Various Positions (5 page)

Cohen thought of himself as a singer then, not a songwriter, although in 1951 he wrote his first song. He and another counsellor worked on a tune all summer and when it was done, they went to a local restaurant to celebrate. Unexpectedly, the very song they sweated over was heard from the jukebox. They had incorporated a pop song of the day, “Why, Oh Why,” into their now dismal effort which they had to abandon. But Cohen soon made another attempt titled “Twelve O’Clock Chant,” which he sings in the 1965
NFB
film about him. The syncopation, lyrics,
subject matter, and emotion expressed in the folk song underlie Cohen’s later structures, melodies, and lyrics.

In 1950 Cohen’s mother married Harry Ostrow, a Montreal pharmacist. Shortly after they were married, Ostrow was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and there was some question as to whether or not he had hidden the knowledge of the disease from Masha before they were married. She had been a nurse with Nathan and that role was now being repeated. Masha had been trained as a nurse, but she didn’t want it to become a way of life. A palpable tension developed between Cohen’s mother and stepfather. Despite the presence of an older man in the household, Cohen still conducted the rituals for the festivals and high holidays. By 1957, Masha and Harry had separated, and Harry moved to Florida hoping that the climate would ease his illness.

After his father’s death, Cohen felt detached from his family. He spent a great deal of time in his room reading and writing, developing a sense of his own private life at an early age. It was a time for exploration, experiment, and imaginary expeditions. The family indulged his solitary efforts and no one ever asked him how he felt about matters. If his grades slipped during these periods of familial disinterest, there was still a determination to do better: “
There were no cries for help in those days. You just did it. You got the grades.”

He maintained a good if distant relationship with his sister Esther, though. Four-and-a-half years older than Cohen, she had little contact with him growing up. Her friends were older and her interests different. There was little sense of co-education at home; their lives at synagogue, Hebrew school, music lessons, swimming lessons, and B’nai B’rith activities didn’t intersect. However, Esther encouraged Cohen’s efforts at writing and he shared his attempts at poetry and song with her. They became closer as they grew older, after Esther moved to New York and married Victor Cohen.

In his late teens, Cohen began a series of significant relationships with women. Yafa (“Bunny”) Lerner was one of the first, a young woman from Montreal who was interested in dance. His first serious love interest was Freda Guttman, a seventeen-year-old art student whom Cohen met when he was sixteen. Freda attended McGill for one year and then transferred to the Rhode Island School of Design. For the next three or
four years, she and Cohen continued to see each other, the relationship fuelled by both sexual and artistic excitement. Cohen read his new work to her, sang for her, and took her to parties. In the summer of 1955 he arranged for them to be counsellors together at a B’nai B’rith camp near Ottawa in the Gatineau hills. He and his girlfriend were unusual figures at the Jewish camp, he a poet and she an artist; one remembered anecdote was his preference for quoting Yeats while rowing campers about. He describes Freda in “The Fly,” in his first book,
Let Us Compare Mythologies
, for which she provided the cover illustration and five interior sketches. When they broke up, Cohen wrote a short essay about Freda and the meaning of love, the first of many works dealing with women he has known.

In his essay, Cohen describes Freda as a slender and narrow-hipped woman with “
especially beautiful thighs and that is why, I suppose, the word occurs so frequently in my verse.” He was attracted to her mouth, her black hair, her long fingers, and to her movements: “
She moved with her own kind of logic, more graceful than any woman I have ever seen.” Sometimes, he writes, she was his closest comrade, but at other times her observations seemed trite. “
A smothering sense of intimacy” soon enveloped him. He rejected this intimacy on the grounds that he did not love her, that he, in fact, knew “almost nothing about love.” Such intimacy, he believed, “
has something to do with mutual destruction.” Cohen writes:

This unusual paragraph, most likely written in 1956, forms an
Ars Amatoria
which outlines Cohen’s attitude toward love, one that has remained consistent throughout his life. There is a studied schizophrenia, the seeking and rejecting of each love in turn.

“
I have never thought of women as a medicine for loneliness.” he writes,

Such views actually protect his easily broken heart. The title of a notebook from the mid-fifties, containing lyrical poems of desire and fear of loss, reads, “Leonard Cohen / Poems Written / While dying of love.”

Cohen’s fundamental position on love is that it is essential but redefines itself with each individual. One requires a variety of lovers to suit a variety of stages in one’s life. “
Love generally,” he warns,

Despite his resistance to love, or perhaps because of it, Cohen was a “charismatic” figure, Freda Guttman recalled. Although his origins were conservative, middle class and very Westmount, he drew people into his world of poetry and desire. His determination to be a poet and his early efforts at songwriting and singing were a source of fascination. He
encouraged this image by showing up at parties with his guitar and offering a song whenever asked. As a Westmount bohemian, Cohen was something of an enigma but he has retained the trappings of both throughout his life. The bourgeois and bohemian co-exist in harmonious counterpoint. Unlike one of his closest friends at the time, Robert Hershorn, who was troubled by obligations to carry on his family’s business, Cohen never seriously considered joining his uncles’ businesses, although he was occasionally pressured to do so.

Cohen did not so much rebel against his Westmount life as follow an alternative path. He felt that his family, for all its prominence, lacked an ideology or dogma:

Freda Guttman recalls that Masha was obsessed with Cohen’s well-being and frequently tried to make him feel guilty for being too independent. Proud of her cooking, she would often get up when Cohen came home at 2:00 a.m. with friends and cook for them. But Masha was prone to depression, the likely source of Cohen’s own depressive states, and could be imperious. She once ordered Cohen not to leave the house with a cold: “
I’ve nursed you back from the brink of the grave and
this
is how you treat me?” Guttman remembers her shouting. She and Cohen laughed at his mother’s outbursts because this was how they expected a “Jewish mother” to act. Cohen defended himself with his wit and the secure knowledge that Masha loved him.

His friend Nancy Bacal, whom he first met in high school, said Cohen was “
always feeling like his own person;” unlike others, he had a sense of direction, perceived by some as the need for control. But he also developed some unusual habits, one of them an obsession with his weight. His mother constantly pushed food on him and Cohen rebelled. “
He seemed like a woman with food,” Guttman said. Although he loved
sweets, she recalls that he once refused to enter a Greek pastry shop in Montreal, as if the mere sight of any pastry would make him fat.

In his last year of high school, life became more complicated for Cohen. He chose to go on to McGill, the expected step for the Jewish middle-class youth of Westmount. But he felt the tensions between a bourgeois life defined by Westmount expectations and the emerging demands of an artist. Nancy Bacal explained that he was the only one she knew who could “
contain and survive elements of pain in the dark. He was in touch with matters of the soul and heart.” He would eventually resolve these tensions, drawing from the best of each world. But in university, the two sides of his personality began to clash.

    L
EONARD COHEN
entered McGill University on September 21, 1951, his seventeenth birthday, and graduated on October 6, 1955, shortly after his twenty-first. Academically, his university career was undistinguished but he continued the extracurricular zeal of high school, becoming president of both the Debating Society and of his fraternity,
ZBT.
Initially, Cohen embodied the Westmount Jew destined for professional success, fulfilling a Westmount creed: “
If you did things right, you would have all the riches life had to offer.” But during his years at McGill, sporadically attending lectures, reading in the Gothic Redpath Library, writing poetry, Cohen distanced himself from
that creed.

McGill was and still is the premier English-speaking university in Quebec. Situated on Sherbrooke Street in the center of Montreal, it
commanded both an important social and physical position. It was the training ground for leading professionals, businessmen, doctors, economists, and professors, reflecting the interests of McGill’s founder, the merchant and fur trader James McGill. Writers, artists, and musicians were of secondary importance. Stephen Leacock, humorist and writer, justified his attachment to McGill as an economist, not as an author. In the early fifties, McGill still maintained a careful eye on the number of Jews it admitted.

Cohen’s average on the entrance exam was 74.1%. Ironically, his lowest mark was in English literature; math was his strongest subject. His actual undergraduate marks at McGill were less impressive: he graduated with an overall average of 56.4%. He studied arts his first year, commerce his second (with courses in accounting, commercial law, political science, and math), and then arts for years three and four, continuing with political science and adding zoology. English was his favorite subject. He attended lectures infrequently though and squeaked through McGill only with supplemental examinations. He explained that his completion of the program was “
paying off old debts to my family and to my society.”

Cohen introduced new ideas and radical policies to his fraternity. Drinking on the lawn and in the fraternity house was encouraged, leading to Cohen’s impeachment. But he brought life to the institution, leading house meetings with his songs and guitar playing, and often unexpectedly promoting surprising moments such as the time a friend and female guest appeared at lunch sharing one overcoat which had difficulty staying closed. To his fraternity brothers Cohen brought “
limitless space” and the gift of possibilities. He was a popular member.

Cohen was active in the Debating Union, first as secretary and later as president. In his first year at McGill, he won the Bovey Shield for Public Speaking, represented McGill in Burlington, Vermont, and at the end of the year received a Gold A award for Debating. In his second year he was corresponding secretary of the society, winning the Annual Raft Debate, and represented McGill at Osgoode Hall in Toronto. During his third year (1953–4), he was vice-president of the Union and was elected president in his fourth year. His presidential nomination speech began with Burke and moved on to a rejection of the “
ineffectual shower curtains of political modesty.”

Cohen participated in national and international debates, engaging diverse opponents that ranged from two Cambridge students to a team of convicts from the Norfolk Penitentiary outside Boston (with whom he debated the negative moral impact of tv on society). Cohen had been introduced to the convicts as a poet and he first clarified his position: