She had married Jensen, and they had a son, little Axel. Her grandmother used to tell her, “You are going to meet a man who speaks with a tongue of gold.” She thought she already had: Axel Jensen, a novelist from home, who wrote in the tradition of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. Her name was Marianne Ihlen, and she had grown up in the countryside near Oslo. Here and there, Cohen caught glimpses of a beautiful Norwegian woman. “Generally, I ended up with a bad hangover.” “I took trip after trip, sitting on my terrace in Greece, waiting to see God,” he said years later. There were drugs to expand it: pot, speed, acid. There were days of fasting to concentrate the mind. He collected a few paraffin lamps and some used furniture: a Russian wrought-iron bed, a writing table, chairs like “the chairs that van Gogh painted.” During the day, he worked on a sexy, phantasmagoric novel called “The Favorite Game” and the poems in a collection titled “Flowers for Hitler.” He alternated between extreme discipline and the varieties of abandon. 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. Photograph by Graeme Mitchell for The New YorkerĬohen was growing weary of London’s rising damp and its gray skies.

Leonard Cohen at home in Los Angeles in September, 2016.

Bob dylan airline guitar