Various Positions (3 page)

Cohen sat and studied not because he was a devoted biblical scholar but “
because I wanted the company of my grandfather. [And] I was interested in Isaiah for the poetry in English more than the poetry in Hebrew.” The Book of Isaiah, with its combination of poetry and prose, punishment and redemption, remained a lasting influence on Cohen’s work and forms one of several core texts for his literary and theological development. His reliance on images of fire for judgment and the metaphor of the path as the way to redemption derive from this central text. The prophetic tone of destruction in Isaiah, “the Lord is going to lay waste the earth / and devastate it” (24: 1), manifests itself repeatedly throughout Cohen’s work in personal and political terms. Isaiah also sets out an edict Cohen has followed: dispense with illusions, reject oppression, eliminate deceit.

Rabbi Klein had a sharp, Talmudic mind, the kind that could put a pin through the pages of a book and know every letter that it touched, Cohen recalled. Even when elderly and living with Masha and her family during a second period in the late fifties, Rabbi Klein exhibited a powerful, although not always concentrated, knowledge. He knew that he had published books in the past, and that Cohen had also published a work:
Let Us Compare Mythologies
(1956). But occasionally, when the
rabbi met Cohen in the upstairs hall of the house, he would become confused and ask his grandson if
he
was the writer or not. When Cohen published the
Spice-Box of Earth
in 1961, he dedicated it to the memory of his grandfather and paternal grandmother. At the time of his death in Atlanta, Rabbi Klein was writing a dictionary without the use of reference books. Cohen inherited his
tefillin
as well as a reverence for prophetic Judaism. His grandfather became the first of a series of powerful teachers in his life who filled the role of his absent father.

————

LEONARD NORMAN COHEN
was born on September 21, 1934, a Friday. In the Jewish religion it is said that those born on a Friday are marked for special piety. His chosen names reflected a family tradition of
L
’s, in Hebrew, the “Lamed,” beginning with Lazarus and Lyon and continuing with Cohen’s daughter Lorca. He was also thought to look more like his grandfather Lyon than his father Nathan. His Hebrew name, Eliezer, means “God is my help.” Norman is the anglicized form of Nehemiah, the rebuilder. The names were significant because in Hebrew, words embody divine attributes.

Born in the year 5695 in the month of Tishri, according to the Hebrew calendar, Cohen entered a family that retained its Jewish traditions. His place in the synagogue was prominent (the family had the third row) as the grandson and great-grandson of two presidents, and early in his youth he participated in the daily prayers and weekly celebrations. Each Friday night the family observed Shabbat. “
Religion structured our life,” Cohen has remarked.

Nathan Cohen, with his brother Horace, ran the Freedman Company, by now a successful mid-priced men’s clothing manufacturer. The company specialized in suits and topcoats, which were distributed throughout the country. At one time it was considered to be the largest men’s clothing manufacturer in Canada. Most of the workers were French Canadian or Italian; the managers were mostly Jewish. Nathan, known as N.B., dealt with the factory, the workers, the machinery, and the suppliers. Horace, or H.R., ran the front office. He was the principal
contact for the buyers and store owners and had all the qualities of a front man: charming, articulate, lazy, and pompous. He eventually received an O.B.E., Order of the British Empire. Although Nathan’s semi-invalid state limited his participation, he remained active in the company. But he resented being second-in-command to his younger brother, a resentment that may have been passed on to Cohen who later questioned his relationship with the family.

Beauty at Close Quarters
, the title of the first-draft of
The Favorite Game
, elaborates this disenfranchisement. The hero’s father was “
a fat man who laughed easily with everybody but his brothers,” the narrator writes, but explains that the “others” all “
walked ahead of his father into public glory.”

Nathan wasn’t given to ostentation but the family had the perquisites of the upper-middle class, employing a maid, a chauffeur-gardener, and an Irish-Catholic nanny named Ann who was devoted to Cohen and had a special influence. She often took him to church, and Cohen grew up respecting rather than fearing the dominating presence of the Catholic church in Montreal. He would often go to her home to celebrate Christmas and recalled that he was brought up “
part Catholic in a certain way.” The church represented romance to Cohen and he saw “
Christianity as the great missionary arm of Judaism. So I felt a certain patronizing interest in this version of the thing.
I didn’t have to believe in it.”

