Various Positions (6 page)

Cohen lost to the inmates, who had not been defeated in twenty-four years. Impatient with the prolonged, ineffectual executive meetings of the Debating Union, Cohen moved to ban any further meetings. The Debating Union was a suitable apprenticeship for a budding lawyer, a career that Cohen was then considering.

Cohen also joined Hillel, the Jewish students’ organization. He organized a Hillel band and participated in a Hillel play directed by Bernie Rothman. The cast included Yafa Lerner; Eddie Van Zaig (later to marry Roz Ostrow, Cohen’s stepsister, also in the production); Freda Guttman, in charge of properties; Robert Hershorn, who was part of the stage crew; and “Lenny Cohen” as second guard. Law, the courts, and freedom were the focus of the work.

Before the start of his second year at McGill, Cohen and two friends formed the Buckskin Boys, a country and western band. The choice was not entirely a surprise since he had long admired country and western music, listening for hours to the musical narratives on radio stations from the states. They chose their name because all three band members had buckskin jackets, Cohen having inherited his from his father. The Buckskin Boys performed at square dances, in high schools, and in church basements, playing pop and country favorites. The group survived
through the McGill years, and Cohen discovered that he liked to perform, although he admitted to being nervous on stage. Something of an instrumentalist at this time, he played backstage guitar for the dramatic society’s production of
Twelfth Night
.

Walking along Sherbrooke Street late one afternoon in the fall of 1954, Cohen came upon a group of students celebrating a victory of the McGill football team. They were rocking several buses and the police had been summoned. While he was watching, Cohen was shoved by a policeman and told to move along. Cohen tried to explain that he was only watching, but the policeman grabbed Cohen’s shoulder and told him to move. Cohen knocked the policeman’s hand away and received an unexpected rabbit punch on the back of his neck. He regained consciousness in the “Black Maria,” the police wagon, and was driven to station Number 10, charged, and released.

Several days later, Cohen appeared in juvenile court with a lawyer, his mother, and his sister. The charges included refusing to circulate, disturbing the peace, obstructing justice, blocking a public path, and resisting arrest. When they were read, Cohen’s sister broke into hysterical laughter and had to be escorted from the court. Cohen received a suspended sentence. Several years later the episode resurfaced when Cohen applied for a job as a Pinkerton detective. He wasn’t granted a second interview because Pinkerton’s discovered that he had been charged with a criminal offense and had failed to note it on his application. He also applied for a position with the Hong Kong police force, which was advertising in the Montreal English language papers (only apparent requirement: a college degree). In 1957, he wrote to the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs inquiring about teaching jobs. They replied that jobs were scarce and thanked him for his inquiry.

Cohen’s career interests vacillated widely during his university years, from law, to teaching, to police work. But three influential teachers, all writers, galvanized him: Louis Dudek, a poet/critic; Hugh MacLennan, a novelist; and F.R. Scott, a constitutional lawyer who was also a writer. Later, Cohen encountered a fourth literary mentor, Irving Layton, who became the most important. In the fall of 1954 Cohen took Dudek’s poetry course which focused on the modernists, including Ezra Pound, with whom Dudek was corresponding.

Born in the east end of Montreal of Polish immigrant parents, Dudek was a poet and critic who held a Ph.D in literature from Columbia University. In the first weeks of the modern poetry course, Cohen showed Dudek some of his writing, which Dudek thought had little value. Two weeks later, Cohen offered more of his work and this time Dudek spotted “The Sparrows,” a five-stanza poem with an elaborate metaphoric scheme. Dudek responded at once: as they walked down a corridor of the arts faculty building discussing the poem, he suddenly stopped and commanded Cohen to kneel. With the manuscript, he knighted him “poet” and bade him rise and join the as-yet-undefined ranks of Canadian poets. Continuity had been established, tradition enacted, and acceptance granted. “The Sparrows” went on to win the 1954 Literary Contest sponsored by the
McGill Daily
which printed the poem on the front page of its December 7 issue.

