I'm Your Man (8 page)

Although Layton was still married to Betty Sutherland, he and Aviva had been living together openly for some time. The arrangement worked as well as such things could, until Aviva took a job as a teacher in a private girls' school—an institution not known for its sympathies toward alternative lifestyles. Irving and Aviva needed to marry. But Irving did not want to divorce his wife. Instead he proposed a solution: he would buy a wedding ring for Aviva and they would have a mock marriage ceremony—Leonard would be best man—and she could change her name legally to Layton. A date was set, and the three met at a bistro near Leonard's apartment for lunch and champagne, “Irving wearing some awful bottle-green coat, [Aviva] in a white, seersucker secondhand dress with curtain bobbles on the bottom, and Leonard, of course, the only one dressed beautifully.” They headed off together to a small jewelry boutique on Mountain Street to buy the ring. “While I'm looking at the wedding rings,” says Aviva, “all of a sudden I notice that Irving is on the other side of the shop saying, ‘I've come to buy a bracelet for my wife. She's an artist.' Leonard, who just understood what I was going through, said, ‘Aviva, I'm going to buy you a wedding ring,' and he did. He slipped it on my finger and said, ‘Now you're married.' And I thought, who the hell am I supposed to be married to? I'm telling you this story because that is so part of Leonard. I'm sure he can be absolutely impossible if anyone wants a marriage kind of relationship with him, but he was, and always has been, impeccable—thoughtful, courtly, generous, really the most honorable man.”

F
or detectives seeking to put together a picture of Leonard's activities and state of mind, a file in one of the stack of boxes in his archives in Toronto might provide some interesting clues. Or muddy the water entirely. Alongside Leonard's unpublished novel
A Ballet of Lepers
are a guitar string, a driving license, a vaccination certificate, a chest X-ray form, a leaflet marking the declaration of independence in Cuba and a library card. Whatever crime it was, the evidence pointed to its having been committed by a troubadour planning an overseas journey, likely somewhere exotic. There is also a number of forms filled out by Leonard requesting arcane publications. Several of these are for books and articles on the benefits, problems, philosophy and technique of fasting. These include “Notes of Some English Accounts of Miraculous Fasts,” by Hyder Rollins, from the
Journal of American Folklore
in 1921, and the intriguingly titled “Individual and Sex Differences Brought Out by Fasting,” by Howard Marsh, from a 1916 issue of
Psychological Review
. Leonard also requested the books
Mental Disorders in Urban Areas
by Robert E. Faris and
Venereal Disease Information
by E. G. Lion. On thin yellowed paper is a typewritten essay titled “Male Association Patterns.” In it the author, Lionel Tiger, from the University of British Columbia—one of Leonard's fellow counselors at summer camp—discussed male homosexuality and the desire for same-sex companionship, as displayed in “sports teams, fraternities, criminal organizations like the Cosa Nostra, drinking groups, teenage gangs, etc. The list is long,” Tiger wrote, “but the common factor is male homogeneity and the communal sense of maleness which prevails.”

Fasting was something Leonard would pursue with enthusiasm in the coming years; he appeared as ardent about losing weight as Masha was to put it on him. As to homosexuality, by all accounts this was merely an intellectual curiosity, a subject that had been thrust into the zeitgeist by the Beats. When the British journalist Gavin Martin asked Leonard in 1993 if he'd ever had a gay relationship, Leonard answered, “No.” Asked if he regretted this, Leonard said, “No, because I have had intimate relationships with men all my life and I still do have. I've seen men as beautiful. I've felt sexual stirrings toward men so I don't think I've missed out.”
23
His friendships with his male friends were, and remain, deep and durable.

