14
This is the final instalment in a series featuring Canadian writers' true tales of love.
It was late spring when I first became aware of him. I was 14 years old, dressed in black, and returning from a Saturday morning drama class with Dora Mavor Moore. I was enrolled at the New Play Society because, the previous fall, I still had some notion that I might be able to achieve my dream of being a child star on Broadway - if I hurried it up and could find some way of miraculously reducing my height. But now it was eight months later and I was dressed in black. The bumps on my chest were leading me to suspect that I might actually be growing up and, if that were so, I had a contingency plan in place. That plan was to become a beatnik.
I took the elevator up to the Jerrold Morris Gallery on the ninth floor of a new building near what I then called the Yorkville Beatnik Village. I had become aware that, beyond wearing black and writing poetry that did not rhyme (I had been doing a great deal of the latter in the furnace room at home, the closest I could get to the kind of subterranean café I had heard that a beatnik should inhabit), it was essential to look at modern art that did not depict anything at all; non- representational work, my mother called it. That morning I had seen an announcement of an exhibition of precisely this kind of work on the bulletin board at the New Play Society and I had jotted down the Gallery's address deciding that I should investigate further. It was necessary, I felt, to gaze at composition and colour and think great beatnik thoughts.
I remember absolutely nothing about the artwork in Mr. Morris's gallery. Once I was inside I was drawn to something I found much more interesting. Lying on a leather bench was an oversized book called Love Where the Nights are Long: An Anthology of Canadian Poems, edited by Irving Layton and graced with quite shockingly representational drawings by famous Canadian artist Harold Town.
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I sat down, took off my black tam and my black scarf, and began to read. Here was George Johnston and Alden Nowlan, here was Mr. Layton himself and Al Purdy and F.R. Scott. As far as I could tell, even though they were old men, each of their hearts was broken and all of their limbs were on fire. I could understand the first concept but was a little vague about the second. And then I found him. I knew instinctively that even though his own heart was broken and his own limbs were on fire, he was not old. His name was Leonard Cohen. He was dying of love and, by the time I had finished reading, I wanted to die with him. In order to do this effectively I knew I would have to purchase the book.
Mr. Morris was a kind man. He explained that the book was part of a limited edition and that it was unlikely that my babysitting money would pay for it. He talked to me about numbered and signed volumes and let me sit on the bench and copy out the poems by Leonard Cohen. He permitted me to puzzle over the Town drawings of entwined bodies. Then he told me I could likely buy a whole book of Cohen's poems from a store called The Book Cellar, quite nearby, on Bay Street.
By the time summer arrived, The Spice-Box of Earth and Flowers for Hitler had taken up permanent residence in my mind, and my life had changed irrevocably. I no longer wanted to be simply a beatnik, I wanted to be a beatnik called Marianne or Annie, even though I could tell from my reading that neither of them understood Leonard Cohen, breaking his heart and frying his limbs the way they did.
All through the long, hot, languid and school-less days of summer I was lost in a dream of Leonard Cohen, whose sorrowful face I had repeatedly studied on the dust jackets of the now much-read books of his poetry. I wanted to "Go by brooks, love/ Where fish stare / Go by brooks" because he would be there, and I wanted to do this even though the poetry rhymed. I wanted him to love me and leave me and return to me soaked with rain. I wanted to understand that "As many nights endure/ Without a moon or star / So will we endure / When one is gone and far." I wanted to be the women in the poetry that didn't rhyme, as well. "Wherever you move / I hear the sounds of closing wings / of falling wings." I wasn't sure how to create such a sound, but I was going to work on that.
I was spending my time in a sleeping cabin at the cottage, rarely going outside, trying to become as pale as the ladies in the poems. I wrote all the words of the angry Cuckold's Song on one of the cabin's plywood walls and, when my mother scrubbed it off with Old Dutch Cleanser, I wrote the tamer poem For Anne in the space left behind while I listened to the sounds of trains heading for Montreal on the CN tracks two miles away. I tried to change the name Anne to Jane but had to admit "With Janie gone/ Whose eyes to compare / With the morning sun?" didn't quite work. I had given up my beatnik attire, partly because it was summer, I admit, but also because of four lines: "When we meet again / you all in white / I smelling of orchards /when we meet ..."
I could tell that Leonard Cohen was desperately unhappy but was able to understand, somehow, that this unhappiness fuelled the poetry. Because of his absence from my life, I was desperately unhappy as well.
By the end of summer my poetry, though still that of an adolescent, was tougher, and I began to cross out lines and make revisions. This brought me quite a bit of pleasure because, in truth, I had really fallen in love with language itself, with its music and its ability to transform life's experiences. The affair that blossomed that summer has lasted all my life.
Jane Urquhart is the author of the novels The Underpainter, Away, Changing Heaven and The Whirlpool, as well as three books of poetry and a collection of short fiction. Her works have been translated into numerous languages, and she is the winner of prestigious literary awards, including the Governor-General's Award.
