I'm Your Man (10 page)

Leonard had fallen in love with Hydra from the moment he saw it. It was a place, he said, where “everything you saw was beautiful, every corner, every lamp, everything you touched, everything.” The same thing happened when he first saw Marianne. “Marianne,” he wrote in a letter to Irving Layton, “is perfect.”
10

I
t must be very hard to be famous. Everybody wants a bit of you,” Marianne Ihlen says with a sigh. There were muses before Marianne in Leonard's poetry and song and there have been muses since, but if there were a contest, the winner, certainly the people's choice, would be Marianne. Only two of Leonard's nonmusician lovers have had their photographs on his album sleeves and Marianne was the first. On the back of the naked, intimate
Songs from a Room,
Leonard's second album, there she sat, in a plain white room, at his simple wooden writing table, her fingers brushing his typewriter, her head turned to smile shyly at the camera and wearing nothing but a small white towel. For many of the young people seeing that picture for the first time in 1969—a troubled year, particularly for young people—it captured a moment and a need and longing that has gnawed at them ever since.

Marianne at seventy-five years old has a kind, round face, deeply etched with lines. Like Leonard, she does not enjoy talking about herself but is too considerate to say no; one might imagine that is how she ended up with a Norwegian-language book about her life with Leonard, after agreeing to do an interview for a radio documentary.
*
She is as modest and apologetic about her English, which is very good, as she once was about her looks. Despite having been a model, she could never understand why Leonard would say she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever met. Fifty-three years before, “twenty-two, blond, young, naïve and in love,” to the chagrin of her traditional Oslo family she had run off with Jensen, traveled around Europe, bought an old Volkswagen in Germany and driven it to Athens. An old woman invited them to stay and let them leave their car in her overgrown garden while they took a trip around the islands. On the ferry they met a fat, handsome Greek named Papas who lived in California, where he had a candy and cookie company that bore his name. They told him they were looking for an island. “He told us to get off at the first stop; it was Hydra.”

It was mid-December, cold and raining hard. There was one café open at the port and they ran for it. It was neon-lit inside and warmed by a stove in the middle of the room. As they sat shivering beside it, a Greek man who spoke a little English came over. He told them of another foreign couple living on the island—George Johnston and Charmian Clift—and offered to take them to their house. And so it all began. Axel and Marianne rented a small house—no electricity, outside toilet—and stayed, Axel writing, Marianne taking care of him. When the season changed, Hydra came alive with visitors, and the two poor, young, beautiful Norwegians found themselves invited to cocktail parties in the mansions of the rich; Marianne recalls, “One of the first people that we met was Aristotle Onassis.” During their time on Hydra, people of every kind drifted by. “There were couples, writers, famous people, homosexuals, people with lots of money who didn't have to work, young people on their way to India and coming from India, people running away from something or searching for something.” And there was Leonard.

Much had happened in Marianne's life in the three years between her arrival on Hydra and Leonard's. She and Axel had broken up, made up, then married. With the advance for his third novel, they bought an old white house on top of the hill at the end of the Road to the Wells. When the rains came, the street became a river that rushed like rapids over the cobblestones down to the sea. Her life with Axel was turbulent. The locals talked about Axel's heavy drinking, how when he was drunk he would climb up the statue in the middle of the port and dive from the top, headfirst. Marianne, they said, was a hippie and an idealist. She was also pregnant. She went back to Oslo to give birth. When she returned to Hydra with their first child, a boy they named for her husband, she found Axel packing, getting ready to leave with an American woman he told Marianne he had fallen in love with. In the midst of all this, Leonard showed up.

She was shopping at Katsikas's when a man in the doorway said, “Will you come and join us? We're sitting outside.” She could not see who it was—he had the sun behind him—but it was a voice, she says, that “somehow leaves no doubt what he means. It was direct and calm, honest and serious, but at the same time a fantastic sense of humor.” She came out to find the man sitting at a table with George and Charmian, waiting for the boat with the mail. He was dressed in khaki trousers and a faded green shirt, “army colors,” and the cheap brown sneakers they sold in Greece. “He looked like a gentleman, old-fashioned—but we were both old-fashioned,” says Marianne. When she looked at his eyes, she knew she “had met someone very special. My grandmother, who I grew up with during the war, said to me, ‘You are going to meet a man who speaks with a tongue of gold, Marianne.' At that moment she was right.”

They did not become lovers immediately. “Though I loved him from the moment we met, it was a beautiful, slow movie.” They started meeting in the daytime, Leonard, Marianne and little Axel, to go to the beach. Then they would walk back to Leonard's house, which was much closer than her own, for lunch and a nap. While Marianne and the baby slept, Leonard would sit watching them, their bodies sunburned, their hair white as bone. Sometimes he would read her his poems. In October, Marianne told Leonard that she was going back to Oslo; her divorce proceedings were under way. Leonard told her he would go with her. The three took the ferry to Athens and picked up her car, and Leonard drove them from Athens to Oslo, more than two thousand miles. They stopped off in Paris for a few days en route. Marianne remembers feeling like she was cracking up. Leonard, in turn, recalled “a feeling I think I've tried to re-create hundreds of times, unsuccessfully; just that feeling of being grown up, with somebody beautiful that you're happy to be beside, and all the world is in front of you, where your body is suntanned and you're going to get on a boat.”
11

From Oslo, Leonard flew to Montreal. If he was to stay on his Greek island, cheap as it was, he needed more money. From his rented apartment on Mountain Street he wrote to Marianne telling her of all his schemes. He had applied for another grant from the Canada Council and was confident of getting it. He was also “working very hard,” he said, on some TV scripts with Irving Layton. “Our collaboration is perfect. We want to turn the medium into a real art form. If we begin selling them, and I think we will, there will be a lot of money. And once we make our contacts,” he wrote, “we can write the plays anywhere.” They'd talked about writing years ago, Leonard and Layton, when they sat on the couch with Aviva, watching TV, improvising their own dialogue and scribbling it down on yellow legal pads. Layton was in much the same bind as Leonard, having been fired from his teaching job for one revolutionary comment too far, so they were pursuing the project with particular enthusiasm. “Irving and I think that with three months of intense work we can make enough to last us at least a year. That gives us nine months for pure poetry,” Leonard wrote. As for his second book of poetry,
The Spice-Box of Earth,
that would be published in the spring; the publicity might help them sell the screenplays. There would be a book tour too, he said, and he wanted Marianne to come with him. “Mahalia Jackson is on the record player, I'm right there with her, flying with you in that glory, pulling away the shrouds from the sun, making music out of everything.” Man, he wrote a mean letter. The telegram he sent was shorter but equally effective: “Have a flat. All I need is my woman and her child.” Marianne packed two suitcases and flew with little Axel to Montreal.
12

Six

Enough of Fallen Heroes

I
t was not easy for Marianne in Montreal. But then, it had not been too easy anywhere for Marianne after one Axel arrived and the other Axel left. Marianne loved Leonard and loved Montreal and got along well with his mother, whom she describes as “a beautiful, strong woman, who was sweet to me and the child.” But she knew no one in Montreal and had nothing to do, besides look after her son. Leonard on the other hand seemed to know everyone and had plenty to do. He and Irving Layton had completed two TV plays,
Enough of Fallen Heroes
and
Lights on the Black Water
(later retitled
Light on Dark Water
), which they submitted along with a play Leonard had written alone, titled
Trade.
They waited expectantly for the dollars and praise they were convinced would arrive by return of post. Nothing came.

Beauty at Close Quarters,
the novel Leonard had written in London, fared little better. The editors at McClelland & Stewart, as Leonard reported in a letter he sent the writer and critic Desmond Pacey, judged it “disgusting,” “tedious” and “a protracted love-affair with himself.”
1
Jack McClelland appeared to be confused as to what his golden-boy poet had sent him; was it an autobiography? Leonard answered that everything in the book had happened in real life bar one incident (the death of the boy at the summer camp in part 2), but that the protagonist, Lawrence Breavman, wasn't Leonard. He and Breavman “did a lot of the same things,” he wrote, “but we reacted differently to them and so we became different men.”
2
McClelland rejected the novel but remained enthusiastic about Leonard's second volume of poetry.
The Spice-Box of Earth
had been scheduled for publication in the spring of 1961. On March 30, the galleys were at the publisher's, ready for Leonard to look at. Only Leonard wasn't in Canada, he was in Miami, boarding a plane to Havana.

It is no great surprise that Leonard should have wanted to see Cuba. Lorca, his favorite poet, had spent three months there when the country was America's playground, calling it “a paradise” and extolling its virtues and vices.
3
The recent revolution had made it even more irresistible to Leonard, with his interest in socialism, war and utopias. What was puzzling about the trip was the timing. Leonard had gone to Montreal to make money, not spend it; after a two-year wait his second book was at last coming out, with its attendant publicity; and he was leaving behind the woman who had only recently, at his behest, moved continents to be with him. It was a dangerous time to visit too. Relations between America and Cuba had been tense since Castro's forces ousted the U.S.-friendly Batista government. When Leonard checked into his room in the Hotel Siboney in Havana, Castro and President Kennedy were in a face-off. There was talk of war. But this only added to the attraction.

So, you went there looking for a war?

“Yes, I did. Just because of the sense of cowardice that drives people to contradict their own deepest understanding of their own natures, they put themselves in dangerous situations.”

As a test?

“A kind of test, and hoping for some kind of contradiction about your own deepest conviction.”

Sounds like a male thing.

“Yeah. A stupid male treat.”

In Havana Leonard dressed as a revolutionary soldier: baggy, mud-green trousers; khaki shirt; beret. In tribute to Che Guevara, he grew a beard. It was an incongruous look. In one of four poems Leonard wrote in Cuba, he described himself, with some justification, as the sole tourist in Havana (“The Only Tourist in Havana Turns His Thoughts Homeward” in
Flowers for Hitler
). In the song he wrote twelve years later about his Cuban experiences, “Field Commander Cohen,” he described himself, with no justification whatever, as

    
our most important spy

    
wounded in the line of duty

    
parachuting acid into diplomatic cocktail parties.

He also began work on a new novel, to which he gave the title
The Famous Havana Diary
.

Two years into the new regime, the city was already fraying at the edges. There were broken windows in the modern offices of downtown Havana and cracks in the concrete through which weeds grew. The grand colonial houses where millionaires once lived were now home to peasants whose goats chewed lazily at brown stubble recognizable only to professional botanists as having once been lawn. But despite Castro's having overturned the moneylenders' tables, closed the casinos, rounded up the hookers and sent them off for retraining, there was still a nightlife in Havana and plenty of women to be found. Leonard found them. He drank into the early hours of the morning at La Bodeguita del Medio, one of Hemingway's favorite bars, and, following his routine in Montreal, New York and London, wandered the alleys of the old town, a notebook in one pocket, a hunting knife in the other.

Leonard spoke in an interview a year later of his “deep interest in violence.” “I was very interested in what it really meant for a man to carry arms and kill other men,” he said, “and how attracted I was exactly to that process. That's getting close to the truth. The real truth is I wanted to kill or be killed.”
4
There was not much violence or killing to be had, but he did succeed in getting arrested by a small troop of armed Cuban soldiers on a day trip to the seaside town of Varadero. Dressed in his army fatigues, he was taken for part of an American invasion force. After finally persuading them of his Canadian-ness, his socialist credentials and his support for Cuban independence, he posed smiling with two of his captors for a photograph, which they gave him as a souvenir.

Like a good tourist, Leonard wrote postcards. In the card he sent Jack McClelland, he joked about how good it would be for publicity if he should be killed in Cuba. He sent three cards to Irving Layton, including one with a picture of Munch's
The Scream
and a quip about another man who had fled from a woman, screaming. If this was a reference to himself and Marianne it was a curious one, since it was he who had asked her to come to Montreal, and their relationship was not over. But if Leonard sometimes appeared to court domesticity, he also ran from it. It was so much more exquisite to long for somebody than to have her there beside him.

On April 15 a group of eight Cubans exiled in the U.S. led bomber raids on three Cuban airfields. A couple of days later, late at night, writing at the table beside the window in the room of his Havana hotel, Leonard was surprised by a knock at the door. In the corridor was a man wearing a dark suit. He told Leonard that his “presence was urgently requested at the Canadian embassy.”
5
Leonard, still in his military khakis, accompanied the official; finally, Field Commander Cohen was being called to action.

At the embassy, Leonard was led into the vice consul's office. The vice consul did not seem impressed to see him. He told Leonard, “Your mother's very worried about you.”
6
Having heard the reports of the bomb attacks and talk of war, Masha got on the phone to a cousin, a Canadian senator, and urged him to call the embassy in Cuba and have them track Leonard down and send him home. Of all the reasons for this summons that had gone through Leonard's mind on the drive to the embassy, this was not one of them. At twenty-six years old he was long past the age of having his mother tug at his leash. At the same time he was rather on the old side for swashbuckling and dressing up. It was understandable that Masha would be concerned; war held little romance for her, since she had witnessed one and nursed one wounded veteran, Leonard's father. But Leonard chose to stay.

He was in Havana on the day of the Bay of Pigs invasion, April 17, 1961. From his hotel room he could hear antiaircraft fire and see troops running through the streets. He did not leave the city until April 26. Although he admired the revolutionaries and had seen many happy Cubans, he had also seen the long lines of people waiting anxiously outside police headquarters, trying to get news of relatives who had been rounded up by Castro's forces and imprisoned, artists and writers among them. Nothing was straightforward; “I felt that I was defending the island against an American invasion and planning that invasion at the same time,” he said. “I was behind everything. I couldn't see the megalomania that made up my perspective at that time.”
7
He admitted that he had “no faith” in his political opinions and that “they changed often,” saying, “I was never really passionate about my opinions even back then.” He was attracted to Communist ideas, but in much the same way as he was “attracted to the messianic ideas in the Bible,” he said: “the belief in a human brotherhood, in a compassionate society, in people who lived for something more than their own guilt.” He had gone to Cuba feeling “that the whole world was functioning for the benefit of [his] personal observation and education.”
8
Having observed, it was time to leave.

José Martí Airport swarmed with foreign nationals trying to get a seat on one of the few planes out of Havana. Leonard joined one long queue after another, finally procuring a ticket. When he stood in the last line at the departure gate, he heard his name called. He was wanted at the security desk. Officials had gone through his bag and found the photograph in which he posed with the revolutionary soldiers. With his black hair and sun-darkened skin, perhaps they thought he might have been a Cuban trying to escape. Leonard was taken to a back room and left in the charge of a teenage guard with a rifle. Leonard tried, unsuccessfully, to engage the young man in conversation. He told him he was Canadian and pleaded his case, but the boy just looked bored—the kind of boredom that might possibly be alleviated by shooting somebody. So Leonard sat quietly and stared out of the window at the plane he was supposed to be on. All of a sudden a tussle broke out on the runway. Armed guards rushed out onto the tarmac, including Leonard's, who in his enthusiasm failed to lock the door behind him. Leonard slipped out. Walking as calmly as he could, he headed for the departure gate and, unchallenged, went outside and up the steps into the plane.

B
ack in Canada, and back in civilian clothes, Leonard spent barely a week in Montreal before taking off again, this time for Toronto. He and Irving Layton had been invited to read at the Canadian Conference of the Arts on May 4. A clean-shaven Leonard read from
The Spice-Box of Earth
. Three weeks later, at 599 Belmont Avenue, the book was launched with a party over which Masha presided—a peace offering to her from Leonard, perhaps, for the Cuban escapade.

This was not the budget paperback Leonard had originally proposed to Jack McClelland but an elegant hardback, containing eighty-eight poems. Six of them dated back to Leonard's Columbia University days and had had their first printing in his literary magazine,
The Phoenix
. The book was dedicated jointly to the memory of his maternal grandfather, Rabbi Kline, and his paternal grandmother, Mrs. Lyon Cohen. On the dust jacket were comments from the literary critic H. N. Frye and the poet Douglas Lochhead, the first commenting that “his outstanding poetic quality, so far, is a gift for macabre ballad reminding one of Auden, but thoroughly original, in which the chronicles of tabloids are celebrated in the limpid rhythms of folksong,” and the second describing Leonard's poetry as “strong, intense and masculine,” with “a brawling spirit and energy.” There was also a paragraph about Leonard that appeared to have been written by Leonard himself in the third person. It painted a romantic picture of the author, mentioning his trip to Cuba and the year he spent writing on a Greek island. He quoted himself saying, in his familiar partly humorous, partly truthful fashion, “I shouldn't be in Canada at all. 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.”
9
Clearly though, his roots were more important to him than that. He ended with an unexpected attack on the modern buildings that were taking over his favorite streets in Montreal. This might well have been ironic; Leonard knew his old neighborhood had more serious things to worry about, now that its grand residences had become the target of militant French separatists and mailbox bombs. But Leonard was genuinely fond of the old Victorian houses, and if, for now at least, he seemed to have soured on change, it was understandable so soon after his experience in Havana, where he saw for himself that life post-revolution was no less desperate than it had been before.

The position Leonard occupied on the conservative-modernist scale was an ambiguous one. A CBC TV presenter, curious to know where he thought he stood as a writer, asked Leonard if he considered himself a “modern poet.” His answer was deflective. “I always describe myself as a writer rather than a poet, and the fact that the lines I write don't come to the end of the page doesn't qualify me as a poet. I think the term ‘poet' is a very exalted term and should be applied to a man at the end of his work. When you look back over the body of his work and he has written poetry,” Leonard said, “then let the verdict be that he's a poet.”

The Spice-Box of Earth
is the work of a major poet, profound, confident and beautifully written. The title makes reference to the ornate wooden box of fragrant spices used in the Jewish ceremony marking the end of the Sabbath and the beginning of the secular week, but this spice box is of earth. The poems dance back and forth across the border between the holy and the worldly, the elevated and the carnal. The opening poem, “A Kite Is a Victim,” presents the poet as a man with some control over the heightened world but whose creative work is also subject to strictures and restraints, just as the kite, though it appears to fly freely, is tethered like a fish on a line. The poet makes a contract in the poem with both God and nature and keeps it throughout the book, which abounds in orchards, parks, rivers, flowers, fish, birds, insects. The killing of a man (“If It Were Spring”) is romanticized through images from nature; “Beneath My Hands” likens Marianne's small breasts to upturned, fallen sparrows. In “Credo,” the grasshoppers that rise from the spot where a man and his lover have just had sex leads to thoughts on biblical plagues. Sex and spirituality share a bed in several poems. In “Celebration,” the orgasm from oral sex is likened to the gods falling when Samson pulled down their temples.