudek’s presentation “The Little Magazine,” Cohen excited discussion by stating that little magazines had fulfilled their purpose and had no real role. “The mass magazines will print the most sensationally daring of material, so that good writers do not need to resort to the little magazines.” Esquire, he argued, was certainly open to the kind of writing that in the past could only be found in little magazines. His position here may have been influenced by having just placed part of The Favorite Gamewith Cavalier (actually a men’s magazine noted for its pinups). He criticized his friend Layton for becoming a cardboard rebel, his antics recorded for the middle class by CBC television. Cohen’s participation in the three-day conference sustained his place in the public imagination, while renewing friendships with those from the days of CIV/n. At the conference he read his poem “Alexander Trocchi, Public Junkie, Priez Pour Nous.”
While in Montreal, Cohen met Suzanne Verdal, a dancer who was one of the inspirations for two poems that would appear in Parasites of Heaven in 1966. He first saw her dancing flamboyantly with her husband, sculptor Armand Vaillancourt, at a boîte in Montreal called Le Vieux Moulin. The first poem, beginning “Suzanne wears a leather coat,” celebrates her dangerous beauty. The second, better-known poem is a version of his well-known song “Suzanne,” from his first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen (1968). He wrote the poem in the summer of 1965, although it lacked focus until Suzanne took Cohen to her loft near the St. Lawrence river. She remembered that they would spend hours talking by candlelight. Cohen maintained that they “were never lovers, but she gave me Constant Comment tea in a small moment of magic.”
Images in the song were drawn from a visit to the seventeenth-century La Chapelle de Bonsecours, the mariner’s church in old Montreal with the figure of the golden virgin at the top with her body turned away from the city to bless the departing mariners. Inside the sanctuary, hanging from the ceiling of the triple-steepled church, are votive lights suspended in model ships. Yafa Lerner can remember walking with Cohen in September 1965 and his excitement about the poem.
In a 1986 interview on the life of John Hammond, the Columbia Records executive who gave Cohen his first record contract, Cohen explained that the opening verse of his song was more or less reportage: “Suzannne takes you down / to her place near the river / you can hear the boats go by / you can spend the night beside her.” Verse two represented the religious symbols of Montreal, a city filled with religious iconography. “And Jesus was a sailor / when he walked upon the water / and he spent a long time watching / from his lonely wooden tower … forsaken, almost human / he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.” Cohen summed up verse three as the “compassionate attention that a man looks to receive from woman”:
Now Suzanne takes your hand
and she leads you to the river she is wearing rags and feathers
from Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey
on our lady of the harbour
And she shows you where to look
among the garbage and the flowers
And you want to travel with her
you want to travel blind
and you know that you can trust her
for she’s touched your perfect body
with her mind
Cohen recalled that he had the chord progression before the lyric and outlined his process of composition: “Most of my songs began with the phrase of music and a phrase of the lyric.” The tunes were usually completed before the lyric. Then Cohen would begin the long process of “uncovering the lyric and fitting it to the melody.”
In Canada, Cohen had been saddled with that unfortunate sobriquet, “The voice of his generation.” “tv stations pay me one hundred dollars a half hour for any blasphemous nonsense I can dream up,” he wrote in a 1963 letter. He had become a literary personality, his persona better known than his work. “I was mailing a letter yesterday and a man came up to me and said, ‘I bet there’s not a decent poem in that envelope!’”
In the same 1963 letter, Cohen announced, “this Sunday I address the Jewish Public Library and I shall have become a Rabbi at last.” This was a controversial event described in the Canadian Jewish Chronicle under the headline “Poet-Novelist Says Judaism Betrayed.” Speaking at a December 29 symposium entitled “The Future of Judaism in Canada,” Cohen gave an address he called “Loneliness and History.” He startled the audience with an indictment of the community’s neglect and indifference to its artists. The emphasis on the corporate survival of Jewish institutions, he said, was wrong; Jews must survive in their loneliness as witnesses, for if they forego that role, they abondon their purpose. Jews are the witnesses to monotheism, and that is what they must continue to declare. Jews had become afraid to be lonely. The prophet had vanished; only the priest remained. And the last great poet who tried to be both prophet and priest, A.M. Klein, had fallen into silence; rabbis and businessmen had taken over. Replacing the loss of Jewish values was the wealth of Jewish businessmen. Klein saw this change and decided to become a priest rather than prophet. Young Jewish writers would not make this mistake; they would remain alone and seek to honor their prophetic roles, Cohen declared.
This indictment of the Montreal Jewish community confirmed their worst suspicions: Cohen had turned against them, first in print in The Favorite Game and now in person. The reaction at the meeting was strong, but because of the late hour the chair, Dr. Joseph Kage, curtailed discussion and suggested that the symposium be continued the following Sunday. At this second meeting, a packed hall was disappointed to learn that Cohen would not be there. The community took his absence as an insult, but in a later interview Cohen said no one had confirmed to him the date of the second meeting. In his absence, several speakers lashed out at him, launching personal attacks. They quoted from his novel and identified Cohen with anything that was critical or vulgar in the book. A few of the younger members of the audience attempted to defend Cohen, although with little success.
Cohen frequently found his Jewish identity tested. The structure of his Judaism, like his quest in music, became a plea for union with a higher being and confirmation of his priestly function. “Draw me with a valuable sign, raise me to your height. You and I, dear Foreign God, we both are demons who must disappear in the perpetual crawling light, the fumbling sparks printing the shape of each tired form.”
The controversy initiated by his December 1963 talk did not abate when early in the new year Cohen traveled to Western Canada. He stopped in Winnipeg for a reading/performance with the Lenny Breau Trio at the Manitoba Theatre Center and a reading at the University of Manitoba, then moved on to Vancouver, where he spoke at the University of British Columbia, the Jewish Community Center, and the Vancouver Public Library, all the while promoting the image of the poet as alienated spiritual iconoclast—cool rather than beat, mysterious rather than angry. His readings were uniformly successful and sensational.
In Vancouver he spent time with Earle Birney, who had promoted his work. In a letter thanking him for his hospitality, Cohen playfully chided him: “Please quit soon. Layton and I will take over. Then we will quit.” At the Jewish Community Center on February 12, he again spoke on “the distinction between the Prophet and the Priest, probably sparking a religious revival.” The library talk generated the most displeasure, however:
there’s something about the West that invites you either to disarm or consider yourself in a state of permanent seige. I chose the latter. Went slightly insane before crowd at Library giving them “new insights into my irrelevant Eastern complexities.”
Many found his behavior offensive, especially his use of frank language and his invitations to the women in the audience to join him in his hotel room after his talk. Despite the furor, he wrote to a Canada Council official who sponsored the tour that “Vancouver is a beautiful Polynesian city and I will stay there forever.”
By March, he told his U.S. agent, Marian McNamara, that his trip had been “fairly triumphant…. As far as the prose goes,” he complained, “much work, many breakdowns,” adding that he would “tap Easter and Passover and all festivals of renewal.”
Cohen felt a new purpose and desire: “Most of all what I want is to be able to seize some discipline and consecrate myself to ten years of real labor.” This consecration occurred with Beautiful Losers, which was written in two intense eight-month periods, the first in 1964, the second in 1965. His goal was to prepare a “liturgy, a big confessional oration, very crazy, but using all the techniques of the modern novel … pornographic suspense, humor and conventional plotting,” as he told Eli Mandel and Phyllis Gotlieb. In February 1964 he said that he wanted to isolate himself “in the country and work on the new lunatic novel.” Seven months later, he wrote Jack McClelland that his “new novel, PLASTIC BIRCHBARK, is deep into its asylum.”
When he started, he worked only long enough to write three pages a day, sometimes one hour, sometimes eight, typing away on the terrace of his house in Hydra with a portable record player beside him. After the book began to take shape, he would work for longer periods of time, up to twelve or fifteen hours a day, aided by amphetamines and a Ray Charles record, The Genius Sings the Blues. His favorite song, played over and over, contains the line “Sometimes I sit here in this chair and I wonder.” Speed, he thought, would strengthen his mind, but at a certain point “the whole system collapsed. It isn’t a very good drug for depressed people because coming down is very bad. It took me ten years to fully recover.”
Work on the novel was interrupted by his October visit to Canada to receive the four-thousand-dollar Prix litteraire du Québec for The Favorite Game. He also participated in a reading tour organized by Jack McClelland. Four poets traveled in two cars; an exuberant Irving Layton, a white-bearded Earle Birney, a nervous Phyllis Gotlieb, and the leather-jacketed Cohen. Beginning with a October 25, 1964, reading at the North York Public Library, they visited six eastern Canadian universities in five days: Waterloo, Western, Toronto, Queen’s, Carleton, and McGill, reading to audiences of up to three hundred students. Receptions, book signings, and publicity accompanied them, as well as tv and radio broadcasts. The poets, however, did not mix well with each other. According to McClelland, Birney drank and was shy; Gotlieb was withdrawn; Layton was a showman; and Cohen went along but didn’t enjoy himself. At Western, Time reported that “Leonard Cohen in a black leather jacket, Caesar haircut and expertly mismatched shirt and tie looked around and asked, ‘Is this a church?’” The report unfavorably described Cohen’s book as “more shackled by despairs exclusively his own” than by history. When an undergraduate demanded to know ‘What makes a poem?’ Cohen replied, “God. It’s the same kind of operation as the creation of world.”
Although the poets made no money—five months later, after all expenses, they had only one hundred and fifty dollars to divide four ways—the venture did result in an added benefit, especially for Cohen. Donald Owen filmed the tour for the National Film Board of Canada. He dutifully traveled with the group, filming their various readings. Birney’s and Gotlieb’s were remarkably dull. This resulted in a re-edited and partially re-shot film by Donald Brittain about Cohen rather than the group. Ladies and Gentlemen … Mr. Leonard Cohen, released in 1965, was the first of several films about Cohen.
The tour did generate publicity, but Cohen complained to Jack McClelland in March 1965 that: the reading-tour made me an enemy of the whole country and ruined my Canadian life. This was not due solely to my obnoxious personality. It also resulted in the minimum attention for the book it proposed to promote. And worst of all it doesn’t look like we’re going to get any money out of it. Yankel, Yankel, why did you lie to us?
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DURING HIS VISIT political events in Canada intruded into Cohen’s artistic world. To Marian McNamara in New York he explained he had been:
torn on the conflicts arising from the so-called quiet revolution here in Quebec. The separatist feeling is very powerful and many of us are engaged in an agonizing reappraisal of the idea of Canada, the value of Confederation, and what the risks of independence would be … It is not easy to talk or resist the dreams of people who feel they have been humiliated and who are ready, today, now, to throw bombs.
On his return to Hydra, he got down to work and began to rewrite Beautiful Losers, often listening to a radio tuned to the Armed Forces network broadcast from Athens, which played mostly country and western music. Cohen incorporated Canada’s political turmoil into his work. The Quiet Revolution was changing the landscape of Montreal, turning it into a secular, francophone city, quietly assaulting the ruling anglophone business class. In 1963, the Front de Libération du Québec began its campaign of violence; in May, the explosion of a time bomb in a Westmount mailbox seriously injured an explosives expert. In a October 26, 1963, interview, Cohen remarked that the exploding mailboxes were an invitation to Canada to re-enter history and that the survival of the nation depended on the response to this event. On July 12, 1963, a bomb destroyed the statue of Queen Victoria on Sherbrooke Street. The brass head of the lifesize statue hurtled fifty feet away and the statue toppled. Chalked on the monument were the words “You’re coming to your goal,” and on the street, near the severed head, was scrawled “Here is the answer.”
Cohen refers to the bombing in Beautiful Losers as a proposal by F., who tells the narrator that he will commit suicide as he lays sticks of dynamite in the lap of the statue. “Queen Victoria and Me,” a poem in Flowers for Hitler, emphasizes the symbolic power of the figure. Cohen included the poem, with minimal musical accompaniment, on his Live Songs album of 1973. Cohen includes the October 1964 visit of the Queen and Prince Philip to Montreal in his novel, contrasting the new revolutionary fervor of Quebec with its decaying ties to the monarchy. The erotic mood of a separatist rally in the text is testimony to the link between politics, history, and sex.
Cohen’s own response to the movement was complex, although in a February 1964 letter from Montreal he wrote that “in ten years Quebec may not be part of Canada and I will stay in Quebec. Our government has recently established a Ministry of Culture, the first in North America.” He told George Johnston on Hydra, “I have made a commitment: to Art and my Destiny. All the other commitments are not commitments at all, but contracts, and I don’t like the legal world of compulsion.”
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IN Beautiful Losers F., a young Montreal poet, asserts that “the texts had got to me.” This was true of Cohen himself, who based his novel on several core readings: P. Edouard Lecompte’s Une vierge iroquoise: Catherine Tekakwitha, le lis de bords de la Mohawk et du St. Laurent (1656–1680) (1927); Kateri of the Mohawks by Marie Cecilia Buehrle; a volume entitled Jesuits in North America; an American comic book from 1943, Blue Beetle; a farmer’s almanac; a passage from Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols; and Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha.
Cohen had become very interested in the life and history of Catherine Tekakwitha, the Mohawk who may become the first Native Canadian saint. He found her fascinating because she “embodied in her own life, in her own choices, many of the complex things that face us always. She spoke to me. She still speaks to me,” he said in 1990. He most likely learned of her through her picture in the apartment of his friend Alanis Obamsawin, an Abenaquis Native, though Kahntineta Horne, a First Nations woman who later became a politician, may have told him about her. A statue of the saint sits on the stove of his Montreal house, and prints of her hang in his Los Angeles home and office. When he was in New York he would put flowers on her bronze statue in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
He also drew from Swedenborg: Arcana Caelestia or Heavenly Arcana, volumes 1 and 2, the Divine Providence, and Divine Love and Wisdom. He studied these volumes in January-February 1966 and each is heavily annotated and marked. He refers to the I Ching in his work, echoing his poem, “How We Used to Approach the Book of Changes: 1966,” published in The Energy of Slaves.
At this time, Steve Sanfield, Axel Jensen, George Lialios, and Cohen regularly met on Hydra to discuss such texts as the Book of Revelation, the I Ching, or Book of Changes, The Secret of the Golden Flower, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Jensen provided the key texts, which also included Tibetan Yoga and the Secret Doctrine and the translations of Evan-Wentz. Cohen introduced Hasidic thought into this mix, notably the work of Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem, as well as the Jewish prayer book.
In an unpublished essay from 1965, Cohen summarizes the importance of his education on Hydra in “esoteric enterprise”:
We have among us adepts of telepathy, telekinesis, levitation, apporte, teleplasty, dematerialization, telesthesy, psychometry, kryptoscopy, and other minor ocular skills which at best assume the importance of parlour games in relation to our ultimate goals, and which at worst may be viewed as a dangerous distraction from those high purposes. I, for one, am rather disposed to the more pessimistic interpretation of these phenomena, but the charity we all practice in regard to another’s discipline forbids me to treat the subject with any further aggression. We also have among us students of tantric sexual systems, and I regret to say, misplaced as my regret may be, that these students have often found themselves in adulterous predicaments.
In March 1965 Cohen told Jack McClelland that Beautiful Losers would be finished in a month “and if it gets by censors it could make money. I need cash—so would you decide how much you’d like to pay me.” Three weeks later Cohen reported that he had “written the Bhagavad Gita of 1965” and that “what happens to this book doesn’t matter because I have discovered a way to write a novel in three weeks and will turn out four in 1965. That is serious.” He then proposed new titles:
SHOW IT HAPPENING or SHOW IT HAPPENING EVERY DAY is the novel’s new title, or maybe THE HISTORY OF THEM ALL, or maybe THE BEAUTIFUL LOSERS, or just BEAUTIFUL LOSERS. Just these titles are worth a fortune to Ideal Hollywood. So you’ll get the mss. in April.
One of us is cracking up.
Two separate draft title pages of the novel read “BEAUTIFUL LOSERS / A Pop Novel” and, correspondingly, PLASTIC BIRCHBARK / A Treatment of the World.” Note sheets contain other variant titles: IT WAS A LOVELY DAY IN CANADA, INDIAN ROCKETS, INDIANS. One experimental section has the prose set to guitar chords.
The narrative of Beautiful Losers encompasses history, politics, and sex. As F. outlines it to the narrator, “You have been baptized with fire, shit, history, love, and loss.” The novel uses a multiplicity of narrative forms and languages, incorporating journals, letters, grammar books, historical narratives, advertisements, catalogues, footnotes, poetry, and drama. Encyclopedic, all-encompassing, and energetic, the text almost bursts its form, and at times the narrator must interject to remind the reader that “a man is writing this … A man like you.” Writing Beautiful Losers taught Cohen “how to treat big themes with a fast, personal technique,” although his work still went through many transformations.
