I'm Your Man (12 page)

As he had during his last stay in London, Leonard spent time with Nancy Bacal, who had since moved out of the Pullmans' house. Through Bacal, he came to know an Afro-Caribbean man from Trinidad named Michael X. Like Trocchi, Michael X was a complex, charismatic and troubled man. “Leonard was fascinated with Michael,” says Nancy Bacal. “Everyone was. He was an intriguing man, all things to all people. He was a poet and rabble-rouser and a charmer and a bullshitter and a lovely, joyous, marvelous man and a potentially dangerous man. And so Leonard was drawn to him, as I was obviously.” Before Nancy and Michael X became lovers in 1962, Michael de Freitas, as he was then named, had been a hustler whose résumé included working as an enforcer for Peter Rachman, a London slum landlord so notoriously iron-fisted that his last name has entered the lexicon.
*
Over time, Michael de Freitas had amassed his own little empire of music clubs and hookers. But Michael X, the man Bacal lived with, was a civil rights activist, an articulate man and a bridge between London's black underground and the white proto-hippie community. Together, Michael and Nancy founded the London Black Power Movement. They “churned out pamphlets on Xerox machines aimed to change the world for the better.” On this and subsequent trips to London, Leonard got to know Michael “very well.” He, Nancy, Michael and Robert Hershorn, when he was in London, would spend evenings in Indian restaurants, deep in discussions about art and politics.

“Michael said to me he was completely against arming the blacks in America,” Leonard told a journalist in 1974. “He said it was crazy, they would never be able to resist that machine. They own the bullets and the armaments factories and the guns. So you give the blacks a few guns and have them against armies? He was even against knives. He said we should use our teeth, something everybody has. That was his view of the thing. It was a different kind of subversion. The subversion of real life to implant black fear.”
14
Leonard recalled going to Michael's house and complimenting him on a drink he'd given him. “God, how do you make this?” Leonard asked. Michael replied, “You don't expect me to tell you. If you know the secrets of our food, you know the secrets of our race and the secrets of our strength.”

As Bacal says, “These were very outrageous times. It was as if everything was and wasn't political. You never knew how far it would go or how dangerous it would get or how effective it would be or if it was just another flower [power] episode. Michael was one of these people who might say something as a joke but you never really knew what was truth and what wasn't—which made him fascinating, because we don't really know in life what is truth and what is fabrication or a dream. He just lived like that, openly. It was very lively.”
*

Rather too lively as it turned out. In 1967, when things started getting too dark, Bacal left Michael. That same year, her former partner became the first black person to be imprisoned under Britain's Race Relations Act—a statute originally passed to protect immigrants from racism—after calling for the shooting of any black woman seen with a white man; Bacal is white. On his release from prison, now using the name Michael Abdul Malik, he founded a Black Power commune run from a storefront in North London, supported and funded by wealthy, often celebrated white people. John Lennon and Yoko Ono donated a bag of their hair to auction. Lennon also paid Michael's bail when he was arrested for murder. The killing took place in Trinidad, Michael's home country, where he had returned to start another revolutionary commune. Two of the commune's members, one the daughter of a British politician, were found hacked to death, reportedly for disobeying Michael's orders to attack a police station.

In London Michael X had told Leonard—perhaps in jest, perhaps not—that he planned to take over the government of Trinidad. When he did, he said, he would appoint Leonard minister of tourism. An odd office, you might think, to choose for Leonard; he might have made a better minister of arts. “I thought it was rather odd too,” said Bacal, “but for some reason Leonard thought it was marvelous.” In some ways Michael X had him nailed; from Michael's point of view, as a black man in London involved in revolutionary politics, Leonard was a tourist, just as he had been in Havana. “I remember them shaking hands on it,” said Bacal. “Leonard was very, very pleased and happy, and that was the end of that story.” The end of De Freitas/X/Malik's story came in 1975, when he was hanged for murder. The Trinidad government ignored pleas for clemency from people in the U.S., UK and Canada, many of them celebrities. They included Angela Davis, Dick Gregory, Judy Collins and Leonard Cohen.

