Various Positions (18 page)

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FOLLOWING THE REVISION
of his novel, Cohen returned to writing poems. They became the core of
Flowers for Hitler
, which Cohen had originally titled
Opium and Hitler
. The book drew together a series of new and immediate themes: Hydra, history, and politics. He considered the poems radical and challenging, and anticipated the negative reception they would receive from McClelland & Stewart. The poems, he told Jack McClelland, “
will speak to nobody because nobody enjoys my grotesque kind of health. I would have rather read these poems than have written them. Enjoy your authoritarian life.” He closed the letter with, “Goodbye forever / Leonard Cohen / The Jewish Keats.”

Unlike the lyrical
Spice-Box of Earth, Flowers for Hitler
, with its tough, unpleasant topics, would offend people, but he accepted responsibility, telling Cork Smith that “
I accept the hemlock for the evils it will work against established order, for I will turn son against father, beloved against lover, apostle against guru, pedestrian against traffic light, eater against waitress, waitress against maitre d’, and they will all lie down, unconnected and free and loving as mating flowers.” He celebrated the importance of the poems as “
a fairly original study of Authority,” writing to his sister that the collection would be complete in a couple of weeks and that the last ten days had been one of his “
best creative periods ever: I’ve really
put the book into wild, evil, and revolutionary working order. I imagine it is the best study of the authoritarian psychology ever written.”

In June Cohen submitted a selection of the poems to a
CBC
poetry contest for poets under thirty. In the covering letter he wrote that
Opium and Hitler was
a collection of “
prose poems which studies the totalitarian spirit of our century.” Several months later he said to his U.S. agent Marian McNamara, “
I gave my mental health to that book and hereafter I am released from the bondage of logic and sanity. It feels good.” Yet the real challenge came from finding a means to express his revised values. He admitted to Cork Smith, “
So many of my values have been challenged and strengthened or destroyed. I want to say something but every form I use seems to cramp, or limps under a kind of self-indulgence which I have to clean out of my system.”

Jack McClelland’s response, though negative, surprised Cohen. He thought that the uneven quality of the poems would harm Cohen’s reputation. But then he added: “
Because you are Leonard Cohen, we will publish the book as is without concern or apology.” Cohen took offense, telling McClelland that he did not want the book published, “
feeling as you do, so cautiously honoring my place in Canadian letters.” He added that he had ten more poems to include, as well as a verse play. And yes, he was willing to make changes, although his confidence in the work was unchanged:

Cohen emphasized the language of his new work, telling McClelland that various young writers had read it:

Publication was delayed by last-minute revisions. The title and the so-called “gas-chamber” poems, works dealing with the Nazis and the Holocaust, received the most severe criticism. One reader’s report begins, “
This is a manuscript which I find on the whole to be disappointing. After a while it has the same effect as a dentist’s drill, and I have to stop reading.” Cohen’s “natural, sensuous gifts as a poet don’t shine through.” Another reader begins with “
This poetry is full of bitterness and hate … How marketable is hate?” The same reader declares that Cohen is being “
immature,” but
“if he
intends to go on endlessly and tiresomely parading the same old theme, then by all means make the most of him while he’s still saleable.”

The original manuscript had a scornful dedication, which was also offensive to readers. Cohen agreed to remove it, although it revealed his current state of mind:

Asked to revise the manuscript, Cohen worked on it during his winter 1963–64 visit to Canada and added new work. “
I was ambushed by fifty new poems which I had to integrate into the book,” he wrote, following a triumphant reading tour of Western Canada in March. In May, he was still arguing about the title with McClelland, wishing to keep
Opium and Hitler:
“
The title is damn intriguing and the diseased adolescents who compose my public will love it.” What disturbed Cohen most was the proposed cover, again by designer Frank Newfeld, which was a drawing of a female body “
with my face for tits … It doesn’t matter what the title is now because the picture is simply offensive … It hasn’t the sincerity of a stag movie or the imagination of a filthy postcard or the energy of real surrealist humor.”

Cohen ended up designing six covers of his own. The final jacket cover amalgamated these images into nine separate boxes, containing drawings of a dog, a parachutist, a house, two roses, and a baby-faced Hitler. A heart is the principal motif, evoking the romance implicit in the reference to flowers in the title. The cover is printed in red with a white background, suggesting a Valentine’s Day card of sorts. “
The whole point of the title is that the word HITLER has to be set against a domestic background, and that’s the point of the book too. Nothing scary, arty, or fearsome. Just let people see the word without all the tympani and squeaky doors and the effect is powerful,” Cohen explained. On the half-title page of the printed book the reader encounters this enigmatic “
Note on the Title”: “A while ago this book would have been called SUNSHINE FOR NAPOLEON, and earlier still it would have been called WALLS FOR GENGHIS KHAN.”

Cohen actually suggested canceling the project, since McClelland & Stewart was not incorporating his changes into the galleys, including a new dedication, replacing the Dachau reference with “FOR MARIANNE.” He added an epigraph, a sentence taken from Italian writer Primo Levi’s memoir
Survival in Auschwitz
, which reminded readers to resist the destruction of one’s conscience and the creation of evil.

It turned out that the book had already been printed by the time McClelland had received Cohen’s letter, but the sheets were unbound. They agreed to scrap that printing, make his changes, and reprint. McClelland had not actually read the full manuscript, only a few of the poems: “I don’t profess to be a lover of poetry … I’m flattered to think that you think that I have read your goddam poetry. Heh! When we have the Beatles we sure as hell don’t need poets.”

