Various Positions (17 page)

A final passage in the letter records his enjoyment of the Twist, danced at a West Indian club called the All-Niter, where the marijuana smoke was so thick, he reported, that you could get high without taking a puff. “
It’s the first time I’ve really enjoyed dancing. I sometimes even forget I belong to an inferior race. Their stuff compares very favorably with Greek hashish. The Twist is the greatest ritual since circumcision—and there you can choose between the genius of two cultures. Myself, I prefer the Twist.”

    B
ACK ON HYDRA
, two distractions interrupted Cohen from the strenuous effort of rewriting
The Favorite Game:
the first was the arrival of his mother; the second, the arrival of many so-called friends. Since he had bought his house, Cohen’s mother had remained unconvinced that his life was secure, that he was eating well, and that he knew what he was doing. Through letters at first to his sister and then to his mother, Cohen stressed the regularity of his life: he had a cleaning lady, caring friends, and a well-looked-after home. He sent his mother recipes, described social events and chronicled his literary progress. But nothing would
substitute for a visit, and in the summer of 1962, in the midst of work on his novel, Cohen had to prepare for his mother’s arrival.

First he had to placate his mother’s fears. Masha was worried about rain, about dampness, and cold. “
In the last six thousand years it hasn’t rained once on the island during the summer, so I doubt if it will begin in 1962,” he assured her, telling her to bring light clothes because it was hot. “
You would suffocate under a mink jacket, and if you didn’t suffocate you’d be eaten by several thousand cats who have never seen a mink jacket and would suppose you to be some new kind of animal.”

It was unthinkable that she stay at a hotel. Why be uncomfortable and hot in their rooms when she could be uncomfortable and hot in his, he asked. Cohen wrote, “
My house is big and you won’t interfere with my work or my several wives, mistresses, and children.” The house, he explained, was being whitewashed, some rotten wood replaced, stones repaired, and despite the absence of running water and electricity, she would find it clean and private. “
Buying this house was the wisest move of my life. I think you and Esther will probably settle here.”

Masha Cohen’s visit precipitated some drastic changes, the most important being Marianne’s removal from the house. According to Jewish law, a Cohen (member of a priestly caste) cannot marry a divorced woman, and living with a divorced woman and her child would have been even more upsetting to his mother. So Marianne had to disappear from Cohen’s daily life. This upset Cohen as much as it did Marianne, who found temporary lodging elsewhere. The visit, meanwhile, was a disaster. The heat bo
thered his mother, she felt unwell, and Cohen didn’t do any writing for a month. “
She’s a little overwhelmed,” he wrote his sister, “and I’m expecting disaster from moment to moment. My own routine has been completely wrecked, of course.” His mother brought with her “
all the old chaos…. She exists on my energy. I have nothing left for anything, books or humans,” he told a friend, adding:

Cohen had an obligation to revise his novel. He had assured his editor Roland Gant at Secker & Warburg that the new version would be much, much better. Half of the original first section had been eliminated, and the book would be a third shorter. He proposed several titles:
The Mist Leaves No Scar
or
Mist Leaves No Scar, Only Give a Sound, Only Strangers Travel
, or
No Flesh So Perfect
, though felt “
nothing sounds any good … THE MOVING TOYSHOP isn’t bad, but this isn’t just a book about youth, it’s an allegory for a lost perfect dim impossible body, the one that escapes us when we kiss, the one that hovers over the best dancer and ruins her dance or makes it sad.” Other possibilities he listed were
Fields of Hair, The Perfect Jukebox, The Moonlight Sponge
, and
The Original Air-Blue Gown
(from Hardy’s poem “The Voice”).

Visitors from Montreal became another nuisance and disruption.
They relied on him to make hotel arrangements, find restaurants, and act as interpreter. To Esther he announced:

In the same letter he complained about Tony Perkins, Melina Mercouri, and Jules Dessin, who were shooting a movie on “the very spot where I happen to swim.” He received surprise visits from people like his witty cousin Alan Golden, “
whom I had never spoken to except over my shoulder at shul … In fact, had he not come, all the Goldens would be to me is a row of blurred faces arranged above a Freedman Company shoulder pad.”

He and Marianne began to avoid people and the port: “
I’ve greeted people so fiercely that nobody dares to drop in. I’ve got a notice DO NOT DISTURB nailed on the front door,” he told his sister. Occasionally an encounter proved interesting, as when he met a troupe of Russian dancers from the Bolshoi Ballet and compared notes with them on the status of artists in Russia and Canada. But soon he and Marianne prepared to visit Kiparissi on the Peloponnesus because Hydra had become
“
intolerably touristic which is fine for one’s real estate but bad for Canadian Literature.” He also admitted, “
It is hard to be a poet
maudit
when you have a good tan.”

But a poet with a good tan is an attractive commodity, and women sought Cohen out. There was Astrid, a tall, stunning redhead from Germany; a willowy blonde from Australia who typed the manuscript of his novel; Phyllis, an American who was in love with his songs; and another Australian, who climbed over his daunting wall to get to him. Some of these women were welcomed, some were passed on to other willing hosts, such as Don Lowe or Anthony Kingsmill.

