Authors: Ira B. Nadel
A prose poem entitled “Here Was the Harbour” suggests the purity of life on Hydra that appealed so strongly to Cohen. Describing the harbor and the intense blue of the sky, he proclaims, “
Of men the sky demands all manner of stories, entertainments, embroideries, just as it does of its stars and constellations.” “The sky,” he continues, “wants the
whole man lost in his story, abandoned in the mechanics of action, touching his fellows, leaving them, hunting the steps, dancing the old circles.” In the silence of Hydra, Cohen found his muse, although Greece plays a surprisingly small part in his writing as a subject or scene. Occasional poems describe his life there, but it has no direct presence in his fiction and appears only sporadically in his songs.
He could not escape politics, however. In October 1961 he provided this analysis of the political situation to his sister:
everywhere is going Communist and cleaning up corruption and poverty and charm. And the West is too expensive, rigid, and hysterical. What chance has a decent fun-loving literary parasite got in this world? Anyways, your cheque will keep me in hashish yet a little longer.
Drugs on Hydra were becoming increasingly evident and could be obtained without much difficulty—often from a local who regularly made trips to Athens, although marijuana was grown on the island. Cohen soon found himself dependent on the drugs for quickening his imagination and often became desperate when they were not available, as his poem “Indictment of the Blue Hole” makes clear. It reads in part:
January 28, 1962
My abandoned narcotics have
abandoned me
January 28, 1962
7: 30 must have dug its
pikes into your blue wrist
“The Drawer’s Condition on November 28, 1961” begins with this question: “
Is there anything emptier / than the drawer where / you used to store your opium?”
The most popular drug was hashish, but acid and marijuana were also readily available. Initially, the pharmacist supplied opiates and other drugs, but soon other sources were needed. To a French-Canadian friend he wrote,
“I’ve smoked quite a lot of hash and eaten a fair amount
of opium. None of it’s any good really, and the O is quite dangerous. Work is better than both—and work is hell.” He later relied on a speed-like drug, Maxiton, which could be bought over the counter. He became known to his close friends as Captain Mandrax, Mandrax being an English brand name for quaaludes. By 1964 he found that hashish and amphetamines assisted him greatly in completing
Beautiful Losers
, in a marathon writing session.
A passage from an unpublished essay of 1965 clarifies the nature of drug use on the island. Cohen writes:
In this part of the planet men have smoked and cooked hashish for many centuries, and as countless American and European homosexuals can testify, without sacrificing any of the vigourous qualities we would associate with a people so crucial to history, a continuous seminal history including not only the classical and Byzantine periods, but also, and perhaps most important, our own time. We who are here today believe that these lands of the Eastern Mediterranean are still the glistening alembic in which the happiest and purest synthesis of the West and Orient must occur. Islanders brew a tea from the wild narcotic poppies which is served to restless children and rebellious mules….
We smoke the occasional common cigarette into which we have introduced a few crumbs of hashish. We cannot rely on this crude device to secure us the visions and insights we hunger for, but it has its use as an agent of relaxation and receptivity. On the recreational side I might say that erotic and musical experience is enhanced under its influence. My wife would not listen to Bach without it, nor I to the cicadas at sundown. … The lyrics of many bazouki tunes celebrate the aromatic generosity of the leaf as it turns to ash.
In September 1961 a confident Cohen wrote to the editor of the
New York Times
to tell him that he was sending him a new sonnet, written a few days earlier. He believed it to be one of his best poems: “
I write a year’s verse to keep in training for a poem like this.” He titled it “On His Twenty Seventh Birthday.” The
Times
did not print it.
He reported to Claire Pratt in Toronto that he was continuing to work on his self-indulgent novel, which nobody, he was sure, would want. He predicted that “
the next book will be so orderly that people will mistake it for a geometry theorem.” He was also busy with his poetry, saying it was “clearing the mind for some splendid Greek pentalic constructions.”
Cohen was living with Marianne again and maintained a six-and-a-half-year relationship with her. Her penetrating blue eyes, high cheekbones, and inquisitive mouth captivated him. Once, when Marianne modeled for a friend’s boutique in Hydra, she looked so marvelous in the borrowed clothes and sunglasses that people stopped her in the port for her autograph, assuming she must be a movie star. On one occasion Cohen himself distracted her by asking for her signature on a menu as she crossed the port. For Cohen, Marianne presented an attenuated, lyrical beauty:
It’s so simple
to wake up beside your ears
and count the pearls
with my two heads
… let’s go to bed
right after supper
Let’s sleep and wake up
all night
Cohen sought to protect her, as he would seek to protect other women throughout his life, one source of his immense appeal. When Marianne returned to Oslo to visit relatives, Cohen followed. Marianne, he wrote to Layton, “
seems to have endured and ruined the women I’ve known after her and I’ve got to confront her mystery in the snow. She is so blonde in my heart!” He had to pursue her and while in Oslo wrote a poem:
“Lead me … into families, cities, congregations: / I want to stroll down the arteries invisible / as the multitudes I cannot see from here.”
While Marianne was visiting her mother, Cohen listened to Greek records, smoked cigars, and enjoyed the clean northern beauty of Norway. “
Something in the air takes no notice whatsoever of our
miniature suffering and invites us, commands us, to join in the insane eternal laughter. Today I’m rolling in the aisles.” He enjoyed the contrast of the northern ethic, the cold air and forthright diet.
“I’ve been working on my new book but today I feel like giving up writing. The air is too sweet for all this working of the mind, the herrings are too tasty. When I am not watching blonde girls I am eating herring and sometimes I do both.”
Learning that his novel was to be published in Swedish, Cohen told Esther that his book would certainly appeal to the Swedes because
“it’s so melancholy, and neurotic and dirty.” To Stephen Vizicenzy he wrote that he had abandoned himself entirely to oral gratification: “
Eating and kissing. Frankly, I hate to get out of bed. I don’t think I’m a poet maudit after all. Maybe I’ll receive my sense of loss tomorrow.” A month later he wrote to Robert Weaver that “
Norway is blonde and glorious and I am popular as a negro with my dark nose. I’ll travel forever.” He danced by himself, listening to Radio Luxembourg. “
I can be seen Twisting alone, not even missing London marijuana.”
His novel was finished in the spring, and Cohen had a feeling of completion and ennui. He told Yafa Lerner:
Strange to find myself absolutely lustless. It makes me have to begin everything all over again, find a new structure to hang myself on. Lustless. It’s like a kind of amnesia. It leaves me with too much spare time and forces me into metaphysics.
I never thought desire was so frail.
Write.
He also wrote to a Mr. Dwyer at the Canada Council to report that his manuscript had been accepted by the literary agents David Higham Associates. “
This is the same novel I’ve been working on for two years, the one Jack [McClelland] hates.” Quoting the readers’ reports, he noted their praise and claimed that if the writing had been any less imaginative, it would have made the “countless passages of remarkable sexual description” inappropriate. He thanked Dwyer for the council’s support “and for having created an atmosphere of concern about my work.” He added that he was working on a “surrealistic sound poem on the Underground
System for Project ’62” of the CBC and is getting “into another novel set in the Eastern Townships.” (Only a few pages of this projected work exist.) He closed with a request to inform him about any suitable jobs for him in Canada.
————
IN MARCH
of 1962 Cohen returned to 19b Hampstead High Street in London to work on revisions for his novel. He wrote Jack McClelland to see if he would “
be interested in publishing a book of offensive instant poems of mine called
Flowers for Hitler
.” T
he
same day he wrote to Rabbi Cass, in charge of the McGill B’nai Brith Hillel organization, thanking him for a copy of a review of
The Spice-Box of Earth
. He noted that the reviewer had rewritten the first stanza of one of his poems—but “
it’s the kind of chutzpa I enjoy and indulge in secretly myself, so convey to him my congratulations.” The final letter that day was to Robert Weaver of the CBC. He told Weaver that he met the critic Nathan Cohen in Paris and together they had spent an evening praising him. He promised to write a piece on Greece for Weaver but was too busy just then with revisions. “
London is horrible,” he concluded, “and I long for the honest, brutal massacre of a Canadian winter.”
Several days later, Cohen wrote to his Montreal friend Daniel Kraslavsky, complaining about the small amount of money he received for his novel:
Over two years on that book in which I invite the whole world to share my glorious youth and what do I get?
Cashmere? What’s cashmere?
I’ve got to go back to the Greek island. I have reports that my house is crumbling there. I’m meeting a Norwegian girl and her baby there. I shall become a husband and father in one fell swoop. I have no money to live anywhere else. I love it there but it cuts me off from my cultural Roots and the Mainstream. I still have illusions that there are Roots and Mainstreams.
Did I plan it this way?
At the end of the letter he wrote he didn’t understand his “blonde woman,” adding, “why have I become Scott Fitzgerald but without any loot or social connections?”
In another letter Cohen was darker, complaining that he was working slowly, “
twice as slowly as I should be, wasting time in severe depressions, bad dreams, maniacal poems. I am almost paralyzed by indecision.” London brought out his vivid dichotomies. After all his praise of Marianne, he admitted to some ambivalence about their relationship. They had seen each other so little that he was “
terrified of waking up to find myself broke and stranded on a Greek island with a woman I can’t contact and a child to whom I can’t even talk in English. I can’t help feeling there’s some disaster waiting for me if I act in that direction.” He wrote that he would probably have to go back to Montreal and “
fight for some tiny income … otherwise I’ll be forced into journalism and all sorts of other excuses for not creating a masterpiece.” Loneliness overpowered him:
I feel I’ve lost Montreal and not only am I lonely but alone. I am like an eye dangling by a few nerves from a man’s socket, and I long for detachment or to be part of the body whole, anything but blind useless pain.
I have not given up by any means so don’t let me depress you. There are insights to be gained from the tedious chaos. I could do without such an education but since I have no choice I might as well learn. Laughter is a fist in the face of the gods and I will make those heavenly faces bloody and blue.
A letter to Marianne confirms his romantic vacillation: “
There are a million things I want to talk about with you,” Cohen wrote, “things I’m frightened about … and oceans between us distort things that become very simple when we are together.” He reports that he has asked Mort Rosengarten to get him some land on a remote Canadian island, Bonaventure, where they can all live a natural life. He misses everything that he loves, beginning with her:
I long for you and blind love, brown bodies that speak to one another in a language we don’t want to understand, I long for readers
to devour my soul at a feast, I long for health in the sun, woods I know, tables of meat and fruit and bread, children shattering the monarch of the home, I long for cities of preserved elegance and the chaotic quarters of modern cities where the village persists, for loyal restaurants, for parks and battles. I have so much affection for the world and you shall be my interpreter.
I want to get back to Canada and rob a bank.
On the same day that he wrote to Marianne, he wrote to his mother and told her that he always knew that his book would be published, “
just as I always knew I wanted to be a writer even when this ambition was discouraged by so-called sensible people and every obstacle of provincialism and caution put in my way.” He has also learned that “
the things which are given you mean nothing, only what we achieve by struggle and suffering have any value … I have no more or less illusions about writing than I had eleven years ago [in 1951] when I began … I will continue to fight for the kind of life I want, continue to fight the weakness in myself.” He explained that “
the secret of my triumph is that I expect nothing, expect to change nothing, expect to leave nothing behind.” He said he planned to return to Canada after he completed his revisions in the summer, possibly buy a small house in the country, and return to Greece in the fall.
The dampness and cold of London made him miserable but Secker & Warburg had asked that he stay in London to do revisions. “
I want to tear at everything that nourishes me,” he wrote to Irving Layton on March 23. “Can I help it if she [Marianne] is a priestess whose nature it is to make everything difficult and prosaic?” He also told Layton that “I’ve been working on my novel with a scalpel. I won’t be able to save it, but it’s one of the most interesting corpses I’ve ever seen.”
Another letter to his sister noted his disappointment at not winning the Governor General’s Award for
The Spice-Box of Earth:
“
Too bad because
Spice-Box
was the last book anyone will understand. I am now running three and a half years ahead of enlightened poetic taste and the time-lag is increasing daily.” And Secker, he explained, took his manuscript because they wanted his next book and that his manuscript is a “
beautiful book that will be misunderstood as a self-indulgent childish
autobiography, disordered and overlong…. In actuality,” he tells her, “it’s an extremely subtly balanced description of a sensibility, the best of its kind since James Joyce’s
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
. I am perfectly prepared to be ignored or slaughtered by stupid men of letters.” He ends with an indictment: