Various Positions (29 page)

Live Songs
came out in April 1973 to little notice. For more than a decade, it was the last of Cohen’s albums to even make the U.S. charts. The album contained a range of concert songs drawn from the 1970 and 1972 tours and was uneven but spontaneous. The mood was somber, the songs full of darkness, and the cover photo haunting. The unusual liner notes by the little-known (and often institutionalized) artist and poet Daphne Richardson read in part that a transformation occurred because of “
the mad mystic hammering of your body upon my body [and] your soul entered mine then and some union took place that almost killed me with its INTENSITY.” She had begun communicating with Cohen while trying to publish a book of collage poems using pieces by Cohen, Dylan, and herself. Cohen found her letters engaging and often wrote to her, excusing her excesses as part of her illness.

Cohen found the intensity of her imagination attractive and her work as an illustrator appealing; he wanted her to illustrate
The Energy of Slaves
. He met her in London during his 1972 tour. A month later, he called his London agent requesting her to tell Daphne that her illustrations for his poetry book would be needed, only to learn that she had committed suicide three days earlier by jumping off Bush House in London. Cohen was mentioned in her suicide note.

The music on
Live Songs
continued the themes of
Songs of Love and Hate
. Bob Johnston again produced the album, essentially a mixing of live tapes from the two previous tours. It opens with “Minute Prologue,” from London (1972), a recitation on the dissension and pain in the world that won’t disappear, although music can heal any damage it causes. One of the most important songs on the album, “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy,” continues the focus on death and despair and, as the liner notes explain, is about a suicidal woman from Montreal whom Cohen knew in 1961. The daughter of a judge, she had had a reckless life, sleeping with everyone and eventually giving birth to a child, who was then taken away from her. She shot herself in her bathroom. As he wrote, “
In the House of Honesty / Her father was on trial / In the House of Mystery / There was no one at all.”

Reaction to the album was negative. A rumor began to circulate that Cohen was going to retire from music, a rumor that upset his lawyer and record company. There was also the suggestion of suicide. In a March 1973 interview, he smoked the interviewer’s cigarettes almost continuously and appeared withdrawn. He answered questions vaguely and lapsed into long, uninterrupted silences. The threat of suicide had always accompanied his morose persona and funereal songs but he later admitted, “
I’m too old to commit suicide. It would be unbecoming.”

The
Toronto Star
unknowingly promoted the retirement controversy, picking up an English story reporting that Cohen had quit the music business. Thinking that he was speaking in confidence following receipt of a Gold Album award from
Melody Maker
for two hundred and fifty thousand sales of his first
LP,
Cohen told reporter Roy Hollingworth, “
I just cannot stand to remain part of the [music] business. I’ve reached a state when I’m just not writing anything.” A week later, he enlarged on the theme of disillusionment and his decision “no longer … to be
tangled up in the mechanisms” of the industry. The industry viewed his comments as an attack. He said that his decision had been made ten months earlier when he entered a Buddhist monastery in California. He planned to continue to write songs only “if I feel they are good.”

In a later interview in the
Toronto Star
, Cohen explained the confusion about his remarks on retirement, declaring, “
I never did retire. I didn’t announce that. It was a completely mischievous adventure on the part of a journalist in England.” The two had been discussing the state of the music business and its depressing character. “And I said, ‘But I don’t want to see a headline: Leonard Cohen quits music business and goes into monastery. And the next week I pick up the paper and it’s been reprinted all around the world.” No one was more surprised than his lawyer Marty Machat, who spent days phoning music publishers and record company executives to tell them Cohen was very much in the business. But what’s to quit, Cohen added: “I mean how can I quit? I’ve never been in it. Nobody’s making me do anything. I’ve done three tours, only a record every two or three years—that’s not much for a singer. I’ve always been able to play it as I wanted. What is there to quit?”

