The Favourite Game
This warm and lyrical semi-autobiographical first novel by singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen charts the coming of age of Lawrence Breavman, the only son of a Jewish Montreal family.‘Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the world is made flesh.’Lawrence Breavman seeks two things: love and beauty. Beginning with the innocent games of delicious misadventure with first love Lisa and the absorbing wanders through Montreal with best friend Krantz, Breavman's tale is a distant echo of ‘Catcher in the Rye’ and ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ – injected with 1960s aesthetics and Cohen’s unique poetry. As Breavman grows into a young man, the emerging writer continues his quest for beauty and love, finding himself in the arms of Shell and a burgeoning realisation of his own talent for appreciating majesty in the grotesque.Semi-autobiographical, the angst and beauty of Cohen’s voice deftly channel the painful confusion of the journey into adulthood, and the friendships, wars and lovers that are our guides.
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LEONARD COHEN
THE FAVOURITE GAME
The Borough Press
An imprint of Harper CollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd., 1963
This edition published by Blue Door in 2009
Copyright © Leonard Cohen 1963
Leonard Cohen asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © JULY 2009 ISBN: 9780007341733
Version: 2015-10-29
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
To my mother
As the mist leaves no scar
On the dark green hill, So my body leaves no scar On you, nor ever will.When wind and hawl encounter, What remains to keep? So you and I encounter Then turn, then fall to sleep.As many nights endure Without a moon or star. So will we endure When one is gone and far.
Table of Contents
Breavman knows a girl named Shell whose ears were pierced so she could wear the long filigree earrings. The punctures festered and now she has a tiny scar in each earlobe. He discovered them behind her hair.
A bullet broke into the flesh of his father’s arm as he rose out of a trench. It comforts a man with coronary thrombosis to bear a wound taken in combat.
On the right temple Breavman has a scar which Krantz bestowed with a shovel. Trouble over a snowman. Krantz wanted to use clinkers as eyes. Breavman was and still is against the use of foreign materials in the decoration of snowmen. No woollen mufflers, hats, spectacles. In the same vein he does not approve of inserting carrots in the mouths of carved pumpkins or pinning on cucumber ears.
His mother regarded her whole body as a scar grown over some earlier perfection which she sought in mirrors and windows and hub-caps.
Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.
It is easy to display a wound, the proud scars of combat. It is hard to show a pimple.
Breavman’s young mother hunted wrinkles with two hands and a magnifying mirror.
When she found one she consulted a fortress of oils and creams arrayed on a glass tray and she sighed. Without faith the wrinkle was anointed.
‘This isn’t my face, not my real face.’
‘Where is your real face, Mother?’
‘Look at me. Is this what I look like?’
‘Where is it, where’s your real face?’
‘I don’t know, in Russia, when I was a girl.’
He pulled the huge atlas out of the shelf and fell with it. He sifted pages like a goldminer until he found it, the whole of Russia, pale and vast. He kneeled over the distances until his eyes blurred and he made the lakes and rivers and names become an incredible face, dim and beautiful and easily lost.
The maid had to drag him to supper. A lady’s face floated over the silver and the food.
His father lived mostly in bed or a tent in the hospital. When he was up and walking he lied.
