Various Positions (11 page)

In mid-July Cohen received a letter from Claire Pratt, an associate editor at McClelland & Stewart and daughter of E.J. Pratt. It said that the manuscript had been accepted on the condition that certain revisions be made, including reducing its length. She also enclosed a reader’s report, which criticized some poems as “
too slight to be committed to book form,” and suggested lessening the number of erotic poems. But “
no other poet can quite match the imagery and expressiveness of these poems” the reader concluded. Pratt anticipated publishing in the spring of 1960.

Cohen was ecstatic with the news, replying,

Rather than see the book in the McClelland & Stewart “Indian File” series, an expensive hardcover line, as Pratt suggested, Cohen had another idea. He explained that costly, hard-bound poetry books were obsolete. The public wouldn’t buy them. He thought that a brightly colored paperback would sell better: “
Please understand I want an audience. I am not interested in the Academy. There are places where poems are being bought and embraced.” He offered to work with their designer on a format that would appeal to a wide following: “
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of anguish, disappointed Platonists, pornography-peepers, hair-handed monks and Popists, French-Canadian intellectuals, unpublished writers, curious musicians, etc., all that holy following of my Art.” Cohen’s preference for a paperback with a potentially large audience contradicts his decision to print his first book in hardcover, the price limiting readership. He concluded his letter with an open and genuine statement: “
Thank you for treating me like a professional and making me feel like a Writer.”

Pratt and McClelland soon discovered that Cohen operated in an unusual manner, declining to sign contracts for his work after
The Spice-Box of Earth. As
a matter of form, a contract would always be sent, but Cohen would never return it. With the exception of his first book for McClelland & Stewart (and his most recent,
Stranger Music)
, this became Cohen’s unorthodox procedure. Jack McClelland chose to ignore this aspect of Cohen’s behavior, despite his anxiety over certain legal matters, including the right of Cohen, rather than the firm, to control his material.

By September, Cohen had decided to leave the clothing business: “Can’t take it anymore. Will try the
CBC,”
which he did briefly, supporting himself by writing reviews and attempting some radio journalism.
He continued to experiment with drugs “
to liberate spiritual energy;” at least that was the excuse, he later remarked. “
Thanks to drugs,” he has sarcastically noted, “for at least fifteen minutes I could consider myself as the Great Evangelist of the New Age!” His role as Evangelist took an unusual form when in early September he joined Layton, Al Purdy, and John Mills at the Ph.D defense of George Roy at the University of Montreal on “Symbolism in Canadian Poetry 1880–1939.” Despite the celebrity audience, the candidate passed.

On November 12, 1959, Cohen accompanied Scott and Layton in a poetry reading at the Young Mens’ Hebrew Association on 92nd Street in New York, by all accounts a great success. Introduced by Kenneth McRobbie, the trio was in good voice, with Scott possessing “
enough Anglo-Saxon dignity to cover the rest of us.” A few weeks after the reading at the YMHA, Cohen departed for London. Following his habit of marking a departure or change, Cohen offered a comic farewell:

On October 29, 1959, Cohen was issued his first passport. It is a well-used document, with stamps that record his wanderings over the following decade: Greece, France, Britain, the United States, Morocco, Cuba, and Norway. The accompanying photo shows a serious young man in jacket, tie, and vest, the embodiment of Westmount success.

    T
HE KING OF BOHEMIA
and William
IV
welcomed Leonard Cohen to London on a dreary December day in 1959. The two pubs stood adjacent to 19b Hampstead High Street, a small, three-story boardinghouse which, despite its address, was actually tucked around the corner on Gayton Road. Today the unassuming brown and tan brick building is squeezed between Oxfam and the Cafe Rouge. Across the road and next to a post office is the Cafe Zen. When Cohen arrived, a green grocer, an East Indian restaurant, and a laundromat were the main attractions. Two small windows in the front of the boardinghouse let in a muted light.

