Dear Marianne,
Sooner or later there had to come a letter from your hand. And that the letter comes a hair’s breadth from the point that you characterize as “down to the last cent” doesn’t confuse me. Now, no bad memories. Just this: The money for Axel Joachim has not in any way been forgotten but has been taken good care of. It’s hopeless to discuss this via letters, but it disappoints me not a little that I have not heard a word from you about how the boy is doing, yes, it makes me so furious that I decided to put the money into a special account until I got a sign of life from you.
Now I’ve received a sign of life. You are in Paris. You want to put Little Axel in a private school. It’s impossible for me to take a position on this on the spot, but the 200 kroner we’ve agreed to for the boy still stands, of course.62
For a month Marianne trod the broad wooden steps that wound elegantly up to Madeleine’s apartment in the Latin Quarter. She missed Axel Joachim, she missed Leonard. Through the high narrow windows in the living room she looked over at the neighbour’s and beyond to the Seine, flowing at its stately pace. But she was unable enjoy Paris and she couldn’t think about attempting a new modelling assignment after that initial debacle. Without a grasp of French, it would be almost futile for her to seek other kinds of employment.
* * *
The October wind rustled in the trees along the river and the colourful leaves danced weightlessly down to the sidewalks. Marianne had been wandering around Paris for hours. The old ring she habitually wore had been irritating her all day. When she was together with Axel she’d inherited a piece of jewellery with an oval golden-yellow topaz from her father’s mother. Marianne had Axel’s cousin, who was a goldsmith, turn the old-fashioned piece into a large ring for her. She wore it often, but for some reason that day it was just a bother. She twisted the ring around her finger until she couldn’t stand it any more and took it off and put it in her bag.
In the evening, her mother called from Oslo to break the news that Marianne’s father’s mother had been hit by a car and had died.
Marianne had tried in vain to find a path toward self-realization in Paris. It was time to go home to Axel Joachim.
Chapter 11
* * *
LONGING AND JEALOUSY
* * *
When Marianne was away from Hydra, Leonard sent cables. “Will you come to Greece now? Love Leonard.” His letters said that it was strange to be on the island without her and to discover how much of the island was Marianne and how much was just stone and sun.
While Marianne was in Norway for the funeral of her paternal grandmother, Leonard, who had been in London and Canada for several months, wrote that he was on his way back to Greece. He missed Marianne and their blind love in which sun-browned bodies spoke their wordless language.63
Leonard reckoned he’d been poorly paid for the novel that he’d spent two years writing, and wanted to go back to Hydra. He sent a complaining letter to a friend in Canada. London depressed him, he said. He was going to Hydra to be with a Norwegian woman and her child — he would “become a husband and father in one fell swoop.”64 He couldn’t afford to live anywhere else than Hydra, he said, yet being on the island isolated him from his cultural background and modern currents.
* * *
Marianne loved living on Hydra. She was at home there and felt she was at her best there. In Oslo, without a social network, she was adrift. She knew everyone on Hydra and after all these years she felt almost like an Hydriot. She enjoyed looking after the home she and Leonard had together brought into being and she seldom felt lonely. During a cold, dark winter evening she might long to be away from the island, but the rhythm she had established for herself on Hydra gave her pleasure and satisfaction. When Leonard rejoined her on the island, there was no other place else she wished to be. Hydra was their paradise.
They lived as a family again, Leonard the bread-winner, Marianne the mother and housewife, muse and lover. As before, Leonard sat writing in his study or on the terrace, Ray Charles on the portable record player beside him. In the mornings Marianne set a fresh gardenia on his work desk. In the evenings Leonard read poems to her. Marianne nurtured his writing and maintained the structure within which he worked well. There was order and harmony in the house. Leonard later said that it wasn’t just that Marianne was his muse who shined before him; she also realized that it was important to get him to sit down and write.65
Marianne often went swimming with the other women and their children. Axel Joachim was nearly four years of age and spoke Greek, English and Norwegian. During the day he scampered from house to house and played with the other children. When they had visitors in the evening, the little boy leaned out of his second-floor window and listened in on the incomprehensible conversations the adults were carrying on below. When Marianne and Leonard were out, Axel Joachim could call to the babysitter, young Sophia, from his bedroom window. Sometimes he took his plastic potty and announced he was going to spend the night at the neighbours’, where they slept several to a bed.
Marianne and Leonard had gradually created a home together. The view wasn’t grand, by the standards of Hydra, but the large L-shaped house was beautiful. Its numerous small rooms were appointed with furnishings passed on to them by friends. When people were flush they upgraded their furniture and kitchen equipment, as the Johnstons had done before giving Leonard their old kitchen table. Beside the ornate Russian wrought iron bed that Leonard had bought, their bookcase gradually filled with books. Axel Joachim was allowed to draw on the whitewashed walls in his room. His imagination given free reign, Axel Joachim delineated long roads that meandered over the uneven surfaces of the stone walls.