With his mother gone and the tourists and the women deflected, Cohen could get back to writing. By August he told Roland Gant that he had “
eliminated a kind of self-conscious melancholy that is fine for a ‘first-novel’—but I want to put a polished and precise weapon on the market. The new book is tough. The author isn’t sticking his personal pain at you in every chapter; that’s why the new version hurts more. Mostly it’s a question of cutting away the blubber and letting the architecture of bone show through.” He finished the work in October, cutting the book virtually in half, confessing to a friend that “
I think I have rewritten myself, and like the book, I’m not sure I admire the product. We all have several images of ourselves. It is a surprise to see which one we assume.”

His self-assessment was unsparing:

To Layton he wrote that he was not entirely satisfied with this rewritten version, but “
anyone with an ear will know I’ve torn apart orchestras to arrive at my straight, melodic line … In a way that means more to me than the achievement itself. I walk lighter and carry a big scalpel. Everything I’ve read in the past week is too long … I don’t know anything about people—that’s why I have this terrible and irresistible temptation to be a novelist.”

November gave Cohen an unexpected opportunity to travel. The
CBC
invited him to Paris to participate in a panel with Malcolm Muggeridge, Mary McCarthy and Romain Gary. To Robert Weaver he exclaimed, “
Has the world gone completely mad? Also fee and expenses!” The hour-long radio program, which he would moderate for a fee of six hundred dollars, would address the question “Is there a Crisis in Western Culture?” It was to be recorded in the Hotel Napoleon. Cohen arrived two days early for the taping, and settled into a “
coffin-colored room in the Hotel Cluny Square” on the left bank, to read the work of the other participants. A short story, “Luggage Fire Sale,” published in
Partisan Review
(1969) narrates his adventure, including picking up a female medical student at 2: 00 a.m. in a Boulevard St Michel cafe and writing on his hotel wall
“
change is the only aphrodisiac
.” The story also hints at his pleasure at being away from Hydra and from “
a couple of women who knew me too well.” He arrived in Paris with a small piece of Lebanese hashish “
and a complete suntan which recorded my major life success, the discovery of hot beaches where I could live naked with someone worth watching.” He added that “the
sweetest aspect” of this unnamed woman of Hydra “was the way she let me know that I could neither hurt nor miss her.”

Before the taping, the participants shared an expensive dinner at the Hotel Napoleon where the principal topic was marijuana. During the taping, Muggeridge stressed culture as embellishing the human condition, and McCarthy allowed that culture was integral to society. Cohen, wondering why he was getting paid, threw in Russia as a topic. They agreed on the existence of a new world culture that encompassed both China and Russia, but could not agree on the issue of greatness in contemporary culture. Cohen reported that the discussion had been neither witty nor profound. The reason, Cohen felt, was that they had been too well fed: “
Cultural crises, especially permanent ones, have little effect on bodies so recently nourished on expensive French food and liquor. We should have been starved three or four days.”

By February of 1963 he was back in North America, partly to replenish his bank account, but partly to celebrate the forthcoming publication of
The Favorite Game
by Viking in New York. “
It’s a perfect little machine,” Cohen said of the book, “not spectacular, but new and
nothing sticks out, and it even sprays a shower of sparks from time to time.”

Cohen began a long and satisfying association with Cork Smith, his new editor at Viking, who had accepted
The Favorite Game
. In May, when Viking received the corrected galleys of the book (it had been published in London in October), Cohen told Smith that the possibility of an epigraph by Yeats was unthinkable.

A perceptive editor, Smith would play a critical role in the development of
Beautiful Losers
, guiding the publication of that difficult novel. Cohen sent the final revisions of
The Favorite Game
to Smith, and included a poem:

In July, after he had returned the galleys, Cohen received a copy of the book jacket and quickly wrote to Cork Smith to express his dismay at the author photo:

Cohen was restless in New York where he stayed with his sister. He wrote to Sheila Watson:

Jack McClelland had not been keen to publish
The Favorite Game
, saying that Cohen did not have to write such a “first novel” work, both autobiographical and egotistical. Cohen responded by declaring it “
a third novel disguised as a first novel…. I use the first novel form the way a good technician uses the first person.” (He actually had written two others:
A Ballet of Lepers
and
Beauty at Close Quarters, both
never published.)

For his next novel, Cohen predicted, “
I will write a book about pure experience which will make THE FAVORITE GAME look like a grotesque gimmick. You will have to come to my cell to pick up the
manuscript.” McClelland thought
The Favorite Game
was “
a beautiful book,” but it was still “a first novel” and not what he should have done. McClelland forecasted that the book would be a critical but not a commercial success, adding that “
one of the great dangers of staying in this business is that you begin to think you know something about books. My greatest virtue as a publisher for years was that I knew nothing about books.” In response to McClelland’s criticism, Cohen explained that: