I'm Your Man (13 page)

“You could only get so much of him that he was willing to give at the moment. He was somebody who was not trying to fill up the spaces of silence with idle chatter; everything he did had to have meaning and importance. But on the other hand you got the feeling from him that time was seamless, that he didn't run on the same time or rhythm as other people. He didn't run after journalists, getting himself publicized; his magnetism is such that it's like a boat creating a wake and people are drawn to him and his ideas. For me what he emanated was model of creativity and freedom to explore and express.”
*

Throughout everything Leonard was writing, typing pages, filling notebooks. He was working on a new volume of poetry to follow up the successful
Spice-Box of Earth,
to which he had given the title
Opium and Hitler
. He sent the manuscript to Jack McClelland. His publisher objected to the title and, judging by the long correspondence between them, seemed not entirely convinced by the content. Michael Ondaatje, who, like Leonard, was published by Jack McClelland, wrote that McClelland was “uncertain of Cohen's being a genius, yet rather delighted at its possibility, and so constantly presenting him to the public as one.”
6

This would have been a comfortable position for someone of Leonard's sensibilities, able to float contentedly on a sea of praise while all the time shrugging modestly. But Jack McClelland could be far more critical in his letters to Leonard than he was when he talked about him to other people. He told Leonard he would publish his book anyway, “because you are Leonard Cohen”
7
—which was in many ways the inverse of a famous incident that would occur twenty years later, when the head of Leonard's U.S. record company, having heard Leonard's seventh album, would tell him, “Leonard, we know you're great, but we don't know if you're any good,”
8
and refused to release it.

Leonard's reply to McClelland contained none of his usual humor and mock braggadocio; it was angry, honest and sure of itself. He knew his book to be “a masterpiece,” he wrote. “There has never been a book like this, prose or poetry, written in Canada.” Yes he could write another
Spice-Box
and make everyone happy, himself included, since he had nothing against flattering reviews. But he had moved on. “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.”
9

Leonard also argued to keep the title. It would appeal, he wrote, to “the diseased adolescents who compose my public.”
10
But when it came down to it, Leonard was a practical man. He agreed to many of the revisions McClelland called for, saying, “I'll carve a little here and there, as long as I don't touch the bone.”
11
He ended up sending McClelland fifty new poems. He also gave the book a new name,
Flowers for Hitler,
and removed the dedication, which McClelland had disliked:

    
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:

    
THE DACHAU GENERATION

This bitter moniker had been taken from the poem Leonard wrote to Alexander Trocchi, his “public junkie” friend. In it, Leonard made excuses for his own inability to take such a committed stance:

    
 

    
I tend to get distracted . . .

    
by Uncle's disapproval

    
of my treachery

    
to the men's clothing industry.

    
I find myself . . . 

    
taking advice

    
from the Dachau generation . . .

Leonard had already felt his uncles' disapproval of
The Favorite Game;
they had been not well pleased, he said, with his description of them as having betrayed their priestly name of Cohen and pledged themselves only to financial success. (Nor for that matter had his uncles approved of his having written about Masha's stay in a mental hospital.)

The book was now dedicated not to the Dachau generation but to Marianne. He also wrote “A Note on the Title,” which, like the original dedication, was arranged in the form of a poem:

    
A

    
while ago

    
this book would

    
have been called

    
SUNSHINE FOR NAPOLEON

    
and earlier still it

    
would have been

    
called

    
WALLS FOR GENGHIS KHAN

In turn, McClelland agreed to some of Leonard's requests, in particular that the original design for the front cover be scrapped—Leonard's face, superimposed on a woman's naked body. “Nobody is going to buy a book the cover of which is a female body with my face for tits,” Leonard wrote in September 1964 in a long, heated letter to McClelland. “The picture is simply offensive. It is dirty in the worst sense. It hasn't the sincerity of a stag movie or the imagination of a filthy postcard or the energy of real surrealist humor.” He told McClelland that he would not be returning to Canada to promote the book. “I'd really be ashamed to stand beside a stack of them at a cocktail party. . . . So why don't we forget about the whole thing? You never liked the book very much.”
12

Flowers for Hitler
was published in the autumn of 1964. The dust jacket, which bore a different design, contained an excerpt from one of Leonard's letters to McClelland. “This book,” it read, “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. My sounds are too new, therefore people will say: this is derivative, this is slight, his power has failed. Well, I say that there has never been a book like this, prose or poetry, written in Canada. All I ask is that you put it in the hands of my generation and it will be recognized.”
13

Thematically,
Flowers for Hitler
“was not entirely new for Leonard; there had been sex, violence, murder and the Holocaust in his first two books of poems, as well as songs to lovers and celebrations of teachers and friends. What was different was its style. It was much less formal and its language freer and more contemporary, which made the darkness and torture it described seem more personal—self-torture, the darkness within—and the love it expressed, for Marianne, for Irving Layton, more heartfelt. As an epigraph Leonard chose the words of Primo Levi, a concentration camp survivor: “Take care not to suffer in your own homes what is inflicted on us here.” A warning not so much that history can repeat itself but that history is not something frozen in some other place and time; it's the nature of humanity.