Not a wall in the house was straight. Minute crystals in the lime wash caught the sunlight and reflected back a soft lustre completely different than ordinary paint. When evening fell and the oil lamps were lit, the luminous whitewash made everyone look beautiful.66
Leonard had a knack for nosing out beautiful objects. When he’d been apart from Marianne, he always returned to her bearing small gifts. A pair sewing scissors in the form of a little bird that sliced with its beak. An Yves Saint Laurent pocket mirror edged with tortoiseshell.
Before the old mirror where Leonard and Marianne would stand and behold themselves was a small table crowded with gifts from visitors along with small prizes they’d found themselves: a piece of driftwood, a bit of coloured beach glass, an old iron. “Oh, that’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” a guest would say, holding up one of the treasures. “It’s yours,” Marianne or Leonard typically responded.
New film teams and artists were constantly arriving. Melina Mercouri and her French director husband Jules Dassin filmed scenes for Phaedra in the bay where Marianne and Leonard regularly swam. Mercouri was a big star in Greece, where she was famous as an actress and a singer, and had attained international celebrity with the film Never on Sunday. She would later become Greece’s Minister for Culture.
As Leonard became more widely known, the flow of visitors who came knocking on their door swelled. Marianne played her part as the hostess, while Leonard grew frustrated with the interruptions. They began to withdraw from the social scene at the port. In any case, Marianne couldn’t go out in the evenings without having arranged for a sitter for Axel Joachim. Sometimes Leonard took off on his own. In Marianne’s eyes, Leonard emanated a kind of light that attracted people who came near him. She was keenly aware of the pull that women felt toward him.
* * *
Marianne continued modelling for the artists on Hydra. The French–Canadian painter Marcelle Maltais painted a portrait of Marianne and Axel Joachim that now belongs to the National Museum of Fine Arts in Quebec. Anthony Kingsmill painted her in his tiny home, which comprised a kitchen and another room on the first floor and, reached by narrow stairs, the single room on the second storey that served as his atelier. Marianne posed nude on a cushion as sand driz
zled down on her head from the old sticks and plaster ceiling. Anthony affixed a sheet of paper to his easel, walked right up to Marianne, took some sight measurements with his pencil, retreated to the far end of the room and did a few little dance steps before advancing to his easel and finally putting pencil to paper. Thus he paced forth and back, executing his dainty footwork, as his sketch made slow but sure progress.
Anthony didn’t have two pennies to rub together. The artist survived on advance payments for paintings that were often never completed. He gambled or drank the money away. The painting of Marianne was lost in a poker game. Leonard bought several of his friend’s pieces — some he received, some he didn’t.
Life on the island had become intractable for many. George Johnston, unwell and thin as a rail, still held court at the table at Katsikas’, where everyone bore witness to the intensifying rancour between him and his wife. When George and Charmian were drunk they aired all their dirty laundry and set about wounding each other viciously, mainly with words but on the worst occasions they ended up in physical scrimmages. Marianne was pained watching her friends ruin each other and themselves.
Another marriage to suffer was that between Marianne’s friend Magda and her husband, the proprietors of Lagoudera. Magda’s husband met an Egyptian princess at the Hilton Hotel in Athens and ran off with her. He’d landed in trouble with the police and since he was now out of the reach of the law Magda took the punishment. She was sent to a women’s prison in Athens. When she was released several months later her vibrant red hair had gone grey. Lagoudera’s inventory had been auctioned off; everything Magda had built up was gone.
Marianne saw Magda almost daily after she got out of prison. One day as the two women lay sunning themselves on the big flat rocks by the sea, a figure appeared at the top of the cliff, above them. The man stood there a while before he dived into the sea with the grace of a swallow. After first displaying himself to Magda in this way, the sailor Theodores kept showing up wherever she was. The pair were eventually married and were devoted to each other for many years. Magda — Marianne’s Czech “big sister” — died in the old-age home on Hydra in the autumn of 2005.
VISIT TO NORWAY
When Marianne left for Oslo to visit her family again, Leonard, who’d been in Montreal, followed her. Marianne had borrowed the apartment of a friend who’d fallen in love with a man on Hydra and was staying there a while. The elegant apartment in the western part of Oslo was at her disposal for a couple of months. As soon as Leonard arrived, he jumped into the bathtub to rid himself of the lice he’d picked during the trans-Atlantic passage he’d scrounged on a freighter. There he lay, at regular intervals, applying creams and potions in a desperate attempt to destroy the little beasts.
They went to the Theatre Café and ate lutefisk — dried cod treated with lye and served boiled. Leonard saw Ibsen’s work performed at the National Theatre and they visited family and friends. In the seventh floor apartment, Leonard took in the view over Oslo, listened to the radio and danced by himself when Marianne was out and he couldn’t concentrate on the book he was working on. The scale of Oslo, the buildings and the snow, reminded him of Montreal. Watching Marianne as she leaned out of the window to issue motherly warnings to Axel Joachim, Leonard learned the expression Ikke lek i gaten — Don’t play in the street.
