Leonard Cohen re-invented himself as a singer-songwriter at the age of thirty-two because he couldn't make a living as a poet and novelist in Canada without either (a) turning into a hip Adrienne Clarkson impersonator at the CBC or (b) finding himself a niche somewhere in the academic hierarchy and becoming an Ur-Ondaatje. Instead, he borrowed money and headed off to Nashville with his guitar. He got as far as New York's Chelsea Hotel. In retrospect, the make over of Leonard Cohen the writer into Leonard Cohen the singer seems inevitable. At the time, it was anything but a sure bet. He had a singing voice even Bob Dylan fans disliked, he was an indifferent guitar player with a five chord repertoire, he was a decade older than anyone else who was hip and too bourgeois to be beatnik, he'd never played with professional musicians and was so heavily into tranquillizers that he'd picked up the nickname Captain Mandrax. In 1969, Songs of Leonard Cohen sounded so wasted and wounded, so used-up, nobody I knew could listen to the album straight through.
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In April 1959, when he was twenty-four, Leonard Cohen was awarded a Canada Council grant of $2000. He used the money to live cheaply in London and even more cheaply on Hydra while drafting the novel he called Beauty At Close Quarters. He returned to Canada in November 1960 and secured another Canada Council grant and a rejection slip from McClelland & Stewart. Jack McClelland objected to Cohen writing prose in the first place, found his novel tedious, egotistical, disgusting and morbid in its sex, worried about its autobiographical content and suggested radical revisions without guaranteeing publication.
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Cohen's gloom had more than one cause. Jack McClelland did take his next poetry book but gave the poet a lot of grief. McClelland insisted on changing the title from Opium and Hitler to Flowers for Hitler, dropping its dedication to "The Dachau Generation", proposing a cover which featured a drawing of a nude female with Cohen's face for tits before grudgingly accepting a compromise cover featuring elements from six different ones Cohen had designed. Then McClelland published it with a back cover blurb (taken from a letter) that was used against Cohen's express wish. When Cohen remonstrated that "It was very important that a Jew's book about Hitler be free from arrogant personal promotion...",