Leonard Cohen and me: A reminiscence

By Jay Stone

Even if we stated our case very clearly and all those who held as we do came to our side, all of them, we would still be very few. — Leonard Cohen, Parasites of Heaven

When he died last week his constituency emerged, thousands, millions perhaps, smitten, devoted, some with stories of how they had gone to his house in Montreal and he had made them egg salad sandwiches. He was gracious, modest, haunting, and with the key to something we thought was ours alone. “Have you ever noticed how private a wet tree is, a curtain of razor blades?,” he wrote (in A Cross Didn’t Fall On Me), and suddenly you did notice. A poem is something that everyone knows but no one ever said before.

I found him by accident. When I was a teenager, there was a copy of his first novel, The Favourite Game, on the bookshelf in my father’s den when we lived in north Toronto. I don’t know how it got there, but my father got a lot of books from publishers because he was on the radio then. I don’t know why he saved it because he didn’t like Leonard Cohen much. But there it was, waiting for me.

The Favourite Game is about the coming of age of Lawrence Breavman and his friend Krantz — no other name, just Krantz — and several girlfriends and how he abandoned them to become a writer. It was tender and melancholy, a life I hadn’t led but knew intimately. Here’s Breavman and Krantz driving on a dark Quebec highway, just driving, not going anywhere “free as a meteor and maybe as doomed.” Breavman says, “Krantz, all they’ll ever find of us is a streak of oil on the garage floor without even rainbows in it.”

I was hooked. There ain’t no cure for love.

I found him by accident. When I was a teenager, there was a copy of his first novel, The Favourite Game, on the bookshelf in my father’s den when we lived in north Toronto. I don’t know how it got there, but my father got a lot of books from publishers because he was on the radio then. I don’t know why he saved it because he didn’t like Leonard Cohen much. But there it was, waiting for me.

Sometimes my friend Bob Snider — my Krantz, or maybe I was his — and I would go to Montreal for a weekend to drink and search for women. I would bring The Favourite Game and try to track down the club on lower Stanley Street where Breavman danced with girls, or the Westmount parks where Breavman and Krantz wandered. I never found the club, or the parks, or the women either, for that matter.

One night we went to hear a folk group called The Stormy Clovers, and they were singing songs by Leonard Cohen. It was the first time I heard Suzanne, that beautiful drone about a woman who lives by the river, and also about Jesus, who sank beneath your wisdom like a stone. After Cohen died, everyone wrote about how his poems and songs had blended the sacred with the profane, but I always thought that it was all sacred.

The Stormy Clovers had a beautiful blonde singer named Susan Jains, and after their show I went to the washroom and came out to find her talking to Bob. He told me that while he was waiting for me, she emerged in the hallway of the club and said hi. Bob’s first thought was how to dump me, but it turned out she just wanted a light for her cigarette. She was the first person I ever met who actually knew Leonard Cohen — this was in the years before the egg salad sandwiches — and I become, not for the last time, flummoxed. All I remember from our conversation is that I asked her if she called him Lenny. She said that her mother sometimes did when she was fed up with him.

In Toronto, Bob and I would go to the Yorkville, the hippie village of the 1960s, almost every weekend, to sit in coffeehouses — the 71 was a particular favourite; it’s gone now, turned into a hair salon — and be beatniks. By then I had also read Cohen’s first books of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies and The Spice Box of Earth, which was just out in soft cover. The original hardcover edition, with illustrations by Frank Newfeld, was a rare book, but there was a copy at the Toronto public library branch on Yorkville (now also gone.) I borrowed it one day and pondered stealing it but — in the manner of Cohen’s refusal of a 1969 Governor General’s literary award because “the poems themselves absolutely forbid it” — I didn’t. A few weeks later, I changed my mind, but the copy was never at the library again. Someone else had stolen it.

In those days I thought I saw Leonard Cohen everywhere. I was ready to meet him in case I did. I would walk up to him and say, “Excuse me, can you tell me Krantz’s first name?” I was a one-person cult, just some Joseph looking for a manger.

And one day in 1966, there he was, standing across Yorkville beside a lamppost, with a guitar case. He was wearing a tweed jacket that, I later learned, had been made for him in Montreal, and it is another of my regrets that I never got the name of his tailor, because I would be wearing one today.

“That does look like Leonard Cohen,” Bob admitted (he was long-suffering through this period.) “Go over and say your thing.” But I couldn’t. I was too shy, too smitten. So I stood there — I was 19 years old, just about to fail out of university, just about to begin a lifetime of standing across the street, as it were, from the famous and the accomplished and then writing about them later — while Bob went over and said to Leonard Cohen, “Excuse me, can you tell me Krantz’s first name?” I saw Cohen smile, and then I knew for sure that it was him.

