Various Positions by Ira B. Nadel Read Free Book Online Page B

all three band members had buckskin jackets, Cohen having inherited his from his father. The Buckskin Boys performed at square dances, in high schools, and in church basements, playing pop and country favorites. The group survivedthrough the McGill years, and Cohen discovered that he liked to perform, although he admitted to being nervous on stage. Something of an instrumentalist at this time, he played backstage guitar for the dramatic society’s production of
Twelfth Night
.
    Walking along Sherbrooke Street late one afternoon in the fall of 1954, Cohen came upon a group of students celebrating a victory of the McGill football team. They were rocking several buses and the police had been summoned. While he was watching, Cohen was shoved by a policeman and told to move along. Cohen tried to explain that he was only watching, but the policeman grabbed Cohen’s shoulder and told him to move. Cohen knocked the policeman’s hand away and received an unexpected rabbit punch on the back of his neck. He regained consciousness in the “Black Maria,” the police wagon, and was driven to station Number 10, charged, and released.
    Several days later, Cohen appeared in juvenile court with a lawyer, his mother, and his sister. The charges included refusing to circulate, disturbing the peace, obstructing justice, blocking a public path, and resisting arrest. When they were read, Cohen’s sister broke into hysterical laughter and had to be escorted from the court. Cohen received a suspended sentence. Several years later the episode resurfaced when Cohen applied for a job as a Pinkerton detective. He wasn’t granted a second interview because Pinkerton’s discovered that he had been charged with a criminal offense and had failed to note it on his application. He also applied for a position with the Hong Kong police force, which was advertising in the Montreal English language papers (only apparent requirement: a college degree). In 1957, he wrote to the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs inquiring about teaching jobs. They replied that jobs were scarce and thanked him for his inquiry.
    Cohen’s career interests vacillated widely during his university years, from law, to teaching, to police work. But three influential teachers, all writers, galvanized him: Louis Dudek, a poet/critic; Hugh MacLennan, a novelist; and F.R. Scott, a constitutional lawyer who was also a writer. Later, Cohen encountered a fourth literary mentor, Irving Layton, who became the most important. In the fall of 1954 Cohen took Dudek’s poetry course which focused on the modernists, including Ezra Pound, with whom Dudek was corresponding.
    Born in the east end of Montreal of Polish immigrant parents, Dudek was a poet and critic who held a Ph.D in literature from Columbia University. In the first weeks of the modern poetry course, Cohen showed Dudek some of his writing, which Dudek thought had little value. Two weeks later, Cohen offered more of his work and this time Dudek spotted “The Sparrows,” a five-stanza poem with an elaborate metaphoric scheme. Dudek responded at once: as they walked down a corridor of the arts faculty building discussing the poem, he suddenly stopped and commanded Cohen to kneel. With the manuscript, he knighted him “poet” and bade him rise and join the as-yet-undefined ranks of Canadian poets. Continuity had been established, tradition enacted, and acceptance granted. “The Sparrows” went on to win the 1954 Literary Contest sponsored by the
McGill Daily
which printed the poem on the front page of its December 7 issue.
    Cohen’s first published works, “An Halloween Poem to Delight my Younger Friends,” and “Poem en Prose,” appeared in
CIV/n
, a literary magazine started in January 1953 with two hundred and fifty mimeographed copies. Initiated by four recent university graduates, led by Aileen Collins (later to marry Dudek), with Dudek and Layton joining as editorial advisers, it derived its unusual title from Ezra Pound’s