Various Positions (9 page)

If Freda Guttman was the muse for
Let Us Compare Mythologies
, Anne Sherman was the inspiration for
Beauty at Close Quarters
, the unpublished version of
The Favorite Game
, as well as for
The Spice-Box of Earth
, which has its origin in Jewish tradition and contemporary love. “For Anne,” a brief poem in
The Spice-Box of Earth
, records this appreciation and her departure. In a letter of July 1961 to his sister, Cohen writes, “
I would appreciate hearing any news about Anne. If you are in contact with her and she is interested please make a book available to her. It is sad, absurd and understandable, that the ‘onlie begetter’ of these poems should not have a volume in her possession.” His sister wrote back in November, saying that Anne was well. “
Your report that Anne is happy delighted me. Besides being an extraordinary beauty, she is an extraordinary person and such people often have great difficulty adjusting to the bleak terms that any life presents, no matter how rich and glamourous.”

Cohen still expresses affection for Anne Sherman, and as with virtually all of his women, he maintained good relations with her after their association ended. Cohen’s lovers have tended to remain his friends, the result of a continued respect, universal graciousness and carefully
orchestrated breakups. And with the exception of
Book of Mercy
, which originated in the rediscovery of a spiritual self at fifty, all of Cohen’s books are in response to women he has known.

For many years after, Anne Sherman remained in his mind as the image of beauty and love, as a letter to her from the winter of 1961 illustrates. Written from Montreal in a seriocomic style, he asks her to join him:

By the summer of 1957, Cohen was back in Montreal. He had enjoyed the beat culture of New York, but he realized that he would always be an outsider; his roots were in Montreal. As he later explained to an officer of the Canada Council, “Don’t worry about me becoming an expatriate. I could never stay away from Montreal. I am a Citizen of Mountain Street.” During this time, he worked intermittently at Cuthbert & Co., his uncle’s foundry, as a lathe operator, brass die-casting machine operator, and a time-and-motion study assistant. He was faced with a dilemma: would he join his uncles at the Freedman Company, settling down to a life of respectability and responsibility, or would he pursue his creative interests and commit himself to his art? He was plagued with the same ambivalence he had faced at McGill. The poem “Priests 1957” describes his situation and suggests a course of action. The work points to the unhappiness of his uncles and their stunted imaginations, the incompleteness of his father’s life as measured by the unread books he
owned, and the general unhappiness of his cousins. At the end of the poem he expresses his sense of ironic disappointment: “
Must we find all work prosaic / because our grandfather built an early synagogue?”

By the next year, while Cohen was living in Montreal, he worked at the Freedman Company hanging coats, and then as a bundle boy (one who carries bundles of material from one stage of production to another). Layton comically described Cohen’s switch from art to manufacturing:

Eleven days later, the critic Desmond Pacey responded to Layton’s lament: “
What will become of Montreal’s bohemia now that all of its leaders are becoming tame and respectable?”

Cohen, along with Mort Rosengarten and Lenore Schwartzman, also ran the Four Penny Art Gallery. It was located in a boarding house on Stanley Street, and for effect they painted every picture frame a different color. They exhibited the work of figurative painters, unusual in Montreal at the time, when the abstract expressionism of Riopelle and others was in vogue. They were the first to show the work of Louise Scott, and they also showed the works of Betty Sutherland, Layton’s wife, and of Vera Frenkel. A fire, however, destroyed a good many of these works, and because of a technicality there was no insurance coverage. Yet Cohen found the gallery an exhuberant, magical space, as the opening of “Last Dance At the Four Penny” makes clear:

Cohen was also working on various pieces of fiction at this time, including an unusual short story about his now senile grandfather, Rabbi Klein. The impact of the elderly Rabbi’s illness led Cohen to write an unpublished short story entitled “A Hundred Suits from Russia.” A grandfather, living with his daughter’s family, accuses his daughter of stealing his suits. The grandson, unable to face the shouting and madness because he can’t write, prepares to leave.
“Work,” his mother mocks, “fine work. In his room all day listening to records. A poet? A deserter.” The grandfather becomes incontinent, and the son tells his mother that the grandfather is not a great Talmudist but senile and must go to a home. One evening the son hears the grandfather sing the most beautiful song. His mother announces that the grandfather has agreed to be quiet so that the son can write and that “
one day you would be a great writer and that all the world would know. He [also] said that people would come from miles to hear you speak.” The story ends with the grandfather banging his fist on a table for each syllable as he shouts, “
One hundred suits from Russia!”

In this early effort, Cohen expresses his frustration with his grandfather’s deterioration, a man he adored and recognized as the catalyst for much of his writing. This attachment to the man continued with Cohen’s unpublished novel,
A Ballet of Lepers
. The book begins, “
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.”

