I'm Your Man (5 page)

The band would practice at the Davis family house, in the basement playroom. “They always seemed to have a great time together, with a lot of friendly kibitzing going on,” remembers Dean Davis, the late Terry Davis's brother; Dean ran the phonograph at their shows and acted as soundman. “I know my parents thought of Leonard as being very polite and a gentleman for his age. My mother always thought it was pretty funny that their trio consisted of a Protestant, a Jew and a Catholic.” Recalls Janet Davis, Terry's widow, “If she was giving them dinner, which happened to be pork on a Friday, she would say it was lamb if they asked.”

Leonard also played in a second band, this time all Jewish, part of McGill's Jewish student society, Hillel. They provided the music for a play whose crew included Freda Guttman and Yafa “Bunny” Lerner, two of Leonard's college-years girlfriends. Mostly, though, he played guitar—alone, in the quadrangle, at the frat house, or anywhere there was a party. It wasn't a performance; it was just something he did. Leonard with a guitar was as familiar a sight as Leonard with a notebook. Melvin Heft, who was at several of those teenage parties, says, “After a while, when he thought the mood was right, Leonard would take out his guitar and play songs and sing to us. He was not a braggart or trying to be a big shot—‘I'm going to sing to you'—he just did it, no fuss at all; it was a natural thing for him. He was always there, singing. He was enjoying it and so were we.”

On weekends the action might move to Mort's house in the Townships—half a dozen students piling into one car and heading for the countryside. Mort's parents weren't there and the place would be empty, except for a man who worked on the property and a woman who acted as concierge, neither of whom was in any position to stop their partying. The crowd might include Leonard; Arnold Steinberg; sometimes Yafa and Freda; Marvin Schulman, one of the first of their set to be openly gay; and Robert Hershorn, a close friend of Leonard's who came from an even wealthier family. They would sit around drinking and talking. When it got dark they would drive to the Ripplecove Inn on Ayer's Cliff, above Lake Massawippi, and drink and talk some more. At closing time they would go back to the house and put a record on the phonograph or play music themselves—Leonard on guitar, running through the folk songs he had learned at the Socialist camp or the pop songs he had absorbed from the jukeboxes of Saint Catherine Street.

“We used to listen to music a lot,” says Rosengarten, “and Leonard, even before he started to write his own stuff, was relentless. He would play a song, whether it was ‘Home on the Range' or whatever, over and over and over all day, play it on his guitar and sing it. When he was learning a song he would play it thousands of times, all day, for days and days and weeks, the same song, over and over, fast and slow, faster, this and that. It would drive you crazy. It was the same when he started to write his own stuff. He still works that way. It still takes him four years to write a lyric because he's written twenty thousand verses or something.”

Sometimes the crowd would assemble at Leonard's family home on Belmont Avenue, although on these occasions his family would be there. Esther would drift in and out—mostly out; her little brother and his friends did not hold much interest—but Masha would preside over everything, making a fuss, making food, entertaining. “His mother was a dramatic lady,” says Rosengarten. “She was Russian, and she could be very, very dramatically unhappy about something and then burst into laughter and send it all up. Sometimes we would be going downtown at about nine o'clock in the evening and Masha would have a fit and say that it was no time to be going out and get all upset, but other times, when we would leave a bar with eight friends at three in the morning and go to her house and start carrying on, and she would come downstairs and greet everyone and offer them food, totally at ease with it; there was no telling how she was going to react.” Steinberg concurs: “Masha was very volatile, but everybody loved her because she was basically a lovely, warmhearted person and she adored Leonard. I don't think she mixed much with the other mothers, so she hadn't picked up the worrisome habits, and so it seemed to me that Leonard was very free. It was always fun just dropping in. I would sit there and listen and Leonard would play his guitar. He never thought of himself as a good musician or performer, but he was always playing, and always learning to play the guitar.”