The Cohen household reflected his father’s formality rather than his mother’s earthy personality. Nathan always dressed in a suit and occasionally wore a monocle and spats. Cohen rarely saw him without a suit jacket on. In Tarpon Springs, Florida, where his father vacationed, he was photographed in a suit against informal backdrops of fishing boats and sponge fishermen. Cohen, too, was expected to wear a suit to dinner, or at the very least, a sports jacket. His sister Esther would argue with her father about her habit of only partially unfolding her napkin; Nathan insisted that it be completely unfolded. He also became upset when the family’s shoes and slippers were not carefully arranged under their respective beds. Decorum dictated the family, business, and communal life of the Cohens.

Although not a man of letters, Nathan recognized the value of books and gave his son an uncut set of leatherbound English poetry. His
mother was not a great reader either, and Cohen recalls only a Russian volume of Gogol on her shelf. Nathan read aloud to his children, although he didn’t have a gift for it. Cohen thought his father was reticent, withdrawn, and introspective. His enthusiasms were concert hall music—Sir Harry Lauder was a favorite, as well as Gilbert and Sullivan—and photography. An amateur filmmaker, Nathan Cohen documented the lives of his children on film. Some of the footage was excerpted in
Ladies and Gentlemen, … Mr. Leonard Cohen
, a 1965 National Film Board documentary on Cohen. The father’s interest instilled in his son an early fascination with photography and the pleasure of being photographed. In the 1951 Westmount High School Yearbook, Cohen lists photography as his hobby, an interest represented in
The Favorite Game
and
Beautiful Losers
.

————

AS A CHILD
, Cohen had a small Scottish terrier, nicknamed Tinkie for the tinkle of his license and identification tags. His parents surprised him with the dog as a gift, the scene described in
Beauty at Close Quarters
. His mother had actually named the dog Tovarishch, but his father disliked the reminder of the site of the Russo-German treaties. Tinkie disappeared in a snowstorm fifteen years later and was found dead under a neighbor’s porch the next spring. The dog had been one of Cohen’s closest childhood companions; Cohen still keeps a picture of Tinkie in his Los Angeles home. To this day he refuses to get another dog, although he had guppies, chicks, mice, turtles, and even a rescued pigeon during his childhood.

For his seventh birthday Cohen’s father bought him a Chemcraft chemistry set and built a laboratory in the basement. With an alcohol lamp and chemicals, Cohen produced dyes, invisible inks, and other concoctions. His friends would join him in the basement, creating new colors and liquids.

Cohen’s secure, comfortable childhood was unsettled by his father’s poor health and premature death. A poignant scene in
Beauty at Close Quarters
narrates the impact of the illness as the father climbs the stairs in
his home, pausing a minute or so at each step. With his son often by his side, the father “
would continue the story he was telling and never stop to complain how difficult the ascent was. Very soon, however, he could spare no breath at all and they would climb in silence.” In the funeral scene in
The Favorite Game
, Cohen recounts his anger at the loss of his father who died at the age of fifty-two, the solemnity of his uncles, the horror of an open coffin, and his mother’s inability to face the tragedy. For his part, Cohen later recalled that “
there was repression … I did not discover my feelings until my late thirties. I had to
adopt
the aspect of receptivity. I was very receptive to the Bible, authority. … Having no father I tried to capitalize [on his absence], resolve the Oedipal struggle, [create] good feelings.”

Following his father’s death, Cohen won a significant dispute with his mother over custody of Nathan’s pistol, a military souvenir. Cohen had been fascinated by his father’s military exploits and at one time Nathan had spoken of sending Cohen to a military college, an idea Cohen eagerly accepted.
The Favorite Game
describes the dispute over the gun, presented as an important talisman: a “
huge .38 in a thick leather case … Lethal, angular, precise, it smoldered in the dark drawer with dangerous potential. The metal was always cold.”