The summer of 1958 found Leonard back again in the Laurentians and at summer camp—as a counselor this time, at Pripstein's Camp Mishmar, which opened its doors to children with learning difficulties. Leonard took with him his guitar and a camera. He went home with a roll of film that contained a series of pictures of women he met there. Nudes. Now that he no longer lacked the female company he had so long craved, he was making up for lost time. “Leonard's always had yearnings for sainthood, [but] at the same time there's certainly been a strong streak of hedonism in him, as there is in almost every poet and every artist,” said Irving Layton. “It's because the artist is dedicated to pleasure and bringing pleasure to others particularly. And if he takes a little bit himself in giving pleasure to others, so much the better.”
24

W
hile Leonard was at college in New York and Mort at art school in London, they sublet their room in the boardinghouse on Stanley Street to friends. When Mort returned to Montreal, he converted the double parlor into a sculpture studio for himself, and he and Leonard talked about turning it into an art gallery. The two put in long hours fixing up the place and planning how it should be. They did not want the hushed formality and office hours of the other Montreal galleries, which “would all close at five o'clock,” says Rosengarten, “so if people were working they weren't free to go.” The Four Penny Art Gallery, as they named it, was open every night until nine or ten, later on weekends, “and much later,” says Rosengarten, “if we had a vernissage.” Opening parties would carry on long into the night. Leonard immortalized one of these evenings in his poem “Last Dance at the Four Penny.” In the poem, the room on Stanley Street and all its associations—art, friendship, freedom and nonconformity—became a fortress against the savagery of the world outside its walls, in Montreal and beyond.

    
Layton, my friend Lazarovitch,

    
no Jew was ever lost

    
while we two dance joyously

    
in this French province.

The artists they exhibited were those whom the Montreal establishment ignored, among them Layton's wife, Betty Sutherland. “We had some of the best young active artists at any given time, and it was very hard to find their work because the galleries were all stuck with their own rigid history and ideas,” says Rosengarten. “We sold poetry books, because no one else would sell them, and ceramics, because no one else would sell them either.” The Four Penny, says Nancy Bacal, became “a gathering place, a haven for art and music and poetry. On warm evenings we would all go up to the roof and sing folk songs and protest songs; Morton would play his banjo and Leonard would play his guitar.”

“The gallery,” Rosengarten says, “was starting to work. Starting to get the attention of the critics. And then in the dead of winter there was a huge fire and the building burned down. Completely. And that was the end of it, because we didn't have insurance. We had a huge show on at that time and there were paintings from floor to ceiling, all gone. I had a little wax sculpture, which survived the fire, which was amazing. It was such a remarkably delicate thing and the only thing to survive.” The Four Penny was dead and cremated.

And Masha was in the hospital. Leonard's mother had been admitted to a psychiatric ward at the Allan Memorial Institute, suffering with depression. The Allan, as locals called it, was housed in a grand mansion at the top of McTavish Street in Mount Royal. From its immaculately kept grounds, the view across Montreal was even better than from the park behind Leonard's family home. “Loonies,” wrote Leonard, revisiting the incident in
The Favorite Game,
“have the best view in town.”
*

It's not surprising that Masha, a woman with a leaning toward melancholy, would be seriously depressed, after her infirm second husband had moved out of the house on Belmont Avenue and gone to live in Florida and then her infirm father had moved in. Nor was it strange that she should lean so heavily on her only son when he visited her—which he dutifully did—berating him for having more time for his shiksas than for his mother and, in the next breath, worrying that he wasn't taking care of himself or eating properly.

It is also no surprise that Leonard would feel frustrated, helpless and angry—a multipurpose frustration, helplessness and anger that seemed to take in his own condition as well as Masha's. He knew by now that he had inherited her depressive tendency, and he was not at his happiest himself. Every weekday, from seven in the morning, he worked in his dead father's clothing company at a job he loathed, while the gallery he had helped create with Mort had literally gone up in smoke. But while Leonard soldiered on, uncomplaining—as Mort says, echoing the sentiments of many of Leonard's friends, “He wasn't the kind of moany-groany depressed person; he has a great sense of humor, and depression didn't stop him from being funny”—the woman who had always supported him and indulged him could lie around all day in a place that looked to Leonard like a country club. There must have been fear too—not just at seeing his sole parent helpless but at the responsibility that came with that, and the vision of what might await him if he stayed in Montreal. The city he had escaped New York to come back to had become uncomfortable, even threatening.

