I'm Your Man (6 page)

Leonard loved his mother. If she smothered him, he smiled or made wisecracks. He learned to shrug off emotional blackmail and her insistence on feeding him and his friends at all hours of the day and night. “My mother taught me well never to be cruel to women,” Leonard wrote in an unpublished piece from the seventies. But what he also learned from Masha was to count on the devotion, support and nurturing of women and, if and when it became too intense, to have permission to leave—if not always completely, and rarely without conflicting emotions.

A
viva Layton, née Cantor, is a vivacious blond Australian, sharp as a pin. She was raised in a “small, stifling, middle-class Jewish community” in Sydney that she couldn't wait to leave, and the minute she turned twenty-one she did. She wanted to go to New York. When they wouldn't let her in, she went to Montreal. Friends had given her the name of someone to call, Fred Cogswell, the poet and editor of the Canadian literary magazine
Fiddlehead
. Cogswell, it turned out, lived in Nova Scotia, some eight hundred miles distant. “But,” she says, “he told me there was a whole covey of Montreal poets that I should look up,” and he gave her the names of half a dozen of them, including Dudek, Scott and Layton. The first person she called was Layton—“I wasn't going to look up anyone whose name sounded vaguely Jewish”—who invited her to come to the house in Côte-Saint-Luc where he lived with his second wife, the artist Betty Sutherland, and their children.

Aviva arrived to find he had company. “All the big names in Canadian literature were there,” including those on Cogswell's list—“except they weren't big names then, they were a small fringe group. I thought, ‘This is marvelous.' ” She intended to become part of the group. This intention was thwarted when, soon afterward, she and Irving began an affair. It would last twenty years and produce a son, but its more immediate result was to cut her off from everyone. “I couldn't go back to his house. This was the fifties, and you had to be very careful about scandal; Irving was teaching in a parochial school and he could easily have lost his job. So I lived in Montreal mostly in isolation, with Irving coming to visit me two or three times a week. The only person Irving ever trusted to know about us was Leonard, and he brought him to my small, basement apartment.

“Irving was in his forties then, twenty-one years older than me, and Leonard was twenty, one year younger than me. I can see myself opening the door to that apartment and there was Leonard on the other side, looking very young, slightly chubby, but there was something absolutely special about him. Irving had said, ‘Somebody called Leonard Cohen is going to come and have coffee with us and he is the real thing.' I'll never forget him saying that—and with Irving ‘the real thing' meant he's a real poet. And this was late in 1955;
Let Us Compare Mythologies
was about to come out.”

The three met up at Aviva's apartment on a regular basis. In spite of the large age difference between Leonard and Layton—Layton was old enough to be his father—they behaved, Aviva says, “like equals. A lot of people say Leonard was Irving's student—some think he was his actual, literal student, which is absolutely incorrect—or that Irving was his mentor. No. Leonard thought, and still does, that Irving was the great writer and poet and man in his life, as well as friend, but I would not say that Leonard was the junior partner in that enterprise.”

Leonard, Layton said, “was a genius from the first moment I saw him. I have nothing to teach him. I have doors to open, which I did—the doors of sexual expression, of freedom of expression and so on and so forth. Once the doors were opened, Leonard marched very confidently along a path . . . somewhat different from my own.”
11
Says Aviva, “Leonard famously said that Irving taught him how to write poetry and he taught Irving how to dress. I think Leonard wrote better poetry and Irving was a better dresser, but they taught each other things.” As to the class difference, she says, “That was interesting. Leonard came from the Bel Air of Montreal, absolutely exclusive, and Irving was born in the slums, but when Irving and I came to rent a house we went to as close to where Leonard had been brought up as possible, and when Leonard wanted to buy a house or rent or live, he came right back to Irving's old part of town. Irving wanted to be where Leonard wanted to escape from, and Leonard wanted to be where Irving wanted to escape from.”

