Authors: Ira B. Nadel
At the center of this circle was Marianne Ihlen. Details vary about how Cohen first met her. A poem romantically describes his seeing her reflection in a bookstore window, and in his poem “Island Bulletin” he describes his instant absorption in her. But he also recalls seeing her in the port once or twice and encountering her with her companion Axel Jensen, Norwegian novelist and a student of Jung and the
I Ching
. It may have been at Katsikas’, or at the Johnstons’. Cohen’s earliest memory of her was seeing her walk arm in arm with Axel and their child and thinking how fortunate they were to have each other.
But they weren’t as close as Cohen thought. Jensen soon began an affair with an American painter named Patricia Amlin. They left Hydra in Axel’s boat but were soon involved in a car crash in Athens that seriously injured Patricia. She recovered, and they remained together. Cohen took it upon himself to look after Marianne and her child, also named Axel, at first moving into her home:
I used to sit on the stairs while she slept, they were the most neutral part of the house, and they overlooked her sleeping. I watched her a year, by moonlight or kerosene … and nothing that I could not say or form, was lost. What I surrendered there the house has kept, because even torn wordless from me, my own first exclusive
version of my destiny, like a minor poem, is too useless and pure to die.
Marianne had modeled both in Oslo and on Hydra and had some test shots taken in Paris. She was beautiful and vivacious and fascinated by Cohen. His graciousness and generosity touched her. When he bought a home for himself on Hydra, Marianne and her son moved in with him. She was quiet, with a domestic bent and Cohen was obsessed with her. She brought order to Cohen’s personal life and encouraged his creativity. On the back cover of Cohen’s album
Songs from a Room
there is a photograph of Marianne seated at Cohen’s typewriter in the narrow writing room on the second floor of his house. She is deeply tanned and smiles shyly at the camera.
Marianne became both muse and mother for Cohen, fuelling his creative impulse and nurturing his dormant desire for security, home, and purpose. “
It wasn’t just that she was the muse, shining in front of the poet. She understood that it was a good idea to get me to my desk,” he said in 1994. “
Marianne is perfect,” he wrote to Layton in 1963. “Even the way she demands masterpieces from me is soft and funny and much more subtle than she understands.” Born in 1935 and raised by her grandmother, Marianne had the education of an older generation, Cohen explained. She was “
the incarnation of the European woman.” In a
BBC
interview Cohen said “
the way she inhabited a house was very, very nourishing and every morning she put a gardenia on my work table.” Marianne’s son Axel brought out a paternal quality in Cohen. They lived comfortably as a family.
At the beginning of their relationship, “
Marianne and I didn’t think there would be a love story,” Cohen has commented. “We thought we would live together,” but it quickly became an intense and enriching relationship. Her presence sustained his work. He was writing new poems and by 1964 was beginning his major prose work,
Beautiful Losers:
There was a woman, she had a child, there were meals on the table, order in the upkeep of the house and harmony. It was the perfect moment to start to do some serious work … When there is food on the table, when the candles are lit, when you wash the dishes
together and put the child to bed together. That is order, that is spiritual order, there is no other.
Marianne adored him, although she worried about his drug use. On Hydra, drugs, especially hashish, were easily accessible. It became a common practice for Cohen to smoke either hashish or marijuana, which he believed accelerated his imagination. Cohen got security from Marianne and in return she received Cohen’s particular attentions.
“
Leonard was unique and amazing,” said a longtime female friend. “Leonard
really
loved women, although ‘love’ is not the right word. He felt that women had a power and a beauty that most did not even know they possessed. To be with Leonard was to begin to know your own power as a woman.” Another female friend said he honored them and made them beautiful. Although he was with Marianne, Cohen was not exclusive to anyone. “
You could not own Leonard,” Nancy Bacal has said.
————
ON SEPTEMBER
27, 1960, six days after his twenty-sixth birthday, Cohen bought a house in Hydra for $1500, using a bequest from his recently deceased grandmother. This was a “big deal” in the words of one of his friends, a commitment to a place and a world that was mysterious and unusual. Buying the house was a complicated act, needing the assistance of his friend Demetri Gassoumis as translator, adviser, and witness to the deed. Cohen later said that it was the smartest decision he ever made. The three-story, ancient whitewashed building, with its five rooms on several levels, was run-down and had no electricity, plumbing, or running water. Yet it was a private space where he could work, either on the large tiled terrace or in his music room on the third floor. Cohen described his home to his mother:
It has a huge terrace with a view of a dramatic mountain and shining white houses. The rooms are large and cool with deep windows set in thick walls. I suppose it’s about 200 years old and many generations of sea-men must have lived here. I will do a little work on it
every year and in a few years it will be a mansion … I live on a hill and life has been going on here exactly the same for hundreds of years. All through the day you hear the calls of the street vendors and they are really rather musical … I get up around 7 generally and work till about noon. Early morning is coolest and therefore best for work, but I love the heat anyhow, especially when the Aegean Sea is 10 minutes from my door.
In a letter to his sister he recounts the nights:
I wander through the rooms with a candle like Rebecca’s housekeeper, upstairs, downstairs, the scary basement; my land (presently a garbage heap) is home for a couple of mules and the tinkle of their bells as they pick for food can break your heart as it blends with the music of a taverna two o’clock of a Monday morning. The wind brings you the sound, or three young men, their arms about each other’s shoulders, singing magnificent close harmony, nasal[.] Turkish minors fill the street with their shared pain of abandoned love, as they reel past your door.… There are about sixty countries I’ve got to visit and buy houses in.
Cohen also adopted the island tradition of keeping cats, although at first he tried to chase them away: “
But they came back. I am told that it is the custom of the island to keep cats, and who am I to defy custom?” He relegated them to the basement, since they might have given him hives.
He knew he had been accepted by the community when he began receiving regular visits from the garbage man and his donkey. “
It is like receiving the Legion of Honour.” Cohen’s house gave him a foundation. To a friend he explained that “
having this house makes cities seem less frightening. I can always come back and get by. But I don’t want to lose contact with the metropolitan experience.” Buying the house also gave him confidence: “
The years are flying past and we all waste so much time wondering if we dare to do this or that. The thing is to leap, to try, to take a chance.”
Greece provided Cohen with a base and an observation post on changing social and sexual mores. “
The primitive circumstances of my
life on this island [are] a condition I hopefully established to attract an interior purity,” Cohen wrote, celebrating the discipline instilled by the island. He also liked the natural magic of the island, which could transform a person; in certain seasons, one came out of the sea luminous because of the plankton that adhered to the body. On Hydra, he was freed from the social rituals, obligations, and expectations of his Montreal Judaism. He could take responsibility for his own Judaic identity.
Cohen regularly observed Shabbat, lighting candles and saying the blessings at the Friday evening meal. He stopped his work for a day, dressed more formally, and often walked to the port for Shabbat meetings at noon with Demetri Leousi, an islander who spoke a special, Edwardian English learned at Robert College in Istanbul. Leousi, who had had a love affair with a Jewish woman in New York when he worked there, sustained a deep affection for Jews and congratulated Cohen on being “
the first Hebrew to own property on the island. We are honored.”
Hydra was also cheap. Cohen could live for as little as a thousand dollars a year, and he quickly worked out a scheme whereby he would return to Canada to earn perhaps two thousand dollars and then race back to Hydra to live for a year or so. And the weather was wonderfully warm. In Hydra, “
everything you saw was beautiful: every corner, every lamp, everything you touched, everything you used was in its right place,” Cohen wrote. “
You knew everything you used … It was much more animated, much more cosmopolitan. There were Germans, Scandinavians, Australians, Americans, Dutch who you would run into in very intimate settings like the back of grocery stores.” There were no interruptions from work or love. Life was engaging and there was order, but also light:
There’s sun all over my table as I write this, and I’m in love with all the white walls of my house, and anxious to leave them and my stone floored kitchen. I swear I can taste the molecules dancing in the mountains, and I may soon have the privilege of recounting these divine confusions before your fireplace is cold.
