Brian had a magic about him. He was spectacular to look at with a shock of frizzy sunflower hair that framed his head like a halo. His long oval face, high cheekbones and startling blue eyes were so striking that even in repose he appeared to be on stage. His face was always alive as though sensing nuances the rest of us were unable to perceive, vibrations we couldn’t feel, like a finely attuned animal, alert, responsive, tuned into another dimension. His body was beautiful, long and lean and golden. It was eloquent, able to communicate when he was silent, and he moved it like a dancer even when he was still. He didn’t speak much but when he did speak his voice was soft and resonant, rich and melodic on stage. I came to see him as some aspect of Yeats, some incarnation Yeats would have desired. Much later, in the months he was in London, it was Brian who insisted on us forming the Yeats Theatre Company and performing several of the dance plays, the first professional production in London since Yeats’ death, and attended by T.S. Eliot’s wife, Valerie, and Ninette de Valois, founder of The Royal Ballet Company, among others. I was merely impelled by his energy. Not long after Shimon and I separated Brian and I became lovers, and when I left Montreal with Ronit, he came with us.
My plan was for the three of us to spend the first part of the summer in Greece on the island of Lesbos with my closest friend Rachel, and then for Brian and I to go on to Ireland to attend the Yeats Summer School, for him an exciting bonus. Rachel, Irving and their son David were spending the summer on Lesbos. Irving, considered Canada’s leading poet, had been my teacher at university, the inspiration behind my pursuit of Yeats. Leonard Cohen, David’s godfather, was also expected. Irving was his mentor and contact with Irving gave him sustenance. Brian, who admired both men and who was a devout reader of their poetry, was thrilled by the possibility of meeting them.
Ronit looked forward to Lesbos. She would be seeing David whom she sorely missed since Rachel and Irving had moved to Toronto the previous year. Although several years older than David they were very close, each like the brother or sister the other never had. I sorely missed Rachel. Since childhood I always had a best friend, friends being the most valued thing in my life. But Rachel was more than a best friend, more than a sister, there was an empathy between us, a twinned connection, that even strangers recognised. Although we looked nothing like each other, she was fair and I dark, although we spoke English with different accents, people confused us, calling her Niema and me Rachel, forgetting which of us they had talked to, which of us had said what, which child belonged to whom.
We never exhausted our times together, always had more to reveal. We shared our most intimate moments, stood by each other through every crisis, were each other’s main source of comfort. When Rachel was devastated by the sudden death of a good friend, Irving sent me to be with her. When Shimon decided he wanted to live with someone else, he first told Rachel asking her how best to tell me. I was with Rachel when she gave birth to David, when she fed him his first spoon of solid food, when he locked himself in a car for which there was no key.
It was never an imposition, a burden, to listen to the repetitive agonised sagas of her life with Irving — the much older man she had pursued and was living with — it was a privilege. I loved her “quicksilver intelligence” (Irving’s phrase), her acid wit, her humour, her vitality, 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.