Various Positions (42 page)

Authors: Ira B. Nadel

BOOK: Various Positions

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Excitement over his Edmonton visit was unrestrained,
Gateway
publishing a piece four days before his November arrival describing him as the “present darling of the campus cognoscenti, the bohemian in-groups, …the Toronto morality squad and lots of lovers of language.” “More to the point,” it goes on, he is “probably the most exciting and likely the best writer in Canada right now.” Anticipation drives the writer into a frenzy of “Cohenesque” prose:
He, LEONARD COHEN, shall from the skybird … descend unto us and sing and speak and chant to beauty in Montreal, love in Toronto, harmony in Canada and other paradoxes and we shall be grateful. … For Cohen comes—and he shall say to Irving [Layton]—behold Irving it is not entirely wrong to have been born in Westmount, for have I not traveled to Edmonton? And can I not roll craps with the best of them?

Shortly after his arrival, Cohen gave an interview to the paper. It’s classic Cohen, filled with self-deflecting remarks and oblique asides. Eli Mandel, then a poet in the University of Alberta English Department, welcomed the reporters at the door to Cohen’s room in the annex to the Hotel Macdonald by saying, “Hi, I’m Leonard Cohen.” The group was not fooled, especially since they could hear Cohen singing from the shower. When he came out, a series of questions ensued: asked if he thought Dylan’s recent breakthrough into pop music would have any greater cultural significance, Cohen said he didn’t know, adding that he felt
he
created Bob Dylan through the “incantation of words to a string accompaniment. That was my whole idea of what I wanted to do.” He got sidetracked into writing for five or six years, he said, but now he was back singing.

Asked if his poetry owed something to the chanting of rabbinic cantors, he answered, “I feel it’s all the same. I think for me it’s all been one poem,” and added that each book represented “a different kind of crisis.” He elaborated: “I never felt anything really move. I saw that the page looked different—sometimes it was prose, sometimes it was poetry—but I never really felt very far from that incantatory voice beside a stringed instrument.”

After he wrote
Beautiful Losers
, mostly to country and western music played on the Armed Forces radio network from Athens, he thought he wanted to be a country and western singer (remember, he had a country and western band as a teenager called the Buckskin Boys). When he returned to Canada, he actually headed for Nashville but got “waylaid in New York and got into that world.” He then revealed to the student journalists that he was making a record in New York. Asked again about
Beautiful Losers
, which had been in stores for only a few months, he told his interviewers that he considered the book “a poem, first of all: sort of a long epic poem.” He added that it was written that way and that
was also the way he wrote his music. “How’s that?” asked an interviewer. “Just music … music, I just handle a very big song, exactly the same way as if I were writing a very small song.” Whether poetry or prose, the central thing is that it “always sounds like a song to me. … [and] anything that has a life and death sound to it is a song.”

Questions then turned personal
and
abstract: “Would you rather make love or make poems? Or are they the same thing?” Cohen’s answer? “That depends on the girl.” He then stated his well-known view that poetry is a verdict—“it’s the name we give to a certain kind of experience;” poems are not organized
per se
but “every poem is life and death … the only realm you want to live in.” Irving Layton, who visited Edmonton the previous year, was then cited along with his claim that “he was one of the great forces holding Canada together.” The reporters then asked if Cohen would make a similar statement about himself. “I think it’s Layton and the railroads. I feel I’m one of the great disintegrating forces,” he explained.

Questioned about French Canada, he admitted that he felt “much closer to the French
chansonnier
than to “any English poet,” a revealing remark, identifying in many ways the origin of Cohen’s ballad style. Asked directly if he would be singing during his visit, he replied, “I am going to do what passes for singing. I really feel that every day has got one song. You know every poet has got one poem, and every novelist has got one story, and everybody’s got one song and all my songs are the same one. All my books are really the same poem. I really feel the only way I can excuse the kind of voice I’ve got is to really write my very, very own song, and it’s the one nobody else can do.”

At the end of the interview, Cohen turned prophetic, announcing that the “disaffiliated and painful novels and poetry of our recent past will be the sutras and mantras of this new religion that’s coming. Everything that we tell each other is a kind of prayer.” He ended by saying he considered himself in the rabbinic tradition and “people who have gone on my kind of trip will be able to consult me, perhaps.” “Will you be their Moses?” he was asked. “I don’t know if I’ll be anybody’s Moses—I might be their Leonard.”

Not surprisingly, every Edmonton venue and performance of Cohen’s was packed, as was his room in the Hotel Macdonald’s annex. Rocco Caratozzolo, an Edmonton photographer, captured the youthful
Cohen in a set of photos, the young singer/writer wearing a black turtleneck and holding his guitar. And new information confirms that Cohen also befriended four women during his visit, which lasted nearly a week: Patricia, Anne, Barbara, and Lorraine. (His poem “I Met You” is about Anne.)

Barbara and Lorraine were undergraduates living in the basement of a philosophy professor’s house on 89
^thAvenue. Leonard was invited to a faculty party there, and Barbara and Lorraine crashed it. He decided to leave and invited them back to his room. The two women fell asleep there and, moved by the evening and his “rescue” from the party, he wrote “Sisters of Mercy” about them. Some time later, when the two girls told their friend Patricia that Cohen had written a song about them, she couldn’t believe it. To confirm their story, they called him in Montreal and he sang it to Patricia over the phone. “Sisters of Mercy,” as Cohen explained, was unique: “it was the only time a song has ever been given to me without my having to sweat over every word. And when they awakened in the morning, I sang them the song exactly as it is, perfect completely formed, and they were & happy about it.”

At last count, there have been nineteen cover versions of the song written so easily for Barbara and Lorraine, by artists as diverse as Dion, George Hamilton IV, Mark Lucas, Mean Larry and Friends, Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt, and Sting and the Chieftains. What’s more, the rock band “Sisters of Mercy,” formed in Leeds in 1980 and led by Gary Marx and Andrew Eldritch, is still going strong.

Cohen’s induction into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame took place on February 5, 2006, in Toronto. Five of his songs were played, with no less a country artist than Willie Nelson singing “Bird on a Wire” and k.d. lang and Rufus Wainwright among the other performers. Cohen spoke briefly and was feted as our senior statesman of hip music
and
Canadian letters.

His new album
Blue Alert
(2006) confirmed this position. Written and produced by Cohen, the songs are jazzy ballads of loss and recovery sung by Anjani Thomas. The Hawaiian-born singer first performed on Cohen’s 1984 album
Various Positions
and as a harmony vocalist and keyboardist on subsequent records and tours.
Blue Alert
began when Thomas took the lead vocal on the
Dear Heather
track, “Undertow.” Soon after, she spied
some lyrics on Cohen’s desk and asked if she could record them as a possible demo for his next album. Pleased with the results, she began to sift through his notebooks and files locating lines or verses she liked. The two then turned these scraps into completed songs, Cohen finding the writing strangely satisfying, saying that, “being what you are is always tricky, but being what you’re not is really liberating.” The album of “bittersweet love songs,” as Thomas calls them, is both melancholic and melodious.

Book of Longing
, published in April 2006, was Cohen’s first volume of new poems in twenty-two years, and some three thousand fans turned up for his signing in Toronto—such a crowd the streets had to be blocked off. The book had been promised many times to his publisher (in interviews, Cohen comically referred to the work as the “Book of Prolonging”), but it proved worth the wait. Within a month of publication, the book reached the #1 position on hardcover bestseller fiction lists in Canada, the first time a book of poetry had done so. A mixture of poetry, prose, autobiography, his own handwriting, song lyrics, and computer-generated drawings, designs, backdrops, and images by Cohen, it’s now in its third printing and has been sold to thirteen countries, including France, Italy, Israel, and Denmark, as well as to the U.S. and Great Britain.

Numerous self-portraits populate the book, creating a mirror text of Cohen in states of confusion and clarity, some images displaying both. “A private gaze” shows a stocky, well-built Cohen; another, entitled “We will all be airbrushed,” dated January 25, 2003, shows a poet disconsolate and frail.
Book of Longing
captures Cohen looking through his dreams to discover what’s happened in his life, also using a whimsical sense of uncertainty expressed in the caption, “one of those days when the hat doesn’t help.” Cohen becomes, and has always been, “a tourist of beauty / in full disappointment/ ready to fall in love/ with a ghost.” But this is recognition, not regret.

Reviews were universally strong, emphasizing not only his witty confrontation of change, but his inability to renounce yearning. His themes repeat those we have encountered and experienced in his work as early as
The Spice-Box of Earth
and
Death of a Lady’s Man:
loss, remorse, isolation, and that damn search for love and companionship. As always, the heart “is in sad confusion,” although this time it has an extra edge of humor. Wit transforms disillusionment into acceptance, as age fails to
alter desire.

Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man
, Lian Lunson’s documentary homage, also released in 2006, provides another new portrait of Cohen. Based on a 2005 concert in Sydney, the film gains its depth from splicing a self-deprecating interview with Cohen with performances of his songs by Nick Cave, Rufus Wainwright, Martha Wainwright, the McGarrigles, Bono, and others. The musicians treat him as a living legend but Cohen undercuts their veneration at every turn.

The publishing history of my biography is itself a measure of the continuing international interest in Cohen.
Various Positions
has appeared in French, German, Polish, and Japanese, as well as in Canadian, British, U.S., and Australian editions. To mark Cohen’s fifty years of writing poetry, his publisher also reprinted his first book of poetry,
Let Us Compare Mythologies
, youthful poems written between the ages of fifteen and twenty. Even Prince Charles, conscious of the pain of yearning, publicly affirmed his enthusiasm for Cohen’s work in a May 2006 TV interview. And interest in Cohen will undoubtedly grow again following the May 2006 announcement that his archive has been donated to the University of Toronto—more than 140 boxes of material, supplementing the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library’s 1968 collection of his work.

In short, Leonard Cohen is far from old, far from stale, far from finished. Cohen’s reputation is an evolving, living thing: from a ’70s cult figure and ladies’ man
(Songs from a Room)
, he became an ’80s sophisticate and cynical roué
(I’m Your Man)
before turning into a ’90s voice of political despair
(The Future)
. Now, he’s allowing himself to a be wise man, revitalized and still interested in the ladies and in the fate of the world but expressing himself through an artfully shaded twenty-first century lyricism conveying a sense of joy tempered by experience
(Blue Alert)
.

A new album and tour are in the works for 2007, his financial insecurities kick-starting a burst of creativity and providing a fresh sense of purpose. His many fans and acolytes are the beneficiaries who eagerly await new insights from the man who has proclaimed, with Zen-like wisdom, that “life gets easier when you don’t expect to win.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY
POETRY

Let Us Compare Mythologies. T
oronto: Contact Press, 1956.

The Spice-Box of Earth
. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1961.

Flowers for Hitler
. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1964.

Parasites of Heaven
. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1966.

Selected Poems, 1956–1968
. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1968.

The Energy of Slaves
. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1972.

Death of A Lady’s Man
. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1978.

Book of Mercy
. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1984.

Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs
. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993.

Dance Me to the End of Love
. Poem by Leonard Cohen. Paintings by Henri Matisse. ed. Linda Sunshine. New York: Welcome Books, 1995.

FICTION