Various Positions (10 page)

As Cohen was meeting with his peers and elders, his friends were leaving. He wrote a short story entitled “Goodbye, Old Rosengarten” that describes the last night with his friend Mort Rosengarten before Mort left Montreal to study art in London. The two revisit their favorite locales, including a bistro called The Shrine, their nickname for the Cafe Andre on Victoria Street. Cohen, unnamed in the story, tries to convince Rosengarten of the virtues of Montreal “
on the threshold of greatness, like Athens, like New Orleans.” At the Shrine, all has changed: the bohemians have abandoned the place, the furniture has been replaced. The story is an apologia for altered lives and an altered city, which both Cohen and Rosengarten must escape to fulfil their promise of greatness. A year later, Cohen also left.

Cohen was adding music to his poetry readings, though not necessarily his own guitar. In February 1958, Layton reported to the critic Desmond Pacey that Cohen was bringing a new Beat style from New York and San Francisco to Montreal:
“He’s currently reading poetry while a jazz orchestra fills in with strophes of its own.” Dudek also tried it one evening but without success, according to Layton, “but Cohen is really laying them in the aisles. A new development in the Montreal School?” Cohen began to appear often at downtown clubs like Birdland, and in March 1958, Layton, Jonathan Williams (an American poet and printer), and Daryl Hine witnessed Cohen’s reading accompanied by a jazz ensemble, and then the three joined in.

In April of that year, Cohen gave his first professional poetry recital at Dunn’s Progressive Jazz Parlour, a room above Dunn’s Famous Steak House on Ste-Catherine Street. Working with pianist and arranger Maury Kay, who usually had a twelve- or fifteen-piece band on stage, Cohen recited his poetry, starting at midnight, often improvising while Kay played piano. Cohen read his poem “The Gift” (which appeared in
The Spice-Box of Earth)
, introducing it by saying, “
It was written for a girl for whom I had given too many poems and she asked me to refrain. So I wrote her this poem. And it’s a serious poem, so don’t cackle just because I told you I needed the money.”

After Cohen’s reading there was a short interview that began with the question, “
I wonder how a poet who’s meant to be a recluse in his room feels about being a nightclub celebrity?” Cohen responds by saying, “
Well, ah, this isn’t quite being a nightclub celebrity. What we’re really doing is bringing poetry to where it belongs…”

One night in the spring of 1958, Morley Callaghan visited Dunn’s, invited by Cohen. Callaghan had read of “
the nightclub poets of San Francisco and Greenwich Village,” and was interested in seeing Cohen’s work performed. Dunn’s, Callaghan writes, “
is a kind of triple-decked club, something for the boys on each floor, and naturally the poet is in the attic.” Around midnight:

Throughout the spring and summer Cohen would appear at Dunn’s, performing with a jazz band. He also performed on the McGill campus
and in Toronto, honing the musical element that would later eclipse his poetry. It was a fresh genre for Montreal audiences and Cohen established a local reputation as a performer.

In June of 1958, Cohen wrote a short essay that defined his aesthetic, a declaration of poetic intent:

————

THE WORLDLY
twenty-four-year-old poet and folk singer spent the summer of 1958 as a counsellor at Pripstein’s Camp Mishmar. Pripstein’s was started by a Hebrew schoolteacher and educator, Hayim (Chuck) Pripstein, and grew out of a children’s camp that was once attached to a Jewish hotel in Filion, Quebec, known for its literary gatherings (Isaac Bashevis Singer, among others, read there). When the river behind the hotel became polluted, the hotel closed and Pripstein transported some of the buildings to a new site in St-Adolphe-de-Howard, north of Montreal. The camp’s philosophy was to take children of varying abilities, background, and behavior and integrate them.

When other camps would reject disturbed or difficult childen, Pripstein’s took them in. The counsellors attended weekly Saturday afternoon seminars on child psychology, mental health, and Judaism to help them handle the problems. The majority of campers were the children of the middle class and most of the counsellors were McGill students. Instead of a bugle to awaken campers in the morning, the opening bars of Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto were played on the public address
system. A camp photograph from 1958 shows a robust Leonard Cohen standing in the back row amid a group of healthy campers. Among the graduates were literary critic Ruth Wisse, pianist Robert Silverman, and sociologist Lionel Tiger. Many of the counsellors and campers went on to become psychiatrists, social workers, and child analysts. At Pripstein’s Cohen organized folksinging and haiku contests and also took an interest in a young camper named Robert Elkin, an autistic
idiot savant
who had an extraordinary facility with numbers. Elkin appears as the ill-fated Martin Stark in
The Favorite Game
.

The fourth book of
The Favorite Game
carefully recounts Cohen’s experiences at Pripstein’s, although not his turning up a week late and in shorts for the wedding of Moishe Pripstein (son of the founder) and Florence Sherman. He does describe, however, his emergence from the boathouse in the early morning with a female counsellor, under the watchful eye of Mrs. Pripstein, whose house surveyed the camp from a hilltop perch. Cohen found camp a fertile ground for romance. One close friend was Fran Dropkin, a gorgeous dancer from Brooklyn with thick dark braids who had come to Pripstein’s as an art counsellor. Another woman, the camp nurse, became the muse for one of his best early poems, “As the Mist Leaves No Scar.” A camper who ran the darkroom at Pripstein’s recalls printing a roll of film for Cohen. They turned out to be a series of photos of nude females.