From the midfifties, the guests at Leonard's parties were starting to include poets and writers, older men, often teachers from McGill. “There were no barriers, no master/student relationships,” Leonard said. “They liked our girlfriends.”
7
Among the most influential of these teachers were Louis Dudek; Frank (“F. R.”) Scott, McGill's dean of law, a poet and a Socialist; and Hugh MacLennan, author of the celebrated 1945 book
Two Solitudes,
an allegory of the irreconcilable differences between Canada's French- and English-speaking populations. MacLennan joined McGill the same year as Leonard, who took his classes in the modern novel and creative writing. But the man who would prove the most crucial was an assistant political science teacher, a poet whom Leonard met in 1954 after inviting him to read from his new work,
The Long Pea-Shooter,
at the fraternity house. “There was Irving Layton and then there was the rest of us,” Leonard would say almost a lifetime later. “He is our greatest poet, our greatest champion of poetry.”
8
Irving Layton would have readily agreed, and added even more laudatory adjectives of his own. Layton was larger, and louder, than life, a bullish man who looked like he'd been hewn from the same Scottish stone as McGill, only with less attention to detail. Layton was a hothead; his eyes blazed, there was an inner fire. Leonard, as did a succession of extraordinary women, loved him.

A dating agency would have been very unlikely to have introduced these two as potential life mates. Twenty-two years Leonard's senior, Layton's brazen, iconoclastic, self-promoting style could hardly be more different from Leonard's modest, self-effacing demeanor. Layton, with his wild mane of hair and disheveled clothes, looked like he had stepped out of a hurricane; Leonard looked like his clothes had been sewn on him every morning by a team of personal tailors. Layton was proudly belligerent; Leonard, despite a long attraction to machismo, wasn't. Layton had fought in the Canadian Army, attaining the rank of lieutenant, the same as Leonard's father; Leonard as a young child had hoped to go to military school, but that dream had died with his father. Still, Leonard had his father's gun; his mother had argued with him about it, but in the end, Leonard won. Then there was the class difference. Layton was born in a small town in Romania in 1912 (his name was Israel Lazarovitch before his family emigrated to Canada) and raised in Saint-Urbain, Montreal's working-class, Jewish immigrant neighborhood. Leonard's upper-class Westmount background was at the opposite end of the Jewish social spectrum. What they had in common was a love of honesty, a taste for irony and a skill in the art of debate (in 1957, Layton appeared in a nationally televised debating series called
Fighting Words,
which he invariably won).

Layton openly despised bourgeois Canada and its puritanism, and so did Leonard, if more covertly—as befitted a man who considered his own family bourgeois—such as when he worked behind the scenes to overturn the rule banning women and alcohol from students' rooms at his fraternity house. Layton was powerfully sexual—which Leonard liked to think he was too, or might be, given half the chance—and so was Layton's poetry: flagrant, unabashed, happy to provide names and details. Layton was passionate about poetry and the beauty and melody of the word—as was Leonard. Layton had become a poet, he said, “to make music out of words.” But he also wanted his poetry “to change the world,” to which the idealist in Leonard related strongly.

As Rosengarten explains it, “The [Second World] War had been a very important factor on our sensibility; people you knew were going off and getting killed, and there was a possibility that we would lose the war and the Nazis would take over America or Canada. But the other thing was that, while this was going on, the word was that if we
did
win the war, because of the great sacrifice everybody had made, the world was going to become this wonderful utopian place, with all this collective energy that had been dissipated in the war directed toward its creation. I think for us it was somewhat disillusioning that, at the end of the war, the first thing they did was kind of repudiate the collective aspect of the society and maintain this idea that it was really good for business to produce things instead, and sell people products as substitutes for this collective spirit. And the enormous numbers of women who worked and did things during the war that were considered unfit for women were packed up after the war and sent back to the kitchen. Leonard and I, these were things we were shockingly aware of.” That sense of a lost Eden, of something beautiful that did not work out or could not last, would be detectable in a good deal of Leonard's work.

