I'm Your Man (7 page)

Leonard was writing in New York, but he was also floundering. After the euphoria of his first publication and the attention it brought him in Canada, now he was in a place where no one knew who he was, and if they did, they wouldn't have cared. For New Yorkers, Canadian literature was a dot on the cultural map barely visible to the naked eye. As a means of making contact with fellow writers—and having some status among them—Leonard founded a literary magazine,
The Phoenix,
but it was short-lived. Leonard was lonely. He missed his old crowd in Montreal; he really did believe that they were special. “Each time we met we felt that it was a landmark in the history of thinking. There was a great deal of fellowship and drinking. Montreal is tiny, it's a French city and the number of people writing in English is small; it didn't have any prestige prizes at the time, not even any girls. But a few of us were on fire and we would write for each other or any girl that would listen.”
18

And then, in New York, Leonard met a girl. Her name was Georgianna Sherman; Leonard called her Anne, or Annie. A year and a half older than Leonard, she had already been married once, briefly, at a very young age and was now working as the program coordinator at International House. Sherman was tall and very attractive, with long, dark hair, soulful eyes and a modulated, aristocratic voice. She came from a patrician New England family; her grandmother was a Daughter of the American Revolution. “Irving and I had heard so much from Leonard about this Annie and how beautiful she was,” says Aviva Layton, “that she almost became a legend in our minds before we met her. But she really was exquisite, a beautiful soul, from very, very good American blood. She was an extremely cultivated young woman—great cook, wrote poetry, played piano—and here was this little Montreal Jew, Leonard. She had never met anyone like him before and he'd never met anyone like her, and they just fell for each other.” Leonard moved into Sherman's upper Manhattan apartment.

“Annie was very, very important in Leonard's life at that time,” says Aviva. “It was when he was just starting out on the enterprise of being a writer and he had moved to New York—this at a time when Canadians weren't crossing the border and going to the U.S. to make their careers—and Annie was in the thick of things in New York. She introduced him to a lot of people. And Leonard began to see that there was a whole other world outside of the world of Montreal.”

In the summer of 1957, Leonard took Annie to Quebec to show her off to the Laytons, who had rented a summer cottage in the Laurentians. “Leonard and Annie would follow us, then find a lake and pitch an ordinary little tent and that was where they would stay. They would read to one another—they'd brought along lots and lots of poetry—and Leonard would play his guitar. They would go to bed when the sun went to bed and get up in the morning with the sun. Sometimes they'd row across the lake to us and spend a couple of days in our cottage. Annie was Leonard's first great love.” She was also a muse, inspiring the poem “For Anne,” in
The Spice-Box of Earth,
and the character Shell, the lover, in
The Favorite Game
.

The relationship did not last. It was Leonard who left; it had started to head down another path Leonard was keen to avoid in his life, which was marriage. As he wrote in
The Favorite Game
, “Supposing he went along with her toward living intimacy, toward comforting, incessant married talk. Wasn't he abandoning something more austere and ideal, even though he laughed at it, something which could apply her beauty to streets, traffic, mountains, ignite the landscape—which he could master if he were alone?” In other words, he had work to do, man's work. However much a woman's love might ease the loneliness and darkness, still it disturbed him, “as generals get uneasy during a protracted peace.” The breakup was painful for Annie. It was for Leonard too. Being the one to end it did not mean that he did not miss her terribly. Years later, as he sat at a wooden table in a white house on a hill on a Greek island, staring out at the solid blue sky, he would write her letters, asking her to come and join him there. When she declined, he wrote her poems.

    
With Annie gone

    
Whose eyes to compare

    
With the morning sun?

    
 

    
Not that I did compare,

    
But I do compare

    
Now that she's gone.