Jake and Stella Pullman owned it and their home became a haven of sorts for Cohen. Mort Rosengarten, whose parents knew the Pullmans, had stayed
there, and two other close friends, Harold Pascal and Nancy Bacal, were still there, eagerly awaiting his arrival. Cohen was told that the only space left was a cot in the sitting room, where all new guests started out; only after someone left did you graduate to an upper floor. He was welcome to it if (a) he tidied the room every morning and (b) he fulfilled his intention of becoming a writer by meeting his announced goal of three pages a day. “
As long as you write your three pages every day you can stay with us,” Stella Pullman told him. Cohen agreed to her bargain and got to work, diligently producing at least three pages a day, a practice he followed for years. Stella’s strictness, as well as her generosity, paid off: “
She is partly responsible for finishing my book in a way,” Cohen said, referring to the first draft of
The Favorite Game
. The Pullmans became a new anchor in his life.

Cohen was excited about being in the capital of English literature and felt he was joining Shakespeare, Milton, and Keats. “
London is welcoming another great author!” he declared. A visit to Dublin created similar excitement, and he wrote a short play entitled “Sugar Plum Fairies” (an early version of “The New Step”) after visiting the Abbey Theatre and the pubs that Yeats had frequented. But after the initial excitement, Cohen found London dull and its nightlife unpromising. He obtained a “reader’s ticket” to the Hampstead Public Libraries and spent a good deal of time at the William (as the local pub, the William iv, was called). He later discovered a West Indian club called the All-Niter, where he found terrific music, marijuana, and dancing. With Nancy Bacal, who was in London to study classical theatre and begin a career in radio journalism with the
CBC,
he explored late-night London. They played pinball in East End dives, met pimps, explored the drug culture, went to clubs, and encountered some alternative politics. Nancy was then dating a disciple of Malcolm X named Michael X, who later founded the Black Muslim movement in London. He planned to return to Trinidad, take over the government, and make Cohen part of the ruling party, as “
permanent advisor to the Minister of Tourism!” Michael X did return, but he was soon arrested. Cohen, with others, attempted to organize support for him but failed.

On the day he arrived in London, Cohen bought a typewriter, a green Olivetti 22, for £40, which would remain with him for years. He also acquired his “famous blue raincoat,” a Burberry with epaulets. That, too, remained with him until it was stolen from a New York loft in 1968. In London, these objects acted as amulets, arming him to combat the world. His Olivetti broke only once in twenty-six years, when he threw the machine against the wall of his Montreal apartment after an unsuccessful attempt to type underwater. It was eventually repaired, and he used that Olivetti to type most of his best-known songs and novels.

His raincoat was memorialized in the song “Famous Blue Raincoat,” recorded on
Songs of Love and Hate
, his third album. “The last time we saw you, you looked so much older / Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder” reads two lines of this song that ends enigmatically, “Sincerely, L. Cohen.” The song has become a signature of sorts, the raincoat embodying Cohen’s early image of mystery, travel, and adventure. The coat itself appears in the 1965
NFB
film,
Ladies and Gentlemen… Mr. Leonard Cohen
. Jennifer Warnes titled her 1986 album
Famous Blue Raincoat
and used a drawing of the coat on the cover.

Cohen quickly established a new social circle in London. Through Tony Graham, a Montrealer who was studying medicine at Cambridge, he met Elizabeth Kenrick, part of a Cambridge set. She, in turn, introduced him to Jacob Rothschild, later Lord Rothschild. Although Kenrick never became Cohen’s girlfriend, he invited her, in jest, to join him when he decided to go to
Hydra in March 1960; she declined. Two years later, he was still concerned about her, telling his sister in New York that Kenrick, “
very lovely both of flesh and spirit,” would soon be visiting and she should help her if necessary.

Cohen’s principal activity at 19B Hampstead High Street was writing the first draft of his second novel,
Beauty at Close Quarters
, later published as
The Favorite Game
. At one point he also considered calling it
Stars for Neatness
. He began the book almost immediately upon his arrival, working diligently, despite interruptions from David the cat; he loved to scatter the pages. Cohen read passages to Nancy Bacal, who later said she felt that the lengthy first draft possessed a looseness and honesty that the published work lacked.