Cohen assessed the novel in a letter to Cork Smith:
As far as the prologue goes, I can’t think of anything to put in a prologue, and I think it would interfere somehow with the way the whole book is launched, its continual forward motion. A prologue would seem to say to the reader: you see, it was all really make-believe, and here am I, your faithful author, standing with a pipe in my library, just another book in my career. But I swear it wasn’t like that at all. I have written some things, even parts of The Favorite Game, that came out of my sense of a career, but every word of the new book is antagonistic to the very idea of career. Your colleague hit on something very true, I think, in his concern for the reader mistaking the book for non-fiction. It is non-fiction, although it would serve none of us to let this get around, in fact the notion must be rigorously suppressed. I believe this will be a problem of the presentation of the book on the market. It is non-fiction in the sense that there is more of the unscreened author on every page than usually appears in a work of the imagination, and this is because the book is really a long confessional prayer attempting to establish itself on the theme of the life of a saint, meditation on a tight rope, slipping off to circus screams, catching it again in the crotch, and all the men in the audience blink—they know what it feels like. To get pretentious, more than anything the book resembles the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, in the way that he requires the student to Visualize the stages of the life of Jesus, to actually see Nazareth, the real landscape, never to leap into glory, but to move from the fact into mystery, mystery is always grounded in the ordinary fact, mystery has a narrow entrance. It is fiction because I use a fictional construction, characters, scene setting, parodies of pornographic suspense—because all of the apparata of religious perception have withered, in me and in you, and we are offended by any accounts of Mystery which are not presented in fictional or anthropological terms. Because I could not write or believe in a book called Cohen’s Meditations, I had to make a story out of prayer. I believe I had enough craft to be able to pull it off, and a lot of the joy in the book comes directly from pride in craft, ordinary fictional craft. Again and again, I had to reassure myself and the reader that it was only fiction, and when we believed it and relaxed, then I could really dive into the prayer which itself (I think) is composed, at the bottom, of real facts, buttons, doubts, garbage, pie-throwing, and you have to move through all the shit before you can use the pure vocative. Anyhow, this is all postmortem. If the book is one of those rare books that is still read three years after it is published, or maybe even five years, it will have become less and less fictional.
During the writing of Beautiful Losers, Cohen had continued his practice of fasting. He felt that it helped focus the mind on creation and also produced a physical manifestation of the holiness of his calling. The absence of food, the denial of pleasure, revivified the importance of his task, following the Judaic tradition of sanctifying the self through exerting control over the appetites. The sanctity was somewhat compromised by the aid of amphetamines, however, which kept him awake and killed his appetite. “My fast has been following me and I have been following my fast,” Cohen writes. His spiritual sustenance diminishes his physical hunger, he explains, and he rejoices in the emptiness of his body.
After he completed the novel, he broke down. With the text finally finished, he decided to take a break and go to another island. He hadn’t prepared himself, however, for the hot afternoon sun when he returned by boat. He nearly passed out when he got home and had to drag himself to bed. He didn’t eat for more than ten days. He hallucinated and lost weight, going down to 116 pounds. Too many amphetamines coupled with sunstroke had caused his breakdown. But the day the storks came to Hydra was the day he recovered. Every year the storks stop over on their way to Africa and nest for one night on the highest buildings, usually churches, and then leave the next morning. When the storks left, Cohen had regained his strength.
The unorthodox nature of the novel made for some difficulties. Viking required eight readings of Beautiful Losers before deciding finally to publish it. Even then, they were not sure of what they had approved. One reader referred to the book as “Canada with the Maple Leaf snatched off—it is a serious put-on, rich and raunchy, terrifying and funny. It is a truly experimental novel, in which, I admit, I don’t always know where he’s going, but I like the way he travels.” Brendan Gill of The New Yorker, Norman Holmes Pearson of Yale, and Leslie Fiedler of Buffalo all offered praise, Fiedler writing that it was an “honest-to-God pop art novel, with an R.C. Pocahontas and all.” McClelland also went to outside readers to confirm his judgment that it was a brilliant book. “It astounds and baffles me and I don’t really know what to say about it. It’s wild and incredible and marvellously well written, and at the same time, appalling, shocking, revolting, disgusting, sick, and just maybe it’s a great novel. I’m damned if I know.”
Cohen’s response to McClelland’s letter of acceptance was a six-page statement beginning with a parodic dialogue between offended Canadian critics and a defensive Cohen. It opens with Cohen telling these critics that he was the author only “for a brief period. Soon it will be the book that you have written, and you will treasure it.” The letter continues in the tradition of the trial scene of Leopold Bloom in the “Circe” episode of Ulysses:
— Fiend of the Kaballa! Explain yourself! We happen to know that even Milton Wilson hates your book.