“There was a very interesting poetry scene in Montreal,” says Rosengarten, “and it was centered around Irving Layton and Louis Dudek, who were good friends at the time.” (They fell out later; their feuds over poetry became famous.) “There were lots of parties where they would read, many of them at Irving's house in Côte-Saint-Luc,” west of Montreal. It is a large suburb today, with a street named after Layton, but in the fifties the farmhouse in which Irving lived with his wife and two children stood alone, surrounded by farmland. “At these parties people would read their poems to one another and discuss them and criticize stuff; it was pretty intense, and it would go sometimes most of the way through the night. There were many times when Leonard and I might quit the bars downtown at three in the morning and go over there to Irving's, and there the scene would be going on. Leonard would show his poems at these parties. They took it seriously. They had a little magazine they mimeographed, two hundred and fifty copies, called
CIV/n,
because at that time the bookstores didn't carry Canadian poets, you couldn't buy a book with any of that contemporary poetry in a bookstore in Montreal; it was pretty grim. But, looking back on it, I realize now that that poetry scene had more influence on me in terms of aesthetics than all the art schools I attended in England with all these people who became important sculptors. I think the gang in Côte-Saint-Luc were way ahead of all of them.”

“We really wanted to be great poets,” said Leonard. “We thought every time we met it was a summit conference. We thought it was terribly important what we were doing.”
9
He looked on these evenings as a kind of poetry boot camp, where “training was intense, rigorous, and taken very seriously.” Leonard would always have an attraction to such regimens. “But the atmosphere was friendly. Once in a while there were tears, someone would leave in a rage, we would argue, but interest in the art of writing was at the center of our friendship.” He considered it an apprenticeship and he was an enthusiastic learner. “Irving and I used to spend a lot of evenings studying poems by someone like Wallace Stevens. We would study the poem until we discovered the code, until we knew exactly what the author was trying to say and how he did it. That was our life; our life was poetry.”
10
Layton became, if not Leonard's life coach, then his guide, his cheerleader and one of his dearest friends.

In March 1954 in the fifth issue of
CIV/n
Leonard made his debut as a published poet. Alongside poems by Layton and Dudek (who were on the editorial board) and others of the Montreal poetry scene were three works credited to Leonard Norman Cohen: “Le Vieux,” “Folk Song” and “Satan in Westmount,” the last of the three about a devil who quoted Dante and “sang fragments of austere Spanish songs.”
*
The following year Leonard won first prize in McGill's Chester Macnaghten Literary Competition with his poems “Sparrows” and the four-part
Thoughts of a Landsman,
which included “For Wilf and His House,” a poem that was published in 1955 in
The Forge.
A remarkably mature work, erudite and moving, it began,

    
When young the Christians told me

    
how we pinned Jesus

    
like a lovely butterfly against the wood

    
and I wept beside paintings of Calvary

    
at velvet wounds

    
and delicate twisted feet

and ended,

    
Then let us compare mythologies.

    
I have learned my elaborate lie

    
of soaring crosses and poisoned thorns

    
and how my fathers nailed him

    
like a bat against a barn

    
to greet the autumn and late hungry ravens

    
as a hollow yellow sign.

Layton had started taking Leonard with him to his book readings, where Leonard reveled in his friend's showmanship, his grand gestures and braggadocio, and the passion that his performance induced in the audience, the women in particular. In the summer of '55 Layton brought Leonard along to the Canadian Writers Conference in Kingston, Ontario, and invited Leonard onstage, where Leonard read his own work and played a little guitar.

The guitar had done nothing to hurt Leonard's success with women—and he could offer them hospitality now that he and Mort had taken a room on Stanley Street. “We weren't really living there, we were just hanging out there, we'd have friends over,” said Rosengarten of the old-fashioned double parlor in a Victorian boardinghouse. Leonard's mother was not well pleased at this development, but she found it hard not to indulge him. Their relationship appeared to be very involved, even beyond the usual mother-son attachment, let alone an archetypal Jewish mother and son—and Masha, according to no less an authority on Jewishness than Rabbi Wilfred Shuchat at Shaar Hashomayim, was “very Jewish.” When Nathan died, Leonard became the object of her indulgence, castigation and utter devotion. She was a vital, passionate woman, with an infirm husband, something of an outsider in Westmount circles, so it was hardly surprising that her only son, her youngest child, became her focus.