Mike Evans - Leonard Cohen: An Illustrated Record

Marianne Ihlen, followed by Leonard and others, on a mule ride in Hydra, 1960.

Cohen had, in fact, already achieved a degree of literary recognition in Canada, where he had been born in Montreal, Quebec on 21 September 1934. Leonard had a privileged early life, growing up in the well-to-do district of Westmount. Although there were certainly wealthier families in the area, few could match his own in terms of status. The Cohens were one of the most prominent Orthodox Jewish families in Montreal. Leonards father Nathan was a successful businessman, the owner of a high-end clothing store in Montreal, whose ancestors had built synagogues and founded several newspapers when settling in Canada. His mother Masha was a Rabbis daughter of Russian descent, and only a recent immigrant from Lithuania when she married Nathan. Leonard would never deny that his was a fortunate childhood, with the familys staff including a nanny (who he and his sister Esther called Nursie), an Irish maid named Mary, and an African-American gardener-cum-chauffeur called Kerry. It was a close-knit family: the Cohens and their relatives would gather together regularly most often at the home of his paternal grandmother for tea parties, as Cohen would later describe in his first novel, the semi-autobiographical The Favourite Game.

The security of this comfortable family life would be abruptly shattered when Leonard was just nine years old. In 1944, his father Nathan passed away following a long illness. Leonard would describe what happened in two unpublished short stories, Ceremonies and My Sisters Birthday, written around fourteen years later. Nursie had broken the news to the Cohen children early in the morning. They should be quiet, she said, as their mother was still asleep. The funeral would take place the following day. But that couldnt be right, thought Leonard, for tomorrow was his sisters birthday. Significantly, at no point could Leonard remember crying. In fact, he would admit he wept more when his dog Tinkie died a few years later: I didnt feel a profound sense of loss 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.

Whilst Cohen might have outwardly professed this, however, the very fact that he would continually return to his fathers death in his writing calls his claims of emotional detachment into question. Years later, in The Favourite Game, Leonard would recall taking one of his fathers bow-ties, slicing it open, and hiding a small piece of paper inside on which hed written something, before burying it in the back garden. He said he had no recollection of what he had written and that he had been looking for his buried note for years. There can be little doubt that Nathans death was integral in shaping the character of the young Leonard, leaving him with a self-confessed morbidly melancholy outlook that would stay with him for the rest of his life.

An emotional catalyst of a very different kind occurred in Leonards early teens, when his sudden adolescent obsession with girls coincided with the development of his interest in a rather more unusual field: hypnotism. His guide was the grandly titled 25 Lessons in Hypnotism: How to Become an Expert Operator by M. Young, of which the first two lessons in particular might have been written as advice to the performer Cohen would become: Your features should be set, firm, and stern. Be quiet in all your actions Let your voice grow lower, lower, until just above a whisper. Pause a moment or two. You will fail if you try to hurry.

Undoubtedly nurturing pubescent fantasies about Mary, the family maid, Leonard embarked on a bizarre plan of seduction. Emboldened by what he had learnt from Youngs handbook, he hypnotised her, and ordered her to undress. As he would recall in The Favourite Game via his alter-ego Lawrence Breavman, it was his first sight of a naked woman. Whether he had indeed mastered hypnotic powers, or the young maidservant was instead a fully conscious, compliant partner in the exercise, is open to conjecture. Regardless, after a time, Mary awoke, just as Leonard had begun to panic that his mother might return home, and find her employee au naturel with her teenage son. For the youthful Cohen, the whole episode was an early confirmation of the power of gentle persuasion be it via the hocus-pocus repetition of the hypnotist, or the eloquence of the written word.

From the age of thirteen, Leonard would wander the streets of Montreal at night, getting a taste of the seedy nightlife of music, drink and casual sex that was still a grown-up world, out of his reach. These nocturnal ramblings were most often undertaken alone, although as he grew older he began to be regularly accompanied by his best friend, Mort Rosengarten. The two had first met back in 1944 at summer camp, just five months before the death of Leonards father. By the time they attended junior high school together, at Westmount High, they were bosom buddies.

Cohen had attended Roslyn Elementary School until he was fourteen, followed by Westmount High. It was at the latter that he began to take a particular interest in the arts, literature and music, developing a fondness for the work of the Spanish poet and playwright, Federico Garcia Lorca. When I was a young man, Cohen recalled, I could not find a voice. It was only when I read, even in translation, the works of Lorca that I understood there was a voice. He gave me permission to find a voice, to locate a voice; that is, to locate a self, a self that is not fixed, a self that struggles for its own existence.

Around the same time, Leonard began to teach himself the rudiments of playing a guitar on a second-hand Spanish acoustic he bought from a pawnshop for $12. He had met a young Spanish busker in Murray Hill Park, who gave him three lessons on the six chords found in all flamenco music. When Cohen returned for his fourth lesson, however, it was to discover that his teacher had tragically committed suicide. Leonard had never even learned his name. Cohen later expressed a great affinity for Spanish culture and remarked, It was that guitar pattern that has been the basis of all my songs and all my music. Although it would be some years before the two disciplines came together in any meaningful way, the die was cast: words and music would be central to Leonards evolution as a creative artist.