An article that appeared in the Canadian magazine
Culture,
written by Louis Dudek, must have been the final blow. Leonard's former teacher, publisher and champion criticized his writing as “a rag-bag of classical mythology” and a “confusion of symbolic images.” Layton leapt to Leonard's defense immediately, branding Dudek “stupid” and declaring Leonard “one of the purest lyrical talents this country has ever produced.” But the damage was done; although Leonard remained friendly with Dudek, he could no longer feel safe in his position as Montreal's golden boy of poetry. It was time to move. For which he needed money. But he could not bear to stay at the Freedman Company, and he knew he could not make a living as a poet. Leonard quit his job and devoted his energies to applying for scholarships and grants. In between working on poems, short stories and the occasional freelance review for the CBC, he and Layton sat together for hours on end, filling in applications and writing proposals. Leonard requested money to travel to the ancient capitals—London, Athens, Jerusalem, Rome—around which, he said, he would write a novel.

In the spring of 1959, two letters arrived from the Canada Council for the Arts: Leonard's and Irving's applications had been approved. Leonard was granted $2,000. Immediately, he applied for a passport. In December 1959, shortly after his return from a poetry reading at the 92nd Street Y in New York with Irving Layton and F. R. Scott, Leonard boarded a plane for London.

Five

A Man Who Speaks with a Tongue of Gold

I
t was a cold gray morning and starting to rain when Leonard walked down Hampstead High Street, clutching a suitcase and an address. It was just before Christmas and the windows of the little shops were bright with decorations. Tired from the long journey, Leonard knocked at the door of the boardinghouse. But there was no room at the inn. The only thing they could offer was a humble cot in the living room. Leonard, who had always said he had “a very messianic childhood,” accepted the accommodation and the landlady's terms: that he get up every morning before the rest of the household, tidy up the room, get in the coal, light a fire and deliver three pages a day of the novel he told her he'd come to London to write. Mrs. Pullman ran a tight ship. Leonard, with his liking for neatness and order, happily accepted his duties. He had a wash and a shave, then went out to buy a typewriter, a green Olivetti, on which to write his masterpiece. On the way, he stopped in at Burberry on Regent Street, a clothing store favored by the English upper-middle classes, and bought a blue raincoat. The dismal English weather failed to depress him. Everything was as it should be; he was a writer, in a country where, unlike Canada, there were writers stretching back forever: Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats. Keats's house, where he wrote “Ode to a Nightingale” and love letters to Fanny Brawne, was just ten minutes' walk from the boardinghouse. Leonard felt at home.

Despite its proximity to the center of London, Hampstead had the air of a village—a village that crawled with writers and thinkers. Among the permanent residents in Highgate Cemetery, which was also a short walk away, were Karl Marx, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot and Radclyffe Hall. Back when London was shrouded in toxic smog, Hampstead, high on a hill, with eight hundred acres of heath land, drew consumptive poets and sensitive artists with its cleaner air. Mort had been the first among Leonard's crowd to stay there, renting a room from Jake and Stella Pullman while he was at art school in London. Next was Nancy Bacal, who had gone to London to study classical theater at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and stayed on to become a radio and television journalist. Nancy, like Leonard, had been given the “starter bed” and a hot-water bottle in the living room until Mort moved out and Mrs. Pullman, judging her worthy, allowed her to take over his room. Which is where she was when Leonard showed up in December 1959.

Bacal, a writer and teacher of writing, cannot remember a time when she did not know Leonard. Like him, she was born and raised in Westmount. They lived on the same street and went to the same Hebrew school and high school; her father was Leonard's pediatrician. “It was a very strong community, inbred in many ways, but in no way was he the usual person you'd find in the Westmount crowd. He was reading and writing poetry when people were more interested in who they were going to date for their Sunday school graduation. He pushed the borders from a very early age.” What made it more curious was that Leonard was not openly rebellious; as Arnold Steinberg noted, he seemed conventional, respectful of his teachers, the least likely to rebel.

“Here you have the contradiction,” says Bacal. “Leonard was embedded in religion, deeply connected with the shul through his grandfather, who was president of the synagogue, and because of his respect for the elders; I remember Leonard used to recount how his grandfather could put a pin through the Torah and be able to recite every word on each page it touched, and that impressed me enormously. But he was always prepared to ask the hard questions, break down the conventions, find his own way. Leonard was never a man to assault or attack or say bad things about anything or anyone. He was more interested in what was true or right.” She recalls the endless talks she and Leonard would have in their youth about their community, “what was comfortable, where it left us wanting, where we felt people weren't penetrating to the truth.” Their conversation had taken a break when Bacal left for London, but when Leonard moved into the Pullmans' house, it picked up where it left off.

