Various Positions by Ira B. Nadel Page B

figurative painters, unusual in Montreal at the time, when the abstract expressionism of Riopelle and others was in vogue. They were the first to show the work of Louise Scott, and they also showed the works of Betty Sutherland, Layton’s wife, and of Vera Frenkel. A fire, however, destroyed a good many of these works, and because of a technicality there was no insurance coverage. Yet Cohen found the gallery an exhuberant, magical space, as the opening of “Last Dance At the Four Penny” makes clear:
    Layton, when we dance our freilach
    under the ghostly handkerchief,
    the miracle rabbis of Prague and Vilna
    resume their sawdust thrones,
    and angels and men, asleep so long
    in the cold palaces of disbelief,
    gather in sausage-hung kitchens
    to quarrel deliciously and debate
    the sounds of the Ineffable Name.
    Cohen was also working on various pieces of fiction at this time, including an unusual short story about his now senile grandfather, Rabbi Klein. The impact of the elderly Rabbi’s illness led Cohen to write an unpublished short story entitled “A Hundred Suits from Russia.” A grandfather, living with his daughter’s family, accuses his daughter of stealing his suits. The grandson, unable to face the shouting and madness because he can’t write, prepares to leave.“Work,” his mother mocks, “fine work. In his room all day listening to records. A poet? A deserter.” The grandfather becomes incontinent, and the son tells his mother that the grandfather is not a great Talmudist but senile and must go to a home. One evening the son hears the grandfather sing the most beautiful song. His mother announces that the grandfather has agreed to be quiet so that the son can write and that “one day you would be a great writer and that all the world would know. He [also] said that people would come from miles to hear you speak.” The story ends with the grandfather banging his fist on a table for each syllable as he shouts, “One hundred suits from Russia!”
    In this early effort, Cohen expresses his frustration with his grandfather’s deterioration, a man he adored and recognized as the catalyst for much of his writing. This attachment to the man continued with Cohen’s unpublished novel,
A Ballet of Lepers
. The book begins, “My grandfather came to live with me. There was nowhere else for him to go. What had happened to all his children? Death, decay, exile—I hardly know.”
    The ninety-one-page typescript of
A Ballet of Lepers
tells the story of a thirty-five-year-old sales clerk who takes in his elderly grandfather. They live in a cramped Stanley Street rooming house. The grandfather is given to fits of violence, and the narrator (who remains unnamed) findsan awakening violence within himself. When the narrator discovers a baggage clerk masturbating in a train station washroom, he begins slapping him, reveling in his power: “Defeated he stood before me. I hated him because he would not resist me. I loved him because he was my victim. I slapped him again. He put a freckled chubby hand against his cheek.” As the narrator escapes to the street, he concludes that “each of us had his secret art. I embraced the noon-time throngs with a smile.” The portrait of the grandfather reflects the difficulties that Cohen faced with his own senile grandfather, although without the degree of violence. Cohen still remembers his grandfather’s words to him when he would visit him in the rest home: “Flee from this place, flee from this place!”
    A Ballet of Lepers
was Cohen’s first extended work of fiction, completed in July 1957. He sent the manuscript out to Pocketbooks and to Ace Publications, but both rejected it. In a 1990 interview, Cohen remembers the writing process: “I had a clock on my desk, and I forced myself to write a certain number of hours every day and I watched this clock. It had no glass on it and I always thought I could just move the hand with my finger. I remember writing on the face of the