I'm Your Man (14 page)

The first time Suzanne met Leonard was at Le Bistro. She had seen him there on several occasions, sometimes sitting with Marianne at a small table under the long mirror on the wall. Suzanne could not recall what they talked about, but “more than conversation was our eye contact. It was the most intimate of touches and completely visceral. We were simultaneously witnessing the magical scenes unfolding at the time and, truly, it felt we were genuinely on each other's wavelength.”

Suzanne had signed her first professional dance contract at the age of eighteen and, after spending a summer studying with Martha Graham in New York, had started her own modern dance company in Montreal, “experimenting with music such as John Cage and Edgar Varèse.” They performed at the Beaux-Arts; at L'Association Espagnole, where flamenco was played long into the night; and also on television. She began to make a name as an avant-garde dancer and choreographer. Erica Pomerance says, “Suzanne was cool and creative and one of the beautiful people, an icon to dance like Leonard was to the poetry and artistic set. She would combine classical, modern and ethnic dance styles and she had a style about her that was the epitome of bohemianism, very New Age. She would design these sort of Gypsy clothes that she wore,” sewn together from silks, brocades and old drapery she found in the Salvation Army store on Notre-Dame Street.

When her relationship with Vaillancourt ended, Suzanne would go for long walks along the harbor by the Saint Lawrence River. “I loved the huge ships that docked there and the taste of faraway travel,” she says. “I related to the sounds of the slow-moving freight trains—hauntingly poetic and somehow soothing. I admired the centuries-old architecture and the grain elevators.” She decided to rent a cheap apartment in one of its large, dilapidated buildings, becoming the first in their circle, she says, “to colonize Old Montreal.” Today the area is fashionable; the half-abandoned rooming house from the 1850s where she lived with her child became a hotel charging $300 a night for a room. In the midsixties the only other occupants were “an elderly couple and an old British lady and her cat.” The building reeked of old pipe tobacco and the floors were all crooked, but they were of fine old burnished wood, and there were stained-glass windows. Suzanne found the place “absolutely beautiful, inspirational.”

There were few restaurants or cafés nearby, so her friends would come to the house. Suzanne would serve them “jasmine tea or Constant Comment and little mandarin oranges and lychee nuts from Chinatown,” which was a short walk away. Among her visitors was Philippe Gingras, a poet friend “who wrote a beautiful homage to me way before Leonard did, in French, in a tome called
Quebec Underground
. When Philippe came I would light a candle to invoke the Spirit of Poetry—I called the flame Anastasia, don't ask me why.” She performed the ceremony for Leonard. “I'm quite sure that Leonard observed that little ritual every time we sat and had tea together; that was a rarefied moment, a spiritual moment, because I would invite the Spirit of Poetry and quality conversation.” They would walk through Old Montreal together, silently, “the click of his boots and the sound of [her] shoes almost like a synchronicity” as they went down to the river, past Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours, where the sailors went to be blessed before going to sea and where the Virgin, wearing a halo of stars, reached out to them across the harbor.

“We were definitely on the same wavelength,” Suzanne says. “We could almost hear each other think at times and that was such a delight to us. I sensed a deep, philosophical side to Leonard that he seemed to see in me as well, and he got a kick out of it in that I was a sort of fledgling in a way, just emerging as a young artist.” Leonard, though younger than Vaillancourt, was ten years older than Suzanne. On one visit, Leonard stayed overnight. “We didn't sleep together, although Leonard was a very seductive man. I didn't want to mar or contaminate that purity of my esteem for our relationship and for him and for myself.”

In August 1967, Suzanne left Montreal for San Francisco. It was around this time, she says, that she learned from a mutual friend that Leonard had written a poem about her, titled “Suzanne.” Not long afterward, when somebody played her a record of Judy Collins singing its words, she discovered it was also a song. The first time she heard it, she says she felt “cut to the core” and like someone was holding a magnifying glass to her life. When Suzanne returned to Montreal she was famous—not as a dancer, choreographer or designer but as the muse for a Leonard Cohen song that everyone seemed to be talking about.

