Various Positions by Ira B. Nadel Page A

glamourous.”
    Cohen still expresses affection for Anne Sherman, and as with virtually all of his women, he maintained good relations with her after their association ended. Cohen’s lovers have tended to remain his friends, the result of a continued respect, universal graciousness and carefullyorchestrated breakups. And with the exception of
Book of Mercy
, which originated in the rediscovery of a spiritual self at fifty, all of Cohen’s books are in response to women he has known.
    For many years after, Anne Sherman remained in his mind as the image of beauty and love, as a letter to her from the winter of 1961 illustrates. Written from Montreal in a seriocomic style, he asks her to join him:
    Let’s run away to Lachine. Let’s hide out in Snowdon. Let’s go native in Ottawa. Let’s meet in Central Station and kiss shamelessly in front of all the trains.
    I want to go back to Westmount with you and live on the polished floors of my father’s house. I want you beside me when I wear a gold chain and am stoned by the workers. I want your dignity for my scorn.
    I will send you flowers when I get some money. You are so beautiful I can be foolish.
    I wish you good appetite, peaceful sleep, Happy Easter, easy Lent, hello, sunny weather, new poems, intelligent tv. Be noble, cold, wild.
    I urge you to join me in my celebrations.
    By the summer of 1957, Cohen was back in Montreal. He had enjoyed the beat culture of New York, but he realized that he would always be an outsider; his roots were in Montreal. As he later explained to an officer of the Canada Council, “Don’t worry about me becoming an expatriate. I could never stay away from Montreal. I am a Citizen of Mountain Street.” During this time, he worked intermittently at Cuthbert & Co., his uncle’s foundry, as a lathe operator, brass die-casting machine operator, and a time-and-motion study assistant. He was faced with a dilemma: would he join his uncles at the Freedman Company, settling down to a life of respectability and responsibility, or would he pursue his creative interests and commit himself to his art? He was plagued with the same ambivalence he had faced at McGill. The poem “Priests 1957” describes his situation and suggests a course of action. The work points to the unhappiness of his uncles and their stunted imaginations, the incompleteness of his father’s life as measured by the unread books heowned, and the general unhappiness of his cousins. At the end of the poem he expresses his sense of ironic disappointment: “Must we find all work prosaic / because our grandfather built an early synagogue?”
    By the next year, while Cohen was living in Montreal, he worked at the Freedman Company hanging coats, and then as a bundle boy (one who carries bundles of material from one stage of production to another). Layton comically described Cohen’s switch from art to manufacturing:
    Now Leonard Cohen has decided to bemuse all our wits by entering the family business, the making of suits for unpoetic characters across the land to buy and wear. Our great lyricist is now a shipping clerk, penning odes to wrapping-paper and string. A handsome way of living brought him to this pass, debt. He puts a good face on the whole affair and mutters something through his strong clenched teeth. If you put your ear close enough you’ll make out the words “discipline,” “good for my character,” and many other sub edifying sounds. May the gods, kind to the erratic ways of poets, be merciful to the three [Dudek, Layton, and Cohen] of us.
    Eleven days later, the critic Desmond Pacey responded to Layton’s lament: “What will become of Montreal’s bohemia now that all of its leaders are becoming tame and respectable?”
    Cohen, along with Mort Rosengarten and Lenore Schwartzman, also ran the Four Penny Art Gallery. It was located in a boarding house on Stanley Street, and for effect they painted every picture frame a different color. They exhibited the work of