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Leonard Cohen was on the island of Hydra, where he had a refuge in a little white house up the hill from the ferry dock. He’d happened upon the island a decade earlier, after he fled London, which is where he’d gone to flee Montreal. “A large part of my life was escaping. Whatever it was,” he said later. “Even if the situation looked good, I had to escape, because it didn’t look good to me. There was a selfish line in that, but it didn’t seem so at the time, it just seemed a matter of survival.”
He was introduced to the island by a few compelling bohemians who got there before him and was drawn by the cheap living, the donkeys and poverty and dazzling light—the opposite of the crushing concrete skies of the Canadian winters, the patches of dirty snow that blanket the frozen grass for half the year. “I’d never been in a sunny place and I’d never known what the sun was,” he said, “so I fell in love with the sun, and a blond girl, and a white house.” The girl was Marianne Ihlen, about whom he wrote a few songs that everybody knows, like “So Long, Marianne” and “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.”
Cohen wrote the novel Beautiful Losers on the island, typing shirtless in the sun on speed, acid, and Quaaludes. Critics praised it, and there are still people who love it, but almost no one bought it at the time. He was on and off Hydra in the years of his rise from the small pond of Canadian letters into the Manhattan music world of Joan Baez and Nico and the Chelsea Hotel, where he was part of the scene but above it, in a suit when everyone was in jeans, someone who was bleak and funny and up to something else, and who evolved into a singular figure as the sixties wore on and wore thin.
By the fall of 1973 Cohen had drifted out of Marianne’s life as he’d drifted out of many others. Now he was on the island with a baby, his first son, Adam, and with a dark-haired woman named Suzanne—not Suzanne of the song “Suzanne,” who was a dancer he’d once known in Montreal, but a different Suzanne, who he’d met in New York. They weren’t married in the legal sense, but she was Adam’s mother, and he described her in writing as his wife. He was almost forty and no longer travelling light.
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If this story has two magnetic poles, and the first is the Sinai desert, then the other is the Gate of Heaven, even though none of the story happens there. The Gate is five thousand miles west of Hydra, in Canada, over a continent and an ocean. If you’re driving from Toronto, take Highway 401 east into the great flat country along the St. Lawrence, past the town of Napanee and a Shorelines Casino, past stretches of swamp, stands of oak, and summer homes, past the terminus of English Canada at the gas station outside Bainsville, into Quebec at the Esso Couche-Tard, and by the neat industrial parks of Vaudreuil-Dorion that announce the approaches to Montreal. Climb Mount Royal toward the fierce Catholic cross on the hilltop. You might think that’s the Gate of Heaven—the people who put it up probably did—but it’s not the one we’re looking for.
The streets become more refined with altitude. This is Westmount. Find another cross, smaller and more polite, which the Anglicans put atop their heap of aspirational English stone at the Church of St. Matthias, then cross the street to a genteel fortress ringed with greenery. Every brick here suggests stability. Nothing hints that the building might be anything as wild as a portal to the divine—nothing but the discreet Hebrew letters identifying it as precisely that: Sha’ar Hashomayim. People here just call it the Sha’ar, the Gate.
The cornerstone of the Gate of Heaven came all the way from the land of Israel to be laid here in 1921 by Lyon Cohen. Lyon was the father of Nathan Cohen, who returned from World War I and married Masha, the daughter of a rabbi of genius from Kovno, Lithuania. The Cohens were descended from Temple priests, as their name denotes, and were leaders of the congregation. When Nathan’s son was thirteen he was called to the Torah in this building as Eliezer ha-Cohen—Eliezer the Priest—but his English name was Leonard.
There are synagogues where dishevelled men and women scream out the prayers on the Day of Atonement, fingers rigid and pointing to the ceiling, prayer shawls and kerchiefs askew, the fast weakening their bodies, spurring panic and repentance over the many failures of the past year. This isn’t that kind of synagogue. Here it’s lowered voices and Louboutin. This kind of place preserves the tradition in wax, sealing its untamed core, which is a transmission to a tribe of slaves from a ferocious deity leading them out of Egypt through the wastes of Sinai, incarnated as a pillar of smoke before their camp, imparting death and life and knowledge, raising them up with glimpses of Himself, smashing them down with marauders and plague, drawing water from rocks. In Westmount you can’t even imagine Sinai.
In 1964, when he was still just a Canadian poet, Cohen enraged listeners in Montreal with a speech dismissing the tidy edifice of the Jewish community’s life as a hollow perversion of their divine mission. “We cannot face heaven,” he said, the contempt in his voice audible in the old recording. “We have lost our genius for the vertical. Jewish novelists are sociologists. Horizontalists. And the residue of energy left from that great vertical seizure we had four thousand years ago—that we turn toward ourselves. We knock on our own doors and wonder that no one answers.” What was needed now, he inveighed, wasn’t priests but prophets, “dirty saints,” “monstrous hermits.” He called for “a moratorium on all religious services until someone reports a vision or breaks his mind on the infinite.” That was one reason that when Yom Kippur arrived in 1973, the synagogue’s most famous son wasn’t there. He hadn’t followed his father and uncles into the community leadership or the garment business. He was somewhere far away in the Mediterranean.
Cohen was stalked by depression for much of his life, and the months on Hydra before the war seem to have been dark. “I live here with a woman and a child,” he wrote. “The situation makes me kind of nervous.” An island is a place to escape to, but also a place where you’re stranded. This mood is expressed in his written account of the journey to Sinai, the beginning of which appears in the next chapter. The writing is often livid and obscene. The way he writes about women, and the way he related to them, was part of the style of those days but is out of step with our own times. It might come as a shock to those unfamiliar with his earlier poetry and novels—who know his transcendent hits without knowing what he was transcending, or whose memories of the man come from his last incarnation as a gentleman in a suit. This later version of Cohen quipped that the first time he really met a woman was when he was sixty-five. The poet at thirty-nine, the one who travelled to Sinai and who typed this manuscript, is in the grip of anger and urges. He’s trying to lose himself with women and drugs. He’s a harder character to love.
That fall he felt frustrated, perhaps even trapped, not just by his new family and by middle age, but by his music. There had been a tour through Europe the year before, including two dates in Israel, that he thought went badly. The sublime moments he strived for eluded him onstage. He was disgusted by the music business and what it had done to him. “Once, long ago, my songs were not sold; they found their way to people anyway,” he told an interviewer in March 1973. “Then people saw that profit could be made from them; then the profit interested me also.”
He started saying he was retiring. “It’s over,” Cohen said that same year in an interview with Roy Hollingworth of Melody Maker. “I wish everybody well on ‘the rock scene,’ and may their music be great. May there be some good songwriters—and there will. But I don’t want to be in it. I have songs in the air, but I don’t know how to put them down. Anyway, I’m going.” He went back to Hydra, and that’s where things stood at the beginning of October, on Yom Kippur.