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

by Liel Leibovitz

  It was a radical move, and not just in Canada: As he was writing his early poems, men a decade or so his elders were congregating in New York and San Francisco and forming a movement that would soon be known as the Beats. Cohen was too young to join their party, and it’s just as well—they had little in common. The Beats’ brightest poet, Allen Ginsberg, howled against the ravages of capitalism and offered instead a gallery of new saints—Tuli Kupferberg, Jean Genet, Blake, Rimbaud—for the hip and the young to worship. If the old religion was withering, he argued, let us sanctify a new one. It was this kind of thinking that eventually led him to found a school in Colorado for “Disembodied Poetics.” But Cohen’s poetics were never disembodied. He never wanted new heroes or a new faith. In his poems—and later in his song lyrics—Christ is not so much the Christian savior as he is a thin and mindful rabbi. Cohen realized that every conscientious young man from Isaiah onward looked around him and saw “the best minds” of his generation “destroyed by madness,” and that the only path to real and sustainable salvation involved learning how to look at stab wounds and imagine that they just might be stigmata, to look at the ancient traditions and imagine that they were still as meaningful as ever.

  “Now the hollow nests,” he wrote in “The Sparrows,” one of the collection’s strongest poems, “sit like tumours or petrified blossoms / between the wire branches / and you, an innocent scientist / question me on these brown sparrows: / whether we should plant our yards with breadcrumbs / or mark them with the black, persistent crows / whom we hate and stone.”15

  In 1954, still a junior, Cohen handed his first draft of “The Sparrows” to his teacher Louis Dudek. The two were walking down the corridor of the English Department, and the professor stopped to read. When he was done, he asked Cohen to kneel. Using the rolled-up sheet of paper on which the poem was typed as his sword, he tapped the young man’s shoulders and knighted him a poet. The poem went on to win a literary contest sponsored by the university’s student newspaper, and Cohen went on to become the campus’s reigning literary talent. Let Us Compare Mythologies was published in 1956, a few months after Cohen’s graduation, the inaugural volume in a university-sponsored series of poetry books, edited by Dudek. Approximately five hundred copies were printed, all of which sold out.

  Still, Cohen must not have felt satisfied, because he turned his attention almost exclusively to writing short stories. Perhaps he hoped that stories would allow him the intricacy and character development precluded by his stark poetic scenes. Perhaps he saw the move as a normal step in the evolution of a writer, from brief poems to short stories to the ultimate form of serious literature, the novel. Or maybe he was just trying his hand at different genres. Whatever the case, his stories provide clues into a mind in a state of unrest.

  Take, for example, “Saint Jig.” Written sometime in 1956 and never published, the story begins by introducing two friends. One, Henry, is charming and confident, the sort of chap who women never resist. His roommate, Jig, is a virgin. He is bright and brooding and immensely appealing, but one of his hands is slightly deformed and he is too self-aware of his disability to attempt courtship. Pitying his friend, Henry proposes he visit a prostitute; it is, he tells Jig, how he himself had become a man. Jig refuses. Paying for sex strikes him as a revolt against the higher order of love. Henry, unmoved, goes to a local brothel and engages the services of one of the women, Ramona. Installing her in a hotel room, he phones Jig and asks him to come right over. Ramona, Henry tells Jig, is an old friend, in town for the night, and could Jig be a sport and show her a good time? Jig agrees, and Henry, rosy with self-satisfaction, goes home to sleep. He is woken up in the middle of the night by a phone call. It’s Jig. Come right down and meet us, he tells Henry deliriously. Ramona and I are getting married. Alarmed, Henry stutters. He tries to convince his friend that he shouldn’t commit to the first woman who had let him into her graces. Jig protests; he and Ramona, he tells Henry, hadn’t had sex. They spent the night talking. And they were in love.

