Setting the Record Slate

It was a summer day in 1957, with Pat Boone’s “Love Letters in the Sand” and the Everly Brothers’ “Bye Bye Love” blasting from car radios across North America, when two buddies took to the highway, Mort at the wheel, Leonard at his side.

Both in their early twenties, both from affluent Jewish families in Montreal, both handsome and rebellious, they had been the best of friends for most of their young lives — at high school, at camp, at university. As teenagers, they used to cruise the rougher districts of the city after dark looking for sex and adventure, drawn by a nostalgie de la boue from their Westmount homes to the strip clubs and all-night diners east of downtown and the smoked-meat delis of the Jewish quarter their families wanted nothing to do with.

This road trip to Mort’s summer house on the southern shore of Lake Massawippi in Quebec’s Eastern Townships was an excuse to hang out together after their longest time apart. Mort had spent the previous winter at St. Martin’s School of Art in London, learning to become a sculptor. Leonard, having dropped out of law at McGill University after one semester, had passed an unhappy year at Columbia University in New York studying English literature. They swapped funny tales. They talked of music and women. And, at times during the two-hour drive, they fell comfortably into their own thoughts while staring out at the passing countryside.

Leonard, who had recently become interested in Japanese poetry, was playing with words and images in his head until he came up with a haiku of his own. “Silence,” he recited to Mort. Pause. “And a deeper silence.” Pause. “When the crickets hesitate.”

More than anything else in those days, Leonard wanted to be a great poet. He possessed what seemed a natural gift for rhetoric and a musician’s ear for composition, and he had already published a slim collection that showed early promise. It was his entree into Montreal’s small but active scene of English-language poets, mostly older men known to one another (though not to many Canadians) through little magazines, literary events, and social gatherings.

Standing tall and patrician at the centre of this scene was Frank, fifty-eight years old that August, a distinguished professor of constitutional law at McGill, a founding member of the brain trust behind the creation of Canada’s first socialist party, and a co-editor in 1936 of New Provinces, the first anthology of modern poetry by Canadian poets.

While his intelligence, wit, and accomplishments made him an intimidating figure to some, Frank retained a playful sense of fun, and he took real pleasure in the company of young people, be they law students, political activists, aspiring poets, or pretty women, because they kept him feeling young. It was Frank’s example that had given Leonard the idea that he could become both a lawyer and a poet. But it was Frank’s encouragement that had persuaded him to dedicate his life solely to his art.

“Hurry home and write folk songs,” Frank called from the porch of his Montreal home as Leonard, still a student, got into a taxi after they had been listening to and discussing a rare record of African drumming music.

While Frank offered equal encouragement to Mort, his wife was the more empathetic role model. The daughter of a prosperous anglophone family, Marian had studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and worked diligently over three decades through an ever-changing, ever-challenging variety of subjects and styles, at times figurative, at times abstract. Quiet and self-deprecating in manner but with a core strength and fierce commitment to her painting, Marian seldom paid any attention to cliques, fads, reviews, or even sales. Eventually she stopped having exhibitions at all, because they were a distraction from her work.

Mort and Leonard decided to take up a standing invitation to drop in on Frank and Marian at their cottage in North Hatley, a picturesque village at the northern end of Lake Massawippi. When they arrived, Frank suggested that the four of them head off for a picnic and swim at “the camp,” the tiny cabin Frank’s brother Elton had built as a wilderness retreat on a steep slope twenty minutes by motorboat down the lake.

The wooden craft was pulled onto the narrow crescent of beach, more pebbles and stones than sand, and a set of rickety stairs led up to the cabin. It was a jerry-built shack always in danger of sliding precipitously into the water if not for the reinforced stilts on which it rested at the front and the heavy ropes tied to trees at the back. Its single room, lit by windows on three sides and seeming to float in the air like a tree house, was only large enough for a cot, a table, a chair, and a small wood stove, though there was a wobbly deck outside with a few weather-beaten chairs, a couple of plank benches, and some large rocks for a party of more than one to sit on.

