Behind her closed eyelids an idyllic picture formed of all that was good in her life. The terrace carpeted with yellow flowers. The little wooden door that opened into the study. Axel Joachim sleeping, breathing evenly and packed snugly in a blanket in the rocking chair. The rope that led from the chair out onto the terrace, where she sat. Leonard reading a poem to her under the starry sky that wrapped around them. Layer upon layer of shimmering yellow stars. A donkey’s bray slicing through the night. Remembering her grandmother explaining that she could make a silent wish on a falling star but she mustn’t reveal it to anyone.
Leonard describes how he would sit on the steps, looking at Marianne while she slept with her golden hair spread upon the pillow: “I used to sit on the stairs while she slept, they were the most neutral part of the house, and they overlooked her sleeping. I watched her a year, by moonlight or kerosene … and nothing that I could not say or form, was lost. What I surrendered there the house has kept, because even torn wordless from me, my own first exclusive version of my destiny, like a minor poem, is too useless and pure to die.”39
That was the autumn that Marianne and Leonard’s spent on Hydra in 1960. She would always try to find again that autumn that sang so beautifully.
For M.
I stayed awake to see you sleep
Some faces die of sleep
Mouths go limp
Gone eyes leave a corpse behind
Maybe I could say goodbye
But you were perfect
You were whole
Your mouth was saying
I won’t ever hurt you
Eyelids saying
Be alive be still
I got as far as the window
Something was wrong
The houses were too white
Cliffs too steep
What were the yards doing so clear
I wheeled around
I knew I had made a mistake
I tried to walk I ran
Everywhere I bumped my head
I was picking up prayerbooks
I kissed your sleep
1960
(Previously unpublished poem by Leonard Cohen)40
Chapter 7
* * *
BACK TO OSLO
* * *
It was November and Marianne was at last going to join Axel Joachim in Norway. She and Leonard enjoyed a good night’s sleep at a nice hotel in Athens before setting out on the journey northward. More than three thousand kilometres lay ahead of them.
Before departing Greece, Marianne had the car checked to ensure it was in good order in spite of the hard knocks it had received. As soon as they put the car in gear and rolled out of the workshop, a fantastically tall Chinese man came running after the car, gesticulating with his arms.
“That’s my car! That’s my car!” he shouted.
“Ok, but it’s mine now!” yelled Marianne back.
When the man didn’t give up, Marianne and Leonard brought the car to a stop. Introducing himself as Mr. Tchang, the man hastened to the front of the beige car and opened the hood with a practised movement.
“Look at this! It’s a Porsche motor!”
It turned out that Mr. Tchang was the son of an ambassador in Sweden and that he’d once been married to Marianne Bernadotte, who would later become the Countess of Wisborg. When the marriage dissolved, his ex-wife got the car, which she unloaded at a workshop in Stockholm. Marianne and Axel had had no idea that a Porsche engine lurked under the hood when they’d bought the car. With newfound horsepower, Marianne and Leonard zoomed off with a wave to Mr. Tchang, who was left dumbfounded by the brief reunion with his old car.
They drove through Yugoslavia, eschewing the major motorways in favour of the secondary roads that wound through poor farmland. They didn’t hurry and slept at small inns along the way. Leonard remembers the drive as wonderful, though he also recalls minor quarrels. Marianne liked to drive fast; Leonard wanted to take it easy. Their disagreements evaporated when they stopped at little cafés and ate pasta or shared a hunk of bread and cheese or a bottle of wine.41
Marianne had longed for Axel Joachim after he’d gone ahead to Norway in August, but she’d also believed that it was safer for him to fly straight to his grandmother than to drive with her and Leonard through Europe. A light-grey baby carrier, full of things she was taking to Norway, lay on the backseat of the Karmann Ghia. Imagining that the carrier held an infant and that she could hear baby sounds coming from it, Marianne regretted her decision. She asked herself what kind of a mother she was to have sent her six-month-old baby away from her: he should have been here, with her.
A little apartment — borrowed from a French friend on Hydra — awaited them when they came to Paris. They decided to spend a few days in the city, to rest.
Some realities were inescable for Marianne. There were her feelings for Leonard, who was soon going back to Canada. She and Leonard hadn’t discussed the future. Neither of them knew what was going to happen, only that they wanted to see each another again. There was a little child waiting for his mother, who had neither a job nor a husband to support them. When Axel left her, Marianne was scandalized at the prospect of a life without a father for her baby — it was almost unheard of, in her view. But she hadn’t succeeded in putting that right.
Marianne climbed up into the windowsill in the white bathroom. Huddled before the large window and its wrought iron bars, her body was racked with sobs as she thought how a jump would release her from all the pain. Leonard helped her down, holding her close until she’d cried herself out. Later she looked out over the roofs and church spires and contemplated her life, somewhere out there.
They strolled along the Seine in the evening light, pulling their jackets snugly around them against the cold wind from the river. Passed little stalls with wooden crates full of second-hand books and old comics. They visited the Louvre. Drank coffee in cafés and watched gentlemen in topcoats and ladies in trenchcoats and high heels. Felt the pulse of the city, a rhythm so different than Hydra’s. Marianne closed her eyes and leaned her head against Leonard’s shoulder, held his arm and let him lead her as if she were blind. She repeated the exercise several times, entrusting him to see for both of them while she slowly set one foot in front of the other, feeling that she had a firm footing before taking the next step. Finding her course and surrendering herself.
