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The genius behind such classic songs as Suzanne, Bird on the Wire and Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen has been one of the most important and influential songwriters of our time, a man of spirituality, emotion, and intelligence whose work has explored the definitive issues of human life – sex, religion, power, meaning and love.

In this biography Sylvie Simmons draws on Cohen’s private archives and a wealth of interviews with many of his closest associates, colleagues, and other artists to share stories and details never before revealed. The result is a deeply insightful, well-rounded portrait of an artist, poet and writer whose reach, vision, and incredible talent has had a profound impact on multiple generations and who continues to create magic today.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sylvie Simmons is a renowned music journalist and award-winning writer. A Londoner, she moved to LA in the late seventies where she began writing about rock music for Sounds, Creem and Kerrang!, then Rolling Stone, the Guardian and MOJO. She is the author of fiction and non-fiction books, including the acclaimed Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes, Neil Young: Reflections in Broken Glass and the short story collection Too Weird for Ziggy. She currently lives in San Francisco, where she plays ukulele and still writes for MOJO.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

The right of Sylvie Simmons to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Sylvie Simmons

List of Illustrations

Dedication

Title Page

Epigraph

Prologue

1. Born in a suit

2. House of women

3. 20,000 verses

4. I had begun to shout

5. A man who speaks with a tongue of gold

6. Enough of fallen heroes

7. Please find me, I am almost 30

8. A long time shaving

9. How to court a lady

10. The dust of a long sleepless night

11. The Tao of cowboy

12. O make me a mask

13. The veins stand out like highways

14. A shield against the enemy

15. I love you, Leonard

16. A sacred kind of conversation

17. The Hallelujah of the orgasm

18. The places where I used to play

19. Jeremiah in Tin Pan Alley

20. From this broken hill

21. Love and theft

22. Taxes, children, lost pussy

23. The future of rock ’n’ roll

24. Here I stand, I’m your man

25. A manual for living with defeat

Epilogue

Afterword

Author’s note

References

Credits

Index

ALSO BY SYLVIE SIMMONS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Leonard’s father, Nathan Cohen (top left), and his uncle, Horace Cohen (seated, centre) [Leonard Cohen personal collection]

The Buckskin Boys, 1952 – from the top: Terry Davis, Mike Doddman, Leonard [Sue Sullivan personal collection]

Aviva and Irving Layton, Anne Sherman and Leonard in the Laurentians, Quebec [Leonard Cohen personal collection]

Leonard, Harry Parnass, Masha Cohen and Anne Sherman, New Jersey [Leonard Cohen personal collection]

At Mrs Pullman’s boarding house, Hampstead, 1960 [Leonard Cohen personal collection]

Captain Mandrax, with Susan Mussmano, Corlynn Hanney and Jeff Dexter [Jeff Dexter personal collection]

Dominique Issermann, photographed by Leonard [Leonard Cohen personal collection]

Perla Batalla [photograph by Julie Christensen, Perla Batalla personal collection]

Julie Christensen with Leonard [photograph by Perla Batalla, Julie Christensen personal collection]

Esther Cohen at the unveiling of a plaque at the Chelsea Hotel [photograph by Linda Straub]

PROLOGUE

He is a courtly man, elegant, with old-world manners. He bows when he meets you, stands when you leave, makes sure that you’re comfortable and makes no mention of the fact he’s not; the discreet stroking of the Greek worry beads he carries in his pocket gives the game away. By inclination he is a private man, rather shy, but if probing is required he’ll put his feet in the stirrups with dignity and humour. He chooses his words carefully, like a poet, or a politician, with a habit of precision, an ear for their sound, and a talent and a taste for deflection and mystery. He has always liked smoke and mirrors. And yet there is something conspiratorial in the way he talks, as there is when he sings, as if he were imparting an intimate secret.

He is a trim man – there’s no excess to him at all – and smaller than you might think. Shipshape. You imagine that he wouldn’t find it hard to wear a uniform. Right now he is wearing a suit. It is dark, pinstriped, double-breasted, and if it’s off the peg it doesn’t look it.

Chapter One

BORN IN A SUIT

When I’m with you

I want to be the kind of hero I wanted to be

when I was seven years old

a perfect man

who kills

‘The Reason I Write’, Selected Poems 1956–1968

The chauffeur turned off the main road by the synagogue which took up most of the block, and headed past St Matthias’ Church on the opposite corner, and up the hill. In the back of the car was a woman – twenty-seven years old, attractive, strong-featured, stylishly dressed – and her newborn baby son. The streets they passed were handsome and well appointed, the trees arranged just so. Big houses of brick and stone you might have thought would collapse under the sheer weight of their self-importance appeared to float effortlessly up the slopes. Around halfway up, the driver took a side road and stopped outside a house at the end of the street. 599 Belmont Avenue was large, solid and formal-looking, English in style, its dark brick softened by a white-framed veranda at the front, and at the back by Murray Park, fourteen acres of lawns, trees and flowerbeds, with a sweeping view of the St Lawrence River to one side and, on the other, downtown Montreal. The chauffeur stepped out of the car and opened the rear door, and Leonard was carried up the white front steps and into his family home.

Leonard Norman Cohen was born on 21 September 1934 in the Royal Victoria Hospital, a grey stone pile in Westmount, an affluent neighbourhood of Montreal, Canada. According to the records, it was at 6.45 on a Friday morning. According to history, it was halfway between the Great Depression and World War II. Counting backwards, Leonard was conceived between the end of Hanukkah and Christmas Day during one of the subarctic winters his home town managed to deliver with both consistency and brio. He was raised in a house of suits.

Nathan Cohen, Leonard’s father, was a prosperous Canadian Jew with a high-end clothing business. The Freedman Company was known for its formal wear, and Nathan liked to dress formally, even on informal occasions. In suits, as in houses, he favoured the formal English style, which he wore with spats, and tempered with a boutonnière and, when his bad health made it necessary, a silver cane. Masha Cohen, Leonard’s mother, was sixteen years younger than her husband, a Russian Jew, a rabbi’s daughter, and a recent immigrant to Canada. She and Nathan had married not long after her arrival in Montreal in 1927. Two years later she gave birth to the first of their two children, Leonard’s sister, Esther.

Early photographs of Nathan and Masha show him to be a square-faced, square-shouldered, stocky man. Masha, slimmer and a head taller, is in contrast all circles and slopes. The expression on Masha’s face is both girlish and regal, while Nathan’s is rigid and taciturn. Even were this not the required camera pose for the head of a household at that time, Nathan was certainly more reserved, and more anglicised, than his warm, emotional, Russian wife. As a baby, Leonard, plump, compact and also square-faced, was the image of his father, but as he grew he took on his mother Masha’s heart-shaped face, thick wavy hair, and deep, dark, sloping eyes. From his father he acquired his height, his tidiness, his decency and his love of suits. From his mother he inherited his charisma, his melancholy and his music. Masha always sang as she went about the house, in Russian and Yiddish more than in English, the sentimental old folk songs she had learned as a child. In a good contralto voice, to imaginary violins, Masha would sing herself from joy to melancholy and back again. ‘Chekhovian’ is how Leonard described his mother.¹ ‘She laughed and wept deeply,’ said Leonard, one emotion following the other in quick succession.² Masha Cohen was not a nostalgic woman, she did not talk much about the country she had left. But she carried her past in songs.

The residents of Westmount were well-to-do, upper-middle-class Protestant English Canadians and second- or third-generation Canadian Jews. In a city that was all about division and separation, the Jews and Protestants had been filed together on the simple grounds of being neither French nor Catholic. Before the ‘Quiet Revolution’ in Quebec in the 60s, and before French became the sole official language of the province, the only French in Westmount were the domestic help. The Cohens had a maid, Mary, although she was Irish Catholic. They also had a nanny, whom Leonard and his sister called ‘Nursie’, and a gardener named Kerry, a black man, who doubled as the family chauffeur. (Kerry’s brother held the same job with Nathan’s younger brother Horace.) It is no secret that Leonard’s background was privileged. Leonard has never denied being born on the right side of the tracks, has never renounced his upbringing, rejected his family, changed his name or pretended to be anything other than who he was. His family was well off, although there were certainly wealthier families in Westmount. Unlike the mansions of Upper Belmont, the Cohens’ house, though big, was semi-detached, and their car, though chauffeur-driven, was a Pontiac, not a Cadillac.

But what the Cohens had which very few others came close to matching was status. The family Leonard was born into was distinguished and important – one of the most prominent Jewish families in Montreal. Leonard’s ancestors had built synagogues and founded newspapers in Canada. They had funded and presided over a lengthy list of Jewish philanthropic societies and associations. Leonard’s great-grandfather, Lazarus Cohen, had been the first of the family to come to Canada. In Lithuania, which was part of Russia in the 1840s, when Lazarus was born, Lazarus had been a teacher in a rabbinical school in Wylkowyski, one of the most rigorous yeshivas in the country. In his twenties, he left his wife and their baby son behind to try for his fortune. After a brief stay in Scotland, he took a ship to Canada, stopping in Ontario in a small town called Maberly, where he worked his way up from lumber storeman to the owner of a coal company, L. Cohen and Son. The son was Lyon, Nathan’s father, whom Lazarus sent for, along with his mother, two years later. The family eventually made their way to Montreal, where Lazarus became president of a brass foundry and started a successful dredging company.

