Various Positions (4 page)

Cohen’s high school English teacher, Mr. Waring, encouraged his interest in literature, and writing began to play a larger part in Cohen’s life. Increasingly, he sought solitude, rushing home to write rather than socialize with friends. Most of his early efforts were short poems, short stories, and effusive journal entries.

Yet he had a large group of buddies, which included his cousins and Mort Rosengarten. “FSOTC and Rosengarten, Too” was a popular rallying cry for him and his cousins: it meant “The Fighting Spirit of the Cohens and Rosengarten, Too.” He enlarged his circle when he began university; it soon included Henry Zemel, Mike Doddman, Derrik Lyn, Robert Hershorn, Harold Pascal, and Lionel Tiger. One of his best friends at the time was Danny Usher, and the two of them would often walk around Murray Park in their raincoats reading and talking. They could always be identified: Danny tall and angular, Cohen short and intense.

At the same time, Cohen “
swam in a Jewish world,” studying the religion, remaining observant but debating its customs. His later departure from Judaic practice stemmed not from its tradition, which he loved, but from concern about its “methods and meditations” about which no one talked. Reflecting a lifetime interest in discipline and order and a desire to understand process, Cohen rationalized his interest
in other spiritual investigations as wanting “
to go into a system a little more thoroughly.”

Music supplemented his Judaic and secular studies. Esther had started studying piano, and Cohen followed her, taking instruction from a Miss McDougall. Progress was slow, and he practiced in a desultory manner in a small basement room where the piano was kept. He preferred the spontaneity of playing melodies on a penny-whistle, which he always carried. He studied the clarinet and learned to play well enough to join the school band, but the guitar soon took over his musical interests.

As a high school student Cohen also became interested in hypnotism, which he discovered through the father of one of his first girlfriends. The father had tried to put Cohen under. He failed but Cohen was fascinated and he continued to study hypnotism, reading M. Young’s
25 Lessons in Hypnotism, How to Become an Expert Operator
(1899). Cohen’s only prop was a yellow pencil, slowly waved back and forth in front of his subject’s eyes. It worked well enough to hypnotize the family maid and so Cohen undressed her, an adolescent fantasy come to life. He had less success bringing her out of the trance, though. Worried that his mother would come home, Cohen tried slapping the maid but it didn’t have much effect. He referred to his book and was finally able to guide her out of the trance before he was discovered. During a summer spent as a counsellor at Camp Sunshine, a camp for disturbed children, Cohen also hypnotized one of the counsellors, revealing to the willing subject aspects of her life she herself had forgotten.

Cohen’s interest in hypnotism was ongoing and had to do with its transcendent powers. In
Beauty at Close Quarters
, he writes: “
he wanted to touch people like a magician, to change them or hurt them, leave his brand on them, to make them beautiful. He wanted to be the hypnotist who takes no chances of falling asleep himself. He wanted to kiss with one eye open.”

To transform people, to make them “beautiful” while watching the process, was Cohen’s ambition. Like his hero Breavman, he believed that “
there [was] some tangent from the ordinary cycles of daily life, a formula not to change debris to gold, but to make debris beautiful.” Cohen sought to be a “magic priest.” Hypnotism was the earliest manifestation of this goal; poetry and music would become its later forms.

Cohen’s fascination with the streets and the downtown nightlife also emerged during his adolescence. Around the age of thirteen or fourteen he began to sneak out of the house at night, walking around downtown and observing the junkies, prostitutes, cafe life, the buzz of the city. He would buy a sandwich at a cafeteria and listen to the jukebox, one of his great pleasures. He also hoped to meet girls.

He generally made these excursions alone, although occasionally his friend Mort Rosengarten would join him. Sometimes Cohen returned home to find his mother on the phone describing his coat to the police after checking his room and finding it empty. She would send Cohen to bed and rage outside the closed door, “
calling on his dead father to witness his delinquency, calling on God to witness her ordeal in having to be both a father and mother to him.” Part of what drove him downtown was a heroic vision of himself with “
a history of injustices in his heart … followed by the sympathy of countless audiences,” an idealistic description not very far from the situation of his early musical career.

In 1949, when he was fifteen, two important events occurred: he purchased a guitar and discovered Lorca. Moved by musical curiosity and the possibility that girls would be more interested in a guitar player than a clarinetist, pianist, or ukulele player, Cohen bought a secondhand guitar for twelve dollars from a pawn shop on Craig Street. Its steel strings made it “
a ferocious instrument,” Cohen has said. There was no guitar culture going on at the time, and it was generally thought that only Communists played the instrument. But Cohen discovered nylon strings and then flamenco when he met a nineteen-year-old Spanish immigrant playing for some young women in Murray Hill Park.

Dark, handsome, passionate, and lonely, the Spaniard embodied a culture as well as a musical talent and Cohen was impressed by both. After three lessons, Cohen learned a few chords and some flamenco. When the young man failed to show for the fourth lesson, Cohen called his boarding house and discovered that his teacher had committed suicide. He never learned his story but Cohen was grateful for his teaching, which became the basis of his musical composition and chord structure. He sang with Mort Rosengarten, who had learned to play the banjo, and his mother frequently joined them. “
I’m a lot better than what I was
described as for a long, long time,” Cohen has remarked: “People said I only knew three chords when I knew five.”

That year, Cohen also unexpectedly came upon
Selected Poems
, by Federico García Lorca, a writer about whom he knew nothing. Cohen has ironically said that Lorca “ruined” his life with his brooding vision and powerful verse. In a way, he later explained, Lorca:

In print and at concerts, Cohen has repeated the lines that first led to the destruction of his purity:
“
Through the Arch of Elvira / I want to see you go, / so that I can learn your name / and break into tears
,” lines from Lorca’s poem “The Divan at Tamarit.” Lorca was a seminal influence on Cohen, as poet, performer, and artist. He was the first of a series of representative poets for Cohen. Louis Dudek, F.R. Scott, A.M. Klein, and Irving Layton would follow, but Lorca was his first poetic model.