I walked across the street to join them. “That’s one of the nicest ways anyone has ever introduced himself to me,” Cohen said, a simultaneous feather in my cap and arrow through my heart. Bob tried to explain, but it was awkward. The whole evening was slightly awkward, and I wish I could have it back. Here’s what I remember. I had just finished reading Beautiful Losers, his gorgeous, hallucinogenic novel about an unnamed man, his imposing friend F, his doomed wife and the native saint Kateri Tekakwitha. I had bought the book the day before its release date by begging the owner of a bookstore (also now gone) on Bloor Street to break the embargo. I devoured it, looking not just for literature but also for possible messages on how to live my life. It lost me, although in the middle is the poem “God is alive, magic is afoot” — all written in one long paragraph, not like a poem at all — that remains the most remarkable prayer of glory that I have ever read. Cohen asked me what I thought of Beautiful Losers and I said that I thought I liked it but I had only read it once. There should be a country song about a guy who regrets not praising a favourite author enough.

…I walked across the street to join them. “That’s one of the nicest ways anyone has ever introduced himself to me,” Cohen said, a simultaneous feather in my cap and arrow through my heart. Bob tried to explain, but it was awkward…

We invited him to have coffee with us at the closest restaurant, Webster’s, a notorious drug hangout just north of Yorkville where, on some evenings, the pot dealer would sit at a table at the back and a lineup of customers would snake through the restaurant and out the door. On the way, Cohen asked me if I was a writer. “I’d like to be,” I said and he said, “Blacken your page,” a phrase he used all his life. I was, as I say, 19 years old, but I was a conspicuously backward 19, and it was kind and gracious of Cohen to take my ambitions at all seriously. I vowed to blacken my page.

I don’t remember much about Webster’s except that I offered Cohen a cigarette — I was smoking Peter Stuyvesant in those days — and he said, “Thanks, but I’m kind of hooked on these.” He brought out a cardboard box that flipped open sideways. Inside were oval cigarettes called Abdullahs, made of strong Turkish tobacco. I bought my own pack of Abdullahs the next weekend, and smoked them on and off for years, although with no appreciable improvement in the quality of my poetry. I can’t remember much else of what we talked about except that Bob said he thought the name Stormy Clovers sounded like Stormy Troopers and there was a pesky Yorkville kid who hung around out table and kept interrupting the conversation.

Later, I drove Cohen back to his hotel on Jarvis Street. I felt like one of the elect.

I met him again a few years later in Montreal. I was with a group of friends and Cohen was going into Dunn’s restaurant on Ste. Catherine Street with a woman. “Leonard Cohen,” I said in my outdoor voice. He turned and looked. “Hello sir,” I added, for reasons that continue to escape me even now, half a century later. He said something quietly to the woman, who went inside Dunn’s, and came over to say hello. I think I asked him what he was up to lately. I don’t tell this story very often.

The third time was in 1988 — in early November, in fact, almost 28 years to the day of his death. He was singing at the Congress Centre in Ottawa on his I’m Your Man album tour. I sat with the Ottawa Citizen’s music critic at a good table near the front — the Congress Centre was set up like a cavernous bistro — and later I got to go backstage and meet him. I had had a few drinks during the show, and I asked him when he was going to produce his next novel. He wasn’t sure. My wife asked for his autograph, then slept with it under her pillow for months. As we all left, Cohen said, “Thank you, friends,” in that deep whisky growl that grew more coarse and truer as he aged.

The last time I met him was near the end of November in 1993. He was being honoured for his life’s work with a Governor General’s Performing Arts award, and was also promoting a collection of his poetry called Stranger Music. I was writing for The Citizen and I interviewed him. We met in a room backstage at the National Arts Centre. He was 59 years old. The occasion seemed to call for looking back on his career, at what he has done and what he hasn’t. Here’s some of what I wrote:

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“It’s all what I haven’t done,” he says. He is dressed in a charcoal grey, chalk-striped suit, black-and-white checked shirt and black tie, grey hair cropped short. The lines to the corner of his mouth are deeper than ever. He may be a happy man, but he is not a merry one.

“I don’t have any idea of the achievement. I’m grateful for the award and I understand I’ve blackened a few hundred pages, and it’s meant something to people here and there, but I never had a sense of anything ever really getting done.”

Later, Cohen will admit that in his work since the record Various Positions (1985), he feels he has come closer to saying what he wants to say, although he has no idea yet what that might be because of his position “on the front line of activity.”

And in the exercise involved in looking back, he says he found that his earliest work — the poems of Let Us Compare Mythologies, written while he was still a student — to be perhaps his best.

“I think it was downhill ever since,” he says. “Some of those early poems were really good. I think they’ve really got it.”

But of the selected work of Stranger Music — his body of work — he says only: “These poems are rhymed out in distress. They’re kind of evidence of a life lived, like ashes . . . it’s a pile of ashes. That’s putting it politely.”

He sounds as if he isn’t proud of it, but he corrects that impression: “It’s good ashes. Well burned. I don’t mean to put it down or downgrade it in any way. It’s the best I could do.

