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| ‘Leonard of Montreal’ is from When the Earth Was Flat, a collection of writings by Raymond Fraser, available in better bookstores and on Amazon. |
It took some doing, but I was able to pry Leonard Cohen’s address out of Kenny Hertz. It was March of 1966 and he’d told me Cohen was back from Greece and living on Aylmer Street in downtown Montreal.
“Aylmer? That’s my street!” I said.
“I know. It’s why I mentioned it,” he said.
“Where on Aylmer?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Just curious.”
A pause. “I don’t think I’m supposed to tell.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t want people barging in on him.”
“I’m not going to barge in on him.”
“Then why do you want to know where he lives?”
“Because you brought it up. You said he lives on my street and I’m curious where. If I said Henry Miller is living on your street wouldn’t you ask me where? Wouldn’t you want to know?”
“Well, probably.”
“I’m not going to kidnap him,” I said. “Irving Layton’s address isn’t a secret. My address isn’t a secret. Yours isn’t a secret. What makes Cohen so different? If it makes you feel better, I won’t tell anyone you told me.”
I suppose giving the address out lessened some of the special status that went with having it, like widening the inner circle. But he couldn’t stand up to my logic and persistence. Being a young poet myself and one of the editors of Montreal’s newest “little” magazine, Intercourse, I doubtless merited a foot in the door. It wasn’t as if I were planning to sell him Fuller brushes.
Kenny himself had been an editor of another little magazine, Cataract, as well as of the little two-issue mag, Tit 1 and Tit 2. Under the name K.V. Hertz he’d made something of a splash as a 16-year-old poet prodigy, but by the age of 17 his poetic flame had burnt out. He was still only nineteen or twenty years old at this time.
At any rate, next afternoon I bought a forty-ounce bottle of Chateau Royale sherry for $1.35 and drank a third of it and went calling on Mr. Cohen. It probably was a shade presumptuous, since I only knew him from having read a few of his poems and from the TV documentary film, Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen.
The day after my visit I recorded my impressions in my journal, as follows:
March 20, 1966. His apartment is a block and a half from mine, in an old greystone building at the upper end of Aylmer, near the McGill University football stadium. There are two apartments in the building and his is the one on the second floor. I rang the bell and he came down and opened the door and immediately ran up the stairs in his bare feet, gesturing for me to follow, like I was someone he already knew.
We were in the main room of the apartment, a combination living room, dining room and study. He obviously used the dining room table for his desk. There was a typewriter on it, and a portable record player, a full-sized tape recorder, a bundle of what appeared to be galley proofs, a telephone and a radio.
The radio was blasting some popular top-twenty song or other. He shut it off, and assured me I wasn’t interrupting him, that he’d been working since early morning and needed a break. I asked him if he wrote with the radio on (it was almost full-volume), and he said he always did, it inspired him.
It wouldn’t inspire me, I said. It would drive me crazy.
He’s smaller than he looked in the film, his shoulders thin and his chest hollow, but his face is just the same, the ultimate poet’s face.
As my reason for being there I showed him a copy of the first and so far only issue of Intercourse, and offered him a drink of wine. He refused the wine, drinking orange juice instead, but gave me a champagne glass for my own use.
As I filled the glass he asked me if I drank a bottle like that every day. I was tempted to say yes, not wanting to disappoint him, but admitted I didn’t, not every day.1 He said he wouldn’t blame me if I did, because only a fool wouldn’t go through life high if he could manage it. He wished he was a better drinker himself but all booze did for him was make him sleepy and stupid.
He leafed through my little literary magazine and complimented me on it, describing it as unique. Or to quote him exactly: “I don’t believe I’ve seen one quite like it before.”2
When I told him it sold for a quarter3 he gave me a dollar, saying I could keep the extra seventy-five cents and send him the next three issues when they appeared.
Later on, after we’d talked a bit, he gave me another dollar as a donation to help the magazine out.
I was there the entire afternoon so we talked quite a lot. I’ll jot down a few things as they come to mind. I remember him mentioning he’d never submitted poems to a magazine in his life, that editors always came to him first, which meant he’d never had a poem rejected. I told him that must be nice and I wished I could say the same for myself, having been rejected hundreds of times already in my young career. And then I had a bright idea.