When Lazarus Cohen first arrived in Canada in 1860, the country’s Jewish population was tiny. In the middle of the nineteenth century there had been fewer than 500 Jews in Montreal. By the mid-1880s, when Lazarus assumed the presidency of the synagogue Congregation Shaar Hashomayim, there were more than 5,000. The Russian pogroms had led to a wave of immigration, and by the end of the century the number had doubled. Montreal had become the seat of Canadian Jewry, and Lazarus, with his long, white, biblical beard and uncovered head, was a familiar figure among its community. Along with building a synagogue, Lazarus established and headed a number of organisations to aid Jewish settlers and would-be immigrants, even travelling on behalf of the Jewish Colonisation Association of Montreal to Palestine (where Lazarus bought land as early as 1884). Lazarus’ younger brother Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Cohen, who joined him in Canada soon after, would become chief rabbi of Montreal.

In 1914, when Lyon Cohen took over the presidency of Shaar Hashomayim from his father, the synagogue could claim the largest congregation in a city whose Jewish population now numbered around 40,000. In 1922, having grown too big for its old premises, the synagogue relocated to a new building in Westmount, almost a block in length, just minutes down the hill from the house on Belmont Avenue. Twelve years later Nathan and Masha added their only son to the synagogue’s ‘Register of Births of the Corporation of English, German and Polish Jews of Montreal’, giving Leonard his Jewish name Eliezer, meaning ‘God is help’.

Lyon Cohen, like his father, had been a very successful businessman – clothing and insurance. He also followed Lazarus into community service, being appointed secretary of the Anglo-Jewish Association while still in his teens. He would go on to establish a Jewish community centre and a sanatorium, and preside over relief efforts for victims of the pogroms. Lyon held top positions in the Baron de Hirsch Institute, the Jewish Colonisation Association and Canada’s first Zionist organisation. He went to the Vatican on behalf of his community to talk to the Pope. He co-founded the first Anglo-Jewish newspaper in Canada, the Jewish Times, to which he contributed the occasional article. Lyon had written a play when he was sixteen years old titled Esther, which he produced and in which he acted. Leonard never knew his grandfather – he was two years old when Lyon died – but there was a strong connection, which intensified as Leonard grew older. Lyon’s principles, his work ethic and his belief in ‘the aristocracy of the intellect’, as Lyon always referred to it, all sat well with Leonard’s own persuasion.³

Lyon was also a staunch Canadian patriot, and when World War I broke out he launched a recruitment drive to encourage Montreal’s Jews to enlist in the Canadian Army. The first to sign up were his sons Nathan and Horace (the third son, Lawrence, was too young). Lieutenant Nathan Cohen, number 3080887, became one of the first Jewish commissioned officers in the Canadian Army. Leonard loved the photographs of his father in uniform. But, after his return from the war, Nathan suffered recurring periods of ill health, which had left him increasingly invalid. This might be why Nathan, although the oldest son of the oldest son, did not continue the family tradition of holding the presidency of the synagogue, nor of much else. Although on paper he was president of the Freedman Company, the business was largely run by his brother Horace. Neither was Nathan an intellectual or a religious scholar like his forebears. The dark wooden bookshelves in the house on Belmont Avenue held an impressive leather-bound set of the Great Poets – Chaucer, Wordsworth, Byron; Nathan’s bar mitzvah gift – but their spines remained uncracked until Leonard took them down to read. Nathan, Leonard said, preferred the Reader’s Digest. But ‘his heart was cultured; he was a gentleman’.⁴ As to religion, Nathan was ‘a Conservative Jew, not fanatical, without ideology and dogma, whose life was purely made up of domestic habit and affiliations with the community’. Religion was not something that was discussed in Nathan’s house, or even thought about. ‘It was mentioned no more than a fish mentions the presence of water.’⁵ It was simply there, his tradition, his people.

Masha’s father Rabbi Solomon Klonitzki-Kline was a noted religious scholar. He had been the principal of a school for Talmudic study in Kovno in Lithuania, some fifty miles from the town where Lazarus had been born (although by the time of Rabbi Kline’s birth, Lithuania had been annexed to Russia). He was also an author, whose two books, Lexicon of Hebrew Homonyms and Thesaurus of Talmudic Interpretations, would earn him the sobriquet ‘Sar HaDikdook’, the Prince of Grammarians. When the persecution of Jews made life in Lithuania untenable, he moved to the US, where one of his daughters lived and had married an American. Masha had gone to Canada, where she took a job as a nurse. When Masha’s work permit expired, he turned to his American son-in-law for help, which led to his introduction to Lyon Cohen’s resettlement committee. It was through the subsequent friendship of the rabbi and Lyon that Masha and Nathan met and married.

Leonard, as a young boy, heard about Grandfather Kline more than he saw him, since the rabbi spent much of his time in the US. Masha would tell Leonard stories, about how people came hundreds of miles to hear his grandfather speak. He also had a reputation as a great horseman, she told him, and Leonard was particularly pleased with this information. He liked it that his was a family of important people, but he was a young boy and physical prowess trumped intellect. Leonard was planning to attend military academy once he was old enough. Nathan told him he could. Leonard wanted to fight wars and win medals – like his father had done, before he became this invalid who sometimes found it hard even to walk up stairs, who would stay home from work, nursed by Leonard’s mother. Through Leonard’s early childhood, Nathan had often been ill. But the boy had proof that his father had been a warrior once. Nathan still had his gun from World War I, which he kept in his bedside cabinet. One day, when no one was around, Leonard slipped into his parents’ bedroom. He opened the cabinet and took out the gun. It was a big gun, a .38, its barrel engraved with his father’s name, rank and regiment. Cradling it in his small hand, Leonard shivered, awed by its heft and the feel of its cold metal on his skin.

599 Belmont Avenue was a busy house, a house of routine, well ordered, and the centre of the young Leonard’s universe. Anything the boy might need or want to do orbited closely around it. His uncles and cousins lived nearby. The synagogue, where Leonard went with the family on Saturday morning, and on Sunday for Sunday school, and to Hebrew school two afternoons a week, was a short walk down the hill. So were his regular schools, Roslyn Elementary School and, later, Westmount High. Murray Hill Park, where Leonard played in the summer and made snow angels in the winter, was immediately below his bedroom window.

The Westmount Jewish community was a close-knit one. It was also a minority community in an English Protestant neighbourhood. Which was itself a minority, if a powerful one, in a city and a province largely populated by the Catholic French. Who were themselves a minority in Canada. Everybody felt like some kind of outsider; everyone felt like they belonged to something important. It was ‘a romantic, conspiratorial mental environment’, said Leonard, a place of ‘blood and soil and destiny. That is the landscape I grew up in, and it’s very natural to me.’⁶

Leonard’s community, half a city away from the working-class immigrant Jewish neighbourhood around St Urbain (which formed the backdrop to Mordecai Richler’s novels), might have appeared to be hermetically sealed, but of course it wasn’t. The cross on the top of Mount Royal, Mary, the family maid, always crossing herself, the Easter and Christmas celebrations at school were part of the young Leonard’s landscape just as the Sabbath candles his mother lit on Friday evenings were, and the imposing synagogue down the hill, from whose walls Leonard’s great-grandfather and grandfather stared down at him from large, framed portraits, reminding him of the distinction of his blood.

As Leonard recalled it, it was ‘an intense family life’.⁷ The Cohens would get together regularly – at the synagogue, in the workplace, and also once a week at Leonard’s paternal grandmother’s home. ‘Every Saturday afternoon, at around four o’clock, Martha, her devoted maid, would wheel in a tea trolley with tea and little sandwiches and cakes and biscuits,’ says David Cohen, two years older than Leonard and a cousin with whom Leonard was particularly close. ‘You were never invited, and you never asked if you could go, but you knew that she was “receiving”. It sounds very archaic, but it was quite something.’ Leonard’s grandmother had a flat in one of the grand houses on Sherbrooke Street at Attwater, which was where all the parades that were held in Montreal would end up. ‘St Jean-Baptiste, that was a big one, before it became a very tough political situation in Montreal, and we’d watch from inside from the big, beautiful window in her living room.’ Their grandmother was very much a Victorian lady, ‘but, though it sounds archaic and old-fashioned, she was a pretty hip lady too’. She made quite an impression on Leonard, who would later describe her tea parties in his first novel, The Favourite Game.

In that same book, Leonard described the older men in his family as serious and formal, but not all of them were. Among the more colourful members of the family was Cousin Lazzy, David’s older brother Lazarus. Leonard thought of Lazzy as ‘a man about town, familiar with the chorus girls and the nightclubs and the entertainers’.⁸ There was also a cousin of an older generation, Edgar, Nathan’s cousin, a businessman with a literary bent. Many years later Edgar H. Cohen would go on to write Mademoiselle Libertine: A Portrait of Ninon de Lanclos, a biography published in 1970 of a seventeenth-century courtesan, writer and muse whose lovers included Voltaire and Molière, and who, after a period in a convent, emerged to establish a school where young French noblemen could learn erotic technique. Leonard and Edgar, says David Cohen, were ‘very close’.

Leonard’s was a comfortable, secure life during an uncomfortable, insecure time. Days before Leonard’s fifth birthday, Germany invaded Poland and World War II began. Closer to home, in 1942 there was an anti-Semitic rally on St Lawrence Boulevard – The Main, as locals called it – which was the traditional dividing line between English and French Montreal. It was led by Montreal’s French Nationalist movement, which included supporters of the Vichy regime in France. One particularly risible claim of the organisation was that the Jews had taken over the clothing business in order to force modest young French Canadian girls to wear ‘improper gowns in New York styles’.⁹ During the rally, windows of several Jewish-owned shops and delis on The Main were broken and racist slurs painted on walls. But for a seven-year-old living in Westmount, sitting in his room reading his Superman comics, it was another world. ‘Europe, the war, the social war,’ Leonard said, ‘none of it seemed to touch us.’¹⁰

He breezed through the early years of childhood, doing all that was required – clean hands, good manners, getting dressed for dinner, good school reports, making the hockey team, keeping his shoes polished and lined up tidily under his bed at night – without showing any worrying signs of sainthood or genius. Nor of melancholy. The home movies shot by Nathan, a keen amateur cameraman, show a happy little boy, beaming as he pedals his tricycle along the street, or walks hand in hand with his sister, or plays with his dog, a black Scottish terrier named Tinkie. His mother had originally given it the more dignified name of Tovarich, the Russian word for ‘ally’, but it was vetoed by his father. Nathan was already aware that in this small, anglicised, Canadian Jewish community, Masha’s Russianness, her accent, her imperfect English and big personality made her stand out. ‘It wasn’t thought to be a good idea to be passionate about anything,’ said Leonard, or to draw attention. ‘We were taught’, says cousin David, ‘to mind our ps and qs.’

Then in January 1944, at the age of fifty-two, Leonard’s father died. Leonard was nine years old. Around fourteen years later, in two unpublished stories titled ‘Ceremonies’ and ‘My Sister’s Birthday’, Leonard described what happened.¹¹ ‘Nursie told us the news.’ Seated at the kitchen table, her hands folded in her lap, Leonard’s nanny informed Leonard and Esther that they would not be going to school that morning because their father had died in the night. They should be quiet, she said, because their mother was still sleeping. The funeral would take place the following day. ‘Then the day dawned on me,’ Leonard wrote. ‘“But it can’t be tomorrow, Nursie, it’s my sister’s birthday.”’

At nine o’clock the next morning, six men arrived and carried the coffin into the living room. They set it down alongside the leather chesterfield sofa. Masha had the maid soap all the mirrors in the house. By noon people started arriving, shaking the snow off their boots and topcoats – family, friends, people who worked at the factory. The coffin was open, and Leonard peered inside. Nathan was wrapped in a silver prayer shawl, his face white, his moustache black. His father, Leonard thought, looked annoyed. Uncle Horace, who ran the Freedman Company with Nathan and who had served alongside him in the Great War, whispered to Leonard, ‘We’ve got to be like soldiers.’ Later that night, when Esther asked Leonard if he had dared to look at their dead father, each confessed that they had, and agreed that it appeared that someone had dyed his moustache. Both of these stories ended with the same line: ‘Don’t cry, I told her. I think it was my best moment. Please, it’s your birthday.’