  It’s a charming story. Like something by Maupassant, it’s a ballet of one-note characters that hinges on a final twist. It would be a lovely piece for a twenty-two-year-old to write, all technical mastery and plot and transition and very little that requires the insight that only comes with experience. But right beneath the surviving copies of the story, in a sturdy cardboard box in the library of the University of Toronto, is its original draft. For a spell, it reads the same: Henry suggests a prostitute; Jig refuses; Henry ambles down to the brothel. But then the story unfurls differently. Instead of getting down to business, Henry walks over to Ramona and calls her by her name. She asks him if they’d met before.

  “Don’t you remember me, Ramona?” he asks. “Five years ago. Don’t you remember you cried; it was the first time that way for you and you cried.”

  They walk to the hotel. Henry phones Jig. Then he and Ramona talk. They realize that the night they’d slept together was not only Ramona’s first as a prostitute, but also Henry’s first altogether. “I remember something else,” Ramona says softly. “I remember that you kissed my shoulder and I felt your tears on my skin.” Henry is moved. “He wanted to hold her, to caress her, to tell her that he remembered everything, how she looked and spoke and wept those important five years ago, and how everything had changed so irrevocably, for him and for her. He was overwhelmed with nostalgia and passion.”

  Henry grows anxious and emotional. Ramona grows teary. She tells Henry that she remembers it all very vividly. Nobody, she said, has ever treated her so tenderly since. Henry wants to flee. He knows that Jig is on his way. He doesn’t want to hurt his friend. “Listen, Ramona,” he says. “Probably neither of us should be here right now. It’s not a good idea to go back in time, to relive what is already past. Nothing is going to be changed anyway. We are what we are, and no second chances. A lot of people want to be different than they are.” But Ramona hears nothing. “She was remembering herself as a young girl,” Cohen wrote, “weeping with a young boy, the whole world ahead of them.”

  And then Jig arrives. “He opened the door very quietly and what he saw in the lighted room was two naked bodies, limbs enmeshed, moving. He recognized one of the bodies as Henry’s, shut the door silently and fled. Back in the dormitory he shoved all his belongings into a large suitcase and ran down the stairs into the street, too hurt to cry.”16

  It’s a bit of a wobbly ending. The whole story is unbalanced, with the first two-thirds emotionally thin, just two guys contemplating girls, before swirling into a crescendo of desire that tears the whole plot apart. Henry and Ramona catch fire; two practitioners of callous sex, they are overwhelmed by intimacy. And Jig—who, in the final draft, is a hapless and unscathed lover—is sacrificed, robbed of his innocence and his friendship with Henry by a desire too violent to be contained. Despite the imperfections, comparing the two versions tells us a lot about the author’s state of mind. Cohen got it right the first time. He wrote a story that is simultaneously sad and sexy, less an account of a youthful fling than an allegory for love’s internal complications. It’s throbbing with feeling. Like Henry and Ramona’s relationship, the story is sudden, senseless, and sultry—which, if you’re lucky, is what life is like in your twenties. But having hit his stride and captured all this turmoil, Cohen wanted out. He toned down his prose, tamed his wild creations. He replaced the vicious ending with a clever joke, and he typed the final draft neatly in three copies and kept them in his drawer. He didn’t want to be the kind of writer who observed the ways in which men and women who set out to love each other ended up ravaging each other instead. At least not for a while. Instead he wrote more stories, nearly all of which resemble the final version of “Saint Jig” in their bloodless adherence to easy plot turns and small, self-contained scenes. Many of these featured a character named Mr. Euemer, an emotionally paralyzed man who feels anything only when he succumbs to the surreally wrought cruelties of those surrounding him. In one story Euemer obeys his wife�
��s demands and shaves his entire body. In another he becomes entangled with a psychopathic youth. Misunderstandings and role reversals abound. Nothing is ever terribly touching or raw.

  Cohen’s journal from the same period, however, is a very different story. Here he needed no religious imagery or plot devices. He wrote bluntly about what he did and what he felt, about his aimless nocturnal walks down to the novelty shops and the strip clubs of St. Catherine Street, about what went through his mind, about life in his mother’s house:

  Sometimes when I got home my mother would be on the telephone describing my coat to the police. As I prepared for bed she’d rage outside my closed door demanding explanations, reciting the names of children who brought their parents pleasure and honour, calling on my dead father to witness my delinquency, calling on God to witness her ordeal in having to be both a father and a mother to me. I would fall asleep in the torrent thinking usually of the exhausted school-day that awaited me.