During his stay in Oslo, Leonard wrote to his old friend Irving Layton, in Canada, that Marianne
… seems to have endured and ruined the women I’ve known after her and I’ve got to confront her mystery in the snow. She is so blonde in my heart!…
I’ve been working on my new book but today feel like giving up writing. The air is too sweet for all this working of the mind, the herrings are too tasty. When I am not watching blonde girls I am eating herring and sometimes I do both.67
* * *
Back on Hydra, Leonard embarked on his second novel, Beautiful Losers, in 1964 and entered an intense period of writing. He wrote with great concentration out on the terrace, breaking only for lunch and a siesta in the middle of the day. He described it as an ideal time to set to work:
There was a woman, she had a child, there were meals on the table, order in the upkeep of the house and harmony. It was the perfect moment to start to do some serious work … When there is food on the table, when the candles are lit, when you wash the dishes together and put the child to bed together. That is order, that is spiritual order, there is no other.68
The new book revolved around the figure of the Native American saint, Kateri Tekákwitha,69 also known as Lily of the Mohawks, with whom Leonard was deeply fascinated. Leonard told Marianne that he lay flowers at the little statue of Kateri in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral when he was in New York. Marianne had always loved to listen to stories like these, dreaming herself away as she had done as a girl, reading under the eiderdown or listening to her grandmother’s fairy tales. Leonard usually said little about his work, but he read his poetry to her and he played his guitar for her as they sat alone on the terrace.
JEALOUSY
Leonard often had a need to socialize after a long day at the typewriter, whereas Marianne was housebound until the babysitter came. When he went to the port before she did, she invariably found a beautiful woman sitting beside him when she came down to join him. Marianne was stabbed by jealousy. She observed the dissolution of the relationships around them and was conscious of the fragility of what she and Leonard shared. Hydra nourished art but not marriage, and many came seeking romantic adventures — as she had done.
Marianne often found herself wishing that she could erect a cage around Leonard so she could swallow the key and keep him all to herself. Leonard was attentive, a gentleman with an eye for women. They loved the appreciative way he looked at them and trailed after him. The knowledge that he was living with her — had chosen her — should have kept Marianne’s head high, but she couldn’t help feeling small and insecure every time she saw women flocking around him.
When a beautiful young American came to Hydra, Leonard disappeared for an entire day as the two of them went up the mountain together. Everything imaginable flooded Marianne’s mind. She curled up in a ball on the floor and thought that she wanted to die, while she constructed an imaginary coffin around herself. People who came in assumed she was sleeping and stole out again. She lay like that all day, without communicating with anyone, engulfed by her own morbid fantasy, which was as vivid as any of her girldhood daydreams. She awoke the next morning and regarded her own deadened gaze in the mirror. But Leonard had come home and she could breathe again.
* * *
Leonard left more often, crossing the Atlantic to add to his bank account and to accrue inspiration for his work. Fewer ideas came to him on Hydra and travelling stimulated him. His collection of poems Flowers for Hitler came out in 1964. Leonard dedicated the book “To Marianne.”
Now in great demand in Canada, Leonard steadily received invitations to read his poetry around the country. The directors Donald Brittain and Don Owen began work on their documentary Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen. Filming took place during poetry readings in Montreal and at the house on Hydra, where the camera zoomed in on the strip of little black and white photographs of Marianne in Paris that hung by the writing desk in Leonard’s sparsely furnished study.
Marianne waited in the whitewashed house while Leonard boosted his life and his writing elsewhere in Europe and in North America. She found it harder to be alone on Hydra while Leonard was away. They seldom had the means for both of them to travel, and besides, travelling was something Leonard preferred to do on his own. Difficulties that were easily resolved when they were together became impenetrable when an ocean lay between them. Their relationship began to crack as the external pressures mounted.
* * *
Leonard: Our relationship was not secure. She’d go back to Norway, I to Canada to try to make some money. We were young, and both of us interest
ed in all kinds of experience, so there was something fragile about the relationship. I was hungry for experience as any young writer is, and every young person. I wanted many women, many kinds of experiences, many countries, many climates, many love affairs. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was natural for me then to see life as some kind of buffet where there was a lot of different tastes. I’d get tired of something and then move on to something else, never terribly happy doing it, leaving one thing for the next because the thing I had didn’t work, whether it was the woman or the poem or the city or whatever it was — it wasn’t working. Until I understood that nothing works. But that took me a lifetime to understand that nothing works and to accept that.70
I have a sense that I was privileged. The sunlight, the woman, the child, the table, the work, the gardenia, the order, the mutual respect and honour that we gave to each other. That’s what really matters. I know there were all kinds of problems. We were kids, and we lived in a period during which the old forms were overthrown. We wanted to overthrow the forms that had been given to us but at the same time maintain things that seemed to be nourishing.71
Those relationships on Hydra were all doomed. We didn’t know it at the time, but they couldn’t withstand what life imposed on us. Those relationships that were formed idealistically or sexually or romantically couldn’t survive the challenges that ordinary lives would confront them with. None of those relationships survived, except in the sense that we honour them and we recognize the nourishment of those experiences.72
So Long, Marianne Page 15