In a 1967 interview in the University of British Columbia student paper the
Ubyssey,
Leonard explained, “[Levi is] saying, what point is there to a political solution if, in the homes, these tortures and mutilations continue? That's what
Flowers for Hitler
is all about. It's taking the mythology of the concentration camps and bringing it into the living room and saying, ‘This is what we do to each other.' We outlaw genocide and concentration camps and gas and that, but if a man leaves his wife or they are cruel to each other, then that cruelty is going to find a manifestation if he has a political capacity; and he has. There's no point in refusing to acknowledge the wrathful deities. That's like putting pants on the legs of pianos like the Victorians did. The fact is that we all succumb to lustful thoughts, to evil thoughts, to thoughts of torture.”
14

His interviewer, literary professor Sandra Djwa, asked Leonard if he wasn't mining the same seams as William Burroughs, Günter Grass and Jean-Paul Sartre in
Nausea
. He answered, “The only thing that differs in those writers and myself is that I hold out the idea of ecstasy as the solution. If only people get high, they can face the evil part. If a man feels in his heart it's only going to be a mundane confrontation with feelings, and he has to recite to himself Norman Vincent Peale slogans, ‘Be better, be good,' he hasn't had a taste of that madness. He's never soared, he's never let go of the silver thread and he doesn't know what it feels to be like a god. For him, all the stories about holiness and the temple of the body are meaningless. . . . The thing about Sartre is that he's never lost his mind. . . . The thing that people are interested in doing now is blowing their heads off and that's why the writing of schizophrenics like myself will be important.”
15

It was a curious answer. It appeared to be equal parts megalomania and madness, anti–New Age yet Newer Age, though with an Old Age patina. Or quite possibly he was high. Leonard clearly considered
Flowers for Hitler
an important book; in 1968 he would choose around half its content for his anthology
Selected Poems
. If Leonard truly believed, though, that
Flowers for Hitler
would prove too provocative for the literati and strip him of his “golden-boy poet” status, he would have been disappointed with the favorable reaction it received. It prompted the critic Milton Wilson to write in the
Toronto Quarterly
that Leonard was “potentially the most important writer that Canadian poetry has produced since 1950,” adding, “not merely the most talented, but also, I would guess, the most professionally committed to making the most of his talent.”
16
(Somewhat prophetic, since one of its poems, “New Step,” would be staged as a theatrical ballet on CBC TV in 1972, and another poem, “Queen Victoria and Me,” would become a song on his 1973 album
Live Songs.
)

Flowers for Hitler
did little to heal relations between Leonard and the Montreal Jewish establishment, nor presumably with his uncles. In December 1963 at a symposium held in the city on the future of Judaism in Canada, Leonard had given an address titled “Loneliness and History,” in which he castigated the Montreal Jewish community for abandoning the spiritual for the material. As he wrote in
The Favorite Game,
the men, like his uncles, who occupied the front pews at the synagogue were pledged only to their businesses; religious observance was an empty masquerade. “They did not believe their blood was consecrated. . . . They did not seem to realize how fragile the ceremony was. They participated in it blindly, as if it would last forever. . . . Their nobility was insecure because it rested on inheritance and not moment-to-moment creation in the face of annihilation.”

Businessmen, Leonard told the assembly in the Montreal Jewish Public Library, had taken over and made a corporation of the religious community. Jews were “afraid to be lonely” and sought security in finance, neglecting their scholars and sages, their artists and prophets. “Jews must survive in their loneliness as witnesses,” he told them. “Jews are the witness to monotheism and that is what they must continue to declare.” Now that A. M. Klein, the great Canadian Jewish poet, a friend of Layton's and much admired by Leonard, had fallen silent—mental illness, attempted suicide and hospitalization had led Klein to stop writing—it remained to young Jewish writers and artists, Leonard said, to take on the responsibility of being the lonely witnesses and prophets. His indictment made the front page of the
Canadian Jewish Chronicle
with the headline
POET-NOVELIST SAYS JUDAISM BETRAYED
. The controversy was now national. Two months later, during an appearance at the University of British Columbia Jewish Community Center in Vancouver—part of a reading tour of Western Canada, which also included a Dunn's Birdland–style performance in Manitoba where Leonard was accompanied by jazz guitarist Lenny Breau and his band—Leonard was unapologetic. He seemed energized, manic almost, as he talked about his work. He announced that he planned to retreat from the world and consecrate himself to writing a liturgy and confessional that would take the form of a new novel.

Back in Montreal, the snow was falling thicker than ever. The cold of a Montreal winter was brutal. It mugged you. Leonard headed for his favorite sanctuary, Le Bistro. It was there, on a glacial night, that Leonard met Suzanne.

S
uzanne Verdal has long black hair and wears long flowing skirts and ballet slippers. For years she has lived a gypsy life in a wooden caravan, with cats and planters of geraniums. It was built for her in the nineties and is towed by an old truck but otherwise seems straight out of a fairy tale. It is parked in Santa Monica, California, where Suzanne works as a masseuse and is writing her autobiography, by hand.

In the early sixties, when she and Leonard first met, Suzanne was a demure seventeen-year-old, “just out of an Ontario boarding school, with a future dream of bohemian heaven.” She frequented the art galleries and the café scene, “making notes and observing the people; there was always some young artist passing through, to partake of long discussions on art or political issues.” Suzanne wrote poetry, but her talent was as a dancer. She worked two jobs to pay for dance classes, and late at night, she would go to Le Vieux Moulin, one of the nightclubs Leonard and his friends frequented, where jazz was played into the early hours and Montrealers drank and danced their way through the glacial winter. One night, on the dance floor she met Armand Vaillancourt, a strikingly handsome man—long haired, bearded and fifteen years her senior. Vaillancourt, a friend of Leonard, was a Quebecois sculptor of some renown; he had a public sculpture on Durocher Street. Suzanne and Vaillancourt became dancing partners, then lovers, and then the parents of a baby girl. They lived in Vaillancourt's studio, an “uninsulated wooden shack” on Bleury Street.