In late July of 2016,
Marianne Ihlen lay dying in her bed in Oslo. Fifty-six years before, in March
1960, she had first met the little-known poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen on
the Greek island of Hydra, and went on to be immortalised in his poetry, on one
of his album covers, and in one of his most beautiful love songs. Now, though,
the 81-year-old was in the last throes of her battle against leukaemia.
When he learned that his
former lover and muse was so ill, Cohen was moved to write her a letter. ‘Well
Marianne, it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are
falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon,’ he wrote. ‘Know that I
am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach
mine.
‘And you know that I’ve
always loved you for your beauty and for your wisdom, but I don’t need to say
anything more about that because you know all about that. But now, I just want
to wish you a very good journey. Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down
the road.’ A little over three months later, Cohen himself died, with leukaemia
being cited as a contributory cause.
Cohen’s letter was a deeply
heartfelt response to their shared history, which began after he first saw her
walking on the island with her husband, the Norwegian novelist Axel Jensen.
Cohen had recently left London for the island that provided a sanctuary for
artists, international bohemians and travellers. As he later commented, ‘I had
no idea that I would spend the next decade with this man’s wife.’
When the part-time model
became estranged from her husband, Cohen spotted her while she was shopping on
Hydra and invited her to join him and his friends at a table. She accepted, and
years later recalled that ‘though I loved him from the moment we met’, their
relationship unfolded and developed like ‘a beautiful, slow movie’.
Cohen was transfixed, and
in November 1960 he presented Ihlen with a first edition of Let Us Compare
Mythologies. In this, his first book of poems, Cohen experimented with styles,
and explored Judaeo-Christian imagery, philosophy, sexuality, death, and a
world of violent contrasts — themes that would go on to define his literary and
musical careers. He inscribed the book: ‘For Marianne / with my love /
Leonard’.
Before long Cohen, Ihlen
and Axel, her young son by Jensen, moved into a small house together on the
island. He worked on his poetry and novels by day and played his guitar or
watched Marianne dance by night. When she finally decided to end her marriage
to Jensen, Cohen drove her the 2,000 miles to Oslo to sign the divorce papers.
After returning from Oslo,
Cohen gave her a small silver Cartier mirror, telling her that he’d never seen
a human face that had given him such joy. ‘One never got the sense that she
played on her looks,’ he said of her. ‘It was as if she wasn’t aware of how
good she looked.’ Cohen also gave her his debating keyring from McGill
University, which he attended in the 1950s.
In 1961 Cohen was forced to
return to his native Canada ahead of the publication of The Spice-Box of Earth,
his second collection of poems. While there, he sent his lover a telegram:
‘Have a flat. All I need is my woman and her child.’ He also sent her a copy of
the book, inscribed ‘To Marianne / with all my love / Leonard / June 8 1961 /
Montreal’. Marianne promptly flew to Canada with Axel.
Cohen dedicated his next
book of poetry, Flowers to Hitler (1964), to Ihlen and soon after wrote his
second and final novel, Beautiful Losers, amid hallucinatory bouts of fasting
and amphetamine-taking. He couldn’t get the book published in Britain, however,
because its vivid descriptions of sex, homosexuality and bisexuality were
considered too obscene. ‘They didn’t realise that I wasn’t turning people on to
sex but putting it down,’ he remarked.
By the mid 1960s, though,
Cohen was beginning to despair of ever making it as a writer and decided
instead to try his hand at being a singer-songwriter. Marianne remained his
muse, and was the inspiration for his elegiac hit record So Long, Marianne,
taken from his 1967 debut album, Songs of Leonard Cohen.
Two years later, she
appeared on the back cover of its follow-up, Songs from a Room, photographed
hunched over a typewriter at their house on Hydra. The album featured the Cohen
classic Bird on a Wire, which Ihlen had encouraged him to write after spotting
birds on the electricity wires outside the house.
The success of his music
saw Cohen spend more and more time in London and New York. By the time Marianne
decided to take Axel and try living with him in the States, it was too late.
Cohen had become part of the city’s artistic demi-monde, partying with Janis
Joplin and Joni Mitchell at the Chelsea Hotel and hanging out with Andy
Warhol’s crowd at The Factory.
The couple eventually
drifted apart, and Ihlen moved back to Hydra. ‘I wanted many women, many kinds
of experiences, many countries, many climates, many love affairs,’ Cohen
explained years later.
Cohen is reported to have
supported Marianne Ihlen and her son for years after their split, and the
letter he wrote to her decades later, as she lay on her deathbed, is proof of
his deep well of love for her. It was ‘the most beautiful woman’, as he
described her, who had given him the space, the encouragement and the stability
he needed to write the works that set him on the road to international fame and
stardom.
https://www.christies.com/features/Leonard-Cohen-and-his-greatest-muse-9305-1.aspx?sc_lang=en&cid=EM_EMLcontent04144A42A_1&cid=DM209004&bid=143674561#FID-9305
So Long Marianne by Leonard Cohen
The song was inspired by Marianne Jensen (later Marianne Ihlen),
whom Cohen met on the Greek island of Hydra in 1960.
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