Various Positions (14 page)

The ambivalence continued, listing between masterpiece and failure. To Seymour Lawrence of the Atlantic Monthly Press, Cohen explained
that “
perhaps its only value is that it cleared my mind of dogging autobiographical material,” adding that McClelland & Stewart thought the first draft “disgusting, tedious, and dark and that I should stick to poetry. A New York publisher reports that it is one of the most promising first novels they have ever seen. I withdrew the book and began to revise it. That is the whole song.” On that same day he also wrote to his sister that
“my work limps slowly along to immortality. I am in the phase when I detest the book.” A few days later he declared: “
It doesn’t matter to me whether it’s published or not, to tell the truth—I learned so much about writing from that, it’s worth it. It makes the next book that much better.”

In mid-1961, in the midst of his re-writing, Cohen showed the novel to George Johnston, who thought it had commercial potential as well as artistic appeal. He offered to put Cohen in touch with his literary agents, David Higham Associates in London, and a long correspondence began between Cohen and his soon-to-be agent Sheila Watson. Their letters carefully detailed the drafts, revisions, and rewrites and included a reader’s report from January 29, 1962:

Another complaint was that the book was “
too long … for what it is saying,” and that the title,
Beauty at Close Quarters: An Anthology
, was too awkward. Cohen continued his revisions and proposed a series of alternative titles:
Buried Snows, Wandering Fires, Winged with Vain Desires. The Favorite Game
was not chosen until November 7, 1962. Secker & Warburg finally published the revised novel in September 1963.

————

DURING A VISIT
to Montreal in December 1960, Cohen re-encountered what he called classic Montreal nights: “
Three in the morning along Pine Avenue. The black fences and trees from all my old poems canyoned with snow.” He was satisfied with his creative life, but had ongoing financial worries. He had a modest yearly annuity of $750, not enough to sustain him. “
Except for this tiny desperation about money, I’m happy, productive, and offending all my colleagues with my huge creative joy.”

One of Cohen’s schemes was to write television dramas with Irving Layton. Every morning Layton came to Cohen’s apartment near Mac-Gregor Street, where the two would work on promising ideas which remained unsold. “
We did it simply by prodding each other,” Cohen said. “He’d get off some line and then I would take the part of a character and so on and we found ourselves working very beautifully together.” Titles like “Lights on the Black Water,” “A Man Was Killed,” “Up with Nothing,” and “Enough of Fallen Leaves” caught no one’s imagination. They hoped to write six plays, including “One for the Books,” about a Communist bookseller. But the collaboration of poets failed to produce saleable drama.

Cohen was trying his own hand at playwriting at this time and Layton recalls a visit from Cohen one day in which they read his play “The Whipping:” It was a “
macabre, compelling thing,” similar to an earlier work Cohen had written after his return from Hydra entitled
The Latest Step
. It would later be published as “The New Step (a Ballet-Drama in One Act)” in
Flowers for Hitler
.

Montreal, like every place he stayed, again began to make Cohen restless. He sought stimulation elsewhere, and the place he chose was Cuba.

    I
N
1957 Cohen’s sister Esther and her husband Victor had gone to Cuba for their honeymoon and came back with reports of glittering nightclubs, casinos, and risqué floorshows. This had been under the auspices of Batista; in 1959 Fidel Castro had come to power and Cohen wanted to see the socialist revolution firsthand. He took a bus to Miami in late March, and then flew to Havana, which was hot and quietly disintegrating. It was 1961 and Castro was facing off with the Americans. “
I am wild for all kinds of violence,” Cohen had said before leaving. He later confessed that he went not so much to support Castro as to pursue a fiction: “
I had this mythology of this famous civil war in my mind. I thought maybe this was my Spanish civil war, but it was a shabby kind of support. It was really mostly curiosity and a sense of adventure.”