Stella Pullman, unlike most residents of Hampstead, was working-class—“salt of the earth, very pragmatic, down-to-earth English” is Bacal's description. “She worked at an Irish dentist in the East End of London; took the tube there every day. Everyone who lived in the house used to schlep down there once a year and have their fillings done. She was very supportive—Leonard still credits her with being responsible for him finishing the book because she gave him a deadline, which made it happen—but she was not what you'd call impressed by him, or by any of us. ‘Everyone has a book in them,' she'd say, ‘so get on with it. I don't want you just hanging around.' She'd been through the war; she had no time for all that nonsense. Leonard was very comfortable there because there was no artifice about it. He and Stella got along very, very well. Stella liked him a lot—but secretly; she never wanted anyone to get, as she would say, ‘too full of themselves.' ” Leonard kept to his part of the agreement and wrote the required three pages a day of the novel he had begun to refer to as
Beauty at Close Quarters
. In March 1960, three months after his arrival, he had completed a first draft.

Late at night, after closing time at the King William IV pub, their local, Nancy and Leonard would explore London together. “To be in London in those times was a revelation. It was another culture, a kind of no-man's-land between World War II and the Beatles. It was dark, there wasn't much money and it was something we'd never experienced, London working class—and don't forget we'd started with Pete Seeger and all those workingman songs. We'd start out at one or two in the morning and wander way out to the East End and hang out with guys in caps with Cockney accents. We'd visit the night people in rough little places, having tea. We both loved the street life, street food, street activity, street manners and rituals”—the places and things Leonard had been drawn to in Montreal. “If you want to find Leonard,” says Bacal, “go to some little coffee bar or hole in the wall. Once he finds a place, that's where he'll go, every night. He wasn't interested in what was ‘happening'; he was interested in finding out what lay underneath it.”

Through her broadcast work Bacal became familiar with London's West Indian community and started to frequent a cellar club on Wardour Street in Soho, the Flamingo. On Friday nights, after hours, it transformed into a club-within-a-club called the All-Nighter. It began at midnight, although anybody who was anybody knew it did not get going until two
A.M
. “It was, theoretically, a very dodgy place but it was actually magical,” said Bacal. “There was so much weed in the air it was like walking into a painting of smoke.” She and Harold Pascal, another of the Montreal set who was living in London, would go there most Friday nights. The music was good—calypso and white R & B–jazz acts like Zoot Money and Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames—and the crowd was fascinating. Quite unusually for the time, it was 50 percent black—Afro-Caribbeans and a handful of African-American GIs; the white half was made up of mobsters, hookers and hipsters.

On the first night Leonard went with Nancy to the club, there was a knife fight. “Somebody called the law. Everyone was stoned and dancing,” she recalls, and then the police arrived. “I don't know if you've ever been to any of these sleazy joints, but you don't want to be there when they turn on the lights. Suddenly all the faces were white. The incident didn't last long, but we were all pretty shook up. I was worried about Leonard, but he was cool.” Leonard loved the place. After a subsequent visit, Leonard wrote to his sister, Esther, saying, “It's the first time I've really enjoyed dancing. I sometimes even forget I belong to an inferior race. The Twist is the greatest ritual since circumcision—and there you can choose between the genius of two cultures. Myself I prefer the Twist.”
1

With the first draft of his novel finished, Leonard turned his attention to his second volume of poems. He had gathered the poems for
The Spice-Box of Earth
the year before and, at Irving Layton's recommendation, had given it to the Canadian publisher McClelland & Stewart. Literally. Driving to Toronto with a friend, Leonard handed his manuscript to Jack McClelland in person. McClelland had taken over his father's company in 1946 at the age of twenty-four and was, according to the writer Margaret Atwood, “a pioneer in Canadian publishing, at a time when many Canadians did not believe they had a literature, or if they did have one, it wasn't very good or interesting.”
2
So impressed was McClelland by Leonard that he accepted his book on the spot.

