A Broken Hallelujah: Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen

by Liel Leibovitz

  Zionism, however, was not the only contender for the passions of Jews unmoored by the Emancipation. Jewish mysticism beckoned, too: As Gershom Scholem, probably its greatest scholar, argued, mysticism has always fought an uphill battle against the steely rationality of the halacha, or Jewish law. Scholem traced the origins of the kabbalah, the Jewish mystical school of thought, to the same medieval period that also witnessed the rise of great and astute scholars who spent lifetimes parsing the letter of the law, like Moses Maimonides. The twelfth-century rabbi’s best-known work, The Guide for the Perplexed, is meticulous, combining textual analysis, Aristotelian cosmology, and rational philosophy. At its core is staunch adherence to negative theology, or the idea that there are no positive and definitive statements we can make about God. Can we say God exists? Maimonides argues that the best we can do is say that he doesn’t not exist. Can we say that he is omniscient? No, but we can argue that he’s not ignorant. He’s not ours to know, and certainly not for us to see: He’s an abstraction. Which, of course, makes for tremendous intellectual fun—Maimonides greatly influenced Thomas Aquinas—but is not a great way to move the spirit. Human beings, the earliest mystics understood, worship with their hearts just as much as with their minds. They frequently feel the need to abandon reason and revel in the mysterious and the ecstatic and the obscure. That, in part, was the appeal of the Hebrew prophets: More than just advocating for social justice, they offered a stark alternative to the cool and critical strand of scholarship Judaism has always championed. They were poets, and none more than Isaiah, with his vision of swords turning into plowshares. The prophets shouted. They trembled. They felt with all their hearts.

  Maimonides found such intensity detrimental. He could not ignore the role prophecy had played in the Jewish tradition, but he did attempt to radically redefine it. “It is one of the basic principles of religion that God inspires men with the prophetic gift,” he wrote. “But the spirit of prophecy only rests upon the wise man who is distinguished by great wisdom and strong moral character, whose passions never overcome him in anything whatsoever, but who by his rational faculty always has his passions under control, and possesses a broad and sedate mind.” The prophet, the great scholar added, must also be “physically sound.”8

  Strength, discipline, industriousness—these were the virtues the Cohens had always promoted, the character traits that had made them great merchants and good soldiers. Young Leonard was expected to follow suit, expected not only to join the family business but also to adopt the kind of dispassionate Maimonidean approach that was all the rage at Shaar Hashomayim, an approach that believed a man was measured by his deeds alone, not by his thoughts. But there was something about Klinitsky-Klein’s readings of Isaiah that Leonard couldn’t shake off. He understood them, he told a biographer decades later, to be a manifestation of his grandfather’s “confrontational, belligerent stance”9 against Judaism’s polite rationality. The old man read and reread the prophet’s stirring passages rather than worship with the dull and the flightless who made up so much of the Jewish community around him.

  Even though he lived with his daughter and her children for less than a year, Klinitsky-Klein gave his grandson the gift of an alternative, and far more stirring, vision of Jewish life. It was spiritual but also deeply erotic: Isaiah’s soul may have pointed heavenward, but his tongue was earthy, speaking of sinners as “the seed of the adulterer and the whore” and equating those who had strayed off the righteous path with a woman who has “uncovered” herself “to another than me.”10 The prophet understood that humankind’s spiritual and sexual yearnings were intertwined. It was an insight that found a ready listener in the adolescent Cohen, himself discovering both yearnings at the same time.

  But what was an adolescent—his father dead, his mother gnawed by grief and anxiety, his own future unclear—to do with such an insight? The only way to quiet the chorus of demons that rattled Cohen with emotions too great for him to handle was to engage in the teenage tradition of excessive distraction: He ran for student government, mastered public speaking, learned to play a host of instruments passably, rode his bicycle, played sports, toyed with hypnosis, pursued women, served as a summer camp counselor, and organized events and activities wherever he went. Observed from afar, Cohen gave off such an affable and adroit air that some of those who knew him during this period could be forgiven for thinking, as they did, that he had willed himself into erasing whatever traumatic marks his father’s passing might have left on his psyche and emerged a new and whole man. He did no such thing. At home he would spend most of his time locked in his room, hiding, reading. And he developed a lifelong habit of wandering, setting out on hours-long excursions that led him to the gritty parts of town that most of his fellow young Westmount Jews had no idea existed. It was freedom, but it came at a cost. While his friends took hesitant steps into maturity, buttressed by families and a sense of security, Cohen had few boundaries to impede or shape his explorations. He could walk downtown. He could hypnotize the young housekeeper into removing her underwear. He could stay up past dawn. As long as his grades were good, as long as he kept up appearances, he could run wild. He wasn’t particularly close to his sister, and his mother had remarried and then divorced; she comes off in her son’s recollections as doting and emotional, caring but quick to lay on the guilt. Often she would stay up all night worrying about Leonard, and then, when he came back from his strolls, yell at him, hug him, and offer to cook him some eggs. She didn’t know how to guide him to comfort. He had to find his own way.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Soul of Canada

  * * *

  He found poetry. How he did isn’t important. In later years he was repeatedly asked for an origin story, and repeatedly gave contradictory, often playful answers. Sometimes he would claim to have been sitting on a deck and basking in the sun when, out of nowhere, a poem struck him like a ray and announced to him his destiny as a conduit for divine inspiration. Other times he would take a more earthly—and earthy—tone and say he only started writing to get girls. “I wanted them and I couldn’t have them,” he told an interviewer in 1970. “That’s really how I started writing poetry. I wrote notes to women so as to have them. They began to show them around and soon people started calling it poetry. When it didn’t work with women, I appealed to God.”1

  While he remained coy about the poetry he wrote, Cohen was much more forthcoming about the poetry he read. Here an origin story does exist, singular and undisputed, confirmed in interviews and public appearances: When Cohen was fifteen, he took one of his ambles and ended up in a used-book shop, where he stumbled upon a copy of a book of poetry by Federico García Lorca. The Spaniard couldn’t have asked for a better reader than Cohen: Astutely, Cohen realized right away that Lorca’s central artistic engine was also his own. It was the duende.

  The term is hard to translate. It is frequently referred to as “deep song,” and often just as “soul.” In a lecture he gave in 1922, Lorca defined it as “a stammer, a wavering emission of the voice, a marvelous buccal undulation that smashes the resonant cells of our tempered scale, eludes the cold, rigid staves of modern music, and makes the tightly closed flowers of the semi-tones blossom into a thousand petals.”2 But duende wasn’t just for musicians; it was also the dowry of poets who cared to apply “the finest degrees of Sorrow and Pain, in the service of the purest, most exact expression.”3 Duende—to paraphrase another of its famous celebrants, Goethe—is that profound and nebulous sadness we all feel but can’t easily articulate. In Lorca, Cohen glimpsed his own state of mind, reflected back at him in beautiful verse, rich with intricate imagery, elegant and gloomy. Often—another attraction for the rabbi’s dutiful grandson—Lorca looked heavenward in his attempt, in a sort of emotional alchemy, to turn misery into joy. He wrote of figures like the “brown Christ” who passes “from the lily of Judea / to the carnation of Spain,”4 a universal redeemer who pays little attention to cultural, historical, or religious distincti
ons.

  With Lorca by his side, Cohen was ready to try his own hand at writing poetry. On the cover of one early notebook, he scribbled “poems written while dying of love.” He was out looking for duende, but soon realized that a gargantuan hurdle separated him from everything he deemed poetic: Unlike Lorca, a gay artist who claimed to have Gypsy blood, collaborated with Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, and was murdered by the fascists while fighting in Spain’s civil war, Cohen lived in a tony neighborhood in a cold country where people were primarily interested in their work and passed the time going to the movies or listening to Patti Page on the radio. It was hardly an environment conducive to romantic life. Spain quivered with flamenco; where was the soul of Canada?

  It wasn’t a theoretical question. By the time Cohen graduated from high school and entered Montreal’s McGill University, in 1951, the English Department, in whose halls he took a great number of his classes, was teeming with students struggling to reinvent Canadian literature.

