I'm Your Man (11 page)

There are poems about lovers (Georgianna Sherman was the muse for “I Long to Hold Some Lady” and “For Anne,” the latter singled out for praise by critics) and about angels, Solomon's adulterous wives and a sex doll made for an ancient king (“The Girl Toy”). Irving Layton, Marc Chagall and A. M. Klein are the subjects of other poems; Leonard's father and uncles appear in “Priests 1957.” The masterful prose poem that ends the book, “Lines from My Grandfather's Journal,” is one of three about Leonard's late grandfather. Rabbi Kline was a scholar and mystic, a holy man, a man of conviction; Leonard considered him the ideal Jew, someone who did not struggle with ambiguities as Leonard did. From Leonard's description of himself in “The Genius” (“For you / I will be a banker Jew . . . / For you / I will be a Broadway Jew,” etc.) he was less sure what kind of Jew he was himself. And yet, in “Lines from My Grandfather's Journal,” there are passages that might apply to Leonard as much as to his grandfather: “It is strange that even now prayer is my natural language. . . . The black, the loss of sun: it will always frighten me. It will always lead me to experiment. . . . O break down these walls with music. . . . Desolation means no angels to wrestle. . . . Let me never speak casually.”

As in
Let Us Compare Mythologies,
there are poems that are called “songs.” When Leonard became a songwriter, some of their content would be taken up in actual songs. Fans of his music will recognize King David and the bathing woman seen from the roof in “Before the Story” in the song “Hallelujah,” the “turning into gold” in “Cuckold's Song” in the song “A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes,” and the poem “As the Mist Leaves No Scar” as the song “True Love Leaves No Traces.”

Critical reaction to
The Spice-Box of Earth
was for the most part very positive. Louis Dudek, who two years earlier had taken Leonard to task in print, applauded the volume unconditionally. Robert Weaver wrote in the
Toronto Daily Star
that Leonard was “probably the best young poet in English Canada right now.”
10
Arnold Edinborough, reviewing for the
Canadian Churchman,
concurred, stating that Leonard had taken Irving Layton's crown as Canada's leading poet. Stephen Scobie would later describe the book in
The Canadian Encyclopedia
as the one that established Leonard's reputation as a lyric poet. There were a few barbs; David Bromige, in
Canadian Literature,
had problems with “the ornateness of the language” and felt that Leonard should “write less about love, and think about it longer,” but concluded that “the afflictions mentioned here are curable, and once Cohen has freed his sensibility from ‘the thick glove of words' he will be able to sing as few of his contemporaries can.”
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The first edition of the book sold out in three months.

Looking back, it is curious to see how this mature, important book sat between two incongruously immature incidents. Just prior to publication there had been his adventure in Havana. Postpublication there was a stranger and even riskier episode, involving a junkie Beat novelist, a rescue mission and an opium overdose. Alexander Trocchi was a tall, charismatic Scotsman of Italian descent, nine years Leonard's senior. In the fifties he had moved into a cheap hotel in Paris, where he founded the literary magazine
Merlin,
published Sartre and Neruda, wrote pornographic novels and espoused his own Beat-meets-early-hippie interpretation of Situationism. An enthusiast for drugs, he turned his heroin addiction into Dadaist performance art; Trocchi, as Leonard would describe him in verse, was a “public junkie.”

Trocchi moved to New York in 1956, the same year that Leonard went there to attend Columbia University, and took a job working on a tugboat on the Hudson River. He spent his nights, as Leonard did, in Greenwich Village, before taking over a corner of Alphabet City and founding the “Amphetamine University.” “Trocchi and a bunch of his friends painted bits of driftwood, mainly, in psychedelic colors, really bright. With all this high-intensity speed going on, they were painting away in the most minute little detail,” says the British author and sixties counterculture figure Barry Miles. “Allen Ginsberg took Norman Mailer there because it was just amazing to see.” In this drab, run-down part of the Lower East Side, it looked like somebody had bombed a rainbow. Trocchi named these artworks “futiques”—antiques of the future. It's easy to see why Leonard was drawn to Trocchi.