The Aegean light had a quality that Cohen felt contributed to his work. “There’s something in the light that’s honest and philosophical,” he told a journalist in 1963, “You can’t betray yourself intellectually, it
invites your soul to loaf.” Not surprisingly, Greece began to play a significant part in the poetry which would appear in
Flowers for Hitler
.
But, just as he felt Montreal both nurtured him and hindered him, Cohen began to feel constrained by Hydra. The attachment to Marianne became both consuming and destroying, a familiar pattern in his later relationships. Island life, with its intense interactions, was becoming difficult. Cohen felt he had to leave for the sake of his art and his peace of mind. The New York poet Kenneth Koch, visiting one summer, reduced the complexities of island life to a single sentence: “Hydra—you can’t live anywhere else in the world, including Hydra.”
By November 1960, Cohen had returned to Montreal. He needed money, and sought to capitalize on the forthcoming publication of his first book with a major publisher. He applied again to the Canada Council for a writing grant and felt he had to make an impression. He borrowed some money, hired a limousine, and with a friend he sang and smoked marijuana on the two-hour drive from Montreal to Ottawa. At the Canada Council offices, he serenaded the secretaries while chasing them in a wheelchair. Whatever impression he made, Cohen received his grant early in the new year, enough to maintain his life on Hydra. Montreal, meanwhile, ambushed him with “
all the old potent guilts.”
A month later, the first draft of what would be
The Favorite Game
was rejected by McClelland & Stewart. Cohen tried to find something positive in the rejection. “
Since hearing the news, I have been strangely exultant. I feel free again, the way I felt before a line of mine was ever published…. I can experiment again, try anything, lose everything. I’m alone with myself and the vast dictionaries of language. It’s a joy.”
After returning to Hydra, Cohen began to rewrite the novel, which had also been rejected by the New York firm of Abelard-Schuman, although it had had a positive reading. He wrote to Maryann Greene at Abelard-Schuman, “
It took me some time to learn to write a poem. It will take me time to learn to write prose. I don’t know too much about form right now, but I promise you, I intend to become the best architect in the business.” By mid-December 1961, he could tell the Pullmans in London, “
I have finished my novel very close to the date at which I began it two years ago in your house.”
McClelland & Stewart had objected to his writing prose in the first
place and their editorial comments were discouraging; “
a protracted love-affair with himself … very tedious, not to say disgusting … The sex is too damp and morbid.” Jack McClelland’s first letter about the work told him it was a difficult manuscript to evaluate: it was beautifully written, as one would expect, but was it publishable? And to what degree is the work autobiographical? Cohen replied from Paris in October 1960 that, yes, it was autobiographical: “
every event described happened with the exception of the death of Robert at the end of the second section.” He “
wanted to tell about a certain society and a certain man and reveal insights into the bastard Art of Poetry. I think I know what I’m talking about. Autobiography? Lawrence Breavman isn’t me but we did a lot of the same things. But we reacted differently to them and so we became different men.”
A later letter from McClelland criticized the novel and asked whether Cohen had other publishing contracts. Cohen responded that in December 1961, Lou Schwartz of Abelard-Schuman had offered him an advance for the revised novel in the presence of Layton, his wife, A.J.M. Smith, and F.R. Scott in a room at the Ritz hotel. He insisted that Cohen take cash right there. Cohen refused and said he would go through regular channels; Schwarz then reneged on his offer. “
He managed to offend me and, as you know, I have a saintly nature and am not offended easily,” Cohen wrote. McClelland invited Cohen to resubmit the novel, after making editorial changes. “
I will always consider you my publisher,” Cohen replied, “and I will never forget the wonderful treatment you gave my book of poems and as far as possible I will always come to you first. But I just signed away Commonwealth Rights to Secker & Warburg. Anyway, there’ll be other better books.” McClelland did remain Cohen’s publisher, an important relationship for both of them.
Cohen was ambivalent about the novel himself, describing it as a
“miserable” but “important mess.” It was “a book without lies,” a work with “the atmosphere of a masterpiece; it won’t
be
a masterpiece, but people will know that guts were strewn on its behalf.” He referred to the revised work as “
a book without alibis; not the alibis of the open road or narcotics or engaging crime.”