  Or, rather, invent it. In Survival, her seminal history of the subject, Margaret Atwood noted with bemused horror that when she traveled across Canada and told people that she was writing a book on Canadian literature, “the two questions I was asked most frequently by audience members were, ‘Is there any Canadian literature?’ and ‘Supposing there is, isn’t it just a second-rate copy of real literature, which comes from England and the United States?’”5

  Of course there were novels and poems published in Canada long before Leonard Cohen first wrote a word, many of them outstanding. But as Canada itself was little more than a handful of provinces and religions and languages and traditions struggling to congeal into a unified nation, whatever literary works were produced in Canada failed to fall into a common mosaic that, seen from above, might resemble a national literature. Until the middle of the twentieth century, Canada’s literary output consisted mainly of long disquisitions on nature and humankind’s slim odds of surviving it, as well as subtle but consistent expressions of the idea, common to all budding colonial literatures, that, as Atwood put it, “the Great Good Place was, culturally speaking, elsewhere.”6

  Elsewhere was down south, and down south the poets and the thinkers—many of them born into pious households and stirred by intimations of the divine—saw the savage beauty of their land as a source of infinite bounty. This was a major theme with Emerson and the Transcendentalists; Canadians, however, were more skeptical. To them nature was a mindless, hungry beast. “I have long been impressed in Canadian poetry by a tone of deep terror in regard to nature,” wrote Northrop Frye, the renowned Canadian critic. “It is not a terror of the dangers or discomforts or even the mysteries of nature, but a terror of soul at something that these things manifest. The human mind has nothing but human and moral values to cling to if it is to preserve its integrity or even its sanity, yet the vast unconsciousness of nature in front of it seems an unanswerable denial of those values.”7

  Whatever the reasons for these diverging worldviews, while American literature thrived, Canada waited for its Emersons and Thoreaus. As late as the 1920s and 1930s, as American poets like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound forged the modernist moment by testing the elasticity of language and form, their Canadian counterparts took much more hesitant steps out of their Victorian sensibilities. Even E. J. Pratt, the nation’s greatest poet, is best known for two epic poems—1940’s Brébeuf and His Brethren, about a Jesuit martyr, and 1952’s Towards the Last Spike, about the building of Canada’s transcontinental railroad—that are more celebrated for their adherence to historical records than they are for challenging the conventions of poetry.

  And then came the Jews.

  Two of them in particular: Irving Layton and A. M. Klein. They wrote very different poetry, Layton’s exuberant and Klein’s studious and pondering. But, like Emerson, they believed that “within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE.”8 When they started out, this idea was much too radical for the local, cerebral, timid sensibility: One of Klein’s first poems was rejected for publication in a prestigious literary magazine because it contained the word “soul.”

  Klein had met Layton in 1930, when the latter was still in high school and needed tutoring in Latin. Three years Layton’s senior, Klein had much in common with his rowdy student. They had both escaped the pogroms of Europe as infants and taken shelter in the Jewish ghetto of St. Urbain Street in downtown Montreal. They both found a calling early on in literature. But whereas Layton displayed the sort of fleshy rambunctiousness that came easily to a kid who grew up in an apartment beneath a brothel, Klein was raised by a devout father, considered joining the clergy, and was never too far, in his speech and thought, from the rabbinical. When he agreed to educate Layton, however, Klein taught him not the Talmud but Virgil. The two met at a soccer field not far from their old school, and Layton sat entranced as Klein’s deep voice plumbed the depths of the Aeneid. They were both transfixed by the language and its meter, but even more with the grand narrative and its stately structure. Themselves raised on the fables of an ancient faith that saw itself as the progenitor of Western civilization, the two young Jews easily fell in love with the ancient Romans and, later, the Greeks. When Klein started a literary magazine at his university, he called it the McGilliad; it published Irving Layton’s first poem. A decade later, when he wanted to express his disgust over the unchecked rise of Nazi Germany, Klein did so in a humorous, book-length epic poem, The Hitleriad.