* * *
When they drove off the ferry from Kiel, they headed straight to Marianne’s mother and Axel Joachim. Autumn had passed since Marianne had last seen him. She rang the doorbell and hurried up the steps with Leonard at her heels.
In a home-knitted jacket with mother-of-pearl buttons, knitted shorts with braces and laced leather boots, a shy tot stood in the entrée, waiting for his mama. When Marianne and Leonard came in the door Axel Joachim ran to his grandmother — whom he called Meme — and grabbed her leg while he stared wide-eyed at Marianne. His grandmother went over to the small piano in the living room and picked up the framed photograph of Marianne that she showed him whenever they talked about his mama.
“See, Little Axel — Mama.”
Nonplussed at the presence of both Meme and Mama, Axel Joachim screwed up his courage and slowly approached Marianne.
Leonard asked if they could light a fire. The red brick fireplace was almost never used, but Marianne’s mother got moving and built a fire for the polite young Canadian who had escorted Marianne all the way from Athens to Oslo. Marianne’s mother didn’t speak English, but as a young lady she’d gone to private school in Paris. Leonard had grown up in Montreal. They mustered their French and conversed with one another.
Later that evening Leonard took his leave like a well-bred man. He checked into the Viking Hotel near the Central Station and settled into a little room facing the back garden for the few nights he would spend in the city.
Axel Joachim slept in Meme’s room. Instead of moving the baby over to Marianne’s girlhood room, Marianne slept in her father’s old bed, her mother on the other side of the room in her bed; in the middle was the child’s bed. The change was too great for the little boy and in the end Marianne went to sleep in her own room while Axel Joachim stayed with his grandmother.
Both Marianne and Leonard had houses on Hydra, but neither of them knew when or under what circumstances they would return to the island. Leonard had to go to Canada to make money. He couldn’t live on writing poetry and he had several projects he wanted to try to make a go of when he got there. When Marianne and Leonard kissed each other goodbye outside her mother’s house neither of them knew when or how they would meet again.
* * *
Shortly after Leonard left, an airmail letter from Axel arrived out of the blue:
Hydra, November 1960
Dear Marianne and Little Axel,
It’s night and I’m sitting behind my writing appliance, pecking my way through existence, pecking myself into the strange world that the new book is miraculously turning into. The great art of letter-writing is not mine for the time being. Thank you for your letter. It is night on this island of ours and two lamps are burning, it smells of them, and my head is tired and I’m thinking of Little Axel and you, and it brings light and movement in this tired brain. When I come to Oslo in February he’ll be walking, won’t he? And he’ll have a head of hair? God, I’m sitting here and it’s night and the lamps are smelling and I’m a pretend family man and have left so much to you. But what else could I do than to write this book? Everything else is just a waste of time. Comical and posturing. So I’m writing a book.
Nothing has changed between Patricia and me. She’s on the road to recovery, but is constantly having plastic surgery. We hope to meet again in February. Take care of the boy-child, who has his father’s eyes. I shall be a peculiar father for him and a strange kind of husband to you — remote and scented with bitterness, but in any case unconventional. And that’s something.
Until the next letter …
Axel42
Marianne was as tired of Axel’s whinging as he was of hers. So much had gone wrong for them. Everything they touched became a shambles.
LONELY IN OSLO
Mother wanted Marianne to wear her coat of black Persian lamb and to get a permanent in her hair so she would look more ladylike. Marianne’s return to Oslo and the winter she spent there were difficult. The town felt unfamiliar, and her old friends had scattered. She had the feeling that her mother had taken over her life and that she couldn’t get a grip on things and establish an independent existence for herself and her little boy. She longed for the freedom of Hydra — faded batique and going barefoot — and wrote desperate letters to Axel, who sat in their house in Kala Pigadia, working on his book while he waited for Patricia to come from Chicago after her operation.
Axel was the only permanent link Marianne had to Hydra. Through six years they’d weathered many storms together, and he was the father of her child. The fighting and his abandonment of her had faded in her memory. She thought that in spite of everything it would be better if they lived as a family on Hydra than if she stayed in Oslo with a child that her mother had more or less taken over. Her heart belonged to Leonard but it had been several weeks and she had yet to hear from him. Feeling alone, she wrote to Axel and told him what she was going through. She raised the question of whether they should try to live together again, for Axel Joachim’s sake. She put pictures of their eleven-month-old son into the envelope, along with cigars — a Christmas present.
On one of the days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, a reply arrived in the mailbox, postmarked on Hydra three days before Christmas:
In all haste … I implore you in God’s name not to send any more floods of tears in my direction because I’m the last person in the world who can comfort you. Try to understand and accept once and for all that there can never be an absolute relationship between us — and it is an absolute relationship I want to have, or no relationship at all. I know how much pain you’re in, and it’s tearing at me because I could assuage that pain of yours — for a little while. And then it would be more of the same. So stop. Stop! Stop!
Soon I won’t have any other recourse to lessen your pain than to give you a hard slap.
I think of Little Axel, and in general I think a lot, but who am I to air all these feelings? Take my silence for what it is. I’m sitting here on an island, and I feel helplessly alone, and everything that means anything to me is spread to the four winds. The book is worthless in its current form. I’ve put it aside and am reading night and day. Haven’t heard anything from Groth, but it’s not his responsibility to write the book. I’m very low, not a good state in which to write letters. I’m writing this because you should know that I’m still alive and that I’m marking Christmas in my own way. I can’t write more, for whatever I say or write will be hurtful, or if it isn’t hurtful would be just a temporary anaesthetic, and I refuse to look upon you as a patient. Liberate yourself from all this, Marianne. Live from your own centre and find yourself a man who does the same. We’ll talk when I come to Norway. If this letter seems harsh you know why. I’m sitting in a rat trap and can’t do more than snarl.43
On Christmas Eve, three days after Axel had composed his letter to Marianne, Leonard sat before his green typewriter in Montreal and did the same. The tone was completely different:
December 24, 1960
Montreal, Canada
… Tonight Montreal is very still under the snow. The trees outside my window are black. The wind has blown the snow from their limbs. Down the street, in a basement of one of the great Victorian houses, I think Jesus is about to be born. No one will ever know except a few gentle animals, a couple of donkeys and a cow, which are wandering towards us on the Laurentian highway.
… I think we will see each other soon. I don’t like an ocean between us.…
There are a lot of possibilities. I have applied to the government for another grant. There is a good chance that I’ll get it. Also, and this is more important, Irving Layton and I are working very hard on a series of television scripts. We’re both overjoyed with the progress we’re making. He comes down here every day and we write like mad.
Our collaboration is perfect. We want to turn the medium into a real art form. If we begin selling them, and I think we will, there will be a lot of money. And once we make our contacts we can write the plays anywhere. We’ll all go to Spain or Greece and set up a little writing factory. We both have excellent reasons for making the venture a success. He lost his teaching job because of his revolutionary ideas and I need money to cross the ocean.
… When my poems come out in March I will probably go on a reading tour across the country. Maybe you could come with me. Television plays may be the solution. Irving and I think that with three months of intense work we can make enough to last us at least a year. That gives us nine months for pure poetry. It sounds like a good life.
… Mahalia Jackson is on the record player. I’m right there with her, flying with you in that glory, pulling away the shrouds from the sun, making music out of everything. Send me pictures of you and Barnet [the child]. Say hello to your family. Tell me what you are feeling.
I give you all my love.
Leonard44
A few days later another letter came from Axel, begging Marianne to forgive the heartlessness of his previous letter. He doubted the worth of his manuscript, raged against it and left off work on it. He hadn’t heard a word from Groth and assumed that his publisher didn’t like what he’d seen of the book so far. Axel hoped sincerely that Marianne would rise out of her depression, for the sake of both of them. He concluded the letter by saying that she must stop measuring things by his yardstick and learn to use her own instead.
* * *
In the new year — 1961 �
� Axel’s book Line was made into a film. Movie-goers flocked to see Margarete Robsahm topless as Line and Toralv Maurstad in the role of Jacob. Many had thought that Marianne should have played Line, but Axel hadn’t been pleased with the suggestion.
The film concerns Jacob, a young seaman plagued by bad nerves. Under the advice of a doctor, he’s travelled back to Norway to clear things up with his father, whose tyranny is at the root of Jacob’s mental state as well as his mother’s psychiatric condition. Back home, Jacob runs into Line, with whom he had fallen deeply in love before going to sea. They embark upon a love affair, which is impeded by parents and previous lovers. The film raised questions about the degrees to which environment and heredity determine choices made in adulthood. Marianne recognized herself and Axel in the dramatization of Line, which evoked memories and made her feel near to Axel again. She’d witnessed the entire writing process on Hydra, had read the manuscript and marked her red dots in the margins, had carried the sheaf of papers under her arm up as she walked up the narrow steps to the second floor, where Axel hammered out new pages on the typewriter.
The film received mixed reviews but was chosen to compete for the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
* * *
It was January 1961 and Marianne was still without work. She hadn’t heard from Leonard since the letter she’d received after Christmas. Axel hadn’t seen his son in half a year; all told, he hadn’t spent more than a couple of weeks in the company of his child. As the little boy’s first birthday approached, another letter from Hydra landed in the mailbox. Marianne had hoped that Axel would come home for the christening on the 19th of February, but when she read the letter she realized this wasn’t going to happen: Axel said he wasn’t coming to Oslo after all. Patricia was expected on Hydra at the end of February, if her lungs didn’t collapse after the last operation. He’d finished writing the first part of the new book, which he was calling Joacim. But his chief reason for writing was to congratulate their son on his birthday. Axel suggested to Marianne that they should give the boy a new name before the baptism. He was afraid that bearing the name Axel would harm the child, that he would always live in the shadow of his name. He proposed Anders. In another letter soon after, Axel wrote:
So Long, Marianne Page 11
