So Long Marianne – Leonard Cohen’s Love Letters to Marianne Ihlen Fetch $876,000

Leonard Cohen was already an up and coming poet in Montreal’s Bohemian cafes when he fled to the Greek isle of Hydra to write in 1960.  He was about to meet his muse, Marianne Ihlen, and half a world away, I was beginning college.  She led him into that love affair of bliss and agony so beautifully rendered in “So Long, Marianne”, and the Sixties slipped into being.  Times and events were about to move right on by his hard-earned Bohemian credentials.

In those days, “Bohemian” meant Beatnik, and its luminaries, such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, were still at the fringes of fame. I was nine years younger than Cohen, and soon letting my studies slip while I spent too much time in college coffeehouses pursuing my own vision of Bohemian life.  The vision Cohen had already tapped into was intellectually rigorous, philosophically existential, and spiritually bleak.  Once trapped in that Bohemian spider web, there was no way out.

In the coffeehouses, we read works like Camus’ “The Stranger” and Sartre’s “No Exit“, watched movies like Truffaut’s “Jules and Jim” (a tale of tortured lovers), and showed up for guitar players who strummed Pete Seeger songs like “Kumbaya” and “We Shall Overcome”.  Cohen eventually pens a song titled “The Stranger”; like Truffaut’s Jim, he beds Marianne after getting her husband to bless his pursuit of her; and artistically, he never finds the way out of emotional solitude, all the time, strumming a guitar.

Cohen’s early Sixties would repel today’s youth. It is a time in which Adele Davis has already published the seminal Eat Right to Keep Fit,  but healthy eating is derided on TV as a kooky Southern California fad.  Rachel Carson has raised environmental alarms with Silent Spring but DDT is still a wonder drug for farmers.  In the early Sixties, women are still going to college to get “Mrs.” degrees,  and equality is gaining a cynical pseudonym – White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP).

I immersed myself, for a while, in the Bohemian world in the early Sixties, but Cohen, already at home there, stayed a lifetime. Our coffeehouse chatter was about Appearance (distained) vs. Reality (to be sought out), about Hypocrisy (the elder generation) vs. Sincerity (our most fervent value).  For youth of the early Sixties, the existential angst of the Bohemians was about to give way to activism.  There was an exit.  But not for Cohen’s creative genius.

As Cohen honed his Bohemian-fueled writing skills in Hydra and Montreal, I was leaving behind coffeehouse chatter, joining campus efforts supporting Martin Luther King’s civil rights causes and lining up with early protesters against America’s creeping engagement in Vietnam. I was hardly alone. The Sixties were about to explode.  Activism was a way out of “waiting for Godot”, but creatively, Cohen was locked into the Beatniks’ beautiful loser aesthetic.

By the time the aesthetically-estranged “Songs of Leonard Cohen” and “So Long, Marianne” were released, I was deep in Africa, doing volunteer work in a remote Ethiopian village. When his equally bleak “Songs from a Room” brought us the anguished “Bird on a Wire”, I was engaged in eyeball-to-eyeball opposition to the war in Vietnam. I recognized immediately the Bohemian pain in Cohen’s narrations, and I wore out the grooves on both albums, but I was philosophically elsewhere, on the journey out of existential hell depicted in novels like A Lesion of Dissent or films like Bill Murray’s Groundhog’s Day.

I didn’t know Leonard Cohen, and am not particularly familiar with his personal life. I know him through the beautifully penned poetry of his songs, especially his early albums. What I recognize in that poetry is an acute sensitivity to the Bohemian mindset of the late Fifties and early Sixties. I dipped my toe in those creative waters and moved on. He stayed, an intelligent observer of the human condition, and made exquisite music. So long, Marianne. So long, Leonard. Thank you.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this vignette about Leonard Cohen’s times and travels in the early Sixties. There’s more adventure to be had in my full length novel A Lesion of Dissent, just a click away at either Amazon or Smashwords.

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Click to buy –  “A Lesion of Dissent”, Smashwords Edition: “Annette Monclere at Cabaret Khartoum”,