Authors: Ira B. Nadel
In addition to a great and energetic teacher, Cohen found in Layton Judaic prophecy and Hebrew thunder. Layton brought the full force of Jewish identity to bear on his work. He also brought politics to poetry and Cohen absorbed Layton’s stance in later works of his own, notably
Flowers for Hitler
and
Parasites of Heaven
. Cohen met Layton briefly in 1949 and again in 1954 when he invited Layton, who had just published
The Long Pea-Shooter
, to read at Cohen’s fraternity at McGill. An aggressive figure with two books to his credit, Layton was then juggling a career as a part-time lecturer in literature at Sir George Williams University and as a teaching assistant in political science at McGill.
Layton’s ego was relentlessly public. He challenged the entire country to rise to his forthright statements and sexuality. From Layton, Cohen learned to value the excesses of the Dionysian style, to accept the power of prophetic visions, and to extend the poetic to include the Judaic. Layton defiled the sanitary classrooms of poetry in the name of poetry: “
with a happy / screech he bounded from monument to monument,” wrote Cohen in his poem “For My Old Layton.” If Dudek
knighted him, Layton took him out on the town. The influence was immense, but over the years, reciprocal: “
I taught him how to dress; he taught me how to live forever,” Cohen has remarked.
Layton frequently brought Cohen along on reading or promotional tours. On one of their frequent car trips to Toronto, they became so engrossed in talking about poetry that they didn’t notice they were running out of gas. Fortunately, they were not far from a farmhouse, where they found help. Several years later they were again driving to Toronto and again ran out of gas. Uncannily, it was in front of the same farmhouse. They sheepishly told their story to the woman in the farmhouse who remembered them from years past. She summed up the entire episode with one word: “Poets!” Cohen and Layton read together at the old Greenwich Gallery on Bay Street, where Don Owen, the filmmaker, remembered that Cohen “
always seemed to leave the gallery with the most intesting woman there, the one I’d spent all evening trying to get up enough nerve to say hello to.” Cohen was in his pudgy phase at this time, Owen noted, but the extra weight did not deter him from his pursuit of women.
Layton commanded the attention of a public unaccustomed to Whitmanesque gestures and outlandish posturings. With flowing hair, Layton shouted and raved from the heights, addressing crucial subjects. “
Poised on a rope stretched tautly between sex and death,” the poet, Layton affirmed, can find salvation only in sexual love, a message that strongly appealed to the young Cohen. Layton was responsible for strong-arming Cohen into the wonderful, boisterous, in-your-face world of serious poetry, where dedication to the art was all, and all of you had to be put into the work. The quest for bold experiences was the poet’s finest teacher, Layton preached, and in Cohen he had a willing disciple.
No gathering Layton and Cohen attended was more important than the Canadian Writers’ Conference held from July 28–31, 1955, at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Organized by F.R. Scott, and supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, the first major gathering of Canadian writers included the established: A.J.M. Smith, Morley Callaghan, Dorothy Livesay, Desmond Pacey, Louis Dudek, Ralph Gustafson, James Reaney, John Sutherland, Earle Birney, Malcolm Ross, and Scott; and the new: Al Purdy, Jay Macpherson, Eli Mandel,
Phyllis Webb, and Miriam Waddington. According to Doug Jones, Layton arrived in staid Kingston “
in a car full of women. I guess it was probably Cohen and various friends, but it was like the sultan coming with his harem.”
Cohen took his guitar, read in the impromptu poetry sessions and listened to the arguments between the writers, who claimed that the mass media were doing little to promote their work, and the mass media, who claimed that the writers were getting what they deserved, especially the poets whose work was intentionally obscure. Layton argued that poets wrote for the public, not for other poets. The poet was part of the proletariat, not the elite. Layton constantly battled journalists and others at the conference in his conviction that the poet was essential for society and that society had a duty to support its writers through foundations or grants. It resulted in a set of resolutions to formalize the study of Canadian literature, recognizing the need to provide a more prominent place for Canadian writing in schools and libraries.
Attending the Kingston Conference in the summer of 1955 was a heady experience for Cohen. He met the major poets and heard new voices. His career was shaped in response to many of the issues that were discussed and the decisions that were made through the workshops, meetings, and resolutions. A new range of publications soon appeared:
Canadian Literature, Prism
, the McGill Poetry series and the New Canadian Library.
————
COHEN GRADUATED
from McGill in October 1955, one of only five arts students to receive B.A. degrees. He had established himself as a literary figure and campus voice, winning the Chester MacNaughton Prize for Creative Writing for his series “Thoughts of a Landsman,” which was made up of four poems, three of which would later appear in his first book. He also won the Peterson Memorial Prize in literature, publicly confirming his talent and renewing his determination to pursue a creative life. The caption under his 1955 McGill Yearbook picture reads
“
You have discovered of course only the ship of fools is making the voyage this year
…”
“
I yearned to live a semi-bohemian lifestyle,” Cohen said of his McGill years, “an unstructured life; but a
consecrated
one; some kind of calling.” In the fall of 1953, at the beginning of his third year at McGill, Cohen and Mort Rosengarten had taken several rooms on Stanley Street in a rooming house. They had hoped to pursue a modestly bohemian life and to break free of the confines of Westmount. It was a decision that upset Cohen’s mother and angered his uncles. His father had lived with his parents until the day of his marriage at age thirty-nine. Cohen’s move was seen as a break with tradition and an abandonment of his mother. But its rewards were too seductive. Cohen invited women to his new rooms, serenaded them, and read them poems. As the narrator of
Beauty at Close Quarters
reports, “
He knew what minor chords went with what hours of the morning, which poems were too vicious, which too sweet…. He wasn’t so much trying to accumulate women as he was ideal episodes.”
After Cohen graduated, he began law school for a term but his real interest was still in writing. At this time, Layton, Souster, and Dudek created the McGill Poetry Series to provide a new outlet for young poets. Works by Pierre Coupey, David Solway, Daryl Hine, and Cohen appeared. But when Dudek offered the first volume in the series to Cohen, he was, in Dudek’s words, “
slow and reluctant to present his manuscript for editing.” Dudek, in fact, didn’t see the completed manuscript of
Let Us Compare Mythologies
until the book was published. Part of the reason for Cohen’s reluctance was Dudek’s rejection of “
the sentimental late-romantic tradition in poetry” to which Cohen was partial. Upholding this tradition was itself a form of rebellion against the modernism of Dudek and others, vividly seen in the work of Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Charles Olson.
Let Us Compare Mythologies
contains poems written largely when Cohen was between the ages of fifteen and twenty and went through four drafts before he felt it could be printed. Cohen masterminded the entire publication, assuming responsiblity for the design, typesetting, production, and paper. His friend Freda Guttman prepared illustrations, and he paid the $300 cost to have the work produced in hardcover, rather than paperback, as Dudek had originally planned. Ruth Wisse, then feature editor of the
McGill Daily
, headed the so-called sales team
which operated by advance subscription only. She alone sold over two hundred advance copies. Cohen also distributed order forms for the book in campus cafes and bookstores. He sold out the approximately four hundred printed copies.
The book appeared in May with a statement about the series on the back jacket emphasizing its uniqueness and Dudek’s role. The inscription on the copy presented to Dudek by Cohen reads:
To Louis Dudek, teacher and friend, who more than anyone wanted me to bring out this book, and whose encouragement and help is deeply appreciated by every young person writing at McGill—
Leonard Cohen
May 1956
Despite increasing differences with Dudek, whose own poetry of ideas and championing of Pound contradicted Cohen’s pull toward romanticism, metaphysics, and sensuality, and despite Dudek’s later belief that becoming a singer undermined Cohen’s talents as a writer, Cohen always valued Dudek’s contribution to his work. He knew that Dudek understood him. “
Leonard always had an image of himself as a rabbi,” Dudek has said. Cohen unexpectedly appeared at Dudek’s retirement party in the mid-eighties and was delighted that it was Dudek who presented him to the McGill Chancellor for his honorary doctorate in June 1992. At the ceremony, Dudek summarized Cohen’s McGill years with a gentle jibe: “
I was fortunate to see him occasionally in my classes in his young days at McGill.” He closed with a fatherly question about Cohen’s status as a celebrity: “But Leonard, is all this fame really good for you?” After praising Cohen’s integrity and search for personal truth, Dudek concluded, “
He has won through, so far as anyone can win through, in this difficult struggle of life.”