A third version of the event appeared in The Favourite Game. It was a more poised account, partly due to Leonard’s writing having matured considerably in the time between these abandoned stories and his first novel, and partly from the distance accorded by having ascribed it in the latter to a fictional character (although Leonard has confirmed that it happened as he wrote it in the book).¹² This time the episode concludes with the young boy taking one of his father’s bow ties from his bedroom, slicing it open, and hiding a small piece of paper inside it on which he had written something. The next day, in his own private ceremony, the boy dug a hole and buried it in the garden under the snow. Leonard has since described this as the first thing he ever wrote. He has also said he has no recollection of what it was and that he had been ‘digging in the garden for years, looking for it. Maybe that’s all I’m doing, looking for the note.’¹³

The act is so weighty with symbolism – having for the first time in his life made a rite of his writing – that it is tempting to take these words from a 1980 interview at face value, even if it were more likely just another of the many good lines that Leonard always gave his interviewers. Children are often drawn to the mystical and to secret ceremonies. And if Leonard has also said that as a young child he had ‘no particular interest in religion’, except for ‘a couple of times when we went to hear a choir’, he was also well aware that he was a kohen, one of a priestly caste, a patrilineal descendant of Moses’ brother Aaron, and born to officiate.¹⁴ ‘When they told me I was a Kohen, I believed it. I didn’t think it was some auxiliary information. I wanted to live this world. I wanted to be the one who lifted up the Torah … I was this little kid, and whatever they told me in these matters resonated.’¹⁵

Still, as a child he showed little interest in the synagogue his ancestors founded. Hebrew school, he said, ‘bored’ him, and Wilfred Shuchat, who was appointed rabbi of Shaar Hashomayim in 1948, appears to confirm this. Leonard ‘was okay’ as a student, says the old rabbi, ‘but scholarship wasn’t his real interest. It was his personality, the way he interpreted things. He was very creative.’

Leonard did not cry at the death of his father; he wept more when his dog Tinkie died a few years later. ‘I didn’t feel a profound sense of loss,’ he said in a 1991 interview, ‘maybe because he was very ill throughout my entire childhood. It seemed natural that he died. He was weak and he died. Maybe my heart is cold.’¹⁶

It is true that since the previous summer Nathan had been in and out of the Royal Victoria Hospital. If it is also true that the loss of his father had no great effect on Leonard, he was not so young at nine years old that it would not have registered on him. Somewhere inside, something would have changed – an awareness for the first time of impermanence perhaps, or a sad wisdom, a crack where the insecurity or the solitude came in. What Leonard has said, and written, that he was most aware of during this important episode of his childhood was the change of status it bestowed on him. While his father lay in the living room in the coffin, his uncle Horace had taken him aside and told him that he, Leonard, was the man of the house now, and that the women – his mother and his fourteen-year-old sister Esther – were his responsibility. ‘This made me proud,’ Leonard wrote in ‘Ceremonies’. ‘I felt like the consecrated young prince of some folk-beloved dynasty. I was the oldest son of the oldest son.’¹⁷

Chapter Two

HOUSE OF WOMEN

In his early teens Leonard developed a keen interest in hypnosis. He acquired a slim, pocket-sized, anonymously written book with the lengthy title 25 Lessons In Hypnotism How To Become An Expert Operator, and the extravagant claim of being ‘The most perfect, complete, easily learned and comprehensive course in the world, embracing the Science of Magnetic Healing, Telepathy, Mind Reading, Clairvoyant Hypnosis, Mesmerism, Animal Magnetism and Kindred Sciences’. On the front cover, beneath a crude sketch of a Victorian lady held spellbound by a wild-haired, moustachioed gentleman, Leonard wrote his name in ink in his best handwriting, and set about his studies.

It turned out that Leonard had a natural talent for mesmerism. Finding instant success with domestic animals, he moved on to the domestic staff, recruiting as his first human subject the family maid. At his direction, the young woman sat on the chesterfield sofa. Leonard drew a chair alongside and, as the book instructed, told her in a slow gentle voice to relax her muscles and look into his eyes. Picking up a pencil, he moved it slowly in front of her face, back and forth, back and forth, and succeeded in putting her in a trance. Disregarding (or depending on one’s interpretation, following) the author’s directive that his teachings should be used only for educational purposes, Leonard instructed the maid to undress.

What a moment it must have been for the adolescent Leonard. This successful fusion of arcane wisdom and sexual longing. To sit beside a naked woman, in his own home, convinced that he made this happen, simply by talent, study, mastery of an art and imposition of his will. When he found it difficult to awaken her, Leonard started to panic. He was terrified his mother might come home and catch them – though one imagines this would have simply added a sense of impending doom, despair and loss to the heady mix that would make it even more exquisitely Leonard Cohenesque.

Chapter 2 of the hypnotism manual might have been written as career advice to the singer and performer Leonard would become. It cautioned against any appearance of levity and instructed, ‘Your features should be set, firm and stern. Be quiet in all your actions. Let your voice grow lower, lower, till just above a whisper. Pause a moment or two. You will fail if you try to hurry.’¹

When Leonard recreated the episode in his twenties in The Favourite Game, he wrote, ‘He had never seen a woman so naked … He was astonished, happy, and frightened before all the spiritual authorities of the universe. Then he sat back to stare. This is what he had waited for so long to see. He wasn’t disappointed and never has been.’² Although it is ascribed to his fictionalised alter ego, it is hard to imagine that these sentiments were not Leonard’s own. Decades later he would still say, ‘I don’t think a man ever gets over that first sight of the naked woman. I think that’s Eve standing over him, that’s the morning and the dew on the skin. And I think that’s the major content of every man’s imagination. All the sad adventures in pornography and love and song are just steps on the path towards that holy vision.’³ The maid, incidentally, was a ukulele player, an instrument his fictional alter ego took for a lute and the girl, by extension, for an angel. And everybody knows that naked angels possess a portal to the divine.

‘Leonard always complained there were no girls. That he couldn’t get girls,’ says Mort Rosengarten. ‘And it was always a serious complaint.’ Rosengarten is a sculptor, and Leonard’s oldest friend. He is the model for Krantz, the best friend of the protagonist of The Favourite Game. ‘You have to remember’, Rosengarten says, his soft voice barely audible over the whirr of the ventilator that emphysema obliged him to use, ‘that at that time we were raised in a totally segregated way. At school the boys were in one part of the school and the girls were in another and there was no interaction whatsoever; and because we didn’t fall in with the conventional Westmount society of our peers in terms of our behaviour, we didn’t have access to those women either, because they were on a certain path. But I always thought that Leonard was lucky, that he knew and understood something about women, because he lived in a house of women, his sister Esther and his mother. I knew nothing about women; I just had a brother, and my mother wasn’t giving any of her secrets away about what women were about. So we always complained.’

Rosengarten’s home is a small, wonky, two-storey terraced house with a bathtub in the kitchen, near to the Parc du Portugal, off The Main. When he moved here forty years ago, it was a blue-collar, immigrant neighbourhood. Despite the signs of gentrification, the fancy boutiques and cafés, the old Jewish delis with Formica tabletops that Mort and Leonard used to frequent are still there. It was a world away from their privileged Westmount origins. Mort grew up on Upper Belmont, 500 yards and another economic stratum above the Cohen family’s Lower Belmont home. Though the money was long gone now, the Rosengartens had been extremely wealthy; they had two Cadillacs and a country estate in the Eastern Townships, some sixty miles outside Montreal. Leonard and Mort met and became friends on neutral territory, when Mort was ten and Leonard nine years old. It was at summer camp in June 1944, five months after the death of Leonard’s father.

The Cohens had long been accustomed to spending the season together at the seaside in Maine, in the US. But in the summers of 1940 and 1941, when Canada was at war with Germany but America had not yet joined the battle, the US imposition of currency restrictions made it more sensible for Canadians to take their holidays at home. A popular spot was the Laurentians, north of Montreal. The writer Mordecai Richler described it as ‘a veritable Jewish paradise, a minor-league Catskills’, with hotels and inns where old men in yarmulkes gossiped in Yiddish across the road from the ‘Gentiles Only’ bowling green.⁴ For those at Leonard’s end of the age spectrum there was a proliferation of summer camps along the lakes around Sainte-Agathe. Camp Hiawatha offered its young charges the usual menu of fresh air, cabin dorms, communal showers, arts and crafts, playing fields and biting insects, but ‘it was terrible’, says Rosengarten, with feeling. ‘Their biggest concern was to reassure the parents that you would never get into any kind of adventure whatsoever. I was stuck there for a few years, though Leonard only went for one summer; his mother found a more sensible camp where they taught you to canoe and swim’ – swimming being something Leonard did enthusiastically and well. An itemised bill from Camp Hiawatha in 1944 appears to confirm Rosengarten’s dim view of the activities on offer: Leonard’s allowance was spent on the tuck shop, stationery, stamps, a haircut and a train ticket home.⁵

Leonard and Mort had more in common than their prosperous Westmount Jewish backgrounds. Neither had much of a father figure in his life – Leonard’s was dead and Mort’s often absent – and each had a mother who, certainly by 1940s Westmount Jewish society standards, was unconventional. Mort’s mother came from a working-class background and considered herself ‘modern’. Leonard’s was a Russian immigrant and had been considerably younger than her late husband. If Masha’s accent and dramatic nature had not ensured a certain separateness from the other mothers in the young boys’ small, insular community, being an attractive, strikingly dressed young widow most likely would. But Leonard’s and Mort’s friendship would really deepen four years later, when they both attended the same junior high school.

Westmount High, a large grey stone building, with lush lawns and a crest with a Latin motto (Dux Vitae Ratio; Reason is life’s guide), looked like it had snuck out of Cambridge and on to a plane to Canada in the dead of night, having grown tired of spending centuries shaping the minds of well-bred British boys. In fact it was relatively young, a Protestant school founded in a far more modest building in 1873, although still among the oldest English-speaking schools in Quebec. At the time of Leonard’s attendance, Jewish pupils made up between a quarter and a third of the school population. A general mood of religious tolerance, or indifference, reigned, and the two groups mixed and socialised, went to each other’s parties. ‘We took our Jewish holidays when they came up and we celebrated the Christian holidays,’ says Rona Feldman, one of Leonard’s classmates. ‘A lot of us were in the choir and the Christmas plays.’ Leonard’s Catholic nanny, who walked him to school every morning – no matter, as Mort Rosengarten pointed out, that ‘it was a block away; Leonard’s family was a very formal kind of scene’ – had taken him to church with her in the past. ‘I love Jesus,’ Leonard said. ‘Always did, even as a kid,’ adding, ‘I kept it to myself; I didn’t stand up in shul and say “I love Jesus.”’⁶

At the age of thirteen, Leonard celebrated his bar mitzvah, his Jewish coming of age. Watched by his uncles and cousins, a battalion of Cohens, he climbed on to a footstool – it was the only way he could see – and read from the Torah for the first time in the synagogue which his ancestors had founded and presided over. ‘There were lots of members of his family,’ recalls Rabbi Shuchat, with whom Leonard had taken his bar mitzvah class, ‘but it was very difficult for Leonard, because his father was not there’ to speak the customary prayer of release. But since the war began, everyone seemed to have someone, or something, missing. ‘There was the rationing and coupons for certain things like meat,’ Rona Feldman remembers, ‘and they sold war savings stamps in the school and some of the classes competed with each other for who bought the most war savings stamps each week. There was a girl going to school with us who was part of a programme of children sent to different places to keep them safe during the war, and we all knew families who had members overseas in the army or the air force.’ And when the war was over, there were the nightmarish photos of victims of the concentration camps. The war, said Mort Rosengarten, was ‘a very big thing for us’, meaning Leonard and himself. ‘It was absolutely a very important factor in our sensibility.’

The summer of 1948, the bridge between leaving Roslyn Elementary and starting at Westmount High, was once again spent at summer camp. Among the mementos from Camp Wabi-Kon in Leonard’s archives are a swimming and water safety certificate, and a document written in a neat, child’s hand and signed by Leonard and six other boys. A schoolboy pact, it reads: ‘We should not fight and we must try to get along better. We should appreciate things better. We should be better sports and we should have more spirit. We shouldn’t boss each other around. We must not use foul language.’⁷ They had even devised a list of penalties, ranging from missing supper to going to bed half an hour early.

The boyish earnestness and idealism had an almost Enid Blyton-like innocence to it. Back home in his bedroom on Belmont Avenue, though, Leonard was thinking about girls – cutting pictures of models from his mother’s magazines, and gazing out of the window as the wind whipped up the skirts of the women as they walked through Murray Hill Park or plastered them deliciously to their thighs. In the back pages of his comic books he would study the Charles Atlas ads that promised puny little boys like himself the kind of muscles it takes to woo a girl. Leonard was small for his age; another new use the adolescent had found for Kleenex was to wad it up and put it in his shoes to make lifts. It bothered Leonard that he was shorter than his friends – some of the girls in his high school class were a head taller – but he started to learn that girls could be won around ‘by stories and talk’. In The Favourite Game his alter ego ‘began to think of himself as the Tiny Conspirator, the Cunning Dwarf’.⁸ In Rona Feldman’s recollection, Leonard in fact was ‘extremely popular’ with the girls in their class, although, due to his height, ‘most girls thought he was adorable more than a hunk. I just remember him being very sweet. He had that same kind of grin that he has now, a little bit of a half grin, kind of shy, and when he smiled it was so genuine, it was so satisfying to see him smile. I think he was very well liked.’

ABOUT THE BOOK

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

SYLVIE SIMMONS

I’m Your Man

The Life of Leonard Cohen

CONTENTS