Suzanne had been a muse for other men besides Leonard, but for nothing as iconic and ubiquitous as “Suzanne.” It is possible that her view might have been more positive had “Suzanne” remained a poem, something more acceptably bohemian, or, since it had entered the world of commerce, if some of the financial benefits had come her way, since her own career had not taken off as conspicuously and successfully as Leonard's had done with this song that bore her name. Also, the song as Suzanne saw it concerned an intimacy, and in reality there was only distance. Leonard had moved on.

In a 2006 CBC television documentary on Suzanne Verdal, the professor of literature Edward Palumbo was asked if the muse is expendable. “I think in the case of Suzanne it appears she really is, or was” was his answer. “On the other hand, the muse is bigger than the poet, at least in the mythology. The muse is the source of what there is, the inspiration. Does the muse have a claim on anything more than that role?” His conclusion was that she did not.
17

It was Jung's belief that the muse
was
the poet, or his anima anyway, his unconscious image of the Feminine. It was himself that Leonard saw in the mirror Suzanne held. Allan Showalter, a psychiatrist,
*
explains, “The key task of a muse is to allow the artist to see his own feminine aspect that is otherwise invisible to him and to be a screen that fits the artist's projections. What completes the artist isn't the intrinsic qualities of the romantic interest but the artist's own feminine archetype. So, to the extent that the artist's projections dominate or replace the muse's own qualities, the muse's soul is dissipated.”

The relationship between artist and muse is invariably one-sided: photographers “steal” their subjects' souls; novelists shamelessly make characters out of family and friends. Leonard the poet transformed the physical Suzanne into the metaphysical “Suzanne” and made her an angel. Leonard the magician sawed her down the middle, then put the two parts back together—the carnal and the spiritual—and made her more perfect than before. Leonard the composer made a hallowed melody of her, both implausibly intimate and ineffably spacious. “Suzanne” is a weightless, mysterious song. The great songs, the ones that keep drawing us back again and again, are mysteries. We go to them not for familiarity and solace—although there is solace in “Suzanne”—but for what is unknown, for something that's hidden in them that continues to haunt us and makes us seekers.

Leonard has spoken about the song and its muse often over the years; because it was his first, and, until “Hallelujah,” best-known song, interviewers have kept asking him about them. In the liner notes for his 1975
Greatest Hits
album, Leonard wrote, “Everything happened just as it was put down. She was the wife of a man I knew. Her hospitality was immaculate.” To the filmmaker Harry Rasky in 1979 he elaborated: “An old friend of mine whose name was Suzanne invited me down to her place near the river. . . . The purity of the event was not compromised by any carnality. The song is almost a reportage. . . . But the song had been begun. It was as though she handed me the seed for the song.” In a 1993 interview he generalized, “I find there's usually somebody in my life from whom I'm drawing enormous comfort and nourishment. . . . I always find there is someone in my life whom I can describe, without whom this wouldn't have happened.”
18

In 1994 he spoke about it at some length in a BBC radio interview. “The song was begun, and the chord pattern was developed, before a woman's name entered the song. And I knew it was a song about Montreal, it seemed to come out of that landscape that I loved very much in Montreal, which was the harbor, and the waterfront, and the sailors' church there, called Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours, which stood out over the river. . . . I knew that vision.” Into that picture came “the wife of a friend of mine. They were a stunning couple around Montreal at the time, physically stunning—everyone was in love with Suzanne Vaillancourt, and every woman was in love with Armand Vaillancourt. But one would not allow oneself to think of toiling at the seduction of Armand Vaillancourt's wife. First of all he was a friend, and second of all as a couple they were inviolate. I bumped into her one evening, and she invited me down to her place near the river . . . She served me Constant Comment tea, which has little bits of oranges in it. And the boats were going by, and I touched her perfect body with my mind, because there was no other opportunity. There was no other way that you could touch her perfect body under those circumstances. So she provided the name in the song.”
19
In recent years he described “Suzanne” as “a kind of doorway. I have to open it carefully, otherwise what's beyond is not accessible to me. It was never about a particular woman. It was about the beginning of a different life for me, my life wandering alone in Montreal.”
20

In a letter sent by Suzanne following our interview there was a footnote: “Leonard has stated publicly that he did not attempt to seduce me. He forgets that, much later, when he had achieved great fame, I had the opportunity to visit him in an East End hotel on rue Saint-Laurent. I was back from one of my travels and wanted to wish him well. He clearly expressed his desire to have physical intimacy but I declined. I had cherished the sanctity of our connection. I felt that if I had shared a sexual encounter with him it would shift that vibration that once had inspired us both. Ours was a soul connection as far as I was concerned.”

“I read somewhere that we don't originate a thought, that thoughts arrive spontaneously, then fractions of a second later we take possession of them. In that sense nobody has an original thought. But original thoughts arise and we claim them.”

So you didn't write “Suzanne” or “So Long, Marianne” or “Sisters of Mercy” about women you knew, they were outside thoughts that you claimed the copyright on?

“Einstein was modest enough to say that his theory of relativity came from outside. We'd like to think that we make these things up but actually the thing arises and we explain it as our own.”

Are you still in contact with these women who have inspired your songs?

“Except for Suzanne Vaillancourt, who I just haven't bumped into in the past thirty years, I'm in contact with most of my friends, both men and women.”

L
eonard's experiments with acid continued in Montreal. Says Aviva Layton, “The first-ever acid trip I ever went on was in 1964 in Leonard's apartment in Montreal. He gave me the acid on the end of his white handkerchief. It was from the very first batch from those professors from Harvard, Timothy Leary and Ram Dass. He sat with me for the entire day—which shows his generosity, because it's really boring to sit with somebody when they're on an acid trip.” Three weeks later, at the Laytons' apartment, he did the same for Irving. “Irving resisted any drugs whatsoever, but Leonard persuaded him and I persuaded him, ‘You've got to take acid.' Irving said, ‘Acid will do nothing for me because I already live in an hallucinatory world.' Leonard gave him a little bit of blotting paper.” For almost an hour they sat there, with Irving periodically interjecting, “See, nothing's happening.” And then the drug kicked in. “Leonard saw Irving staring hard at the bookcases and Leonard said, ‘What are you looking at?' Irving said, ‘All the books are coming out one by one and bowing before me, every one of them.' We had tons and tons of books, a whole wall of them, each coming out and doing an obeisance in front of Irving, and then they all bowed in front of a painting of his mother.” Irving never would admit that the drug had any effect on him. This, he told Leonard, was his “normal life.”

In October '64, after receiving the Prix Litteraire du Quebec for
The Favorite Game,
Leonard and Irving Layton left with two other poets, Phyllis Gotlieb and Earle Birney, on a whirlwind reading tour of the university circuit—six schools and a library in one week. A filmmaker and sometime poet named Don Owen, an acquaintance of Leonard's, shot the performances for a purported National Film Board of Canada documentary—a project that was shelved when two of the poets proved less than engrossing on film. In the end, the footage would be employed in a documentary about just one of the poets. Right now that poet had gone to Greece; Leonard had a novel to write.

L
eonard sat in his room in his house on the hill in Hydra, writing furiously. He was driven by an overpowering sense of urgency. He had the feeling, he said, of time running out. This was a strange sentiment for a thirty-year-old man, unless he were Jesus, or seriously ill, or thinking about suicide. “Around thirty or thirty-five is the traditional age for the suicide of the poet, did you know?” Leonard told Richard Goldstein of the
Village Voice
in 1967. “That's the age when you finally understand that the universe does not succumb to your command.”
21

It could be argued that the universe had done quite a good job of succumbing to Leonard. Within days of his thirtieth birthday he had been feted with a literary award and filmed on a poetry tour for a documentary, which would end up being entirely about him. He had good reviews and the respect of Canada's literati. He had a congregation of female admirers. He had won a grant that allowed him to live on a Greek island, where a beautiful woman kept house, put meals on his table and flowers on his desk, and allowed Leonard to do what he wanted to do, which was write his new novel,
Beautiful Losers
. “But when he worked,” said Marianne, “sometimes it was torture to get it the way he wanted. Some of it came,
pouf!,
just like that, but he was a perfectionist, a man who demands much of himself.”