The afternoon passed with chatter and laughter. Marian quizzed Mort about St. Martin’s and his sculpture teachers, Eduardo Paolozzi, Anthony Caro, and Elisabeth Frink. Frank quizzed Leonard about Columbia and the young Beat poets he had met in Manhattan. As the sun went over the yardarm, to use the old expression, Frank began mixing a shaker of his famously potent martinis. “You fill the shaker with gin,” he liked to joke, “and wave a bottle of vermouth over it.”

Frank and Leonard began reciting drafts of their latest works in progress to each other, as was the custom whenever the Montreal poets got together to trade honest and sometimes harsh critiques in bars and living rooms. Among them was the haiku that Leonard had composed during the car ride.

Mort, hearing it again, had a sudden inspiration: it would be the perfect thing to carve into the smooth, dark grey piece of slate, an irregular oval roughly sixty-five by thirty centimetres and five centimetres thick, that he had spotted on the beach. In London, he had taken an elective course in lettering from Eric Winters, a fifth-generation carver who taught from illustrations of the classical inscription on Trajan’s Column in Rome. Now, keen to practise, Mort found a hammer and screwdriver in an old toolbox and set to work.

The art of letter carving in stone requires precision in the size and placement of each letter and in the sharp angling of the V‑shaped incisions needed to best catch the light. Nevertheless, despite the bluntness of the screwdriver and the blur of talk and martinis, Mort managed to carve the first word on the first line and the first word on the second line before evening came and it was time to head back to the village.

The slate remained behind at the unlocked camp until the following summer, when Frank again saw the SILENCE and the AND of Leonard’s haiku. “What would you charge to complete it?” he asked. To which Mort replied, “How about some more of those martinis?”

Mort returned from London to set up a studio and open a gallery with Leonard, and he occasionally rented a boat to return to Frank’s camp to continue the haiku with a proper chisel, which produced noticeably better lettering. Leonard wandered between Montreal and Hydra, Greece, but he too occasionally returned to the camp to work on his poems and begin a coming-of-age novel in which Mort was to appear thinly disguised as the hero’s buddy Krantz.

At the end of one stay, Leonard left behind a small piece of white birchbark, cut as though to approximate in miniature the ovaloid shape of the haiku’s slate. On its inside was a poem inscribed with a pen in his neat handwriting:

Frank found it lying on the table, a gift perhaps or a discarded draft, either way a riff on Mort’s inspired use of a natural material — ink on bark instead of chisel on rock. He pinned it like a butterfly to a block of wood with two thumbtacks and propped it on a shelf among the camp’s bric‑a‑brac.

In 1961, Leonard published The Spice-Box of Earth, his second book of poems but his first with a major publishing house, and it contained the silence and crickets of “Summer Haiku,” dedicated to Frank and Marian. A year later Mort, in need of a cheap studio space, bought an old creamery in Way’s Mills, a village ten kilometres east of Lake Massawippi. In its garden one sunny day, more than five years after the picnic at the camp, Mort hosted a luncheon with Frank and Marian to celebrate the carved poem’s completion and receive his fee in martinis.

The years passed into decades. Leonard Cohen became a world-famous singer and songwriter based in Los Angeles, and on one of his later albums he set Frank’s “Villanelle for Our Time” to music. Morton Rosengarten continued producing sculptures and drawings in Way’s Mills, including portraits of Leonard and Frank for a limited-edition anthology of Canadian poets, right up until his recent death at the age of ninety-two. F. R. Scott became an eminent dean of law at McGill, and he won a 1981 Governor General’s Award for his volume of collected poems. Marian Dale Scott continued working on ever more challenging abstracts in her home studio while her reputation grew ever more established as one of the pioneers of modern art in Canada.

All that while, Leonard’s haiku on Mort’s slate served as a doorstop at Frank and Marian’s cottage in North Hatley. Near it, placed on the mantel above the fireplace by then, sat the birchbark poem, its blue ink ghostly in places but still legible. Haiku and poem, slate and bark, like two old friends sharing the memory of a summer’s afternoon when they were young — forgotten until now.