I
n London in 1962, Leonard continued to turn out pages for Stella Pullman. He stayed in London for as long as he could stand to—four months, which was four weeks more than he managed the first time. He did not quite finish the revisions to his novel, but he was making great inroads into a new book of poetry. By the summer he was back in his house on Hydra, playing host to his mother. Masha still fretted that her boy wasn't looking after himself, but this time, rather than send in the consulate, she decided to go there and check on him herself. Marianne and little Axel moved in with a friend for the duration of her visit. Although Masha knew Marianne in Montreal and was aware that she was living with Leonard, there was a strong sense that she would not have been comfortable being under the same roof with her son and his Scandinavian, non-Jewish girlfriend.

Forsaken by one woman who loved him—if only temporarily and with his collusion—and engulfed by another, Leonard was unable to write. Masha stayed with him for a month. When she left, Leonard returned gratefully, joyfully, to his life with Marianne, little Axel and his Olivetti, and finished the novel he had variously retitled
The Mist Leaves No Scar, No Flesh So Perfect, Fields of Hair, The Perfect Jukebox
and, finally,
The Favorite Game.

Seven

Please Find Me, I Am Almost 30

A
biography is considered complete,” Virginia Woolf wrote in
Orlando,
“if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand.” True, if not words to warm the heart of a biographer. Autobiographers have it easy; they can stand in front of the mirror and wear any mask they fancy.
The Favorite Game
is a sort of autobiography, though more accurately it's a sort of biography. A sort of biography of Leonard Cohen written, and at the same time ghostwritten, by Leonard Cohen. It recounts Leonard's life from childhood to early manhood through an alter ego named Lawrence Breavman, who looks like Leonard and has (name changes aside) the same family, friends, lovers and accumulation of experiences, to which he may or may not have reacted in the exact same way as Leonard did. Or as Leonard believed, or might like to think he did, autobiography, even sort of autobiography, can be one of the most fictional of genres. First novels often have a good deal of autobiography, but to complicate matters further,
The Favorite Game
was not technically Leonard's first novel. Before that there was the unpublished
Ballet of Lepers,
the unfinished
Famous Havana Diary,
and all those unpublished or unfinished, to some degree, autobiographical short stories, stacked up like mirror-lined Leonard Cohen Russian dolls reflecting, and deflecting, ad infinitum.

It is a beautifully written book and very funny in a dark, wry, incisive, exuberant, erotic, self-aware, playful, Cohenesque kind of way. It opens with scars: scars of beauty (his lover's pierced ear), scars of war (his father's battle wound), the scar from a fight with a boyhood friend over aesthetics (the correct style for a snowman's clothes). And it ends with a scar, the indelible memory of a game he played as a child and the mark a body leaves in the snow. In between, our self-inflated yet self-mocking, scarred hero chronologically contends with his father's death, Jewish summer camp, the synagogue, sexual longing, getting laid, and becoming a writer—“blackening pages,” possibly the debut of Leonard's much-used line to describe his work. Although it irked Leonard that some reviewers dealt with the book as if it were autobiography, not a work of art, and though the contents of the novel might not stand up in court, it still provides useful evidence on Leonard's life for a biographer tired of digging in the trenches, who fancies a few hours in a comfy chair in the ivory tower.

The unconventional form in which Leonard arranges his “life” resembles a film more than a novel—more specifically an art-house coming-of-age film and a buddy movie, in which Breavman/Leonard and Krantz/Mort play the “two Talmudists delighting in their dialectic, which was a disguise for love.” Each chapter of his account of how his life led to his becoming the writer of this story is presented as a separate scene, which he scripts, directs, stars in, and at the same time observes from the back row, smiling, while perfectly executing the popcorn-box trick on the girl in the next seat.