Cohen has always been fascinated by weapons, reflected in his novel
Beautiful Losers
. “
I loved the magic of guns,” the character F. declares. For several years Cohen himself kept a gun. In her lyrics to “Rainy Night House,” Joni Mitchell describes how she and Cohen took a taxi to his mother’s house in Westmount during her absence: “she went to Florida and left you with your father’s gun alone.” In “The Night Comes On,” from Cohen’s album
Various Positions
(1985), a wounded father tells his son:

The gun remained in the house until vandals stole it in 1978, the night before Masha Cohen died. Its disappearance meant the loss of protection, Cohen once reflected. But its importance was clear, as the narrator explains in
The Favorite Game:
“
The gun proved [the dying father] was once a warrior.”

Cohen handled the pain of his father’s death stoically. “I didn’t feel a profound sense of loss, maybe because he was very ill throughout my entire childhood,” he later said. In an unpublished poem that celebrates his father, written on the Greek island of Hydra, Cohen writes:

Following the death of Nathan Cohen, Masha’s status in the family altered. Her financial situation changed and the loss of her husband and security threw her into uncertainty. Cohen found himself in an awkward position, relying on his uncles for employment and the family for income. This change in status was subtle but profound and it was felt by everyone. Masha’s suffering was the most intense and obvious, manifested by mood swings and the occasional depression.

Thirteen years later Cohen dedicated his first book,
Let Us Compare Mythologies
, to his father, whose death he confronts in the poem “Rites.” The work castigates the failure of his uncles to allow his father a peaceful death by unrealistically prophesying his recovery as he lay dying. Unsurprisingly, death is the topic of one of Cohen’s essays from McGill. It emphasizes the scar that is “
always left on one of the survivors—a scar that does not heal quickly.”

At the time of his father’s death, Cohen was attending Roslyn School, a nearby elementary school. Academically he did well but didn’t distinguish himself. The school stressed extracurricular activities, including art
classes and sports, and Cohen enjoyed both. Two afternoons a week and Sunday mornings, he attended the Hebrew School at the synagogue. Expectations of him, as a Cohen, were greater and the work harder, but as early as age six he was familiar with Hebrew and basic Judaism. Miss Gordon and Mr. Lerner, his teachers, were important influences, but neither of them, nor anyone else, ever sat him down and explained what God wanted from him. No theology was offered. In a sense it was atheistic, Cohen has said.

Regular Shabbat attendance with the family at Shaar Hashomayim reinforced his Judaism, and he vividly remembers sitting in the third row of the synagogue with:

Still, it was a solemn occasion; one came to pray in a formal manner, with reverence but not feeling. Cohen’s knowledge of Hebrew was limited to the liturgy: “
I knew how to address the Almighty in Hebrew as long as it was exclusively concerned with redemption!”

In 1945 at age eleven, Cohen began an education of another sort when he first saw pictures from the concentration camps. This was the true beginning of his education as a Jew, he has said, and the realization that Jews are “the
professionals in suffering.” This view was later reinforced by his sister’s trip to Israel in 1949 with a group of Jewish students. Cohen had become politicized by the suffering of the Jews at an early age.

In 1947 Cohen had his bar mitzvah, marking full acceptance into Judaism with his reading of the Torah. But the event was marred by his father’s absence; the traditional prayer of release recited by the father (ending a father’s responsiblity for his son) was missing from the ceremony. A celebration at the synagogue only partially alleviated the sadness of the event.

He began attending Westmount High in 1948, where he was elected to the Student Council. He later became its president and proved to be a
convincing politician, persuasive, seductive, and showing a gift for organization. In
Beauty at Close Quarters
, he added a fictional reason for seeking the presidency: attraction to the beautiful outgoing president from whom he would have to receive hours of instruction. Cohen was also a member of the Board of Publishers, which oversaw the student paper and yearbook. He was a surprisingly avid athlete, involved in cycling, cross-country skiing, swimming, sailing, and was an unlikely member of the school hockey team. He was also chairman of Student Productions, the drama club, and soon had his first printed work appear: a homeroom Christmas skit for a holiday assembly, which was mimeographed and distributed to the cast. His “ambition,” as described beneath his graduation photograph in the Westmount High School Yearbook for 1951, reads “
World famous orator.” His “pastime” was “Leading sing-songs at intermissions.” But he also found time for girls: on the back of his 1950–51 Student Council card are the hastily written names and phone numbers of two female students.