— The authorship of the book is already among you. I have already lost it. I am the one man who has not written it.
— The associates of Jack McClelland are easily certain that you are a sick phony and they have conveyed this opinion to their associate, Jack McClelland, who resists it with that true and baffled courage with which a man who longs to be a pagan resists the voice of his conscience.
— Sirs, do not apply for pity.
— Eeeek! Jew Cohen, you’ve condescended too far this time. You have written a disgusting book and we intend to punish you with the G[overnor] G[eneral’s] award, so that you will be hidden forever from the Americans.
The dialogue continues with charges of the novel’s filth, fetishism, and fantasy. Cohen responded by declaring “the book I hold is absolutely empty, it contains not a trace of anyone, especially me.” He also outlined his terms for publication to McClelland, including control over the cover and jacket copy. He was still smarting at the poor job with Flowers for Hitler: the “exhibitionism I argued off the front cover turned up on the back. We’ve got to avoid all hints of this sort of thing with Beautiful Losers.” He also didn’t want quotes from critics on the back cover. Of “Canadian critical opinion, I say this in all truthfulness, there is not a single mind in the whole dreary heap that I can take seriously, whether they turn their attentions to me in attitudes of censure or praise.” As always there was the matter of money: “if you can get that $500 [the advance] to me quickly you would be contributing to my mental health. So let’s say, to put it in writing, that I accept your publishing offer in general, and that we will work out details in our usual unofficial gentlemanly way.”
McClelland agreed to Cohen’s supplying biographical copy and approving jacket copy for the novel. Part of Cohen’s own description of the book was adopted for the jacket, which reads:
Driven by loneliness and despair, a contemporary Montrealer tries to heal himself by invoking the name and life of Catherine Tekakwitha, an Iroquois girl whom the Jesuits converted in the 17th Century, and the first Indian maiden to take an Oath of Virginity. Obsessed by the memory of his wife Edith, who committed suicide in an elevator shaft, his mind tyrannized by the presence of F., a powerful and mysterious personage who boasted of occult skills and who was Edith’s lover, he embarks on a wild and alarming journey through the landscape of the soul. It is a journey which is impossible to describe and impossible to forget … Beautiful Losers is a love story, a psalm, a Black Mass, a monument, a satire, a prayer, a shriek, a road map through the wilderness, a joke, a tasteless affront, an hallucination, a bore, an irrelevant display of diseased virtuosity, a Jesuitical tract, an Orange sneer, a scatological Lutheran extravagance, in short a disagreeable religious epic of incomparable beauty.
The categories are there, Cohen is saying; take your pick.
But even the manuscript, it seemed, would not cooperate: after the book had been accepted, Cohen wrote, “I lost my only carbon of the original when a sudden wind sent pages scattering to the sea during an outdoor reading in Hydra. Only because my NY agent could get another copy could I proceed with revisions.” But advance sales were promising; pre-publication orders reached a surprising 3100 copies. It was also being read by a number of movie producers: Otto Preminger, the MCA group, Ulu Grosbard, and Alexander Cohen, for a possible movie option.
Release of the novel in Canada created a problem for Jack McClelland: censorship. He expected the book would be banned, hence, the small advance. The marketing strategy proceeded with advance copies and notices to the trade that the book was a strong, rewarding work. Promotion, McClelland explained, would avoid the sensationalist approach.
Replies from advance readers were too cautious or negative to use. But McClelland went forward with a gala launch party at the Inn on the Park in Toronto, held on March 29, 1966, nearly a month before the official publication date. The launch was attended by journalists, academics, politicians, broadcasters, and publishers, as well as writers, filmmakers, and general readers. The original invitation list included over four hundred names and read like the Who’s Who of Canada: Robertson Davies, F.R. Scott, Earle Birney, Hugh MacLennan, Northrop Frye, Douglas LePan, Milton Wilson, Phyllis Gotlieb, Nathan Cohen, Morton Shulman, Irving Layton, Peter Desbarats, Peter Gzowski, Robert Fulford, William French, Pierre Berton, Mavor Moore, Patrick Watson, Harold Town, Timothy Findley, Adrienne Clarkson, Morley Callaghan, Marshall McLuhan, Ramsay Cook, and George Grant.
