Chapter 1599 Belmont Avenue

Foreword

In the summer of his sixtieth year a man who had spent his whole life turning words into songs climbed a mountain east of Los Angeles and was given a new name. The name was Jikan. His teacher translated it as the silent one. Consider the joke in that, and the mercy. One of the most careful writers of his century — a lifetime of notebooks filled, a shelf of poetry collections, two novels, a catalogue of songs that people were already carrying to their own funerals — and the old Japanese monk who knew him best looked at him and named him silence, and Cohen bowed and accepted it, and for five years he washed the man's robes and chopped his daikon and rang a bell at three in the morning in the cold. I have turned that scene over in my hands more times than I can count. It is where this book began.

I came to him sideways, through the one song everyone knows. In the tradition I was raised on and have written about for most of my working years, a hymn is a machine with a purpose: it is built to be sung by people who did not write it, in rooms where the writer will never stand, over griefs the writer never met. That is the whole test of a hymn — whether it will hold a stranger's sorrow. By that test Hallelujah is the hymn of the age, and it came out of a man with no congregation, a Jew who said the kaddish for his father on a Buddhist mountain and would tell you plainly he was no Buddhist. I wanted to know how a hymn gets built by a man standing outside every church. It turned out to be the least of what I wanted to know.

I expected to write about a songwriter and I spent three years writing about a man trying to get quiet. The record is deep and mostly public — sixty years of interviews he gave with a candor that still surprises me, the memoirs and remembrances of the people who loved him and left him, the press files and the court filings from the late trouble over his money, the poems and the two novels he had published before he ever picked up a guitar for pay. I read it forward and backward. I listened again to the records I thought I understood and found I had been hearing the surface — the low voice, the wit, the women — and missing the thing underneath, which was a lifelong argument with silence conducted, of all the perverse ways to conduct one, out loud.

What I found underneath went back to a rose bed in Montreal. When Cohen was nine his father died, and the boy cut a slit in one of the man's bow ties, folded a written message inside, and buried it in the garden. He never told anyone what the message said. He spent the next seventy-two years writing letters — to women, to God, to his mother, to himself — and mailing none of them to the one reader who was already in the ground. I did not set out to write a book about grief. Grief is what the mountain was for. The silence he climbed toward at sixty was the same silence he had been folding paper into at nine.

A life earns a book when it refuses to resolve, and Cohen never resolved himself. He was a devout man who broke every vow of steadiness he made, a comedian of the erotic who wanted more than anything to pray, a Jew ordained a Buddhist monk who stayed a Jew, a man who followed a teacher he later had reason to be ashamed of and would neither disown him nor defend him. He left the knots tied. Most biographies are written to cut the knots — to hand the subject his meaning and file the copy. This one is written to leave them where he left them, because the knots are the man.

This book follows him from the rose bed to the mountain and down the far side of it, all the way to a kitchen table in Los Angeles where, dying, he sang the word his family had carried out of the synagogue on the Day of Atonement — hineni, here I am. I went up the mountain after him certain I knew what a hymn was for. I came down less certain, and listening harder. A subject earns his book by doing exactly that to the person foolish enough to try to explain him.

— Bryson Lyle, Nashville

Chapter 1 · 599 Belmont Avenue

The boy was nine. He went out to the back garden in the cold January light with his father's bow tie folded in his pocket and a kitchen knife from the second drawer in the pantry. The tie was navy silk, dotted, the most formal of the seven Nathan Cohen had owned. The boy knelt at the edge of the rose bed where the snow had been cleared for the funeral guests. He cut a slit in the tie with the kitchen knife, slid a piece of paper inside, and folded the silk over the paper as though folding a child's hand around a coin. Then he scraped a hole in the cold earth with the same knife and put the tie in and pushed the soil back over it. He smoothed the surface with his palm. He stood up. The roses had been cut back for winter; the canes were dark stumps in the snow. He went back inside through the kitchen door.

He did not say what he had written on the paper. He did not say it the next morning. He did not say it in 1963 when The Favourite Game came out and a clever American journalist asked him whether the Lawrence Breavman who buries his father's tie at the end of Chapter Three was an autobiographical figure; he did not say it in 1991 when Maclean's revisited the chapter at the bow-tie passage; he did not say it in the New Yorker portrait of October 2016 when David Remnick interviewed him and the dying man returned to the burial in the Belmont Avenue garden as though to a room he had not entered for sixty years. The paper went into the ground in January 1944. Whatever it said is in the ground still; it was never publicly known, the contents of the message unrecorded, the boy who had written it now buried himself across the city in Mount Royal and a long life lived on the wager of the unsaid.