The camp was a cultural mecca and long hours were spent among counsellors and campers in stimulating discussions of poetry, history, and drama. Life in Israel, the status of Jews in Quebec, and the nature of Montreal were also analyzed. It was a time of intense self-expression and Cohen, whose talent was acknowledged, was the leading nonconformist. The counsellor’s lounge, underneath the dining hall, became the center for most of these debates.

Part of that year was also devoted to visiting his mother, who was being treated for depression in the Allan Memorial Institute, a psychiatric hospital in Montreal. The depression was triggered by inappropriately prescribed drugs for a skin disease brought on by the stress caused by the return of the now senile Rabbi Klein to the Cohen household. During visits to the hospital, Masha often accused Cohen and his sister of neglecting her and Cohen found the encounters difficult. Once her
medication changed, however, she regained her mental balance and was quickly released. But his familial links withered further when he failed to return to the family business at the end of the summer. When asked by his cousin Edgar Cohen why he left the Freedman Company, Cohen replied, “
Edgar, I had no choice.”

In the December 1958 issue of
Culture
there was a surprising attack on Cohen from his former mentor, Louis Dudek. The newest generation of poets, Dudek stated, is “
not even capable of social anger or of pity.” Cohen was criticized for his “
obscure cosmological imagery … a confusion of symbolic images, often a rag-bag of classical mythology.” Layton was suitably incensed, calling Dudek’s attitude “
as stupid as it is false. Cohen is one of the purest lyrical talents this country has ever produced. He hates the mythologizing school of Macpherson, Reaney and Daryl Hine.” Cohen overlooked the charges and accompanied Dudek and F.R. Scott to a January 1959 party for Ralph Gustafson at the Montreal Press Club.

In April 1959 Cohen and Layton both received Canada Council grants. Cohen’s proposed project was to write a novel drawn from visits to the ancient capitals of Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem. Because he had the support of writers like Layton and Scott, and was gaining attention in reviews from Margaret Avison, Desmond Pacey, Milton Wilson, and Northrop Frye, the Canada Council decided to fund his request. A number of Canadian writers were living overseas at the time: Dorothy Livesay and Mordecai Richler were in London, Mavis Gallant was in Paris, and Margaret Laurence was in Africa. According to Layton, this was to be expected because “
the Canadian poet … is an exile condemned to live in his own country” without a public or following; hence, one might as well depart to a region where art was at least respected. The arts grant of two thousand dollars made it possible for Cohen to leave Montreal.

That June, Layton introduced Cohen to A.M. Klein who was to become an instrumental figure in Cohen’s life. Klein was the seminal Jewish Montreal poet and had been the editor of the
Canadian Jewish Chronicle
from 1938–55. He had won a Governor General’s Award for poetry in 1949 and had been the leader of the Jewish literati until his nervous breakdown and withdrawal from writing in the mid-fifties. Cohen
grew up reading Klein and Klein had reviewed Cohen’s grandfather’s book in
The Canadian Jewish Chronicle
. Klein remembered both the book and the rabbi. After their visit, Cohen told Layton that he thought “
the fires had been banked” but that Klein was still witty and eager to talk about poetry. Cohen had already written two poems about Klein: “To a Teacher” and “Song for Abraham Klein,” later to appear in
The Spice-Box of Earth
.

Cohen interpreted Klein’s breakdown as the result of being exiled by his community. In a December 1963 talk by Cohen at the Jewish Public Library of Montreal, Cohen said, “
Klein chose to be a priest though it was as a prophet that we needed him, as a prophet he needed us and he needed himself …” To avoid such a split himself, Cohen attempts to collapse the divide between prophet and priest and to join them throughout his work—or at least give them equal time. The prophet, Cohen notes, is the visionary; the priest his disciple.

Cohen learned from both Klein and Layton, combining Klein’s priestly mien with the prophetic energy of Layton to reformulate the voice of the Jewish poet. Cohen examined Judaism within a broader context, one that allowed the incorporation of Zen Buddhism and traditional Jewish orthodoxy. Cohen’s poetic world became a complex mix of tradition and experimentation, conservatism and propheticism. What he called the Montreal tradition was “
a certain Hebraic sense connected with Layton and A.M. Klein, and it connected me in a certain way with Scott, whose father was a minister. I’m attracted to a priesthood.” But Klein stood out:

Such a move established a paradigm for Cohen, who would himself step outside the Montreal poetry scene.
“I always was more interested in the
exile,” Cohen has commented, “somebody who can’t claim the entire landscape as his own.”

————

ON MAY
5, 1959, Cohen wrote an important letter from his Mountain Street apartment:

The manuscript was
The Spice-Box of Earth
, and its arrival marked the beginning of Cohen’s long-term relationship with one of Canada’s leading publishers. Jack McClelland recalls the young poet self-confidently striding into his office earlier that spring wearing a jacket and tie, carrying a manuscript of poems. McClelland quickly scanned Cohen’s poetry, which had been recommended by Irving Layton. In an unprecedented move, McClelland accepted Cohen’s manuscript on the spot, without consulting any of his editors. “I think it’s the only time I ever—without reading a manuscript or without having it read—made the publishing commitment…. I said OK, we’re going to publish this guy; I don’t give a shit whether the poetry’s good, although I did look at a couple of the poems and thought they were pretty good.”