THE FAVOURITE GAME
Inscribed first edition — association copy — of Cohen's first novel, signed in year of publication to fellow Canadian poet Gilles Hénault.
Near fine in near fine jacket.
Price: $12,000.00
THE FAVOURITE GAME
"Anything I tell you is an alibi for something else."
At the time of this inscription Cohen had just returned from several years in Europe. He was living in his childhood home with his mother, struggling to make it as a writer, and still several years away from the beginning of his music career. He'd returned to Montreal in part for the publication of FAVOURITE GAME but, as he wrote to his lover and muse Marianne Ihlen in early October, reviews had "not been particularly favourable." One notable exception, however, was to be written by Hénault for LA PRESSE. His review, published a month after this inscription, not only praised GAME ("...destroy[s] ancient myths to make new ones..."), but more significantly was one of the few to directly address the book's Jewish themes (Rae 57).
Cohen and Hénault had known each other for some time. Both had read at "[o]ne of the most talked about cultural events of the early 1960s Canadian poetry," the opening night of the debut Canadian Conference for the Arts (1961): "On the first night, five poets — [Irving] Layton, Earle Birney, Gilles Hénault, Jay Macpherson, and Leonard Cohen (who also read for the absent Anne Hébert) — read for two hours to an overflow crowd" (Mount). THE GLOBE & MAIL at the time described the audience as "one of the largest [...] ever faced by Canadian poets." The event helped define Canadian poetry in much the same way as the Berkeley Poetry Conference would in the United States just a few years later, inaugurating a "Golden Age" of experimental Canadian poetry (ibid).
Hénault would go on to win the Prix du Grand Jury des Lettres and the General Governor's Award. Though a generation older than Cohen, Hénault — whose stylistic mix of surrealism, Rimbaudian romanticism, and existentialism was not unlike Cohen's — would continue frequently to be mentioned together with Cohen in discussion of vanguard Canadian verse (until Cohen's musical reputation eventually eclipsed his literary one).
A tremendous association between these two important figures of Canadian arts.
Read more: Hénault, "The Favourite Game, Ou Le Jeu De L'amour Et Du Hasard," La Presse, Dec. 7, 1963; Rae, From Cohen to Carson: The Poet's Novel in Canada; Mount, Arrival: The Story of CanLit; Finnigan, "Canadian Poetry Finds Its Voice," Globe and Mail, Jan. 20, 1962.
The Object
First printing. London: Secker & Warburg, (1963). Original full green cloth. In original price-clipped color pictorial jacket designed by Barry Trengove. 224 pages. Inscribed by Cohen on the front free endpaper: "For Gilles Hénault / all good things / Leonard Cohen / October 30 1963 / Montreal." Faint sunning to jacket spine, minor soil here and there. Book boards a touch bowed. Else bright and sound.
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