I'm Your Man (9 page)

During childhood he had the comfort and kindness of women for protection. In his youth he had come to depend on having a community of like-minded, mostly (but not exclusively) male friends. He had no problem with leaving one place and moving to another—he traveled light and wasted little time on sentimentality. But wherever he lived, he liked to surround himself with a clan of fellow-thinkers: people who could hold a conversation, could hold a drink and knew how to hold their silence when he needed to be left alone to write. Athens couldn't provide that. But an acquaintance in London, Jacob Rothschild (the future fourth Baron Rothschild, young scion of a celebrated Jewish banking family), whom he had met at a party, had talked about a small Greek island named Hydra. Rothschild's mother, Barbara Hutchinson, was about to be remarried to a celebrated Greek painter named Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas, who had a mansion there. Rothschild suggested that Leonard go and visit them. The island's small population included a colony of artists and writers from around the globe. Henry Miller had lived there at the start of World War II and written in
The Colossus of Maroussi
about its “wild and naked perfection.”

After leaving London, Leonard stopped first in Jerusalem. It was his first time in Israel. By day he toured the ancient sites and at night he sat in the Café Kasit, the haunt of “everybody that thought they were a writer.”
7
Here he met the Israeli poet Natan Zach, who invited him to stay at his house. After a few days, Leonard took a plane to Athens. He stayed in the city one day, during which he saw the Acropolis. In the evening he took a cab to Piraeus and checked into a hotel down by the docks. Early the next morning, Leonard boarded a ferry to Hydra. In 1960, before they started using hydrofoils, it was a five-hour journey. But there was a bar on board. Leonard took his drink up on deck and sat in the sun, staring out at the rumpled blue sheet of sea, the smooth blue blanket of sky, as the ferry chugged slowly past the islands scattered like a broken necklace across the Aegean.

As soon as he set eyes on Hydra, in the distance, before the ferry even entered the port, Leonard liked it. Everything about it looked right: the natural, horseshoe-shaped harbor, the whitewashed buildings on the steep hills surrounding it. When he took off his sunglasses and squinted into the sun, the island looked like a Greek amphitheater, its houses like white-clad elders sitting upright in the tiers. The doors of the houses all faced down to the port, which was the stage on which a very ordinary drama unfolded: boats bobbing lazily on the water, cats sleeping on the rocks, young men unloading the day's catch of fish and sponges, old men tanned like leather sitting outside the bars arguing and talking. When Leonard walked through the town, he noticed that there were no cars. Instead there were donkeys, with a basket hung on either side, lumbering up and down the steep cobblestone streets between the port and the Monastery of the Prophet Elijah. It might have been an illustration from a children's Bible.

The place appeared to have been organized according to some ancient ideal of harmony, symmetry and simplicity. The island had just one real town, which was named, simply, Hydra Town. Its inhabitants had come to a tacit decision that just two basic colors would suffice—blue (the sea and the sky) and white (the houses, the sails and the seagulls circling over the fishing boats). “I really did feel I'd come home,” Leonard said later. “I felt the village life was familiar, although I'd had no experience with village life.”
8
What might have also given Hydra its feeling of familiarity was that it was the nearest thing Leonard had experienced to the utopia he and Mort used to discuss as boys in urban Montreal. It was sunny and warm and it was populated by writers, artists and thinkers from around the world.

The village chiefs of the expat community were George Johnston and Charmian Clift. Johnston, forty-eight years old, was a handsome Australian journalist who had been a war correspondent during World War II. Charmian, thirty-seven, also a journalist, was his attractive second wife. Both had written books and wanted to devote themselves to writing full-time. Since they had two children (a third arrived later), this necessitated finding a place to live where life was cheap but congenial. In 1954 they discovered Hydra. The couple were great self-mythologizers and natural leaders. They held court at Katsikas, a grocery store on the waterfront whose back room, with perfect Hydran simplicity, doubled as a small café and bar. The handful of tables outside overlooking the water made the ideal spot for the expats to gather and wait for the ferry, which arrived at noon, bringing the mail—all of them seemed to be waiting for a check—and a new batch of people, to watch, to talk to, or to take to bed. On a small island with few telephones and little electricity, therefore no television, the ferry provided their news and entertainment, and their contact with the outside world.