Cohen eventually agreed to change the title to
Flowers for Hitler
. But the jacket copy, which Cohen had asked to be suppressed, “
has made me and the book a hell of a lot of enemies. It was very important that a Jew’s book about Hitler be free from arrogant personal promotion.” The blurb, taken from a September letter to McClelland, stressed his move from romantic lyricism to history in all of its horror. Cohen also objected to the austerity of the book’s production, especially in the paperback edition; he thought that the book looked cheap and that the poems were mutilated by their awkward placement on the page.

Earlier, in the summer of 1963, Cohen had tried to place portions of his
The Favorite Game
in various magazines.
Playboy
said no, but
Cavalier
said yes. Encouraged, Cohen wrote to his New York agent that the novel could easily become a movie and that she should pitch it to Hollywood. Unfortunately, a series of studios turned it down.

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PUBLICLY
, their lives appeared rich: Cohen was preparing for the publication of his novel, Marianne was modeling for a chic island boutique run by Magda-Slovak. Privately, their lives were falling apart. A short vacation in late July 1963 attempted to patch things up but a letter to Irving Layton in August suggests that the difficulties remained. “
The Mediterranean doesn’t help,” Cohen wrote. “Everything breaking up here. … Gurdjieff was right when he shouted from his deathbed to all his teary followers: ‘Abandon the System!’” Cohen’s idyllic relationship with Marianne was unraveling.

Travel and contact with others stimulated his creativity but dimmed his love. His song “So Long, Marianne,” expresses these sentiments:

To renew the “holiness” of his work, he had to pursue his artistic quest, as he would summarize in
Death of A Lady’s Man
several years later: “
I had the woman I loved. I wanted to end it, but it would not end: my life in art.”

A letter of September 1963 to a New York editor stressed “
a violent disintegration that lets me catch fewer and fewer bright sparks … I can
go for a week without feeling anything.” The time is “filled not so much with violence as with lies … I feel deprived, and I want even ugly women, I want nakedness, I don’t want to talk to anyone who isn’t naked.” A note of self-criticism creeps in: “
What I want from people, mostly women, is outrageous, and I begin to see how hilarious and just it is that no one gives it to me. To Cork Smith Cohen wrote,
The further a writer gets from his malice, his bitterness, his selfish problems, the more full of wounding pain his writing becomes.”

Cohen’s personal life was in turmoil but visitors continued to appear on the island: John Knowles, novelist and author of
A Separate Peace;
Howard Bacal, Nancy Bacal’s brother, who was training to become a psychiatrist; Marcelle Maltais, a French-Canadian painter; Sharona Aaron, an Israeli folksinger; and others: “
A tall blonde girl who wears Oriental robes and carries a book called
The Mystery of Life
came here with my name.”

He continued to monitor the sexual scene on Hydra, writing to his sister in late August:

He also added that “
from a sexual point of view,” he was completely

That summer one of his close friends was arrested for drug possession, taken off the island, and beaten in a prison in Piraeus. The event became the catalyst for his poem, “
I Threw Open the Shutters.”

In September his novel appeared in New York and by October, Cohen returned to Canada to accept a five-hundred-dollar first prize in the
CBC
competition for new Canadian poets. Prompted by the attention his novel was receiving,
Holiday
magazine suggested that he write a story
about pianist Glenn Gould. The idea was to interview Gould and record his impressions about a series of cities. The editor was concerned that Gould and Cohen would be recognized and suggested that they wear false beards as they walked around Montreal, the first proposed site. Cohen actually met Gould in the basement of the Hotel Bonaventure in Ottawa to begin the piece but became so enthralled by Gould’s conversation that he forgot to pursue the line of questioning he had prepared. For months afterward he avoided answering the phone, convinced that the caller was the disgruntled editor waiting for his story.

In mid-October, Cohen participated in the Foster Conference, an informal gathering of poets and critics, held in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. The major speakers were John Glassco, A.J.M. Smith, Irving Layton, F.R. Scott, Milton Wilson, Louis Dudek, and George Whalley. Delegates included Ralph Gustafson, Eli Mandel, Seymour Mayne, Henry Moscovitch, Ronald Sutherland, and Leonard Angel. Cohen’s presence signaled his involvement with the emerging Canadian literary scene.

Following Layton’s address, entitled “The Creative Process,” Cohen announced that “
there were thousands of poems and thousands of poets in the world and that most of the poems don’t get written down. The poets are specifically anal characters who like to collect it all.” Layton took a different view, describing poetry as “
a self-authenticated speaking, a reaching down into the roots of one’s being … doubts, perplexities, inner conflicts, joy, desire, chagrin—the terror and ecstasy of living daily beyond one’s psychic means. The major poets have large-sized, terrifying demons inside their psyches.”

In response to Louis Dudek’s presentation “The Little Magazine,” Cohen excited discussion by stating that little magazines had fulfilled their purpose and had no real role. “
The mass magazines will print the most sensationally daring of material, so that good writers do not need to resort to the little magazines.”
Esquire
, he argued, was certainly open to the kind of writing that in the past could only be found in little magazines. His position here may have been influenced by having just placed part of
The Favorite Game
with
Cavalier
(actually a men’s magazine noted for its pinups). He criticized his friend Layton for becoming a cardboard rebel, his antics recorded for the middle class by
CBC
television. Cohen’s participation in the three-day conference sustained his place in the public
imagination, while renewing friendships with those from the days of
CIV/n
. At the conference he read his poem “Alexander Trocchi, Public Junkie, Priez Pour Nous.”