Cohen’s first published works, “An Halloween Poem to Delight my Younger Friends,” and “Poem en Prose,” appeared in
CIV/n
, a literary magazine started in January 1953 with two hundred and fifty mimeographed copies. Initiated by four recent university graduates, led by Aileen Collins (later to marry Dudek), with Dudek and Layton joining as editorial advisers, it derived its unusual title from Ezra Pound’s statement, “
CIV/n: not a one-man job,” “CIV/n” being Pound’s abbreviation for civilization. Its stated goal was to present poetry that would be “
a vital representation of what things are, done in strong language (if necessary) or any language, but it [would] rouse the reader to see just what the world around him [was] like.” Poets in Canada, Collins added, were “
forced to write with maple syrup on birch bark,” and this needed to change. The energetic editorial meetings, attended by Layton, Dudek, and Collins, often at Layton’s Montreal home, led to the appearance of new and unorthodox writing: it was frank, colloquial, unselfconscious, and experimental. To get the Canadian mind out of storage,
CIV/n
proposed the following new standard:

In a letter to Robert Creeley, Layton comically summarized the completion of the inaugural issue: “
Last night we celebrated
CIV/n
with an orgy and to give the issue the proper send-off we all undressed and sat about holding each other’s privates (sounds gruesome now).”

Pound was sent copies of the magazine and replied to Dudek that he found it unpolemical and too local. He questioned whether the magazine had any interest in “
standing for maximum awareness.” The fourth issue of
CIV/n
, which included Cohen’s first effort, was more broadly based. The issue also contained work by both Creeley and Corman; a long article on Pound by Camillo Pellizzi, an Italian author/critic; and an editorial by Dudek on why Pound was being held in a Washington, D.C., mental hospital. It also contained contributions from Phyllis Webb, Raymond Souster, and Irving Layton. Cohen’s author’s note reveals that “
Leonard N. Cohen … composes poetry to the guitar; now studying at McGill.”

The second poem by Cohen in the issue alludes to his experiences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the summer of 1953. That summer Cohen had gone to Harvard, ostensibly to take a poetry course from the experimental French poet Pierre Emmanuel, who was teaching a course on the nature of modern poetry. Cohen convinced his mother that the enterprise would be worth a month or so in Cambridge, though he spent most of his time listening to folk music from the world-famous John Lennox Collection at the Widener Library. In the poem, he describes how the “
secret undulations” of the River Charles “
swarmed the shadows of ten dozen streetlamps and a moon.” The poem appears retitled and revised as “Friends” in
Let Us Compare Mythologies
. Four other poems by Cohen appeared in
CIV/n
before publication ceased in 1955.

The literary environment of
CIV/n
was as important as the publication itself, and through
CIV/n
Cohen came into contact with older, more experienced writers who sought to challenge the poetic orthodoxy of the country. Aileen Collins later characterized this challenge as the effort, at least in Montreal, to contradict the Canadian Authors Association’s notion of poetry as effusive expressions of emotional states, similar in form and taste to a blend of maple syrup; hence her comment about maple syrup on birch bark.

The
CIV/n
circle included Layton, Betty Sutherland (sister of the McGill poet John Sutherland and Layton’s companion from the mid-1940s; they married in 1948), the sculptor Buddy Rozynski, art director of the magazine, his wife Wanda, and later, Doug Jones, Phyllis Webb, Eli Mandel, F.R. Scott, Cid Corman, Raymond Souster, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson. Aileen Collins and the Rozynskis handled the production and distribution of the magazine, as well as the finances, and also took charge of the correspondence, accounting, art-work, and circulation.

Cohen was soon participating in the group’s discussions, debates, and informal readings, often bringing his guitar to accompany his poetry. These gatherings were actually workshops, and Cohen recalls that even an experienced poet like Scott was shaken by some of the candid reactions to his work. There was, Cohen recalls, a “
savage integrity” to the Montreal group. Phyllis Webb recollects meeting Cohen in late 1955 when he was preparing to publish his first book with Dudek. Dudek brought him to Layton’s house, and she remembers her surprise at learning that this young poet was “
voluntarily studying the Bible as an informal on-going project.” That evening, as usual, poems “
got battered about,” but Cohen’s was “the most freshly lyrical and genuinely sensuous.” Arguments, insults, and praise characterized these meetings, and provided a sounding board for Cohen. The importance of
CIV/n
, said Dudek, was its role in stimulating a vital Montreal literary environment.