Leonard met George and Charmian almost as soon as he arrived. He was not the first young man they had seen walking from the port, carrying a suitcase and a guitar, but they took to him immediately, and he to them. Like Irving and Aviva Layton, George and Charmian were colorful, charismatic and antibourgeois. They had also been doing for years what Leonard had wanted to do, which was live as a writer without the necessity of taking regular work. They had very little money but on Hydra they could get by on it, even with three children to provide for, and the life they were living was by no means impoverished. They lunched on sardines fresh off the boat, washed down with retsina—which old man Katsikas let them put on a tab—and seemed to glow in the warmth and sun. Leonard accepted their invitation to stay the night. The next day they helped him rent one of the many empty houses on the hill and donated a bed, a chair and table and some pots and pans.

Although he had been brought up with so much, Leonard was happy with very little. He thrived in the Mediterranean climate. Every morning he would rise with the sun, just as the local workmen did, and start his work. After a few hours' writing he would walk down the narrow, winding streets, a towel flung over one shoulder, to swim in the sea. While the sun dried his hair, he walked to the market to buy fresh fruit and vegetables and climbed back up the hill. It was cool inside the old house. He would sit writing at George and Charmian's wooden table until it was too dark to see by the kerosene lamps and candles. At night he walked back again to the port, where there was always someone to talk to.

The ritual, routine and sparsity of this life satisfied him immensely. It felt monastic somehow, except this was a monk with benefits; the Hydra arts colony had beaten the hippies to free love by half a decade. Leonard was also a monk who observed the Sabbath. On Friday nights he would light the candles and on Saturday, instead of working, he would put on his white suit and go down to the port to have coffee.

One afternoon, toward the end of the long, hot summer, a letter arrived by ferry for Leonard. It told him that his grandmother had died, leaving him $1,500. He already knew what he would do with it. On September 27, 1960, days after his twenty-sixth birthday, Leonard bought a house on Hydra. It was plain and white, three stories high, two hundred years old, one of a cluster of buildings on the saddle between Hydra Town and the next little village, Kamini. It was a quiet spot, if not entirely private—if he leaned out of the window he could almost touch the house across the alley, and he shared his garden wall with the neighbor next door. The house had no electricity, nor even plumbing—a cistern filled in spring when the rains came, and when that ran out he had to wait for the old man who came past his house every few days with a donkey weighted on both sides with containers of water. But the house had thick white walls that kept heat out in summer, a fireplace for the winter and a large terrace where Leonard smoked, birds sang and cats skulked in the hope that one might fall from its perch. A priest came and blessed the house, holding a burning candle above the front door and making a black cross in soot. An elderly neighbor, Kiria Sophia, came in early every morning to wash the dishes, sweep the floors, do his laundry, look after him. Leonard's new home gave him the pure pleasure of a child.

O
ne of the things I wanted to mention and which a lot of people haven't caught,” says Steve Sanfield, a longtime close friend of Leonard, “is really how important those Greece years and the Greek sensibility were to Leonard and his development and the things he carries with him. Leonard likes Greek music and Greek food, he speaks Greek pretty well for a foreigner, and there's no rushing with Leonard, it's, ‘Well, let's have a cup of coffee and we'll talk about it.' He and I both carry
komboloi
—Greek worry beads; only Greek men do that. The beads have nothing to do with religion at all—in fact one of the Ancient Greek meanings of the word is ‘wisdom beads,' indicating that men once used them to meditate and contemplate.”

Sanfield's friendship with Leonard began fifty years ago. He is the “Steve” described in Leonard's poem “I See You on a Greek Mattress” (from the 1966 book
Parasites of Heaven
), sitting in Leonard's house on Hydra, smoking hash and throwing the I Ching, and the “great haiku master” named in Leonard's poem “Other Writers” (from the 2006 collection
Book of Longing
). He is also the man who would introduce Leonard to his Zen master, Roshi Joshu Sasaki. In 1961, when Sanfield boarded a ferry in Athens and, on a whim, alighted at Hydra, he was “a young poet seeking adventure.” Like Leonard, he “fell in love” with the place. The people he met in the bar at the port told him, “Wait until you meet Leonard Cohen, you're both young Jewish poets, you'll like him.” He did.

Sanfield's memories of Hydra are of light, sun, camaraderie, the voluptuous simplicity of life and the special energy that emanated from its community of artists and seekers. It was a small community, around fifty in number, although people would come and go. The mainstays, the Johnstons, he says, “were vital in all of our lives. They fought a lot, they sought revenge on each other a lot with their sexuality, and things got very complicated, but they were really the center of foreign life in the port.” Among the other residents were Anthony Kingsmill, a British painter, raconteur, and bon vivant, to whom Leonard became close; Gordon Merrick, a former Broadway actor and reporter whose first novel,
The Strumpet Wind,
about a gay American spy, was published in 1947; Dr. Sheldon Cholst, an American poet, artist, radical and psychiatrist who set his flag somewhere between Timothy Leary and R. D. Laing; and a young Swedish author named Göran Tunström, who was writing his first novel and was the model for the character Lorenzo in Axel Jensen's 1961 novel
Joacim
(although many still believe Lorenzo was based on Leonard).

“A lot of people came through in those early years,” says Sanfield, “like Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso”—the latter of whom was living on the neighboring island, coaching a softball team. Leonard met Ginsberg on a trip to Athens. Leonard was drinking a coffee in Saint Agnes Square when he spotted the poet at another table. “I went up to him, asked him if he was indeed Allen Ginsberg, and he came over and sat down with me and then he came and stayed in my house on Hydra, and we became friends. He introduced me to Corso,” said Leonard, “and my association with the Beats became a little more intimate.”
9

Hydra in the early sixties was, according to Sanfield, “a golden age of artists. We weren't beatniks, and the hippies hadn't been invented yet, and we thought of ourselves as kind of international bohemians or travelers, because people came together from all over the world with an artistic intent. There was an atmosphere there that was very exciting and I think touched everyone who was there. There were revolutions going on in literature, and there was the sexual revolution, which we thought we'd won and we probably lost, and a number of us—George Lialios, Leonard and myself—began to examine different spiritual paths like Tibetan Buddhism and the I Ching.”

George Lialios was a significant figure in Leonard's life on the island. Nine years older than Leonard, with a thick black mustache, bushy beard and bright, piercing eyes, he owned a seventeen-room mansion at the top of the hill. “He was a remarkable man and a mysterious man,” says Sanfield, by various people's accounts a philosopher, a musician, a semiaristocrat and an intellectual. Lialios himself says that he was “from Patras, born in Munich, both parents Greek, the family returned to Athens from Germany in 1935. Studied law, did three years' military service during the so-called civil war, then followed studies of music and composition in Vienna, 1951–1960. An inclination toward philosophy is correct.” His Greek father had been a composer and a diplomat who was in Germany during World War II. George was fluent in Greek as well as in German and English. Leonard spent many evenings on Hydra with Lialios, mostly at Leonard's house. Sometimes they would have deep conversations. Often they did not talk at all. They would sit together in silence in Leonard's barely furnished, white-walled room, much as Leonard would with Roshi in years to come.

Another expat islander who played a part in Leonard's life was Axel Jensen. A lean, intense Norwegian writer in his late twenties, he had already published three novels, one of which was made into a movie. The house where Jensen lived with his wife, Marianne, and their young child, also named Axel, was at the top of Leonard's hill. Sanfield stayed in the Jensens' house when he first arrived on Hydra; the family had rented it out while they were away. Its living room was carved out of the rock of the hillside. There were copies of the I Ching and
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
on the bookshelves.

When Marianne came back to the island, her husband was not with her. “She was the most beautiful woman I'd ever known,” says Sanfield. “I was stunned by her beauty and so was everyone else.” Leonard included. “She just glowed,” said Sanfield, “this Scandinavian goddess with this little blond-haired boy, and Leonard was this dark Jewish guy. The contrast was striking.”