Various Positions by Ira B. Nadel Read Free Book Online

on his family’s business, Cohen never seriously considered joining his uncles’ businesses, although he was occasionally pressured to do so.
    Cohen did not so much rebel against his Westmount life as follow an alternative path. He felt that his family, for all its prominence, lacked an ideology or dogma:
    life was purely made up of domestic habits and affiliations with the community. Aside from that, there were no pressures on the individual. I never knew of rebellions or conflicts because there was nothing to rebel against. I didn’t have anything to renounce my family for. Because in a sense nothing was solid. I have no urge to struggle with this world, to take a position.
    Freda Guttman recalls that Masha was obsessed with Cohen’s well-being and frequently tried to make him feel guilty for being too independent. Proud of her cooking, she would often get up when Cohen came home at 2:00 a.m. with friends and cook for them. But Masha was prone to depression, the likely source of Cohen’s own depressive states, and could be imperious. She once ordered Cohen not to leave the house with a cold: “I’ve nursed you back from the brink of the grave and
this
is how you treat me?” Guttman remembers her shouting. She and Cohen laughed at his mother’s outbursts because this was how they expected a “Jewish mother” to act. Cohen defended himself with his wit and the secure knowledge that Masha loved him.
    His friend Nancy Bacal, whom he first met in high school, said Cohen was “always feeling like his own person;” unlike others, he had a sense of direction, perceived by some as the need for control. But he also developed some unusual habits, one of them an obsession with his weight. His mother constantly pushed food on him and Cohen rebelled. “He seemed like a woman with food,” Guttman said. Although he lovedsweets, she recalls that he once refused to enter a Greek pastry shop in Montreal, as if the mere sight of any pastry would make him fat.
    In his last year of high school, life became more complicated for Cohen. He chose to go on to McGill, the expected step for the Jewish middle-class youth of Westmount. But he felt the tensions between a bourgeois life defined by Westmount expectations and the emerging demands of an artist. Nancy Bacal explained that he was the only one she knew who could “contain and survive elements of pain in the dark. He was in touch with matters of the soul and heart.” He would eventually resolve these tensions, drawing from the best of each world. But in university, the two sides of his personality began to clash.

2
LIFE IN A GOLDEN COFFIN
        L EONARD COHEN entered McGill University on September 21, 1951, his seventeenth birthday, and graduated on October 6, 1955, shortly after his twenty-first. Academically, his university career was undistinguished but he continued the extracurricular zeal of high school, becoming president of both the Debating Society and of his fraternity, ZBT. Initially, Cohen embodied the Westmount Jew destined for professional success, fulfilling a Westmount creed: “If you did things right, you would have all the riches life had to offer.” But during his years at McGill, sporadically attending lectures, reading in the Gothic Redpath Library, writing poetry, Cohen distanced himself fromthat creed.
    McGill was and still is the premier English-speaking university in Quebec. Situated on Sherbrooke Street in the center of Montreal, itcommanded both an important social and physical position. It was the training ground for leading professionals, businessmen, doctors, economists, and professors, reflecting the interests of McGill’s founder, the merchant and fur trader James McGill. Writers, artists, and musicians were of secondary importance. Stephen Leacock, humorist and writer, justified his attachment to McGill as an economist, not as an author. In the early fifties, McGill still maintained a careful eye on the number of Jews it admitted.
    Cohen’s