![]() Hydra promised the life Cohen had craved: spare rooms, the empty page, eros after dark. Eventually, he bought a whitewashed house of his own, for fifteen hundred dollars, thanks to an inheritance from his grandmother. Cohen rented a place for fourteen dollars a month. Mules humped water up the long stairways to the houses. There was something mythical and primitive about Hydra. With the chill barely out of his bones, Cohen took in the horseshoe-shaped harbor and the people drinking cold glasses of retsina and eating grilled fish in the cafés by the water he looked up at the pines and the cypress trees and the whitewashed houses that crept up the hillsides. Not long afterward, he alighted in Athens, visited the Acropolis, made his way to the port of Piraeus, boarded a ferry, and disembarked at the island of Hydra. ![]() The teller said that he had just returned from a trip to Greece. After weeks of cold and rain, he wandered into a bank and asked the teller about his deep suntan. An English dentist had just yanked one of his wisdom teeth. In a letter to his publisher, he said that he was out to reach “inner-directed adolescents, lovers in all degrees of anguish, disappointed Platonists, pornography-peepers, hair-handed monks and Popists.”Ĭohen was growing weary of London’s rising damp and its gray skies. Even before he had much of an audience, he had a distinct idea of the audience he wanted. He was a bohemian with a cushion whose first purchases in London were an Olivetti typewriter and a blue raincoat at Burberry. Cohen, whose family was both prominent and cultivated, had an ironical view of himself. In those days, he was a Jamesian Jew, the provincial abroad, a refugee from the Montreal literary scene. This was 1960, long before he played the festival at the Isle of Wight in front of six hundred thousand people. He got by on a three-thousand-dollar grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. When Leonard Cohen was twenty-five, he was living in London, sitting in cold rooms writing sad poems. Photograph by Graeme Mitchell for The New Yorker Leonard Cohen at home in Los Angeles in September, 2016. ![]()
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