her appetite for experience, her generosity with her friendship. If times were bad for me, her presence improved them, and if times were good, her presence made them even better. We gave each other permission to take pleasure from life, a precept adhered to by my parents but vigorously denied by hers. We could be open, exposed, vulnerable, with complete trust. And when we were “on” we could take on the world, and did. A German poet or was it philosopher once said, Love is greater than genius itself and friendship is greater than love. He could have been referring to our friendship. Unlike love, it brought no hurt, no violent mood swings, no desperation. Most importantly it was not an addiction, it was more like a sustaining habit, like a book at bedtime, a great healer. It was its very “greatness” that made it difficult for others to contend with. Although Irving and I had been friends before I met Rachel, he sometimes couldn’t help resenting our special attachment. “Your wife called,” he would report sardonically. “You spend so much time with Rachel, why don’t you move in,” my mother would complain. But lately we had been living in different cities, and now we would be living in different countries. Our time together in Lesbos was especially precious.
I also looked forward to seeing Leonard Cohen. I had met him many years before at Irving and Rachel’s. From the first meeting, Leonard fascinated me with his bitter-sweet attitudes to life, his penetrating humour often entrenched in pain and directed against himself, his beautiful melancholy, his dark mesmerising good looks and his promise of anguish and ecstasy. Perhaps it was because of this promise, made in poems and songs bleeding with tender love, yet savagely accurate, delivered in his smoky opium voice resonant with incantation that spanned Rabbinical intoning to Buddhist chanting, that both men and women were to phone him saying they wanted to hear the sound of his voice before taking their lives. He was a magnet for the tortured.
Although he was very young at the time he seemed to peel and discard layer after layer of living, as though he had been on earth an eternity. Yet he could be newborn, child-like, unfallen. Like Bob Dylan his imagination had a life of its own, an original way of seeing things, of yoking ideas, but his was a darker vision, intense, haunted, as though he had visits with doom. Predictably enough he was intrigued by Bob Dylan, by his songs, by his startling imagination, by his rise to fame. He was just beginning to write songs himself and was overwhelmed that I knew Bob Dylan. He wanted to hear every detail about him, especially what it was like to be famous, even to know someone famous. Ironically, he was to find out all too soon. And, to compound the irony, in 1975 Dylan was to dedicate his album Desire to Leonard Cohen.
When Ronit graduated from elementary school, Irving gave her a copy of Leonard Cohen’s poems with the inscription, “Now that you have graduated, let Leonard Cohen do the rest!” He asked Leonard to autograph the book and Leonard added, “Yeah, let me do the rest!” He was drawn to Ronit’s undefiled girlhood and made me promise to keep her in white until she was old enough to marry him. But a photograph I have of them at this time looks like they were already married. Such was the oneness between them, the similarity of expression, of unseen internal forces shaping the external image. Caught by the camera in a moment of intense connection, they were two aspects of one reality. Ronit looking outwards in innocent wonder, entering life, Leonard with his arm around her shoulder, protecting her from what he had already lived.
For me the most striking thing about Leonard was a compelling kind of madness, and a genius for infecting others with it. Both Rachel and I were especially susceptible to this seductive charisma and an experience we had with it was so intense, so bizarre, so magical, that it remains one of the extraordinary happenings in my life. It was made possible not only because of Leonard’s unique power, but because Rachel and I were together, experiencing it with him.
One of Irving’s qualities I found most attractive was his interest in younger writers. No matter how busy he was he found time to offer encouragement and advice, even financial assistance to the promising young poets who regularly sought him out. Leonard Cohen was such a young poet. His zaniness, “the joker high and wild,” the gypsy-boy, complemented Irving’s essential sobriety; his pale aristocratic inheritance, Irving’s robust peasant roots. They were drawn together like the joining of night with day. Leonard had a profound regard for Irving’s talent as a poet and a deep love for him as a man. Irving considered Leonard to have “the purest lyrical gift in the country,” and cherished him as a friend. Leonard fascinated Irving; his tortured sensibility, his mystical yearnings, his affinity with pain, his Christ—like suffering, were diametrically opposed to Irving’s pragmatic vigorous solidity, his refusal to turn the other cheek. Leonard brought Irving in touch with an ethos Irving could not otherwise reach. And, in turn, Leonard drew strength from Irving’s vast resources of stability and health. Leonard’s first book of poetry was dedicated to Irving.
Later, Leonard expanded his literary activities to include novels and then turned to writing songs and eventually to performing them. Although from the beginning he achieved popularity in the States, especially as a song-writer and performer, he wasn’t successful in Canada except among a small group of admirers. Canada refused to recognise his talents. Every grant, every award, he applied for was denied and everything he published, every performance he gave, received a negative review. Discouraged by repeated rejection he left Montreal and went to live in New York. Years later, when, as a successful super star with several gold albums, he returned to Montreal to give his first big concert there, he was still steeling himself against the anticipated negative response. Rachel and I found him in the dressing room composing a terse reply to the inevitable bad review he knew would appear in the Montreal Star.
“Why do you bother?” Rachel asked. “The London Times says you’re great, the New York Times says you’re fantastic, you get international rave reviews, why do you care what the pathetic little Montreal Star writes?”
“Because,” he answered sadly, “my mother reads the Montreal Star. She’s convinced I’m a failure.”
I came to know Leonard through my friendship with Irving and Rachel. I met him often at their home before he became famous, and then at least for Christmas once he was famous. He believed in maintaining traditions, said they were his anchor in the chaos of existence. Even if it meant flying from one side of the world to the other, he never failed to share the Christmas spirit with his dear friend Irving, and with Rachel and David. Ronit and I would come as well, and the six of us would usher in the Yuletide with blessings for peace and love. After dinner Leonard would lead us in various ceremonies and rituals, depending on what esoteric philosophy he was involved with at the time. One year we incanted the mantra Om Mani Padme Hum by the light of a single candle, entranced by the sound of the Tibetan words: God in unmanifest form is like a jewel in the centre of a lotus, manifest in my heart. We chanted invocations for peace and love until, in a semi-hypnotic state, we could feel our energies merging with the cosmic energies in an overwhelming energy of universal love. Even Irving was captivated.
It was Leonard who first introduced me to Tibet, an introduction that was to become an obsession. Leonard emanated a contagious magic. He was a master at evoking mystical atmospheres, creating strange moods where all things were possible. Like a magician he wove a spell impelling sceptic and believer alike to surrender to it. His writing and his music had this same compelling power. Like Rachel, I was especially receptive to these charged atmospheres. He once told me that I was a “familiar,” that force which is conducive to the creation of magic, like the black cat whose presence assists the clairvoyant — the catalyst that makes the magic happen. I had never considered that possibility but I was pleased he had. Leonard moved in and out of my life at intervals which became further apart the more famous he became.
The event I referred to earlier occurred one cold Montreal night. My friend Tom phoned telling me he had managed to procure some magic mushrooms. Leonard had introduced both Irving and Rachel to magic mushrooms, the love drug, and they reported huge ecstasies, delights of phenomenal proportions. I was a coward when it came to drugs. I even avoided aspirin. I didn’t smoke tobacco and rarely drank alcohol. Even when Shimon and I were travelling in Spain and a free bottle of wine
