Leonard Cohen’s eternal masterpiece: The decade-long love story of ‘So Long, Marianne’
In September 1960, around 1,500 Canadian dollars could buy you a house on a Greek island. Most people think they were born in the wrong century due to missing the great art created in those times, but it’s actually the wrong century for the housing market. It’s true; that kind of change could buy you property at that time, and Leonard Cohen was one of the people who found this out directly.
After receiving an inheritance from his grandmother, Cohen bought a small house on the Greek island of Hydra on the Saronic Gulf. This was when he was an up-and-coming poet and novelist rather than anything resembling the songwriting giant we’d come to know. His semi-reclusive existence on the island, supported by a modest trust fund granted to him in his father’s will, allowed him the space to work on his writing. It would also change his life entirely.
Not for the reason he thought it would, either. After Cohen had moved to the island full-time, his typically roving eye spotted a stunningly beautiful woman, who would most often be accompanied by her young son. There had never been an opportune moment to introduce himself to this young woman until one fateful day, when Cohen spotted her, in floods of tears, in a local supermarket.
Ironically enough, considering this is an encounter involving the actual Leonard Cohen, I’m not sure Laughing Len himself could put it better than she did. “There he was, standing in the door way with the sun behind him, and you don’t see the face, just the contours, and so I hear his voice saying ‘would you like to join us? Come into the sun. We’re sitting outside’. He was wearing a beautiful little sixpence cap. When my eyes met his, I felt it throughout my body.”
Who was Leonard Cohen writing about?
This was Marianne Ihlen, who at the time had the married name Marianne Jensen. Her story could have been plucked out of a F Scott Fitzgerald novel. A Norwegian aristocrat who’d married a dashing writer in her early 20s and found very shortly afterwards that dashing, successful writers don’t tend to make the most reliable husbands.
Her marriage to said writer, Axel Jensen, was a torrid, toxic one. Many times, he’d introduce Marianne to other young women, then promptly inform her that he was madly in love with this new woman, and that Marianne should pack her bags because he was leaving her. Before he’d come crawling back, cap in hand, full of apologies later in the night.
The couple had settled in Hydra for much the same reason that Cohen did, as it was a peaceful and cheap location for a writer to get inspiration and work on their projects. It was around this time that the singer and Marianne first met, while she was still (at least technically) married. This would not last as, surprise, surprise, Axel found another woman and, this time, left Marianne in Hydra with their baby son.
Fortunately for her, this wasn’t the end of the world. Axel had been a nightmare to live with, and she’d been preparing for his full-time departure for years. Once the house was transferred to her ownership, she focused on her son and her deepening bond with Cohen. That, alongside a stipend coming in from Axel’s publisher, kept the wolf from the door and allowed Cohen and Marianne to go from close friends to a romantic partnership in their own right.
Over the decade, the three of them basically became a family. However, either Cohen or Marianne was constantly on the move. She often left for her home city of Oslo, or he would take off for his native Montreal. Cohen’s writing career also wasn’t taking off the way he’d hoped, with the novels he’d released receiving lukewarm reviews and low sales.
Subsequently, their relationship became strained. After a mutual decision that they needed a break from each other, Cohen departed for Montreal alone to work out what to do about his floundering career. It was during this break that he turned to music, his first real song, ‘Suzanne’, becoming a hit due to Judy Collins. Inspired by the New York folk scene he’d been an admirer of from a distance, he began turning this tough period of his life into songs.
Chief among them was the song inspired by the moment that he realised that Marianne, this woman who had been his family for the better part of a decade, wouldn’t be his family for much longer. In the liner notes of his 1976 greatest hits collection, he wrote of the song, “I began this on Aylmer Street in Montreal and finished it a year or so later at the Chelsea Hotel in New York. I didn’t think I was saying goodbye, but I guess I was.”
He went on to say, “She gave me many songs, and she has given songs to others too. She is a Muse”. Cohen was not kidding here. Marianne once pointed out that a bird perched on a telephone wire looked like a musical note, and, from there, Cohen produced the masterwork ‘Bird on the Wire‘. However, of all the songs that Marianne Ihlen inspired, above all of them must rise the one that began life titled ‘Come On, Marianne’, but once finished, was titled ‘So Long, Marianne’.