“It’s like a marriage. If someone came to you at the end of 30 or 40 years and said, ‘You’re going to get an award for being the best husband in town.’ And you knew who you are and you knew what you’d done and you knew what your marriage was like, and you knew how lucky you’d been that it didn’t collapse. And you knew how humiliated you felt half the time. And you knew how many times you’d betrayed your wife, if not in flesh then in spirit and thought.

“If you knew clearly and you were honest about all your failures and sins, you’d say, ‘Yeah, I’ll take the award,’ but you’d certainly have some private thoughts about it.”

He says there is something “sticky, soiled, exhausted” about the whole enterprise of poetry. “You always feel there was a bit of the hustle behind the thing anyway, like any man thinks about anything he does.”

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Later he talked about how he lives in Los Angeles to be close to Roshi, his 86-year-Buddhist spiritual teacher.

“I sit with him and I drink with him,” he says.

“And what do you . . .

“Drink?” Cohen interrupts. “We first began to drink cognac together. I guess he came from Japan and I don’t think he knew too much about western alcohol. But he got very interested in cognac and in being able to identify the different cognacs in a blind taste test. It’s harder than you think to identify Remy from Courvoisier. His feeling was that Remy Martin has kind of a feminine taste and Courvoisier has a more masculine taste, but many long weekends were devoted to cultivating this capacity to distinguish one cognac from another.

“Ten years later we got very interested in Scotch. Some students who were devoted to him would bring him Scotch, and some students whose appreciation was deep would bring him Ballentine Scotch, 36 years old. Several years were spent in examining the true nature of Scotch.

“Then I developed an interest in red wine about five years ago, as my fortunes changed and I was able to afford more expensive vintages. And I began to share very good bottles of wine with Roshi. And I didn’t think he’d go for it, you know. He went for it for a while, but then he finally said red wine was too strong for him, and he went back to saki.

“But recently, he developed an interest in tequila. . .

“Anyway, that’s my spiritual journey.”

…”Ten years later we got very interested in Scotch. Some students who were devoted to him would bring him Scotch, and some students whose appreciation was deep would bring him Ballentine Scotch, 36 years old. Several years were spent in examining the true nature of Scotch”…

So much for wine and song. What about women? Cohen is known for an almost magical magnetism — part romance, part suffering — to women from Marianne, in Greece, to Suzanne, subject of his first hit song, to Rebecca de Mornay, the actress and his most recent friend and sometime collaborator.

“Yeah, I’m the only guy interested in women,” he says, getting up to pour himself another cup of coffee. “No one else has ever written a song to a woman except me.”

He is modest about his appeal.

“Hey, I’m over the hill you guys. It’s getting harder and harder to get a date . . . You know, I’ve never been able to discover anything particularly significant or original about my interest in women. I think it’s just a red-blooded Canadian boy’s interest in the opposite sex.”

What is left, then, is Cohen’s discovery of the rewards of fatherhood, and, in his work, the lasting passion for poetry.

“I never had the feeling of luxury when I started with poetry,” he says. “It was a thirst. It was urgent. And those poets — all of them, from King David to Lorca — were satisfying an urgent thirst that I had for some kind of fraternity or meaning or significance or solidarity.

“I never felt I was standing at a buffet table. I was reading in the midst of an emergency. I was trying to find comfort or solace.”

And has he found it? “Yeah, more or less, although I don’t think we’re meant to be entirely consoled in this realm. That’s not what this world is about.”

Leonard Cohen

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I’m not sure how I behaved during the interview, but afterwards he asked me about myself, and I could sense myself being handled, calmed down. He wanted to know about my son and my daughter and where I lived, and he soothed me with assurances of how lucky I was. It’s a common experience, I suspect, among the many of us who fell under his spell.

Our number has grown since those early days. I’ve read many stories about people who met him and enjoyed his hospitality and his grace, and often his food. I know many women who were almost magically drawn to him. I know a guy who got to know him pretty well and would sometimes have dinner with him.

We are no longer very few.

I’m 11 years older now than he was when talked about looking back on his life, but I’m still smitten, in a way, by songs like Closing Time and Hallelujah. I re-read his books, which is now my favourite kind of reading. In my dining room is a signed print — Dear Heather, also used as the cover drawing of an album — which I bought from a Toronto art gallery during the time when he was trying to raise money because his former manager had stolen his savings. I have all of his books on my bookshelf, including The Favorite Game. One year for my birthday — I would have been about 50 or so — my daughter made a card with a Leonard Cohen poem on it: “The big world will find out about this farm / the big world will learn the details of what I worked out in the can / and your curious life with me will be told so often / that no one will believe you grew old.” I guess he was right about family and luck. I trust he finds consolation in the next realm.

Above: Illustration by Victor Bonderoff

THE EX-PRESS, November 15, 2016

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