The Favorite Game
was published in September 1963 in the UK by Secker & Warburg, and in the U.S. the following year by Viking. Reviews on both sides of the Atlantic were positive. The U.S.
Saturday Review
described it as “interior-picaresque, extraordinarily rich in language, sensibility and humour.” The
Guardian
newspaper in the UK called it “a song of a book, a lyrical and exploratory bit of semiautobiography.” It even made it into Britain's esteemed
Times Literary Supplement,
earning a short yet favorable critique in an “Other New Novels” roundup. The Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje praised its “tightly edited, elliptical poetic style”
1
and pointed out connections with James Joyce's
Portrait of an Artist
. (There were indeed several, and Leonard did study Joyce at McGill University with Louis Dudek.) Some years later, writer T. F. Rigelhof made comparisons with Hungarian-Canadian writer Stephen Vizinczey's
In Praise of Older Women,
likewise “poignant, hilarious and erotically-charged.” Both novels, Rigelhof wrote, “were too brave and unbridled for Jack McClelland.”
2
McClelland might have been slow to warm to a book that would become a cult classic, but he was by no means conservative in his tastes. According to the writer and editor Dennis Lee, who later worked for him, McClelland was a flamboyant man, “a real wild man, who kept pace with some of the wilder writers he was publishing.” If he had an issue with Leonard's book, it was less likely to be its sexual content than that it was not poetry, and he had signed Leonard, personally and at first sight, as a poet. McClelland did eventually publish
The Favorite Game,
seven years behind the British. Until that time, Leonard's first novel was available in Canada only on import.

Still, life continued to lead Leonard back to Montreal, as it would for periods in the early and midsixties. “We didn't have any money so he went to Montreal. He left because he had to,” said Marianne, who mostly stayed behind on Hydra, “not because he wanted to. He had to make money.” The checks that arrived for him on the ferry rarely amounted to more than $20 at a time. Marianne helped out where she could. She sold her house at the top of the hill, took modeling assignments, and, when the annual dividend arrived from a small inheritance she had, she paid the tab that they had run up at Katsika's. Leonard and Marianne did not spend much on themselves, but there was the child to feed and clothe. They simply did not have enough. So, in order to keep the dream alive of living as a writer on an island for another year, Leonard hustled for money in Montreal. It became an increasingly tiring enterprise. It did not help when, in 1964, George Johnston and Charmian Clift, the first to show Leonard the possibility of leading such a life, decided to leave Hydra and move back to Australia. Johnston's latest book,
My Brother Jack,
was a bestseller—something that all the expat writers were hoping for to solve their financial problems.
*
But Johnston, in his fifties now, was suffering from tuberculosis. He wanted to go home for medical treatment and to capitalize on his success.

Leonard, no youngster himself by the standards of the sixties with his thirtieth birthday approaching, soldiered on, applying for grants and taking the odd job. He looked into the possibility of selling movie rights to
The Favorite Game,
but there were no takers until 2003, when the Canadian filmmaker Bernar Hébert made a film of it, curiously turning it into more of a conventional narrative on-screen than it was in the novel. Leonard also approached a Montreal book dealer with his archive of manuscripts, this time with more success. In 1964 the director of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, Marian Brown, purchased the first of its collection of the Cohen papers.

It would be wrong though to picture Leonard plodding woefully through his hometown, black cloud above his head, begging bowl in hand. Although he often felt the need to escape from Montreal, he loved the place. Montreal for Leonard was much like Dublin was to Joyce. He immersed himself in the city, luxuriating in the company of friends. Lovers also. Leonard was devoted to women, and they returned the sentiment in numbers that increased with his renown. As Leonard saw it, he had slaved for years trying to write “the perfect sonnet to attract the girl,”
3
then he had looked up from his “blackened pages” to find that women were making themselves sexually available. It had happened on Hydra, and now it was happening in Montreal. “It was terrific,” he said. “It was a moment where everybody was giving to the other person what they wanted. The women knew that's what the men wanted.”
4
Asked whether having so much of what he wanted devalued it for him, he said, “Nobody gets the right amount in terms of what they think their appetite deserves. But it lasted just a few moments, and then it was back to the old horror story. . . . I'll give you this if you give me that. You know, sealing the deal: what do I get, what do you get. It's a contract.”
5
Leonard did not like contracts. He did not have one with McClelland; it was a handshake, a gentleman's agreement. It was not a question of loyalty for Leonard but of having freedom, control and an escape hatch.

Leonard had rented a furnished duplex in the west of Montreal, an old stagecoach house. Once again Marianne flew out to join him. The house was within walking distance of McGill University, and on warm days Leonard would go there and sit in the spot in front of the Arts Building where the grass curved down like a bowl and where people played guitar and sang. It was here that Erica Pomerance first saw him. Like most McGill art students, she knew who Leonard was and counted herself among the “circle of admirers” that surrounded him on the grass on the campus or in “the continental hipness of Le Bistro. If you were looking for Leonard,” says Pomerance, “Le Bistro was the first place you would go.”

