write and tell me your heart
Leonard Cohen's letters to Marianne Ilhen
ISO a rabbit hole? Glad you asked. I recently stumbled across the response to that famous letter to Marianne Ilhen from Leonard Cohen that he wrote in their old age:
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. 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 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.
Leonard to Marianne, 2016
Everyone has seen this quote once, twice, ten million times, but it was a while before I finally saw the response from Marianne Ilhen’s family and a documentary filmmaker that was there at the end of Marianne’s life, from Leonard’s Facebook page:
Dear Leonard,
Marianne slept slowly out of this life yesterday evening. Totally at ease, surrounded by close friends.
Your letter came when she still could talk and laugh in full consciousness. When we read it aloud, she smiled as only Marianne can. She lifted her hand, when you said you were right behind, close enough to reach her.
It gave her deep peace of mind that you knew her condition. And your blessing for the journey gave her extra strength. Jan and her friends who saw what this message meant for her, will all thank you in deep gratitude for replying so fast and with such love and compassion.
In her last hour I held her hand and hummed Bird on a Wire, while she was breathing so lightly. And when we left he room, after her soul had flown out of the window for new adventures, we kissed her head and whispered your everlasting words
So long, Marianne
Marianne and Leonard: lovers tangled in time who met on the island of Hydra, Greece in the ‘60s; whose near-mythical eros inspired one of the greatest bangers of all time.
A young Leonard was growing tired of London’s damp and dark skies. He had gone into his bank and asked mournfully about his teller’s dark suntan. After the teller mentioned that he had just gotten back from Greece, Cohen bought a one-way flight. We’ve all been there, girl.
Okay, Ritalin was also widely available on Hydra but I like to believe in the suntan story. He bought a whitewashed house with no electricity or plumbing with the inheritance from his grandmother on a little island surrounded by blue. He began a new life away from the grey of the UK and his hometown of Montreal. Then he fell in love with Marianne. She was the single mother of a young son in a bohemian community of artist ex-pats, and the muse for some of Cohen’s greatest works.
Norwegian Marianne Ilhen had married similarly Norwegian Axel Jensen, a novelist, and had a baby, naming him after his father. Though Axel took up with another woman (and another, and another) they remained married while Marianne and Axel Jr. found a chosen family with Leonard and friends. They remained together for the next eight years, eventually, Leonard began to spend more and more time away from Hydra, finding a renewed sense of dedication to his career after years writing poems in paradise.
I soon realized there were many temptations on the island. Unless you were very strong and incredibly disciplined as an artist, it would take a heavy toll on you. It was a very difficult place to survive. I think for the Greeks it is different—they have a very strong culture, a very strong discipline and religion that everyone is a part of. But for the expat community, it is entirely different. Only the most disciplined and determined have really benefited from the island in a creative sense. I think most people just fell by the wayside. (Documentarian Nick Broomfield)
Cohen suffered from depression and the psychedelic fervor of his ‘60s expat family didn’t help with that. “I took trip after trip, sitting on my terrace in Greece, waiting to see God,” he said years later. “Generally, I ended up with a bad hangover.”
So Cohen left, and from all over the world, he wrote to her, the only real her there ever was amongst the many many many women of Cohen’s life.
(For more juicy deets, one of their friend’s memoirs of magic of the found family on Hydra is excerpted on Lit Hub: “It was now the heart of a sizzling Greek summer heatwave, so while we were in the house, Marianne and I usually just wore bikini underwear and went topless while Leonard wore khaki army-style shorts and no shirt. There was no erotic or exhibitionist element in it. It was just too hot for clothes—necessary nudity, one might say.”)
In 2019, after both Leonard and Marianne died, what seems like just Marianne’s collection of Leonard’s letters was sold through Christie’s for $879,000 (seems like a deal, tbh). After reading through them and crying my little eyes out, I thought it would be nice to share them here to provide emotional support for any other girls that would give up everything to time travel to Hydra in 1960 and share Ouzo on ice with a deeply tan Leonard Cohen playing guitar in his little house on the Myrtoan sea.
Montreal to Norway, 1960 “My book was refused. All the reader’s reports were unfavourable. Since hearing the news I have been strangely exultant… No one knows me. No one has ever heard of me… I’m alone with myself and the vast dictionaries of language.”
“What can I say? You have gone deep inside me… A whole Greek sky of sunlight is bursting in my heart.”
“From Tel-Aviv with love,” to Hydra, 1960
“Writing this from the beach at Tel-Aviv. The water isn’t as blue as where we bathed, but the waves come crashing in, and power is some compensation for purity… It’s hard to write you. The surf is too loud. The beach is too crowded, and you’re too much in my heart to put anything down.”
“I received your letter this morning, I have never read anything so simple and beautiful… It is a privilege to be close to you.”
Cuba to Norway, 1961
“Cuba vibrates with energy. And this is just the beginning. All of South America is on the threshold of revolution. Sometimes I look at my poems and feel quite obsolete before the forces of history. People must eat. There must be an end to humiliation.”
Hydra to Norway, 1961. “Have I hurt you?”
Hydra to Oslo, 1961. “I long for you very much and what I remember I love.”
From Montreal to Hydra, 1961 “Forgive the long silence. I have not even spoken to myself.”
“Ahead of me for the next few months — work and solitude. I am not complaining. There is joy in these things, but I want you to know that you will be close to me through these days, that I will hold on tightly to your smile and your warmth and fierce golden innocence. Please understand that I can promise nothing. I’ve said this to you before. It is not for you, but for my own conscience that I repeat it. Write and tell me your heart. All my love, Leonard.”
See the rest of the letters here… All my love, KLL.
Do you think anyone will pay $879,000 for our letters after we’re gone?
my GOD do I love letters and the worlds that hide inside of them! thank you for sharing this rabbit hole <3 one of my best friends lives on another continent and we have been writing letters for over 10 years now. i really find that we are able to crack open the nut of a feeling through our letters and build a very special kind of intimacy that can sometimes be embarrassed in closer contact. the things we feel safer revealing through a letter versus a conversation! there is a lot more room to just muse and reflect uninterrupted, and maybe sometimes create a comforting lie through the absence of a fact! but there is always some truth in there too.