Federico García Lorca was executed by Granadian Falangists on August 19, 1936, shortly after his return to Spain to aid in the Spanish Civil War. Cohen identified with Lorca’s fanciful belief that he possessed the blood of gypsies and Jews and shared his elegiac tone and faith in a spiritual absolute. Three questions by Lorca anticipate themes that animate Cohen’s work:

LEONARD COHEN
began to write poetry seriously in 1950 at the age of sixteen, a year after he discovered Lorca. He recalls:

Another explanation was his desire for women:

Dionysus not Apollo reigned.

From his earliest efforts with poetry, Cohen was committed to the discipline, the task. In contrast to the casual activities of his friends, he was absorbed by his work. Cohen’s stepsister remembers that he often worked late into the night. One product of those late nights is an essay entitled “Murray Park at 3 a.m.” in which he recounts his “possession” of the park: “
It is my domain because I love it best.” He narrates the forms of his control, from fictitious assaults on the tennis players to his control of the floundering sailing vessels in the pond. The cement pools, sunken “
in stone plazas of different levels joined by stone steps and bordered by clipped hedges, appear like the prospect to some mist-obscured exotic house of worship or love palace.” And listening to his own footsteps walking home, he thinks, “
You [an early love] brought me into the light. I was in the darkness.”

Cohen’s friends understood that his commitment to writing was genuine, and he recalled a game they played with an anthology of English poetry. His friends would open it at random, read him a line, and expect him to complete the poem.

Cohen and his friends were movie fans and often went to Ste-Catherine
Street movie houses on Saturday afternoons. But a Montreal bylaw prevented children under sixteen from entering alone. Cohen overcame this problem by altering streetcar passes to show an earlier birthdate. But the forged passes couldn’t disguise the fact that he was simply too short to be sixteen. The tallest boy would buy the tickets then they would nervously walk down a long hall to the ticket usher where Cohen was often turned away. His success rate was only about twenty percent. A strict code of conduct was observed: every boy for himself. If one of them couldn’t get in, the group wasn’t expected to forfeit the movie in sympathy.

Cohen’s height was enough of a problem that for his bar mitzvah he needed a footstool to see over the
bimah
or lecturn. After reading in
Reader’s Digest
that pituitary injections of a hormone were guaranteed to make you taller, Cohen consulted the family doctor about getting the shots. The treatment was experimental and Cohen’s doctor dissuaded him from trying it. He also tried stuffing Kleenex in his shoes, but the disadvantages soon became apparent and painful at a school dance and Cohen abandoned his search for height.

For several summers Cohen participated in the ritual of camp, beginning in 1944 at Camp Hiawatha in the Laurentians, where he met his life-long friend, Mort Rosengarten. A report of August 26, 1949, from Camp Wabi-Kon in northern Ontario cited Cohen’s abilities as a leader, although it also noted his dislike of routine. At these and later camps, Cohen learned more about the guitar, and when he became a counsellor he frequently led singalongs when not instituting new games such as a haiku contest.

At Camp Sunshine, a Jewish Community Camp where he became a counsellor in 1950, Cohen met Jews unlike himself: they were extravagant and emotional and had an earnestness grounded in necessity, not fantasy. Their high schools were almost entirely Jewish, unlike Westmount High. Whereas Cohen’s family liked “
to think of themselves as Victorian gentlemen of Hebraic persuasion,” the counsellors at camp recognized that they were Jews above all. Irving Morton, the director, was a twenty-seven-year-old intellectual, a socialist, and a folksinger. He had a large catalogue of folk songs that celebrated workers, from a Jewish collective in the Crimea,
Zhan Koye
, to the desperate struggle of miners.

He also believed in “creative camping”: no regimentation, virtually no discipline, and no competition.

In 1950 at Camp Sunshine, Alfie Magerman, one of Cohen’s closest friends, introduced him to
The People’s Songbook;
his father, it turned out, was involved in union organization and the two sang from the book every morning.
The People’s Songbook
represented a new folk culture of high moral and political content, “
homemade songs of protest and affirmation.” It was the time of the Weavers, who made their debut at the Village Vanguard in 1949, of Woody Guthrie, and of Josh White. Each song, whether a German anti-fascist song, a French partisan song, or “Viva la Quince Brigada,” the historic song of the 15th or International Brigade of the Spanish Republican Army, reflected politics, patriotism, or protest. Israeli pioneer songs, Chinese resistance songs, a German solidarity song with words by Brecht (printed across the page from “The Star Spangled Banner”), all demonstrated to Cohen that songs could be about protest, freedom, and resistance. Cohen’s “The Old Revolution,” “The Partisan,” and “The Traitor” all reflect what he learned from
The People’s Songbook
. From that songbook, he said, he “
developed a curious notion that the Nazis were overthrown by music.”

He now understood that songs could convey social thought as well as personal hope, taking examples from Woody Guthrie, Brecht, and Earl Robinson (composer of “Joe Hill”).
The People’s Songbook
introduced Cohen to the potential of folk music, confirmed when he heard Josh White perform at Ruby Foo’s Chinese restaurant in 1949. Although Cohen found the burgeoning pop music world fascinating, hustling quarters around his house to sneak out at night and listen to jukeboxes, folk music was his first love. “
Through my interest in folk music, I discovered what a lyric is and that led me to a more formal study of poetry.”