Cohen’s departure created confusion at McClelland & Stewart: “
the day you left for Cuba, the page proofs [of
Spice-Box]
came in, and now I am wondering what we had better do,” wrote his editor. On March 30 Cohen was on a Pan American flight from Miami to Havana. Thirty-one years earlier, almost to the day, García Lorca had made a trip to Cuba, and part of Cohen’s attraction to the country, as it had been with Columbia University, was that it had excited his literary mentor. Lorca’s three-month stay, beginning in April 1930, included lectures, poetry readings, and a crocodile hunt. “
The island is a paradise,” Lorca exclaimed to his parents. “Cuba! If you can’t find me, look for me in Andalusia or in Cuba.”

When Cohen arrived, he found a splendid city in decay. The skyscrapers of Vedado, the business center west of the Old City, were falling into disrepair, the façades cracking, windows broken. The bright pastels of the elegant homes in Cubanacan and El Cerro had faded, the houses now inhabited by peasant families. Walls were crumbling, paint was peeling, and weeds were sprouting. Manicured lawns had turned brown and goats grazed alongside the swimming pools. Elegant cars had been replaced by decrepit taxis. The Havana Country Club was the new National School of Art, and the Prado, once an elite Spanish heritage club, was filled with gym mats for its new use as a gymnastics center.

Havana had once been called “the whorehouse of America,” with boatloads of prostitutes greeting tourists as they traveled up the narrow waterway that separates Morro Castle from the city. Under Batista, the government disguised the profitable prostitution rings as dance academies. When Cohen arrived, a program to reform the nearly eleven thousand prostitutes of Havana was underway. The casinos were outlawed and gambling had been reduced to a back-street operation. But the exotic appeal of the sensual Cuban world could not be erased by socialism, and a violent beauty remained. The rhythm of maracas and marimbas playing the rumba, the
son
, or the cha-cha was heard throughout the city. Sloppy Joe’s bar, at one time Cuba’s most famous drinking establishment, remained open, although it lacked its former glamor. In Old Havana, the walls of La Bodeguita del Medio, a favorite of Hemingway’s, still displayed the signatures of thousands of patrons. Everywhere there was the smell of dust and salt, cigar smoke and cheap perfume.

Despite the new reforms, a certain lasciviousness still hovered about the city, and Cohen rapidly fell into what he referred to as his old bourgeois ways: staying up late to explore the night scene. This teenage habit continued throughout his life and he would often be up writing, drinking, or talking at 3:00 a.m., his favorite morning hour. He soon adopted the fashionable rebel garb: khaki shorts and the fresh stubble of a new beard. But very few citizens were on the streets at that hour and certainly not the East Bloc and Soviet technicians and aides, nor the young female Czech translator he met whose boss would not let her out at night. Only the prostitutes that congregated along the Malecón, the broad boulevard that edged the ocean, or those he met in the Old City kept him company. Of black and Spanish heritage, these chocolate-skinned women with marvelous figures expressed an eroticism that Cohen found irresistible.

Joining the pimps, hookers, gamblers, small-time criminals, and black marketeers who prowled Havana all night, Cohen roamed the urban slums of Jesus del Monte to the swank waterfront suburbs of Miramar. He frequented the back alleys and little bars of Old Havana and the once-renowned Tropicana, which claimed the largest dancehall in the world. Ever since the Shanghai, celebrated for its nude shows, had closed, the Tropicana, with its roulette rooms, cabaret, and open-air dance floor and stage, had flourished. Initially outlawed under Castro, the nightclubs, gambling houses, brothels, casinos, and slot machines soon reappeared. When they were closed, unemployment was too high, compromising the economic goals of the revolution. Cohen imagined himself as “The Only Tourist in Havana,” the title of a later poem.

Late one night a Canadian government official knocked on the door of Cohen’s Havana hotel, politely telling him that his
“presence was urgently requested at the Canadian Embassy.” Looking back on the incident, Cohen remembers that he felt apprehensive but excited: “
I was Upton Sinclair! I was on an important mission!” Feeling “feisty” and emancipated, Cohen accompanied the dark-suited figure to the embassy. He was immediately ushered into the office of the vice-consul, who took an instant dislike to him, his beard, and his khaki outfit. The official disdainfully conveyed the dramatic news to the pseudo-revolutionary: “
Your mother’s very worried about you!” It turned out that because three bombers piloted by revolutionaries had staged a minor attack on
the Havana airport, exaggerated in the world press as an all-out war on the country, Cohen’s mother had contacted Laz Phillips, a Canadian senator who happened to be her cousin and asked him to locate her son to make sure he was alive.