Irving would later say of Leonard that “he was able to find the sadness in Westmount. That takes genius. He was able to see that not all rich people, not all comfortable people, not all plutocrats, were happy.” Genius, Layton said, is “the ability—a very rare ability—to see things as they actually are. You are not fooled.”
12
Leonard had taken Irving and Aviva to Belmont Avenue on several occasions. “He used to go there frequently and still had his room there and lived there I think in between places. One time when Masha wasn't around we had a huge party, one of those mad parties you had in those days, and somebody vomited on her damask, heavy curtains. The place was an absolute shambles. I remember going in the kitchen with Leonard and he would open up the kitchen drawers and show us that Masha would keep every paper clip and nail and little bit of string that had ever come through the front door.”
*

When Aviva first met Leonard, he told her something, she says, “which he might not remember but which I remember absolutely clearly. He said he'd been studying law at McGill, and that one day while he was studying, he looked into the mirror and it was blank. He couldn't see his own reflection. And he knew then that the academic life in whatever form whatsoever was not for him.” The following year, armed with a BA degree; another literary award, the Peterson Memorial Prize; a cover line on the March 1956 edition of
The Forge
and, at the top of the pile, his first published volume of poetry,
Let Us Compare Mythologies,
Leonard enrolled as a graduate student at Columbia University and left Montreal for Manhattan.

Four

I Had Begun to Shout

L
et Us Compare Mythologies
was published in May 1956. The slim hardback, containing forty-four poems written by Leonard between the ages of fifteen and twenty, was the inaugural release of a new imprint that aimed to introduce the public to new young writers of merit. It was funded by McGill University and edited by Louis Dudek. Leonard himself designed the book, which was illustrated by Freda Guttman, his artist girlfriend and the muse for several poems. Her mysterious pen-and-ink drawings are Edenic at times and at others tortured; the image on the front cover is of a cowed, misshapen human, who looks to be under attack from doves or miniature angels. On the back, in the author's photograph, the twenty-one-year-old Leonard gazes unflinchingly at the camera. In spite of the sober expression, the stubble and those deep lines running from nose to mouth, he looks very young. In the poems, by contrast, he appears a much older man—not just the maturity and authority of his language and his command of poetic technique, but the “raging and weeping”
1
of the kind that suggests a man who has lived long, seen much and lost something very precious. Leonard dedicated the book to the memory of Nathan Cohen. His father's death is the subject of the poem “Rites”:

    
the family came to watch the eldest son,

    
my father; and stood about his bed

    
while he lay on a blood-sopped pillow

    
his heart half-rotted

    
and his throat dry with regret . . .

    
but my uncles prophesied wildly

    
promising life like frantic oracles;

    
and they only stopped in the morning

    
after he had died

    
and I had begun to shout.

The themes and content of much of the poetry would feel perfectly familiar to those who would come to know Leonard as a singer-songwriter. There are poems—some of them titled, in Lorcan fashion, “Song” or “Ballad”—about religion, myth, sex, inhumanity, humor, love, murder, sacrifice, Nazis and Jesus on the cross. There are echoes of Joan of Arc and the Holocaust in “Lovers,” where a man has erotic feelings for a woman who is being led to the flames. Several poems contain naked women and wounded men, the two conditions not unrelated. In “Letter,” a poet armed with only his pen and his indifference claims victory over the femme fatale fellating him:

    
I write this only to rob you

    
that when one morning my head

    
hangs dropping with the other generals

    
from your house gate

    
that all this was anticipated

    
and so you will know that it meant nothing to me

The poems have a sense of timelessness, or of multilayered time. Ancient wrongs are juxtaposed with modern-day atrocities, and archaic language—courtly, biblical, Romantic—with contemporary irony. Leonard employs both the traditional poetic form and prose poetry. Like a twentieth-century troubadour, or a nineteenth-century Romantic, he places his own inner experiences and feelings at the center—often feelings of failure and despair. The epigraph comes from William Faulkner's novel
The Bear
and refers to a comment a young man makes during a conversation on the meaning of Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “He had to talk about something.” As Leonard explained later, when a writer “has some urgency to speak,” the subject matter of what he writes “becomes almost irrelevant.”
2
Leonard had that urgency.