“Since you mention it,” I said, “about editors asking for poems and so on, what about giving us one for Intercourse? I mean if there’s something you can spare. Maybe some old thing you have kicking around that you don’t know what to do with and it’s taking up space and getting in the way and – It doesn’t have to be that great or anything.”
He said he’d see what he had. He went to his typewriter, which had a big roll of paper inserted in it, like a roll of toilet paper, only wider and of better quality. It was evidently how he was doing his writing these days, after the manner of Jack Kerouac. He scrolled back through the roll, pausing now and then to read, and then stopped and took a pair of scissors and cut a small square out of the middle of the paper and passed it to me. On it was an untitled 12-line poem, which began like this: Snow is falling.
There’s a nude in my room.
She surveys the wine-colored carpet... I read through it quickly and almost said, for a joke: “I’m sorry, I have to reject this.” But good manners got the better of me.
In fact it wasn’t one of his finer compositions, but I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. As I thanked him and tucked it in my pocket I was already seeing his name on the cover of issue number two, and thinking how it would help increase the number of our subscribers, which at present stood at none.4 As I said, I spent most of the afternoon with him, and probably did more talking than he did, being the one drinking the wine; but still I plied him with a good many questions. Some of his comments I found quite strange. For example, he said he considered books an obsolete form of entertainment and preferred watching television.
“Don’t you find the commercials annoying?” I said.
“No. I especially like the commercials,” he said. He called them a modern-day art form, like billboard advertisements – another popular art form. He said he enjoyed everything about modern North American life: television, movies, songs, dances, cars, planes, skyscrapers, neon lights. It was pop culture and he embraced it. “It’s where the action is,” he said. “It’s what’s happening.”
Noting that Intercourse was subtitled “Contemporary Canadian Literature”, he asked me what I thought of contemporary literature, whether Canadian or otherwise.
I said I didn’t know quite how to answer such a sweeping question, and asked him for his opinion. He said it wasn’t a very high opinion. He didn’t care much for what was known as “literature”. All the traditional forms of imaginative writing were obsolete, he said. Films had taken their place, just as photography had replaced painting. Books were of little or no value and he rarely read them. Poetry above all was a dead art, pretty much useless as it was written now. The only real poetry of the past thirty years was in the lyrics of popular songs. And Bob Dylan was the best poet alive today.
I’m not so sure he really believes all of this. Some of it maybe, but not most of it. I’d like to think it’s his defense against an unpalatable world, but more probably it’s just an act. He was great in Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen, witty, mysterious, unpredictable; and on this afternoon I was his audience, and the show must go on.
Not that there’s anything wrong with a good act. It’s not on the same level with being genuine, but if done well, it’s the next best thing.
He’s thirty-one years old (seven years older than myself), and has four or five books published. He has new poems in that paper roll that’s in his typewriter. In his film he said he was working on a second novel and writes six hours a day, and has lately begun making a living from it. And now he says books are of no value and poetry is dead?
Anyway, at this juncture the phone rang and he excused himself. I kept an ear cocked and gathered he was talking to a publisher about a manuscript he was in the midst of proofing.5
When he hung up he said, “Now what were we talking about?”
“You were telling me Bob Dylan is the best poet alive today.”
“So he is. His songs are poetry. Read them sometime. The vagabond who’s knocking at your door, is standing in the clothes that you once wore... He’s like the early bards and troubadours – he sings and people flock to listen. They fill halls by the thousands and buy his records by the millions. Isn’t that how poetry should be? Isn’t it preferable to the so-called poetry that bores students in the classrooms of English courses?”
“But you write poetry?”
“I write songs now.”
“You do? I didn’t know that.”
He grinned. “Would you like to hear one?”
I could hardly say no. There was a guitar leaning against the wall, and he picked it up, and for the next half hour or so sang to me. The songs weren’t short. There was one about a girl named Suzanne, and an even longer one called The Stranger Song, about “some Joseph looking for a manger”, and four or five or six others. Once started he didn’t want to stop. He wanted to make sure he gave me my money’s worth.
He had a deep, sombre, rather monotonal voice, which to my ear sounded not too bad, in an unpolished folky sort of way. Although, to be truthful, I was more impressed by his guitar playing, since I’ve been trying to learn the instrument myself for a year or so and getting nowhere. And if I’m to be really truthful, I’ve yet to meet a man drinking who wants to sit for half an hour letting some other guy sing songs he’s never heard before and which he can’t join in on. But I kept my peace, and when he finished applauded his performance.
Then I offered to sing a while myself, as a return favour. I thought I would sing him some old Miramichi folk songs from my home province of New Brunswick.6 He said he’d love to hear them, but unfortunately had an appointment to keep. If I wanted to stick around, however, he’d listen to me when he got back. He would only be an hour or so.
As he was going out the door I said once again how much I’d enjoyed his film, especially the humour in it. “If you ever decide on a change of career,” I said, “you could always become a comedian.”
“I’m already a comedian,” he said.
I sat for a while, and then got the idea to pass the time by recording some of the Miramichi songs on his tape machine. I wasn’t concerned about how to operate it. By now I’d gone through about four-fifths of the wine and was confident I could master any piece of machinery.
There was already a tape in it. I pressed the play button and hearing Leonard’s voice fast-forwarded and checked again, and did this until I was sure I wouldn’t be recording over one of his songs. Then I started singing. I wasn’t competent enough yet on the guitar to accompany myself, but I didn’t let that bother me. The old lumberjacks who sang these songs never had accompaniment, and what was good enough for them was good enough for me.
The session went along quite well at the beginning. But then as I was moving through the fourth verse of that great doleful lumberman’s ballad, Peter Emberly, I fumbled a line, and when I tried to redo it found I couldn’t remember exactly how it went, and would need to think about it a minute. I shut the machine off and went through the song again in my head. The words came back, but now I had to rewind the machine a bit so I could sing over where I’d made the mistake. And this was where I got into trouble. I rewound back too far, then fast-forwarded too far ahead, then went back too far again. It was very hard to find the right place. I was jumping from stop to rewind to play to fast-forward to stop to I don’t know what. And in my frustration I must have hit some buttons I shouldn’t have, because Leonard was singing again and I didn’t know if I was forward or backward and so I slammed a button and then another and suddenly the right reel stuck and the tape flew off and went flying all over the table and floor like a great string of confetti.
I had a hell of a time threading it around the reel again and getting it to look like it had never been touched. When I pressed “play” nothing happened. The same with the other buttons. I took a pull on my wine and finished the bottle off, and reflected that Leonard would likely be detained longer than he thought and so I might as well just leave, and the sooner the better.
When I next saw him he didn’t say anything about the tape recorder, and I saw no reason for bringing the subject up myself. Presumably he got the problem straightened out, and any songs he might have lost he would have recorded again. The extra practice no doubt did him good.
Where I ran into him was in a bar café on Mountain Street one afternoon, a place called Le Bistro, or just the Bistro in English, where Montreal’s literary and arty set hung out in the sixties. He was sitting by himself over a coffee and invited me to join him. “What are you drinking?” he asked. “You probably don’t want a coffee.”
“I think I’ll have a Molson,” I said.
“A pint or a quart?”
“Oh, I think I’ll have a quart.”
He insisted on treating me, and I didn’t put up a fight. I had no income at the time (it was a few months before I landed a job as copy editor for the tabloid Midnight) and I knew he had an annuity from his late father’s estate, which was why he could afford to live in Greece, as he’d been doing.
We chatted about one thing and another, and among other things I asked him if he’d been reading any good poetry lately. To me he was still a poet, no matter what he said. This notion about writing and singing songs – in the mid-sixties everyone was writing and singing songs, so I didn’t think it was actually something he would take seriously.
“Only yours,” he said.
“Really? You mean the ones in Intercourse?”
“Yes. And there was another I saw in Talon.” Talon was a little magazine out of Vancouver, which I think had printed a poem of his as well. “I particularly liked that one.”
“Speaking of which,” I said, “I meant to ask you. Who’s your favourite Canadian poet?”
Without a pause he said, “You are.”
I laughed. I took it of course that he was being “original” and still working my vote. I wasn’t laudably modest about my poetry, but I wasn’t foolishly immodest either. I liked my poems, but at the time saw myself as potentially a better story writer and novelist.
I wrote the following lines about Cohen’s comment some years later, in a poem called ‘The Cohen Endorsement’: I said Leonard who’s your
favourite Canadian poet
and he said “you are”!
I told this to Seymour Mayne
who said no kidding (wishing it was him)
put that on your next book
my favourite Canadian poet says Cohen
except for witnesses
no third party just myself
nothing in writing no tape recorder playing
it would never stand up in court
a poem of mine he’d read
something about everyone’s written everything
about everything and what’s there left to write
and Irving Layton one day saying
the trouble with Leonard
he has nothing to say It’s true Irving Layton said that to me. It must have been hard for his ego to see his less talented (as a poet) protégé (as Leonard had been) surpass him to such a degree in fame and fortune.
When we left the Bistro he offered me a drive home. I was living by this time out on Côte-des-Neiges Road, in another direction from his mother’s house in Westmount, which was where he was headed. But he said it didn’t matter and hailed a cab. As we turned onto Côte-des-Neiges and were climbing the hill he spotted a pretty girl hitchhiking and told the driver to pull over.
“Do you know her?” I said.
“No. But she needs a lift.”
She had obviously never been offered a free ride by a taxi before and so was a little dubious, but seeing our charming faces she got in. As we motored along I informed her she was in the company of one Leonard Cohen, the famous poet and star of the motion picture, Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen. She seemed impressed enough by that, but what happened after I got out at my place and they drove off together I don’t think I should say. It wouldn’t be right, since I don’t know.
Later that year he went to New York and sang Suzanne over the phone to Judy Collins, and in December she released an album called In My Life, which featured among other fine songs two of Cohen’s, Suzanne and Dress Rehearsal Rag.
The following year, 1967, he released his own first album, and that fall I travelled to Dublin where I discovered that in Europe he had already become a famous songwriter/singer. In Dublin I met a young lady and bought the Judy Collins album for her and to this day the songs that are on it, including Cohen’s, bring back poignant memories of those rambling days. We had been out a few times to the pubs before she found out I knew Leonard and from then on she would introduce me as Leonard Cohen’s friend.
“Well, I wouldn’t say we’re friends, exactly,” I’d have to qualify.
“But you know him? You’ve met him?”
“Oh yes.”
“Bartender, give this man a drink! What’s he like?”
He reminds me of Bernard of Ventadour, a famous 12th century troubadour, who “like other troubadours was at once a composer and a poet; he created both the music and the lyrics for his songs.”
C. Warren Hollister in his book, Medieval Europe: A Short History, writes: “At an early age Bernard showed great talent as a poet and musician, and was singled out by the Viscount of Ventadour for training as a troubadour. His happy days ended, however, when the viscount found the young boy in bed with the viscountess. He was banished from the castle and obliged to seek his fortune elsewhere.”
Ever resourceful, young Bernard travelled to the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen of England, and sought an audition. Impressed by his gifts, the queen kept him around to compose and perform songs for her and her entourage.
Bernard’s songs celebrate the joys and sorrows of romantic love, and became immensely popular, earning him fame and fortune, to say nothing of favours from the fair sex. Some forty of his compositions are still sung to this day, including such widely known hits as Lancan folhon bosc e jarric and Non es meravelha s’eu chan.
Bernard of Ventadour afterwards joined the court of Raymond, count of Toulouse, and towards the end of his life retired to a monastery in southern France where he died.
Leonard at least for a while retired to a monastery in California, where he said he hoped to end his days.
With one thing and another, all these similarities, some tend to believe that in the 20th Century Bernard of Ventadour underwent a reincarnation, coming back for an encore as Leonard of Montreal.
FOOTNOTES 1. This was fairly early on in my drinking career (which ran from 1958 to 1982), before things started to get out of hand.
2. I thought it was extremely handsome myself, well worth the work that had gone into it. My wife Sharon and co-editor Leroy Johnston and I had spent several days typing the master copy on paper stencils and cranking the pages out on an old prototype Roneo mimeograph machine and sorting and folding and stapling and so on. It was probably the worst-looking magazine ever produced anywhere, but at the time I didn’t see it. I was like a doting parent with an ugly child, oblivious to its flaws.
3. Today rare book dealers sell it for a hundred dollars a copy, when they can find one.
4. The lino-cut cover of Intercourse II was created by the now well-known set designer Michael Eagen and hand-rolled individually by LeRoy Johnson and myself, all 500 copies! (Watching us Michael said we should change the name from Intercourse to Handjob). Cohen’s name appeared on the cover, along with those of other luminaries such as Irving Layton, Raymond Souster and Elizabeth Brewster.
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