The grandfather had built the synagogue. That was the first thing to know about Westmount in 1944. Lyon Cohen, born 1868 in Suwałki, Poland, brought to Montreal at age three, made his first fortune in tailoring and his second in insurance, and in 1919 founded the Canadian Jewish Congress and presided over its first session at the Monument National on Saint Lawrence Boulevard. The Cohen family (meaning the Eliezer Cohen line, which was Lyon's branch) had, from the later nineteenth century, become the leading family of Congregation Shaar Hashomayim — the congregation founded in 1846 by an earlier generation of Montreal Jews — and had led the building of its Romanesque limestone fortress of 1922 on Côte-Saint-Antoine Road that occupied the better part of a city block in upper Westmount and would still occupy it the day they buried Leonard. The building was named for Beth Israel Beth Yehuda Shaar Hashomayim (the Gate of Heaven) and it was meant to be the Gate, plainly. Lyon Cohen had been buried in the family plot in the synagogue's cemetery on the slopes of Mount Royal in 1937 with the procession of the Jewish establishment of Montreal walking up the hill behind him.

Lyon's son was Nathan Bernard Cohen, born 1891. Nathan went to Montreal High and McGill, did one year of law and abandoned it, came into the Freedman Company of his father-in-law's family and ran the men's-clothing operation through the 1920s; served as a lieutenant in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in the First World War, came home with his health broken, convalescent, and married. The war-damaged lungs were the slow undoing of his life. He coughed through the 1920s, walked with a slight stoop, drove the Buick himself only as far as the Freedman office on de Bleury Street and then home to Belmont. His own father, Lyon, died seven years before he did. Nathan inherited the seat at Shaar Hashomayim, the four-thousand-square-foot family townhouse at 599 Belmont Avenue, the Buick, and the lung damage that was eating him.

The wife was Masha Klonitsky (the spelling later softened in the New World press to Klonitzky-Kline), born 1905 in Kaunas, Lithuania, the daughter of Rabbi Solomon Klonitsky-Kline, Talmudic scholar of the Yeshiva of Kovno. Masha came to Canada in 1927 to escape the deteriorating Lithuanian situation and within months had been introduced to the Cohen family at a wedding in the Shaar Hashomayim social hall. She married Nathan in 1928. She was twenty-three; he was thirty-seven. She brought Russian songs and the Yiddish of her father's library and a beauty that the family photographs do not blunt. In old age the family told the story that Masha had once dreamed of the opera; the family in Lithuania had had no money for a conservatory and the daughters of rabbis did not in any case sing for paying audiences. She would sing the Russian and the Yiddish at the Belmont piano in the evenings while Nathan smoked his single cigar in the leather chair and the children sat on the carpet and listened. The opera dream went into the songs at the Belmont piano. The songs went into the boy listening.

The first child was Esther Frayda Cohen, born 14 January 1930. The second and last was Leonard Norman Cohen, born 21 September 1934, at the Royal Victoria Hospital on Pine Avenue, the building below the cemetery on Mount Royal. Esther was four years and eight months old; the family was complete.

Belmont Avenue, in 1934, was the steepest of the three short streets that ran between Côte-Saint-Antoine at the top and The Boulevard at the bottom, the cross streets cutting the upper slope of Westmount in a tight grid. Number 599 was the third house from the top on the east side, three storeys of Greystone limestone and a fourth of dormer attic, a slate roof, a small carriage entrance to the side, a back garden that descended to a lane. The neighbours were doctors and the senior partners of King Street accounting firms and one judge of the Quebec Superior Court. The lawn was raked by the gardener twice a week in summer and the snow was shovelled by him from October to April. The boy in the carriage in 1934 (the Buick had not yet acquired the second motor) was a Jewish boy in a Westmount that was not, in its bones, especially welcoming to Jewish boys; the gentiles' clubs were closed to the Cohens, the St. James Club kept the family out by an open quota, the Selwyn House School had taken Lyon's son but did not always take Lyon's grandson. Westmount in the 1930s held a separate Jewish enclave (the upper Jews, the lower Jews, the Outremont overflow on the wrong side of the mountain), and the Cohens were the apex of the upper Jewish part of upper Westmount. The boy played hockey on Belmont with the gentile boys in winter and went home for the Friday night Shabbat candles. The arrangement worked for the early years. The walls held.

The father was the still figure at the centre of the early architecture. Nathan came home from de Bleury Street in the late afternoon with his hat and his cane (the cane was for the lung), shed his coat in the hall, took the cigar from the cigar box on the sideboard, sat in the leather chair in the front room. The boy was permitted to sit on the carpet at his feet while the father read the Montreal Star and Le Devoir. The boy was permitted to ask one question. Nathan would answer the question, fold the paper, and the day was over. There was a routine, a clock, a lung, and a quiet voice; there was no shouting; there was no embrace. The boy understood early that his father was being killed by the war that had ended sixteen years before his birth, and that the killing was internal, and that the schedule of the killing was not on his side.

The mother provided the heat. Masha was a woman of operatic emotion: her grief came in storms, her affection came in floods, her lullabies were Yiddish and Russian and the lyrics were of war and exile and the Bunye and Tumbalalaika. She wept easily. She laughed with her whole body. She was, at the same time, an Orthodox observer's daughter; the kashrut was kept; the candles were lit on Friday; the bensch was sung after meals; the family went to Shaar Hashomayim every Saturday morning while Nathan was alive and most Saturdays for the year of mourning afterward. The boy's earliest religious memory was the Shaar Hashomayim sanctuary, the ark, the bimah, the cantor's voice climbing through the Hineni of the Yom Kippur Musaf: Hineni he'ani mi-ma'as, nirash ve-nifhad, here I am, of poor deeds, trembling and afraid, the cantor's first-person address to God on behalf of the congregation. The chant came back to him at the Tremaine Avenue dining-room table in Mid-Wilshire in October 2016 when he sang the title track of You Want It Darker into the Neumann microphone and asked the Shaar Hashomayim choir to sing the Hebrew behind him. The Hineni was the family's word, and the family's word was in the bones from the synagogue Lyon Cohen had built.

The brother and sister he never had. There was Esther; there was no younger child. The household was tight: father, mother, sister, son. The fragility was already in the air by the boy's seventh year, by the time the war in Europe had begun and Nathan's lung had taken its second decisive turn. The boy slept in the bedroom at the back of the house, his window looking down to the rose bed and the lane. He slept badly. He had nightmares of being abandoned in train stations.

There was the guitar story. Cohen told it definitively at the very end of his life, in his 2011 Prince of Asturias Award speech in Spain: as a young man in Montreal he came upon a young Spaniard playing flamenco beside the tennis courts in the park near his mother's house. The playing stopped him. He asked the man, across their broken French and English, whether he would teach him. The Spaniard came to the house three times and taught him six chords — the flamenco pattern that had stopped him in the park. Then he failed to appear. Cohen telephoned the boarding house where the young man was staying, and the landlady told him the Spaniard had taken his own life. Cohen knew nothing about him: why he had come to Montreal, why he had died. But standing before the Spanish court sixty years later, Cohen said that those six chords, that guitar pattern, had been the basis of all his songs and all his music. The flamenco was the founding music. The Spaniard's gift went into everything that followed, including the Isle of Wight at dawn on 31 August 1970 twenty years later.

By the autumn of 1943 Nathan Cohen had become a thin man, a pale man, a man whose Buick stayed in the carriage entrance most days, a man whose visits to the de Bleury Street office were once a week and then once a fortnight. The lungs the war had broken had finally arranged the timetable. There were nurses in shifts. There were the doctors from the General. There was the rabbi from Shaar Hashomayim, who came in the afternoons. The boy was close to his father through the long decline; what passed between them in the back bedroom is on no record. The house learned to be quiet around the dying man.

The death came on a Sunday in mid-January 1944. Nathan had taken a sudden turn during the night; the family doctor was called at three in the morning; by seven Nathan was unconscious; by ten he was dead. The body was in the bed. Esther was led into the room by Masha; the boy followed. The boy looked at his father. He stood at the bedside. He did not cry. The funeral was the next day in the Belmont Avenue front room: the body brought downstairs, the casket plain pine in accordance with Jewish rite, the rabbi reading the Kaddish, the family of Lyon Cohen and Masha Klonitsky-Klein gathered in the room where Nathan had read the Star and smoked his single cigar.

The procession went out the front door of 599 Belmont, up Belmont to Côte-Saint-Antoine, west to the synagogue, the prayers in the Memorial Chapel of Shaar Hashomayim, then by motor to the cemetery on the upper slope of Mount Royal, the Cohen family plot, the burial beside Lyon and Lyon's wife and the row of Cohens who had died before. The boy was permitted to throw the first handful of earth on the casket. Masha threw the second. Esther threw the third. The plot held the family.

That afternoon the boy went down to the back garden of 599 Belmont with his father's bow tie and the kitchen knife and a piece of paper. The bow tie was the navy silk, the dotted one, one of his father's own. The boy cut the slit in the silk and slid the paper inside. He folded the tie. He scraped the hole in the rose bed. He put the tie in. He smoothed the soil over.

The act has been read by every interpreter of Cohen's life as the founding image of his lyric mode: the sealed letter, the buried document, the address to an absent reader. A father who would not live to hear the next song. A mother who would one day be gone before all the songs were sung to her. The buried bow tie is the architecture between those two silences. Hineni. Here I am.

The boy went back inside through the kitchen door. The wake continued in the front room. The mourners ate the casseroles the neighbours had brought. The mirrors in the house had been covered, in accordance with custom; the family would sit shiva for seven days. The light through the front window was the cold low Westmount January light. The boy was quiet. He sat on the carpet in the front room. He listened to the adults speak Yiddish and the formal English of the McGill professors. He did not cry. He did not cry that week. He did not cry the next week. He cried for the first time, by his own later account, on the seventh day, when his mother took the children to the cemetery for the unveiling of the temporary marker, and Esther knelt at the marker and put her hand on it and Masha began to wail in the operatic manner she had brought from Lithuania, and the boy looked up at the sky over the Mount Royal slope and understood that the sky was not going to give the father back, that no ritual was going to restore the man whose lungs the war had broken and who had finally finished dying in the bedroom at the back of 599 Belmont, and that the only thing left was the silence and the singing and the buried document in the rose bed. He cried. He was nine years old.

Esther had just turned fourteen. Masha was thirty-eight. The Cohen establishment of Westmount continued. The men of the family (Nathan's brothers, the cousins from the Freedman Company, the rabbis from Shaar Hashomayim) gathered around Masha and the children and arranged the affairs. The Freedman Company would be carried by Cohen Jr. of the cousin line, with Nathan's interest going into trust. Belmont Avenue would be kept; the gardener would be kept; the routine of Friday-night candles, the Shabbat morning at the synagogue, the regular Sunday afternoons with the cousins on Roslyn Avenue and Argyle, the summer at Glen Mountain, the winter skating at the Westmount Lawn Bowling Club rink: the routine would be kept by Masha and the maternal will. There was money. There was no fall. There was, instead, the thinning. Esther took on the older-sister role early; she would attend McGill, marry, and remain her brother's lifelong ally in the Westmount Jewish establishment. She predeceased him, dying in 2014. The plot on the upper slope of Mount Royal would in time gather the family: Lyon (1937) and Lyon's wife, Nathan, Masha (1978), and in the end both of Masha and Nathan's children. The row was not yet complete in 1944; the boy at the rose bed that January was burying the first of the family's deaths he would carry.

The bow tie went into the ground. The paper went into the silk. The boy went back inside. He grew up.

What did the paper say? Cohen never told. The interviewers asked. The biographers asked. The Favourite Game (1963) gave a fictional version: the boy Lawrence Breavman buries a written message with a bow tie in the garden — and the novel, like the life, never tells the reader what the message said. The historical language went into the ground in the rose bed and was never publicly known. The boy who wrote it became a man whose songs would, again and again, take the shape of letters — the recipient sometimes named and sometimes not. He would write letters to Marianne, to Suzanne Verdal, to Suzanne Elrod, to Janis Joplin, to Rebecca De Mornay, to Anjani, to his children, to his sister, to his mother, to his teacher, to his god, to himself. The first letter was addressed to his father and put into the ground in the rose bed at 599 Belmont in January 1944.

There it stayed. There it was, still in the ground, on the November morning in 2016 when the news came from Mid-Wilshire that the boy who had buried it was gone. There it remains.

The shiva ended. The household resumed. The routine held. The Shaar Hashomayim continued. The Freedman Company continued. The boy continued. The bow tie was in the ground.

He went on with his life.