  This infusion of mythical thinking and imagery into the staid core of Canadian poetry greatly appealed to other young poets, like Louis Dudek and F. R. Scott, and for the first time produced not a loose coalition of poets but an actual literary school bound by friendship and shared sensibilities. But Layton was never really one for schools, and while Klein continued to explore Jewish tradition and history, he trained his mind on more common matters. A poem from his second collection, published in 1948, is titled “To the Lawyer Handling My Divorce Case,” in which the poet—then moving from wife number one to wife number two in what would ultimately be a series of five—imagines his attorney referring to him as a bit of bodily waste. “If at all,” the poem begins, “he thinks of me as a soiled fingernail.”9 Other poems were equally as curious about the body and its dictates. Layton’s world was still an epic place governed by spirits and demons, but it was also occupied by women who had to be courted and seduced. He was, in that respect, a student of the Hebrew prophets. Finally the frozen kingdom had a poet who wrote about fucking, and the fact that he acted out on these carnal scenarios in life as well as in verse, and the fact that he let his hair grow long and shaggy and always spoke as if he was reading poetry, soon made Layton the nation’s most fascinating poet.

  It also made him a professor at McGill, where in 1954 he met a promising junior, the young poet Leonard Cohen. As a thinker Cohen probably learned more from Klein, whose best works are dense with ideas and allusions to rituals, and as a teacher of craft, Cohen had Dudek, who introduced him not only to the history of verse but also to its rules. These are necessary skills for anyone interested in writing poetry. But how is a twenty-year-old to learn how to be a poet? There was more to the calling than the scrubbing of lines. There was the duende, and it hardly lived in Westmount. Cohen wrote poetry, but he wasn’t ready to appoint himself a member of the same club as Lorca and the others he admired. In his junior year at McGill, as the newly elected president of the debate club, he traveled with his friends to the Norfolk Penitentiary outside Boston to debate the inmates about the moral implications of television on society. He had already published some of his writing in school publications, and someone introduced him as a poet. When he took the podium, he denied the allegation. “My colleague has promised you a poet,” he said, “but I am afraid that you will be disappointed. I do not converse in rhyming couplets, nor do I wear a cape or walk brooding over the moor or drink wine from a polished human skull or st
ride frequently into the cosmic night. I am never discovered sitting amid Gothic ruins in moonlight clutching in my pale hand a dying medieval lily and sighing over virgins with bosoms heaving like the sea. In fact I wouldn’t recognize a dying medieval lily if I fell over one, and hardly think I could do better with a virgin, and I’ll drink out of anything that has a bottom to it.”10

  Still, he wrote poetry. From his maternal grandfather he inherited the sense that the highest form of literature speaks of justice and aims at transcendence. From Layton he got a license to lust for thighs and breasts. Klein infused him with a love of the epic, and Lorca with a passion for universal truth. These gifts were all seminal, but they alone don’t account for the collection of poems Cohen eventually produced, published in 1956 and aptly called Let Us Compare Mythologies. Like his elders, Cohen conjured otherworldly images, biblical references, spiritual currents. But these all came crashing down onto the streets of 1950s Montreal, and the sacred became all the more startling when viewed against the backdrop of the profane.

  Writing about Cohen’s technique years later, the novelist Michael Ondaatje called it “a gothic use of juxtaposition.”11 When Cohen, for example, described Christ as pinned “like a lovely butterfly against the wood,”12 he recalled not the living savior but an image in a cheap painting, with “velvet wounds / and delicate twisted feet.”13 Another poem delivered another slain saint, a lady, a star of the screen, “found mutilated in a Mountain Street boarding house.”14 Her stigmata were the stab wounds streaking her chest. Yet the poem wasn’t gory. It ended with young people dancing atop her grave, and with the earth blooming with fragrant roses. The martyr’s death, like Christ’s, was the vehicle of redemption, her mutilation a moment of beauty. Rather than lament—as is the perennial disposition of the young—the gone glories of an earlier age, and rather than compare—as was the habit of so many Canadian writers before him—his own landscape unfavorably with some other, foreign, and more luminescent one, Cohen wrote poems that argued that his own place and time were brimming with detritus but also with holiness. He realized that a simple encounter between a man and a woman was worthy of the language and the passion of the biblical prophets. Rather than try to inflate the world to epic proportions, as Layton did, Cohen made his universe seem ever grander by admitting just how awash it was with bigotry and violence and dumb lust.