8 saturday review 1GR Saturday November 14 2020 | the times

was playing her beauty, or maybe she was

so brilliant at it that no one saw.

I remember we had to catch the boat

back to Hydra, and we got a taxi, and I’ve

never forgotten this. Nothing happened,

just sitting in the back of the taxi with

Marianne, I lit a cigarette, a Greek

cigarette that had that delicious deep

flavour of a Greek cigarette, that has a

lot of Turkish tobacco in it, and I’m

thinking, I’m an adult. You know. I have a

life of my own, I’m with this beautiful

woman, we have a little money in our

pocket, we’re going back to Hydra, we’re

passing these painted walls. That feeling

— I think I’ve tried to re-create it

hundreds of times, unsuccessfully. Just

that feeling of being grown up, with

somebody beautiful that you’re happy

to be beside and all the world is in front

of you.

B

etween 1960 and 1967,

the Canadian singer-

songwriter and poet Leon-

ard Cohen lived in the

artists’ colony on the Greek

island of Hydra. His debut

album Songs of Leonard

Cohen was released in 1967, inspired by his

time spent with the married writers George

Johnston and Charmian Clift and his Nor-

wegian muse, Marianne Ihlen, for whom he

wrote So Long, Marianne.

Whatever you saw, whatever you felt,

whatever you held, was beautiful, and

when you picked up a cup you knew by the

way that it fitted into your hand that it was

the cup that you always had been looking

for. And the table that you sat at, that was

the table that you wanted to lean on, and

the wine, that was ten cents a gallon, was

the wine that you wanted to drink, the

price you wanted to pay. The people that I

bumped into, both the Greek and the

foreigner, had the feeling of the people that

I was meant to be with. This is the place

where I was meant to be.

It was a very free and happy and

disciplined life at the same time. There’d

be a little table in the port where we were

centred around... the Johnstons

[Charmian Clift and George Johnston put

Leonard up in their spare room on the

Greek island of Hydra]. And there were

wonderful conversations, a lot of drinking,

a lot of abandon and dancing and drunk-

enness. Everyone was looking for some

kind of amorous opportunity, of course,

people paired off and split up and paired

off again — that kind of very exciting,

sometimes painful activity... One felt very

free. And foreigners were tolerated, some-

how. In fact, we seemed to be their enter-

tainment.

I remember seeing Marianne [Marianne

Ihlen, Cohen’s Norwegian muse and

girlfriend in the 1960s] several times

before she saw me. I saw her with Axel

[Jensen, Marianne’s writer husband] and

with the baby [Axel Jr], and thinking

“What a beautiful holy trinity they are.”

They were all blond and beautiful and

suntanned.

She was an old-fashioned girl, and I

come from an old-fashioned background

book extract

Marianne and me:

Leonard Cohen in

his own words

In an extract from

a new book, Untold

Stories — featuring

tales from the singer

and his friends —

Cohen recalls his

love affair on Hydra

on hydra Marianne Ihlen with her husband, Axel Jensen,

in 1958. Top: Leonard Cohen with Marianne on the Greek island

in 1960. Main: Cohen in the same year, with Charmian Clift

myself, so the things that I took for granted

with Marianne, and she perhaps took with

me, a certain kind of courtesy and

behaviour and ritual... There was always a

gardenia on my desk where I’d work.

There was such a sense of order and gener-

osity that she had.

There wasn’t a man that wasn’t interest-

ed in Marianne. It wasn’t just that she was

a traditional Nordic beauty — that was

indisputable — but she was also very kind,

and one of the most modest people about

her beauty. There was no sense that she

‘There wasn’t a man

who wasn’t interested

in Marianne. She was

beautiful and kind’