Poets are not especially known for their salesman skills, but Leonard worked his book like a pro. He even instructed the publisher how it should be packaged and marketed. Instead of the usual slim hardback that poetry tended to come in—which was nice for pressing flowers in but expensive to print and therefore to buy—his should be a cheap colorful paperback, said Leonard, and he offered to design it. “I want an audience,” he wrote in a letter to McClelland. “I am not interested in the Academy.” He wanted to make his work accessible to “inner-directed adolescents, lovers in all degrees of anguish, disappointed Platonists, pornography-peepers, hair-handed monks and Popists, French-Canadian intellectuals, unpublished writers, curious musicians etc., all that holy following of my Art.”
3
In all, a pretty astute, and remarkably enduring, inventory of his fan base.

Leonard was sent a list of revisions and edits and given a tentative publication date of March 1960, but the date passed.

In the same month, Leonard was in the East End of London, walking to the tube station from the dental surgery where Mrs. Pullman worked, where he had just had a wisdom tooth pulled. It was raining—Leonard would say “it rained almost every day in London,” which sounds about right—but, that day, it rained even more heavily than usual, that cold, sideways, winter rain in which England specializes. He took shelter in a nearby building, which turned out to be a branch of the Bank of Greece. Leonard could not fail to notice that the teller wore a pair of sunglasses and had a tan. The man told Leonard that he was Greek and had recently been home; the weather, he said, was lovely there at this time of year.

There was nothing to keep Leonard in London. He had no project to complete or promote, which left him not only free but also vulnerable to the depression that the short, dark days of a London winter are so good at inducing. On his application for the Canada Council grant, Leonard had said he would go to all the old capitals—Athens, Jerusalem and Rome, as well as London. On Hampstead High Street he stopped in at a travel agent's and bought tickets to Israel and Greece.

S
urvival, in discussions of the mystery and motivations of Leonard Cohen, has tended to be left in the corner clutching an empty dance card while writers head for the more alluring sex, God and depression and haul them around the dance floor. There is no argument that between them these three have been a driving force in his life and work. But what served Leonard best was his survival instinct. Leonard had an instinct for self-protection that not all writers—or lovers, or depressives, or spiritual seekers, or any of those creative types that nature or nurture made raw and sensitive—possess. Leonard was a lover, but when it comes to survival he was also a fighter.

When Leonard's father died, what the nine-year-old boy wanted to keep of his was a knife and a service revolver; when Leonard was fourteen, the first story of his ever published (in his high school yearbook) bore the title “Kill or be Killed.” Yes, young boys like guns and gangsters, and small Jewish boys who grow up during World War II have even more layers to add to the general chromosomal bias, but Leonard definitely has a fighting spirit. Asked who his hero was, he rattled off the names of spiritual leaders and poets—Roshi, Ramesh Balsekar, Lorca, Yeats—adding the caveat, “I admire many men and women but it's the designation ‘hero' that I have difficulty with, because that implies some kind of reverence that is somewhat alien to my nature.” But the following day Leonard sent an e-mail, having thought about the question. His message said, without qualification this time:

    
i forgot

    
my hero is muhammad ali

    
as they say about the Timex in their ads

    
takes a lickin'

    
keeps on tickin'
4

Leonard still is a fighter. Some years after this correspondence, when Leonard, in his seventies, discovered that his former manager had bled his retirement account dry, he dusted off his suit, put on his hat and set off around the world to win his fortune back. But the gods conspired to give him an instinct for flight as well as fight. When it came to survival, Leonard would often turn to the first of the two for, as he put it, “the health of my soul.”
5

Leonard was not entirely joking when he spoke about having had a “messianic” childhood. From an early age he had a strong sense that he was going to do something special and an expectation that he would “grow into manhood leading other men.”
6
He had also known from an early age that he would be a writer—a serious writer. Of all the trades a sensitive and depressive man could follow, few are more hazardous than being a serious writer. Acting? Actors are on the front line, yes, but most of the damage occurs during auditions. Once they land a role, they have a mask to hide behind. But writing is about uncovering. “Not I, but the poet discovered the unconscious,” said Freud, through what an analyst's analyst would recognize as the gritted teeth of envy. It's about allowing the mind to be as noisy and chaotic as it wants and leaping into the dark depths of this pandemonium in the hope of surfacing with something ordered and beautiful. The life of a serious writer requires long periods of solitary confinement; the life of a writer as serious, meticulous, self-critical and liable to depression as Leonard means solitary confinement in one's own personal Turkish prison, cornered by black dogs.