The ninety-one-page typescript of
A Ballet of Lepers
tells the story of a thirty-five-year-old sales clerk who takes in his elderly grandfather. They live in a cramped Stanley Street rooming house. The grandfather is given to fits of violence, and the narrator (who remains unnamed) finds
an awakening violence within himself. When the narrator discovers a baggage clerk masturbating in a train station washroom, he begins slapping him, reveling in his power: “
Defeated he stood before me. I hated him because he would not resist me. I loved him because he was my victim. I slapped him again. He put a freckled chubby hand against his cheek.” As the narrator escapes to the street, he concludes that “
each of us had his secret art. I embraced the noon-time throngs with a smile.” The portrait of the grandfather reflects the difficulties that Cohen faced with his own senile grandfather, although without the degree of violence. Cohen still remembers his grandfather’s words to him when he would visit him in the rest home: “
Flee from this place, flee from this place!”

A Ballet of Lepers
was Cohen’s first extended work of fiction, completed in July 1957. He sent the manuscript out to Pocketbooks and to Ace Publications, but both rejected it. In a 1990 interview, Cohen remembers the writing process: “
I had a clock on my desk, and I forced myself to write a certain number of hours every day and I watched this clock. It had no glass on it and I always thought I could just move the hand with my finger. I remember writing on the face of the clock the word ‘help.’” When an interviewer asked some years later about his productivity, Cohen replied that what an artist really requires is staying power and intransigence and cited Woody Allen’s quip that “eighty percent of life is just showing up!”

The theme of the novel anticipates many of Cohen’s later works, especially
Beautiful Losers
and
The Energy of Slaves
. There is, for example, the perverse symbiosis that links people, whether lovers or family:

In
A Ballet of Lepers
, Cohen also demonstrated a growing sense of Jewish history and tragedy, a theme that would develop in his next three books of poetry:
The Spice-Box of Earth, Flowers for Hitler
, and
Parasites of Heaven
. Explaining his violent acts, the narrator says:

A fundamental artistic theme of Cohen’s is the necessary cruelty of love. “We are not mad, we are human, we want to love, and someone must forgive us for the paths we take to love, for the paths are many and dark, and we are ardent and cruel in our journey.” The predatory nature of love and the need for compassion were explored repeatedly in Cohen’s published works, as well as the need to “
learn betrayal so that you may not betray.” It is also necessary “
to learn shame, remember humiliation, be diligent in your recollection of guilt. … Understand contamination so you may be pure, violence so you may be peaceful.”

————

COHEN INTENSIFIED
his attachment to Layton at this time, acting as best man at the poet’s faux wedding in Montreal in the spring of 1958. Incapable of asking his wife, Betty Sutherland Layton, for a divorce, Layton wanted to buy his current love, Aviva Cantor, a wedding ring. Cohen joined Layton and Aviva for lunch and in the afternoon they went to a jewelry shop on Mountain Street, where Aviva looked at gold bands. Layton neglected her, however, and instead bought a chunky silver bracelet for Betty. It was left to Cohen to choose a gold band and he placed it on Aviva’s finger, standing in for the ambivalent Layton. Remembering the incident, Cohen said that Layton
“probably
felt like living with both women.
I think he could have handled them both, too. It was the
women
who demanded a resolution.” To Layton’s mixed pleasure, Aviva Cantor called herself Mrs. Layton from that moment on.

By day, Cohen was still working in the shipping department or office of his uncles’ clothing company; at night he would write poems. Sometimes he read the poems in coffeehouses with names like the Pam-Pam or the Tokay. At the Pam-Pam, he and Stephen Vizinczey, a Hungarian writer who would later edit the short-lived magazine
Exchange
, would often spend an evening seated near the door rating the women who entered, issuing invitations to the finalists.

At this time Cohen often projected a mood of despair and angst, especially and perhaps only with women. Vera Frenkel recalled an incident at the Tokay when after a conversation with Cohen about a lost suitcase she telephoned a close friend to express her concern about his state of mind. “Don’t worry,” her friend remarked, “he often becomes this way with women. He needs to experience this condition in order to work.” Such repeated “
torment on the bed of love,” as Frenkel described it, became a frequent condition for Cohen, which some thought to be theatrics and others a genuine crisis.
“Leonard,” Frenkel added, “always needed to be saved and lost in the same breath.”

Cohen sometimes played host to visiting Canadian writers. Al Purdy recalls a visit with Milton Acorn in the late fifties and the stark contrast between the two poets, Acorn intensely political, “
a red fire hydrant in blue denims,” Cohen giving “the impression of elegant aristocracy, wearing a fancy dressing gown to putter around the kitchen in … perfectly self-aware.” Cohen moved “
within a slight but perceptible aura of decadence … of standing aside in slight weariness, of having been through life before and found it rather boring.”

Cohen accompanied Irving Layton to a meeting with another icon of Canadian poetry, E.J. Pratt. Earle Birney had arranged for Layton and Cohen to lunch with Pratt and himself. A photograph commemorating the event shows a businesslike Pratt in suit and hat, Birney casual in jacket and pants, and Layton and Cohen dressed as kibbutzim in slacks and white shirts with their sleeves rolled up. The sartorial clash was mirrored in conversational styles. Layton noted Birney’s
“sad Duke of
Windsor face” and Pratt’s formal anecdotes, explaining to Desmond Pacey that when he and Leonard drove back, “
we had lots of impressions to compare and analyze. We haven’t stopped talking about it yet.”