Ironically, at the time of the controversy, his work was being celebrated. In July 1973 at the Shaw Festival, Gene Lesser, a New York director, was preparing a production of “Sisters of Mercy.” Its opening led to this headline in a Canadian paper: “
Bed-centered play aimed at open-minded people.” Based on Cohen’s songs and work, the play went to New York after its Canadian premiere and opened off Broadway at the Theatre de Lys. Clive Barnes of the
New York Times
panned it, writing that if the play was a “
musical journey into the words of Leonard Cohen,” as the program stated, “it is, to be frank, a journey that I would rather not have taken.” Barnes also criticized the play’s autobiographical element: “Unfortunately, while Mr. Cohen may very well be … God’s final gift to women, he doesn’t shape up so well as either a poet or a musician. As a poet he is cute, as a musician he is familiar.” Cohen himself disliked the production.

————

COHEN FELT
that his life was becoming a battle for survival, and the opportunity to participate in a real war was too tempting to resist. He and his family had returned to Hydra in August 1973. But to test himself and to escape the turmoil of his personal life, Cohen flew to Israel from Athens a few days before the Yom Kippur War began in October 1973, partly out of a determination to help, partly “
to recover from vanities of the singing profession,” and, as he wrote in the unpublished prose work “The Final Revision of My Life in Art,” partly “
because it is so horrible between us I will go and stop Egypt’s bullet. Trumpets and a curtain of razor blades.” When he arrived, he told the press that he flew to Israel to entertain troops during the conflict and “
to make my atonement.” He added that in the past he sided with the Arabs in their demands that Israel return territory taken by it in the 1967 war, but now he supported the Jewish state.

Cohen left Hydra and the difficulties with Suzanne. “
What a burden for the woman being born to carry still-born blessings up the hill … I must study the hatred I have for her, and how it is transmuted into desire by solitude and distance.” He felt she restrained him and curbed his success: “
I never became a sign for everything that is high and nervous … the band ran down like an unwound music-box, too slow and too sweet. A fungus became attached to the spirit of song and high pretensions infected the gift of words.” He made a pact: “
I won’t fuck in the Holy Land unless she is my True Wife.”

At the airport he got the last seat on the flight to Tel Aviv and his attitude quickly changed:

Sitting on the floor at the airport with his leather bag, he felt conspicuous, and after a quick visit to the airport post office, he was stopped by a plainclothes security officer, who questioned him in the men’s room about his destination. When the officer discovered that Cohen spoke some Greek and that he was flying to Israel, he was released. The unexpected expression of democratic ideals expounded by a poet in Greek
convinced the police to let him go. As he waited to be searched before boarding the plane, his thoughts shifted: “
I could see that certain people had recognized me. No one I wanted to fuck but some I wanted to look at naked, especially a girl whose eyes are looking at me now.”

He arrived in a tense and nervous country, admitting, “
I am in my myth home but I have no proof and I cannot debate and I am in no danger of believing myself … Speaking no Hebrew I enjoy my legitimate silence.” He accepted the invitation of a married couple he had met on the flight to stay with her mother and sister in Herzliyya, a suburb of Tel Aviv. The sister immediately inflamed him, but he deflected his interest when he learned that
the war was not that easily found, despite the sad news about the fighting on the radio every hour. The mother and daughter still went to the beach every day; “The war was somewhere else.”

Despite his nominal pact with himself, Cohen became involved with a series of women in Israel. A tall, red-haired woman with “
long, stainless steel legs” and a body he called “a sexual construction;” a Yemenite broadcaster who had interviewed him two years earlier; and a girl who recognized him in the lobby of a movie theater. One incident, he said was symbolic:

After returning from the beach, he continued his search. “
After I had showered and changed, I walked up and down the vacant blacked-out streets looking for Hanna, longing for her. Such patrols are a usual feature of my life in art.”

Most of his assignations occurred in the Gad Hotel on Hayarkon Street in Tel Aviv. After checking into the Gad, Cohen heard footsteps outside his room. It was the tall and striking woman he had just met at the desk. He heard an interior voice saying, “
You will only sing again if you give up lechery. Choose. This is a place where you may begin again.” Another voice countered, “
But I want her … Please let me have her.” The inner voice that won advised him to, “Throw yourself upon your stiffness and take up your felt pen.” His attitude toward women remained
shameless; he invited women reporters to undress for him, or at least bare their breasts during an interview.

Shortly after moving to the hotel, he went to see the singer/promoter Sholomo Semach, who was attached to the air force. Cohen wanted to volunteer, and Semach immediately lined him up with an entertainment group in the air force. Before he started, however, the Israeli singer Ilana Rovina invited him to perform one night at an air base near Tel Aviv, which he did. He then joined her group for performances in the Sinai, flying in on a Dakota aircraft. At a desert airport he stole a .45 pistol from a deserted shed, armament for the battle. Soon after his return to Tel Aviv, he had a new assignment: Cohen, Matti Caspi, and a third entertainer drove around and sang at rocket sites, tank encampments, aide stations, and army posts. They were flown by helicopter across the Suez to a former Egyptian air base, where they performed in a concrete hangar. Cohen was startled to find there a leftover Egyptian calendar and a can of mashed potatoes that had a label which read, “A Gift from the People of Canada.” A helicopter arrived with wounded men, and Cohen began to weep as he stared at the bandaged soldiers. When someone told him that the troops were Egyptian, his relief disturbed him. But when an Israeli soldier gave him some Egyptian money found on a dead soldier, he could not take it and buried it in the sand.

He then drove with others toward Ismailia and General Sharon’s encampment, where “
tanks are the only architecture.”

Returning to the Egyptian airfield, they came under fire and were forced to take cover. Cohen fantasized: “
I manage to kill an arrogant Israeli officer who has been bugging me with relentless requests to sing Suzanne. The scales are balanced. Let justice be done. I doubt if I made this up.” Lurking behind his actions was this constant question: “
May I entertain the notion of Personal Purity as the condition for my Task?” It was a question that he had asked of himself in Cuba as well.

The performances were ad hoc, with soldiers shining flashlights on the singers. “
It was very informal and very intense,” Cohen said. “Wherever you saw soldiers you would just stop and sing.” Occasionally there was danger, “
but you get caught up in the thing. And the desert is very beautiful and you think your life is meaningful for a moment or two. And war is wonderful … It’s one of the few times people can act their best. It’s so economical in terms of gesture and motion…. Everybody is responsible for his brother.” War and earning a living are the only two activities that ever permit men to leave women, he added. He explains this in “My Life in Art”: “
Feeling good in the desert. War is ok… As my friend Layton said about acid on his first ‘trip’: ‘They’ll never stamp this out.’”

Before Cohen left Israel, he decided that he had to visit Jerusalem. He believed that if he walked there from Tel Aviv he would be cleansed. He quickly got lost in the outskirts of Tel Aviv, however, and found himself wandering back to Dizengoff Street, with its numerous cafes. The next day he took a bus to the Holy City, where that night at dinner, his friend Asher confronted him: “You must decide whether you are a lecher or a priest.”

After a month or so, Cohen left Israel, which was demoralized because it had experienced heavy casualities in the war. He reported, however, that “
people stop me and thank me here and there and tell me never to leave Jerusalem.” He took a military flight to Athens but flew on to Asmara, Ethiopia, where he lived in the Imperial Hotel for a while, writing songs and re-assessing his life. Ironically, this too would become a site of war some six weeks later, when a revolution occurred. At the Imperial, he finished “Chelsea Hotel #2” and began several songs incorporating his Israeli experience: “Field Commander Cohen,” for example, is about a surrealistic spy known for parachuting “
acid into diplomatic cocktail parties” who returns to nothing more than “silver bullet suicides, and messianic ocean tides / And racial roller-coaster rides / And other forms of boredom advertised as poetry.”