The original print run for
Let Us Compare Mythologies
was around four hundred copies. Ruth Wisse, Leonard's fellow student in Louis Dudek's class and editor of the
McGill Daily,
took on the role of head of Leonard's sales team and sold half that number on campus. The book received a handful of reviews in Canada, largely positive.
Queen's Quarterly
called it “a brilliant beginning.”
3
The
Canadian Forum
's critic Milton Wilson wrote, “He knows how to turn a phrase, his poems at their best have a clean, uncluttered line, and he writes ‘about something.' ”
4
Fiddlehead
's Allan Donaldson found Leonard's virtues “considerable” but had problems with what he described as Leonard's greatest weakness, “an overuse of images of sex and violence, so that at its worst his work becomes a sort of poetic
reductio ad absurdum
of the Folies Bergères and of Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horror. It was, I believe, Mr. Harry Truman who remarked of the Folies Bergères that there was nothing duller than the protracted spectacle of a large number of bare breasts.”
5
Leonard and Truman would have disagreed. The criticism appeared to be less about the quality of the work and more a reflection of the conservatism and puritanism of Canadian literature, against which Irving Layton had so loudly raged. Leonard's book contained a poem to Layton, titled “To I.P.L.,” in which he described his friend affectionately as

    
. . . depraved

    
hanging around street corners

    
entertaining hags in public places.

“I felt that what I wrote was beautiful and that beauty was the passport of all ideas,” Leonard would say in 1991. “I thought that the objective, open-minded reader would understand that the juxtaposition of spirituality and sexuality justified itself entirely. I felt that it was that juxtaposition that created that particular beauty, that lyricism.”
6
Later still, on the publication in 2006 of a fiftieth-anniversary facsimile edition, Leonard said, “There are some really good poems in that little book; it's been downhill ever since.”
7
The coda might well be one of his familiar self-effacing tics—it is hard to argue that Leonard has not produced better work since. But there was something in this first book that Leonard would often, subsequently, seem to long for—the innocence, the confidence, the prolificacy and hunger of his youthful self.

Let Us Compare Mythologies
won Leonard the McGill Literary Award. It also brought him attention from the Canadian media. The Canadian Broadcasting Company invited him to participate in a project titled
Six Montreal Poets,
a spoken-word album. The other five were Irving Layton, Louis Dudek, A. M. Klein, A. J. M. Smith and F. R. Scott, the leading members of the so-called Montreal Group—prestigious company for a new, young writer. The album, studio-recorded, was produced by Sam Gesser, a folklorist and impresario who founded and ran the Canadian division of the American label Folkways and promoted Pete Seeger's and the Weavers' first Montreal shows. Leonard made his first-ever appearance on record on side one, between Smith and Layton, reading eight poems from
Let Us Compare Mythologies
: “For Wilf and His House,” “Beside the Shepherd,” “Poem,” “Lovers,” “The Sparrows,” “Warning,” “Les Vieux” and “Elegy.” Listening to it today, Leonard's voice sounds high and forced, somewhat British. The last of these he blamed on “the influence in the [Canadian] universities” during that period. “That accent was meant to dignify the poem. The declamative style that the Beats introduced hadn't quite gotten there yet.”
8

It had, however, gotten to New York. In 1956, the same year that Leonard published
Let Us Compare Mythologies,
Allen Ginsberg, an American Jew and Columbia University graduate, published his visceral, personal poetry book
Howl
. In 1957, the same year that
Six Montreal Poets
was released in the U.S. on the Folkways label, Jack Kerouac, an American Catholic of Quebec ancestry who had gone to Columbia on a football scholarship, published his landmark autobiographical novel
On the Road
. These two books were sacred texts of the Beats, a literary movement dedicated to personal liberty, truth and self-expression and influenced by bebop jazz, Buddhism and experiments with drugs and sex. The Beats were hard-core.
Howl
had been banned for obscenity, before a celebrated court case put it back on the shelves, and Kerouac had conducted a private, backyard ceremony before sending out his first manuscript, in which he dug a hole, inserted his penis and mated with the earth. Though it was not quite the same as Leonard's interment of his first piece of writing in his father's bow tie, Leonard felt a kinship. In December 1957, when Kerouac made an appearance at the Village Vanguard in New York—a bohemian Greenwich Village speakeasy turned jazz club—Leonard was there. Kerouac, extremely drunk—he found drinking helped with his shyness—read to the accompaniment of jazz musicians. Leonard, who was also shy, and who claimed to have “never really liked poetry readings; I like to read poetry by myself,”
9
was impressed. If poems were to be delivered publicly, this was a fine way to do it.