The first version of the story, completed in the winter of 1959/1960, opens with the self-conscious narrator, Lawrence Breavman, searching in his papers for a passage summarizing the difficulty of beginnings. He wishes he could be known to the reader in a flash but realizes he must unfold himself through exaggeration and distortion, “
until by sheer weight of evidence, you will possess me, knowing when I am false and when I am true.” An undisguised autobiographical text follows, with the narrator identifying his birth in Montreal in September 1934, the month and year of Cohen’s birth. Cohen’s family history follows, essentially a semi-fictional summary of adventures, incidents, and interests of his first twenty-five years.

The actual names of several friends appear, including Freda [Guttman] and [Robert] Hershorn; Mort Rosengarten appears as Krantz; Irving Morton, a socialist folksinger, appears as himself. Other names in the final version change: Freda, presented as a politically motivated student, and Louise, a Montreal artist, merge into a single character, Tamara. Stella, the housemaid from the Maritimes that Cohen hypnotized, becomes Heather. Details about the family home appear, including a careful description of the photograph of Cohen’s father that hung in his childhood bedroom. Cohen, through Breavman, narrates his life, including his father’s illness, his early girlfriends, and his mother’s overbearing love.

After completing the first draft of his novel in March 1960, Cohen then revised the typescript of
The Spice-Box of Earth
and sent it to McClelland & Stewart. Cohen wrote to Claire Pratt, “
I’m glad the book is out of my hands. Poetry is so damn self-indulgent. During these past few weeks of intense polishing, I’ve been making nasty faces at myself in all the mirrors I pass.” The work was reduced by the suggested third, while its design became more clarified in the author’s mind: “
I wouldn’t like to see these poems rendered in any sort of delicate print. They should be large and black on the page. They should look as if they are meant to be chanted aloud, which is exactly why I wrote them.”

Jack McClelland offered Cohen a choice: he could publish the manuscript in a common edition to appear in the fall of 1960 or do a more expensive and distinctively designed volume for the spring of 1961. In late July, Cohen told McClelland to let Frank Newfeld design the book and publish it the following spring. His choice of the higher-priced,
more artistic form for the book contradicted his earlier wish for a mass market paperback. But this format would satisfy his sense of poetry as a formal art that should have an elegant, almost “Westmount” look and feel. The appearance of the volume suited the taste of the author. In his letter to McClelland, he also mentioned that he had almost finished his novel, which he would forward to him. On August 28, 1960, he sent “
the only copy in the world,” as he admitted to McClelland, to Toronto.

Earlier in March, when he had completed his manuscripts, Cohen was free to consider his position in London, and he found it wanting. After having a wisdom tooth pulled one day, he wandered about the East End of London on yet another rainy afternoon and noticed a Bank of Greece sign on Bank Street. He entered and saw a teller with a deep tan wearing sunglasses, in protest against the dreary landscape. He asked the clerk what the weather was like in Greece. “Springtime” was the reply. Cohen made up his mind on the spot to depart, and within a day or so he was in Athens. “
I said to myself that I should go somewhere completely different in order to see how they live,” he later explained.

It was actually the island of Hydra that attracted Cohen. English was spoken and an artists’ colony was flourishing. He had first heard of Hydra from Jacob Rothschild, whose mother had married Ghikas (Niko Hadjikyriakos), one of modern Greece’s most important painters. They lived in his family’s forty-room seventeenth-century mansion perched on a hill some distance from the port with a striking view of the sea. Jacob Rothschild encouraged Cohen to visit his mother, promising to write to her to say that Cohen was coming. Layton had predicted Cohen’s departure. “
I suppose when he’s finished his novel,” he told Desmond Pacey, “he’ll leave London for the Continent, where he’ll make love to all the beautiful French and Italian women, and then leave for Greece and Israel!”