“For Anne,”
SELECTED POEMS 1958–1968

Annie went on to marry Count Orsini, the owner of Orsini's, the famous New York restaurant. In 2004 she published a book,
An Imperfect Lover: Poems and Watercolors
. In the poem “How I Came to Build the Bomb,” she describes falling in love with “a wandering Jew” and learning that for “a traveling man, love / was a burden he couldn't take on.”
19

H
aving spent one year in New York, Leonard moved back to Montreal and into 599 Belmont Avenue. So did his grandfather Rabbi Klonitzki-Kline. The old man was suffering from Alzheimer's disease; once again Masha became the caregiver. To a fly on the wall it might have looked much like the old days—Masha in the kitchen, making food; Leonard tapping away on a manual typewriter; the old man poring over the dictionary he was trying to write from memory, and all the while his memory was disintegrating.

Leonard was working on a novel titled
A Ballet of Lepers
. It opened with: “My grandfather came to live with me. There was nowhere else for him to go. What had happened to all his children? Death, decay, exile—I hardly know. My own parents died of pain.”
20
It was a depressing way to begin a book, and Leonard acknowledged this: “But I must not be too gloomy at the beginning or you will leave me, and that, I suppose, is what I dread most.” After putting the novel through several drafts, Leonard sent it out to publishers in Canada. For a while it looked as if Ace Books might take it, but in the end, along with all the other publishers, they turned it down.
A Ballet of Lepers
was not, as some have thought, an early version of
The Favorite Game
. In Leonard's view it was “probably a better novel. But it never saw the light.”
21
Leonard filed the manuscript away.

The rejection did not stop Leonard from writing. He continued to take a notebook with him everywhere. His friend from McGill Arnold Steinberg recalls, “Of all the things about Leonard, the first thing that comes to mind was he was constantly, constantly writing—writing and sketching. One always sensed that there was an inner need—pushing out words and pictures, never ending, like a motor running.” Phil Cohen, a Montreal jazz musician and music professor, remembers seeing Leonard sitting, writing at a table in the corner of a drugstore at the intersection of Sherbrooke and Côte-des-Neiges. “I'm guessing it was just a place where nobody knew him and he could sit and do what he wanted. A couple of times he looked up, and he looked like he was totally out of it—not drugged, just in a totally different world, he was so into what he was doing. From my experience of working with a lot of performers, there was this sense of almost desperation that I picked up from the look on his face that said, ‘Don't disturb me.' I said to myself, ‘This guy is very serious.' ”

Leonard was finding it impossible to stay at his mother's house after having lived on his own, and with Annie. He found an apartment on Mountain Street, and in order to pay the rent (and since he no longer had the excuse of studying in New York), he agreed to take a job in one of the Cohen family firms. For a year Leonard worked at W. R. Cuthbert & Company, the brass foundry that his uncle Lawrence ran. A reference letter written by the foundry's personnel manager in December 1957 stated: “Leonard Cohen was employed by us for the period Dec 12th 1956 to Nov 29th 1957 in various capacities: Electro-cycle turret lathe operator, Brass die-casting machine operator, Time and motion study assistant. During the time of his employment, Mr Cohen was known to be honest, capable and industrious. We have no hesitation in recommending him for any sort of employment and would like to express our regret at his departure.”
22

Leonard, who did not share this regret, was looking for work in America. He applied to the U.S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, DC, for a teaching position on a reservation. The bureau, oddly, had little use for a Jewish poet from Montreal with electro-cycle turret lathe skills. (It would be nine more years before Leonard would display his Native American scholarship in his second novel,
Beautiful Losers
.) So he moved on to another of the family firms, the Freedman clothing company, run by his uncle Horace. Leonard spent his days in the office, moving papers around, or in the factory, hanging the finished suits and coats on racks. His nights were spent in the clubs and bars of Montreal, which in the late fifties could still boast the liveliest nightlife in Canada—so lively that the military authorities had designated certain streets off-limits to its personnel because of the number of brothels. Montreal then was Canada's New York, the city that never slept; musicians who played in its many nightclubs were expected to keep on playing until the last drunk was carried out.

With the new decade, and Quebec's “Quiet Revolution,” just two years away, it was hard not to notice there was a change in the air. “People of different backgrounds—linguistic, religious and the rest—were beginning to come forward and take chances,” says Phil Cohen. Some of the clubs had started to feature more experimental musical acts. Among them was a jazz pianist named Maury Kaye. A small Montreal Jew whose goatee, thick black-framed glasses and unruly hair made him look like a beatnik, Kaye had become well-known on the Canadian jazz circuit as a big-band leader, a composer and a noted sideman who had played with Edith Piaf and Sammy Davis Jr. He also had a small, less mainstream jazz band that played late-night gigs at clubs like Dunn's Birdland on Saint Catherine Street, a jazz parlor above a popular smoked-meats delicatessen, which was reached by a flight of rickety stairs. One night in April 1958, at midnight, when Kaye came onstage with his band, Leonard was with them.

Among the audience of around fifty people was Henry Zemel, a math and physics student at McGill, who had no idea at that time who Leonard was, although in the sixties they would become close friends. “It was curious,” remembers Zemel, “a little place with a small audience and a little stage. Leonard sang and he read some poetry but, as I remember, he sang more than he read poetry.” Recalls Aviva Layton, who went to Leonard's first night with Irving to give moral support, “I don't remember him reading poetry, I remember him singing and playing the guitar. He perched himself on a high, three-legged stool and he sang—his own songs. That magic that he had, whatever it was, you could see it there at these performances.”

“Maury Kaye was a very gifted pianist and jazz arranger. He would play something, and I would improvise. That was probably the first time that I . . .”

Performed onstage as a singer?

“Well, I was invited to read poetry now and then, but I never really enjoyed it, I was never terribly interested in that kind of expression. But I liked singing, chanting my lyrics, to this jazz group. It felt a lot easier and I liked the environment better. [Smiles] You could drink.”

Was it new to you, improvising? You're better known for a more studied approach.

“Well, I would sit with friends on the steps of the place we were living in when we were at college on Peel Street and calypso was popular in a tiny corner of Montreal—there was a tiny black population and there were some calypso clubs there that we started going down to quite a lot—and I would improvise calypso lyrics about the people who were passing in the street, things like that.”

Along with the Beat-style improvisations he had witnessed in Greenwich Village, Leonard had prepared some set pieces, among them “The Gift,” a new poem that had its premiere on his first night at Dunn's.
*
“They called it Poetry to Jazz,” remembers David Cohen, Leonard's cousin. “It was a very fifties-ish thing. Leonard wrote poetry and a little blues stuff and I remember him reading this poem very seriously: ‘She knelt to kiss my manhood,' or something like that. I was cracking up, and all the young girls were going, ‘Ooh, isn't he something else?' Did it make Leonard popular with women? As the old expression goes, it didn't hurt.” Leonard also ad-libbed and made jokes. Irving Layton, always his biggest cheerleader, declared him a natural comic.

Ever since Mort left Montreal to study sculpture in London, Leonard had increasingly come to rely on Layton for friendship and support. Several times a week he would go to Irving and Aviva's place for supper. Often, after they had eaten, they would “crack a poem.” Aviva explains, “We would choose a poem—Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, anyone—and we'd go through it line by line, image by image. How did this poet put together those images? What does this poem really mean? How do we crack this poem? Honestly, it was worth more than a PhD from Columbia.” Some evenings they would go to the cinema—Leonard and Irving “both adored trashy movies,” Aviva says—“and then we would sit up till dawn talking about the movie, analyzing the symbolism, and try and trip each other up on how many symbols we'd seen.” On the nights they stayed in, they would “wheel in this old black and white television set with the rabbit ears on top and, while eating lots of candy—Leonard would always bring over a huge slab of his favorite, which was dyed sugar made to look like bacon—they would talk about what they'd seen until the cows came home.”