The emergence of the
CIV/n
group also confirmed the move of new poetry from Toronto to Montreal. Raymond Souster’s
Contact
, from which the Contact Press emerged, had ended, and the new
CIV/n
, in Montreal, had begun. In addition, the magazine solidified the union of Souster, Layton, and Dudek, which had begun with the publication of their co-authored project
Cerberus
(1952).
Canadian Poems, 1850–1952
, an anthology edited by Dudek and Layton, signaled a break from poetry shaped strictly by narrative, exhibiting a modern lyricism.
CIV/n
was more challenging than the other small magazines in Canada, such as
First Statement, Contact
, or later,
Delta
, and certainly fostered Cohen’s early work.

The best-known writer on the faculty at the time was the Governor General’s Award winner Hugh MacLennan, whose
Two Solitudes
had startled the country when it appeared in 1945. MacLennan joined McGill in 1951 to teach a course on the modern novel and to run an
advanced creative writing seminar. Cohen met MacLennan through Tony Graham, son of the novelist Gwethalyn Graham, who had achieved notoriety with her best-selling novel
Earth and High Heaven
(1944), about the love affair between a young Jewish lawyer and a Gentile from Westmount. While at McGill, MacLennan drafted what would become
The Watch that Ends the Night
(1957), also destined to win a Governor General’s Award.

The reading list of MacLennan’s novel course, which Cohen attended, included James Joyce’s
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
. This work had a powerful effect on Cohen, especially the impressionistic “bird girl” section where Stephen Dedalus poetically describes a young woman on the beach. It demonstrated to Cohen how lyrical prose could become within the novel form.

Enrollment in the advanced creative writing course required a submission of material, which Cohen presented and MacLennan approved. Cohen found that he liked MacLennan as a person as well as an instructor. “That’s where my life has been mostly,” Cohen has said. “I’ve only gone on these kinds of adventures where there was a personal relationship involved.” He remembers MacLennan as a beautiful teacher: “
the more restrained he was, the more emotional was the atmosphere in the classroom.” For a time afterwards, they continued to exchange letters, and MacLennan expressed interest in Cohen’s developing career as a writer. When two of Cohen’s poems were published in the February 1954 issue of
Forge
, a student publication at McGill, MacLennan provided an introduction.

F.R. Scott was another influential figure at McGill. An eminent constitutional historian, he was also a noted poet who was able to straddle both the earlier generation of
The McGill Fortnightly Review
and
Preview
, as well as the new efforts of the innovative
CIV/n
. Cohen studied commercial law with him and briefly entered law school, admiring the apparent ease with which Scott could balance poetry and the law. Scott encouraged Cohen’s literary efforts and Cohen recalled that visits to the Scotts’ were “
warm and wonderful [with] a very open, fluid atmosphere; lots of fun; drinking; and talk of politics and poetry.”

Several years later, Scott and his wife Marian, a painter, would venture into downtown Montreal to hear Cohen read and sing in the various
clubs and coffeehouses. Cohen, in turn, often received invitations to North Hatley, where the Scotts had their summer cottage. He wrote in a lean-to cabin belonging to Scott’s brother Elton, which the Scotts made available to Cohen. He began to write
The Spice-Box of Earth
there in 1957 and a year later he returned to work on early versions of
The Favorite Game
. To show his gratitude, he wrote “Summer Haiku for Frank and Marian Scott,” which Mort Rosengarten carved on a rock. The Scotts put it to use as a doorstop; the poem also appears in
The Spice-Box
. Scott later wrote a recommendation for Cohen for a Canada Council grant.

Of all Cohen’s mentors at McGill, however, Irving Layton was unquestionably the most influential. Layton forced a new vitality into moribund poetic forms and linked the prophetic with the sexual. In Layton’s work, Cohen discovered a Judaic voice of opposition, energy, and passion. Who, Layton asked with a flourish, will read the “castratos,” the critics? “
What race will read what they have said / Who have my poems to read instead?” Northrop Frye, among others, tried to diminish Layton’s sexuality:
“One can get as tired of buttocks in Mr. Layton as of buttercups in the
Canadian Poetry Magazine
,” he remarked in the
University of Toronto Quarterly
in April 1952, when reviewing
The Black Huntsmen
.