The “personal truth” Dudek cited in 1992 is evident in the forty-four poems of
Let Us Compare Mythologies
(1956). The themes are remarkable for a twenty-two-year-old encountering the power of romantic love and shattered by the reality of loss. “Elegy,” a poem marking the death of his father, is the first poem in the text; “Beside the Shepherd,” a poem celebrating the resurrection of life, is the last. Patrimony, inheritance,
history, and desire emerge as the dominant themes, united by an absorption in myth and integrated with religious sensuality.
A prose statement dated December 27, 1956, written during his year at Columbia, contains Cohen’s explanation of the importance of myth in his work. He begins with a declaration:
I want to continue experimenting with the myth applying it to contemporary life, and isolating it in contemporary experience, thus making new myths and modifying old ones. I want to put mythic time into my poems, so they can be identified with every true fable ever sung, and still be concerned with our own time, and the poems hanging in our own skies.
Cohen cites marriage and adultery as major themes that he will likely explore and then goes on to name poems that illustrate how myth can control poetic image and development. The poems deal exclusively with betrayal or adultery, his third example being the most self-defining, since it narrates the betrayal of the speaker. It reads in part:
I know all about passion and honour
but unfortunately this had really nothing to do with either;
oh there was passion I’m only too sure
and even a little honour
but the important thing was to cuckold Leonard Cohen.
Enlarging his sense of myth is his belief that what he does is linked to the folk song. His ballads, Cohen once explained, “
strive for folk-song simplicity and the fable’s intensity.”
Cohen’s interest in myth coincided with a shift in literary studies, summarized by the work of the Canadian critic Northrop Frye. In 1957, the year after
Let Us Compare Mythologies
, Frye published his encyclopedic treatment of myth and literature,
Anatomy of Criticism
, initiating a new paradigm for the study of literature via archetypes. Frye reviewed Cohen’s first book in the
University of Toronto Quarterly
, providing restrained praise and acknowledgment of a minor talent. During this period, Canadian writers like James Reaney, Eli Mandel, and Jay
Macpherson were also turning to myth as a narrative device. Cohen’s book became part of the unconscious but unified development of mythopoetic studies that was evolving in Canada.
Let Us Compare Mythologies
contains several other themes that would inform Cohen’s later poetry: history, especially related to Jewish persecution, and the Holocaust; sexuality and attraction to women; lyrical sensuality; anger; cultural stereotypes; religion; and frustration with art or history as a means of solving personal crises. It is a young poet’s work designed to shock as well as excite (“
The moon dangling wet like a half-plucked eye.”) One sees his early use of poetry as a form of prayer and the role of the poet as a sacred voice. And it exhibits confidence, demonstrating what Layton said was essential for a young poet: arrogance and inexperience. When asked in 1994 about the quality of his work in those days, Cohen quipped, “
It’s been downhill ever since. Those early poems are pretty good.” Cohen had no strategy for becoming a public figure like Layton. “
Mostly what I was trying to do was get a date. That was the most urgent element in my life.”
Women were becoming a dominant interest at this time, as an essay from the mid-fifties confirms. The topic was breasts, or as he preferred, “tits,” a word he did not use carelessly: “
Breasts, in my mind at least, divide, they turn the mind one way and then another.” The terminology was significant: “bosom” belonged to the world of feminine hygiene. “
Women who have popularity problems talk about their bosoms,” he writes. Other terms seem too flippant, “so back to tits which are nothing more than what they are, human and real, the form, the swell, the rosy corrugated nipples all carried plainly in the sound of the word.” One particular girl possessed “magic tits” which enraptured him, although he tries to explain that he is not a breast man. The tits of this particular woman deserved a poem, Cohen felt, but who would write it?
Layton would at once attach them to one of his wives or perhaps appropriate the whole body to be mutilated on some fierce landscape. Dudek would spurn them, or if he dared to examine them at all, would compose a travelogue, cataloguing every pore and hair, and having done this thing he’d praise them. Hine does not believe in them. Reaney or Macpherson would turn them to silver, that dear
flesh to metal, and etch on them hieroglyphs to prove some current theory of their master who is a Professor of English Literature. Leonard Cohen would embarrass us all by caressing them publically under the guise of praying to a kind of Oriental-eyed suffering Jehova.