In the spring of 1961, still a cheerleader for heroin, Trocchi gave some to a sixteen-year-old girl. “He wasn't a dealer; he had this absurd, fairly sick thing that he just loved turning people on to smack,” explains Miles, “but it was a capital offense in New York.” Trocchi was arrested. Facing the possibility of the electric chair, or at least a very long prison term, he went on the run. Nancy Bacal, whom Leonard introduced to Trocchi when she was making a program for CBC about drug use in London, says, “Alex was a strange, brilliant, one-of-a-kind person. Leonard was extremely fond of him.” Evidently so. Leonard arranged to meet Trocchi at the Canadian border, then took him to Montreal and put him up in his apartment. The Scotsman did not like to visit empty-handed; he brought some opium with him and set to cooking it up on Leonard's stove. When he was done, he handed Leonard the pan with the leftovers. Apparently he left a little too much. When they set off on foot to find a place to eat, Leonard collapsed as they crossed Saint Catherine Street. He had gone blind. Trocchi dragged him out of the way of the passing cars. They sat together on the curb until Leonard came round. He seemed none the worse for wear. For the next four days Leonard played host to Trocchi until someone—some say George Plimpton, others Norman Mailer—came up with false papers for Trocchi to travel by ship from Montreal to Scotland. Alighting in Aberdeen, Trocchi made his way to London, where he registered as a heroin addict with the National Health Service and obtained his drug legally.

In his poem “Alexander Trocchi, Public Junkie, Priez Pour Nous,” which would appear in Leonard's third book of poetry,
Flowers for Hitler,
Leonard wrote of the outlaw he helped rescue,

    
Who is purer

    
more simple than you?  . . .

    
I'm apt to loaf

    
in a coma of newspapers . . .

    
I abandon plans for bloodshed in Canada. . . .

    
You are at work

    
in the bathrooms of the city

    
changing the Law . . .

    
Your purity drives me to work.

    
I must get back to lust and microscopes

T
he Spice-Box of Earth,
despite its excellence and acclaim, failed to win the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry. According to Irving Layton, this hurt Leonard; whatever else might not work out the way he might like, Leonard could at least rely on being the darling of the Canadian poetry world. Then the Canada Council came through like the cavalry with a grant of $1,000. In August 1961, Leonard was back in Greece, writing.

“It was a good place to work,” says Mort Rosengarten, who stayed with Leonard on Hydra for two months. “It was very special—no electricity, no telephone, no water. It was beautiful and, back then, very inexpensive, so it was the best place for him to be to write. We had a nice routine. We would go to sleep about three in the morning but we'd get up very early, six
A.M
., and work till noon. I started drawing—in fact the first time I really started drawing was there; I'd studied sculpture but I'd never drawn or painted—and he also got me a bag of plaster so I made some sculptures. At noon we would go down to the beach and swim, then come back, have lunch at the port, and then we would go up to the house, have a siesta for a couple of hours and then start happy hour. It was very good—a lot of fun and very productive. Leonard worked his ass off. But I couldn't—I'm sure neither of us could—maintain that schedule.”

Leonard had the assistance, or at least the companionship, of a variety of drugs. He had a particular liking for Maxiton, generically dexamphetamine, a stimulant known outside of pharmaceutical circles as speed. He also had a fondness for its sweet counterpoint Mandrax, a hypnotic sedative, part happy pill, part aphrodisiac, very popular in the UK. They were as handsome a pair of pharmaceuticals as a hardworking writer could wish to meet; better yet, in Europe they could still be bought over the counter. Providing backup was a three-part harmony of hashish, opium and acid (the last of these three still legal at that time in Europe and most of North America).

Mandrax I get, but speed? Your songs don't sound like they come from a man on amphetamines.

“Well, my processes, mental and physical, are so slow that speed brought me up to the normal tempo.”

And acid and the psychedelics?

“Oh, I looked into it quite thoroughly.”

As in studied or dropped a few?

“Of course. A lot more than a few. Fortunately it upset my system, acid—I credit my poor stomach for preventing me from entering into any serious addiction, although I kept on taking it because the PR for it was so prevalent. I took trip after trip, sitting on my terrace in Greece, waiting to see God, but generally I ended up with a very bad hangover. I have a lot of acid stories, as everyone does. At the side of my house there was a kind of garbage heap that during the spring would sprout thousands of daisies, and I was convinced that I had a special communion with the daisies. It seems they would turn their little yellow faces to me whenever I started singing or addressing them in a tender way. They would all turn toward me and smile.”

Is there a Leonard Cohen acid song or poem?

“My novel
Beautiful Loser
had a bit of acid in it, and a lot of speed.”

“Did he tell you about the writing on the wall?” asks Marianne. “It was in gold paint and it said, ‘I change, I am the same, I change, I am the same, I change, I am the same, I change, I am the same.' I think it was beautiful.” Steve Sanfield remembers that they “smoked a lot of hashish and began to use LSD and psychotropic drugs more as a spiritual path than recreational.” There was a variety of paths to follow. Hydra, says Richard Vick, a British poet and musician who lived on the island, “always had the odd shaman who came and went and would be the feature of the winter, who would be into the tarot or sandbox play or something.” The I Ching and
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
were popular. George Lialios was also investigating Buddhism and Jung.

Leonard continued to fast, as he had in Montreal. The discipline of a week of fasting appealed to him, as did the spiritual element of purging and purification and the altered mental state that it produced. Fasting focused his mind for writing, but there was vanity in it also; it kept his body thin and his face gaunt and serious (although the amphetamines helped with that too). There seemed to be a deep need in Leonard for self-abnegation, self-control and hunger. In
Beautiful Losers
he would write, “Please make me empty, if I'm empty then I can receive, if I can receive it means it comes from somewhere outside of me, if it comes from outside of me I'm not alone. I cannot bear this loneliness. . . . Please let me be hungry. . . . Tomorrow I begin my fast.” The hunger he wrote of appeared to be all-encompassing. In the
Spice-Box of Earth
poem “It Swings Jocko,” a bebop song to his prick, he wrote,

    
I want to be hungry,

    
hungry for food,

    
for love, for flesh.

Leonard abstained from eating meat, but he was less restrained when it came to his appetite “for the company of women and the sexual expression of friendship.”
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Sit in a taverna by the harbor in Hydra long enough and you could compile quite a catalog of who slept with whom and marvel at the complexity of it all and that so little blood was spilled. You might hear a tale of a woman, an expat, so distressed when Leonard left on the ferry that she threw herself into the sea after it, even though she could not swim; the man who dived in and rescued her, they say, became her new partner. “Everyone was in everyone else's bed,” says Richard Vick. Leonard too, although compared to other islanders he was, according to Vick, “very discreet as a whole.” Vick recalls one evening in a bar in Kamini where he was drinking with his then-girlfriend and her female friend. Leonard and Marianne showed up. During the course of the evening it came out that both of the women with Vick knew Leonard intimately. The women, says Vick, told Leonard genially, “You know, Leonard, we were never in love with you.” Leonard replied equally genially, “Well, me too.” “Those were innocent times,” remarks Vick, but they could be difficult for Marianne. “Yes, he was a ladies' man,” says Marianne. “I could feel my jealousy arousing. Everybody wanted a bit of my man. But he chose to live with me. I had nothing to worry about.” It did not stop her worrying, but she was not one to complain, and she loved him.

I
n March 1962, two years after he had left London for Hydra, Leonard made the return journey and moved back into Mrs. Pullman's boardinghouse in Hampstead. He had found a London publisher—Secker & Warburg—for the novel he had begun writing there. At the publishers' urging, he was in London to revise it. For someone who described the writing process as being “scraped” and “torn from his heart,” the cutting and revising of a manuscript he thought finished was torturous. He wrote to Irving Layton about wielding “a big scalpel” and how he had “torn apart orchestras to arrive at my straight melodic line.”
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The operation was performed with the aid of amphetamines and the pain eased by Mandrax and hashish. But still, it was difficult going back over something he'd been happy with, like being locked in a room with an old love he had once considered beautiful but could now see only her flaws. He wrote to friends about his dark dreams, his panic and depression. The flat gray sky over London did not help. The King William IV pub was not the Bodeguita del Medio, and Hampstead wasn't Hydra. He wrote a letter to Marianne telling her how much he longed for her. In his novel he wrote how “he needed to be by himself so he could miss her, to get perspective.”