The threat of invasion, however, put everyone on alert and eventually led to Cohen’s arrest. Castro had detained nearly one hundred thousand suspected dissidents in the preceding months and Cohen unwittingly joined their ranks. It happened while he was staying at the Hotel Miramar at Playa de Varadero, walking on the famous white sand beach roughly ninety miles east of Havana. Wearing his khakis and carrying a hunting knife, he was suddenly surrounded by twelve soldiers with Czech submachine guns. It was late at night and they thought he was the first of an American landing team. They marched him to the local police station while he repeated the only Spanish he knew, a slogan of Castro’s:
Amistad del pueblo
, “Friendship of the people.” This made no impression on his captors, but after an hour and a half of interrogation, Cohen convinced them he was not a spy but a fan of the regime who wanted to be there.

Once he had persuaded them that his intentions were innocent, Cohen and his captors embraced, brought out the rum and started a party. The soldiers were
militianos
, and to confirm their good will, they placed a necklace of shells and a string hung with two bullets around Cohen’s neck. He spent the next day with his captors and rode back to Havana with them. As they were walking down a Havana Street later that afternoon, a photographer snapped their picture, Cohen wearing his khakis and his new necklace. Afterwards, he stuffed the photograph in his knapsack.

Cohen spent much of his time in the Havana night scene, meeting artists and writers, arguing about artistic freedom and political oppression. He also ran into a number of American Communists. He disagreed with their views and had a violent argument with one of them. The man spat at Cohen and denounced him as bourgeois. The next day Cohen rose to the accusation by shaving his beard and putting on a seersucker suit, confirming their suspicions that he was a “bourgeois individualist.”

In Montreal, Irving Layton, as well as Cohen’s mother, was now worried. Following the attack on the airport on April 15, Layton wrote
to Cohen, advising him to leave as soon as possible. “
This is no time for a footloose reckless poet to find himself on the island,” Layton told his friend Desmond Pacey. Layton was convinced that within days there would be an invasion and that Cohen was in danger.

Layton was right. The imminent danger was intensified by the January suspension of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba. Anti-imperialist rhetoric increased in intensity and daily life became more perilous for foreigners. The Bay of Pigs invasion of April 17, 1961, confirmed the Cubans’ fear, although Castro’s unexpected success in defeating thirteen hundred U.S.-trained Cuban invaders solidified his power and stature. “Tourists” were arrested daily without explanation, although Cohen found the official attitude of the government “impeccable,” even toward someone as “ambiguous and ambivalent as myself.”

The day after the invasion, Cohen wrote to Jack McClelland, ostensibly to thank him for his first literary contract, adding, “
Just think how well the book would sell if I’m hit in an air-raid. What great publicity! Don’t tell me you haven’t been considering it.” He then gives this report of events the night of the invasion:

When Cohen decided to leave Cuba, he discovered that most of Havana’s middle class was trying to leave as well. Daily visits to the shell-struck Jose Martí airport, sixteen miles southwest of the city, became a fruitless ritual. He was unable to get a seat, although he soon befriended others in the waiting line, including the editor of the socialist magazine
Monthly Review
, who was also eager to escape. Cohen eventually managed to reserve a seat on a flight to Miami. Standing in line on April 26, the day he was to leave, Cohen was surprised to hear an official call the name of the person in front of him and the name of the person behind him, but not his own. Looking at the official’s list, he saw that a line had
been drawn through his name. Ordered to go to the security desk, Cohen was informed by a Cuban official that he could not leave the country. The reason? A picture of him dressed as a
militiano
and standing with two other soldiers had been found in his knapsack and he was thought to be an escaping Cuban. A copy of Castro’s
Declaration of Havana
, condemning American exploitation of Cuba, in his belongings didn’t help his claim that he was a foreigner. His Canadian passport was thought to have been a forgery.