Le Bistro looked like someone had smuggled it in from Paris, with its zinc-topped horseshoe bar, blackboard menu and long mirror along one wall. On another wall, Leonard had scribbled a poem:

    
MARITA

    
PLEASE FIND ME

    
I AM ALMOST 30

“Marita,”
SELECTED POEMS 1956–1968

He had written it in response to having had his advances spurned by Marita La Fleche, a Montreal boutique owner, who told him to come back when he had grown up. Le Bistro was the meeting place of choice for both French- and English-speaking artists and intelligentsia, who would sit there, talking, long into the night, drinking red wine and smoking French cigarettes. On any given night you might see Leonard, Irving Layton, Mort Rosengarten, Derek May, Robert Hershorn, the sculptor Armand Vaillancourt and Pierre Trudeau, the socialist writer and law professor who would go on to become prime minister of Canada and whose beige Humphrey Bogart raincoat became as famous as Leonard's blue one.

Another regular haunt was the 5th Dimension, a coffee bar and folk club on Bleury Street. Leonard was with Hershorn the night he first met Pomerance there. Leonard remarked to Hershorn that she reminded him of Freda Guttman, his old girlfriend at McGill, and introduced himself. Pomerance says, “He was a ladies' man, an extremely magnetic personality, someone with a special aura, even before he burst on the music scene. I was eighteen and very impressed by these people. They were very sophisticated and very much into their own style in the way they dressed—black, very simple—and in what they talked about, art and literature mostly, not so much politics. They just seemed to have a handle on life. They were so sure of themselves and where they were going, and at the same time not too focused on any specific thing except creativity and art. As a younger girl I guess they were my ideal, particularly Leonard and Derek May. Leonard seemed to be the epitome of cool.”

For a while, Leonard courted her. “He didn't seduce you in the typical way; he was very obtuse, very laid back. You felt drawn to him on some sort of spiritual level.” He took her to the house on Belmont Avenue, where his mother still kept his bedroom. “There were photographs of his dad and of him as a boy. We smoked hash and he nearly seduced me in that room. But I was still a virgin, and I remember thinking that even though he was hard to resist I didn't want to make love for the very first time with someone who was living with another woman.” She was referring to Marianne.

Leonard introduced the young woman to his mother. “A very attractive woman, very strong face, strong features, with steely gray hair and dressed like a high-class Westmount Jewish woman who had means,” recalls Pomerance, herself a Montreal Jew. “She was halfway in the old world and halfway in the new. She ruled the roost; she was what you would call now a domineering mother. My feeling was that she was thirsty. She wanted to be let into Leonard's life and his successes.” Leonard, though, “was like quicksilver, a free spirit who looked like he was doing just what he wanted and you couldn't tie him down anywhere. I think she would have liked to have had more of a piece of the pie in terms of having more time with him, but Leonard would come and go. When he'd enough of her he escaped, but he always remained close to her.”

After dispensing with her virginity elsewhere, Pomerance “did not remain resistant forever” to Leonard's charms. “He took me to all the haunts where he took most of his paramours, like the Hotel de France, which was this seedy hotel which he loved, on Saint Laurent Street on the corner of Saint Catherine, and we went for walks in the mountains. At one point he took me to his house,” she says, referring to where Leonard was living with Marianne. “That's where I heard him play guitar for the first time. We sat around and smoked a bit, because Leonard was into pot and hash, and we'd jam.” Pomerance played guitar and sang. “I remember Leonard liking a western style of music.”

Leonard also introduced her to Marianne. “She seemed so cool and beautiful and calm,” says Pomerance. “Everything I wasn't was this woman. I think they must have had an understanding. He probably brought other women there he was having casual relationships with, and then when you were there it was obvious Marianne was his common-law wife, his muse, the queen, and that she had a tremendous amount of respect and they seemed to be on an equal footing. She was very nice and warm and very accepting—you didn't feel that she was jealous or anything—but I think that she probably put up with a lot to remain with him, because he was moody and he had his own rules and needed his freedom. I remember one day, it was his birthday, we went back to his room in his mother's house and he was lying down on his bed, and he had this yellow rose on his chest and he was just being very, very passive and Buddha-like, inviolable and untouchable, in some remote area.