Posters showed a photograph of Cohen dressed in a turtleneck and jacket, staring intensely at a manuscript with pen in hand. It was a meditative posture designed to offset the potentially scandalous novel. Also on display was the cover art by Harold Town. Nearly three hundred people turned up at the lavish party, where the following telegram was received and read out: “Live Forever Leonard Cohen / Assorted Shy Bacchantes.”
The University of Toronto, which had begun acquiring Cohen’s papers in 1964, bought the manuscript of Beautiful Losers a month before the book was to be published, paying Cohen almost six thousand dollars, a substantial sum for him. The purchase underscored his stature in Canada at only thirty-one and showed confidence in his new work, since it had yet to be released.
Reviews of the novel began to appear in April and reaction was intense. Journalist and critic Robert Fulford both praised and damned the book, dismissing it as “a fantasy wrapped in a fable,” adding:
this is, among other things, the most revolting book ever written in Canada. Far from encouraging sexual drives, it will if anything mute them. The book is an important failure. At the same time it is probably the most interesting Canadian book of the year.
A few days later, Fulford reported that a Toronto bookstore had failed to sell any of its twenty-five copies of the novel in the first eight days of publication. Cohen’s appearance on the current affairs show This Hour Has Seven Days on CBC television helped sales despite unfavorable reviews across the country. Austin Clarke in the Toronto Telegram objected to the paper-thin characters, stilted dialogue, and exhibitionist pedantry. Miriam Waddington could say no more than “the story concerns three sexually versatile people.” The Deer Park Public Library in Toronto circulated its three copies of the novel with Fulford’s review attached as a warning. Poet bill bissett responded more positively; in the magazine Alphabet he wrote, “i give the book of Cohens a good review, a great review, easily million stars.” Few critics shared his enthusiasm, although Cohen maintained, “It’s the best thing I’ve ever done. It’s a technical masterpiece.”
Cohen was unhappy with distribution of the book, however. Jack McClelland pointed out that such stores as Simpson’s and W.H. Smith had decided that they didn’t want to take the risk of handling such a controversial work. McClelland had strenuously defended the book as a work of great energy to George Renison of W.H. Smith, explaining that “most of the people interested in pornography would not begin to understand either Cohen’s purpose or his accomplishment,” but to no avail.
On the matter of the $6.50 price, which Cohen thought too high, McClelland cited his production costs; he had imported printed sheets from the United States and bound them in Canada; the duty on the sheets was ten percent and there was an eight percent exchange on the U.S. dollar. An expensive jacket and a good binding had been used. More than three hundred copies of the four-thousand-copy run had been distributed as review copies. Then there was the cost of the posters, promotional materials, press releases, and the expensive launch party (which McClelland thought had been of little value “because you [Cohen] didn’t think it suited your image or were unwilling to put yourself out”). McClelland implored Cohen to do more radio and tv interviews but to avoid “calling it a pornographic book yourself … People have been hanged for less.”
By the summer of 1966, Cohen’s popularity had reached a new height when it was reported that he had accepted a position as a tv commentator for the CBC in Montreal. Robert Fulford began a column by saying, “It is pleasant to think that Canada may soon have a poet who is also a TV star, or a TV star who is also a poet.” Interviewed about this unusual development, Cohen replied, “I thought it was time to get into mass communications.” With a female co-star, he was to do short interviews and films. “I’d like to make something beautiful. I’d like to get close to the viewers, get them to participate in the show, even send in home movies. And I’d like to help re-establish English Montreal as a community,” he explained. But the television show never came off; nor did the proposal in November that he become part of a new CBC network show produced by Daryl Duke and titled Sunday. Though his heart lay in novels and poetry, Cohen had begun to realize the power of the electronic media.
Poetry expressed his longing and it nurtured him artistically, but it didn’t pay the bills, and poetry, Cohen wrote, “is no substitute for survival.” Parasites of Heaven, a collection of poems, was published in 1966, containing poems that dated back to 1957. An enigmatic four-line poem begins the slight book: “So you’re the kind of vegetarian / that only eats roses / Is that what you mean / with your Beautiful Losers.” The chief value of the collection is that it registers a shift in Cohen’s outlook from satisfaction to discontent with the isolation of Hydra. He felt the need to join, in some fashion, the experiences of his audience and redefine his past. “How can I use the gull’s perfect orbit / round and round the hidden fish, / is there something to do as the sun / seizes and hardens the ridge of rocks?” he asks. The collection received mixed reviews and modest sales and Cohen contemplated another career.