Leonard liked the Beats. They did not return the sentiment. “I was writing very rhymed, polished verses and they were in open revolt against that kind of form, which they associated with the oppressive literary establishment. I felt close to those guys, and I later bumped into them here and there, although I can't describe myself remotely as part of that circle.”
10
Neither did he have any desire to join it. “I thought that our little group in Montreal was wilder and freer and that we were on the right track, and we, in our provincial self-righteousness, felt that they were not on the right track and that they were getting some kind of free ride, that they weren't honoring the tradition as we felt we were.”
11

It is interesting that someone who in high school and university had seemed keen to sign up for, even lead, any number of groups should choose not to join this particular club at such a pivotal moment for poetry. In the fifties, the Beats made poets the counterculture spokesmen, the rock stars, if you like, of their generation. It's interesting too that although Leonard was younger than Ginsberg and Kerouac, they viewed him as part of the old guard. In the sixties, when rock stars would become the counterculture spokesmen and poets of their generation, Leonard would once again be considered old—if with better reason this time; he was in his thirties when he made his first album—and would feel himself to be an outsider.

Leonard did not appear at all troubled at his outsider status. In fact, a certain sense of isolation seems to have set in toward the end of his years at McGill and his first term at Columbia University, which seemed to coincide with Leonard's first bouts of serious depression. “What I mean by depression isn't just the blues, it's not just like a hangover from the weekend, the girl didn't show up or something like that,” said Leonard, describing the paralyzing darkness and anxiety he experienced. “It's a kind of mental violence which stops you from functioning properly from one moment to the next.”
12
Leonard took to spending “a lot of time alone. Dying,” he said. “Letting myself slowly die.”
13

L
eonard's first address in New York was International House, at 500 Riverside Drive, where Columbia billeted its foreign students. It was on the Upper West Side, a stone's throw from the Hudson River. At nights Leonard would head downtown, much as he had done in Montreal, and seek out the city's netherworlds, of which New York had many. Greenwich Village was a particular draw. Leonard's days were not devoted to studying; at Columbia, as at McGill, Leonard was not much interested in academic study. He was less interested in reading than in writing himself—or writing about himself, as he did when one professor, knowing when he was beaten, allowed Leonard to submit a term paper on
Let Us Compare Mythologies
.

In his room, sitting at the table by the window from which he could watch the sunset turn the gray river gold, he wrote a number of poems and short stories. One story, “The Shaving Ritual,”
14
was inspired by a piece of advice his mother had given him. Whenever things got bad, she said, he should stop what he was doing and have a shave, and he would feel better. It was counsel he found himself taking often, as the episodes of depression increased.

Leonard had gone to New York to be a writer—a serious writer, but also a popular writer. Even at this early stage, when the Canadian literary world was starting to talk about him as Canada's best young poet, he wanted his work to be read and liked by more than just Canadian literati, the small group that Irving Layton used to refer to as the “Canuckie Schmuckies.” Enrolling at Columbia had really been a cover, something to keep Leonard's family happy. Going to America to do postgraduate studies at a renowned university was an acceptable activity for a young man from a conservative, upper-middle-class Montreal Jewish background; going to America to become a writer, not so much. Mort Rosengarten explains, “It was not, and still is not, encouraged by that community. They don't want their children becoming artists. They're very hostile to it. They don't want to know about themselves. But Leonard got away with it.”

How Leonard got away with it had a lot to do with having lost his father when he was nine years old. “I never had to come up against that powerful male influence that a young man meets as he grows older,”
15
he says. The powerful influence in his childhood was female, his mother, who was “a generous Chekhovian spirit, very accepting in her way. She was alarmed when she saw me running around Montreal with a guitar under my arm, but she was very kind in her observations. She would occasionally roll her eyes, but that was about as far as it went.”
16
His uncles would step in now and then with “indications and suggestions and advice and lunches held, but very subtly. Considering the tales one hears of the tyrannies of family, mine was very gentle in that respect.”
17
Nevertheless, the other big reason for going to New York was to get away from Montreal, to put space between himself and the life his upper-class Montreal Jewish background mapped out for him: from Westmount to McGill, then on to studying law or commerce, and finally taking his place in the family business.