  I don’t know what it was that drove me downtown two or three nights a week. There were often long dark blocks between the windows I loved. Walking them, hungry for the next array, I had a heroic vision of myself: I was a man in the middle-twenties, rain-coated, battered hat pulled low above intense eyes, a history of injustice in his heart, a face too noble for revenge, walking the night along some wet boulevard, followed by the sympathy of countless audiences.

  My creation was derived from the lonely investigations of private eyes into radio or movie crimes, family accounts of racial wandering, Bible glories of wilderness saints and hermits. My creation walked with the trace of a smile on his Captain Marvel lips, he was a master of violence but he dealt only in peace. He knew twenty languages, all the Chinese dialects, hardly anyone had ever heard him speak. Loved by two or three beautiful women who could never have him, he was so dedicated, every child who ever saw him loved him. He wrote brilliant difficult books and famous professors sometimes recognized him in streetcars but he turns away and gets off at the next stop.

  If we could ever tell it, how it happens, we grow to approximate the vision (minus the nobility, trace of smile, languages, mastery), we get what we wanted, we grow in some way towards the thirteen-year-old’s dream, training ourselves with sad movies, poems of loss, minor chords of the guitar, folk-songs of doomed socialist brotherhood. And soon we are strolling the streets in a brand-new trench coat, hair in careful disarray, embracing the moonlight, all the pity of the darkness in a precious kind of response to the claim of the vision, but then much later, when we are tired of indulgence and despise the attitude, we find ourselves walking the streets in earnest, in real rain, and we circle the city almost to morning until we know every wrought-iron gate, every old mansion, every mountain view. In these compulsive journeys we become dimly aware of a new vision, we pray that it might be encouraged to grow and take possession, overwhelm the old one, a vision of order, austerity, work and sunlight.17

  Melancholia, wanderlust, delusions of grandeur: they were too much to take. Cohen tried several remedies. He spent a semester in law school. He spent some months working for his uncles. He drove down to New York, rented an apartment on Riverside Drive, and enrolled at Columbia, studying English and writing more stories. But none of these felt right; the routines of work or of graduate school could not curb his desires or his sense that there was a better way of being that he simply hadn’t discovered yet. Frustrated, he wrote a maniacal short novel, Ballet of Lepers. In it a young man much like himself is forced to take in his grandfather, a sweet but fierce man much like Cohen’s own, the rabbi Klinitsky-Klein. The grandfather is losing his mind, and punctuates his interactions with short bursts of violence. If a window refuses to open, he smashes it. If a clerk provides poor service, he socks him. Slowly the grandson is entranced, understanding that the old man is not just a lunatic but some sort of a strong-armed Bartleby: Like Melville’s scribe, he’d rather not succumb to the degradations of modern, commercial life. Instead of inaction, he opts for a jab or a punch. Soon, the young man follows suit, directing his rage at one poor lowly official. If Cohen had ever sent the manuscript to publishers—by most accounts, he had—it is clear why it was rejected. It’s a gorgeous work, but it’s too dense with grotesque moments, and too faithful to its own feverish rhythms, to make much sense to the casual reader. With his drawers now bursting with middling manuscripts, Cohen was back to the same question that had been haunting him since he first found Lorca: how to be a poet in a world that increasingly expected its poets either to act up on television or languish in obscurity.

  His answer was simple but inspired. He would blend truth and artifice until his audiences didn’t know which was which. He would entertain, but deliver the sort of punch lines that carried a real and existential punch. To achieve that he needed a public persona, and so he became the Poet. In the strip clubs and the jazz joints and the oily eateries of St. Catherine Street, Leonard Cohen was reborn as John Keats. At Birdland, a third-floor lounge on top of Dunn’s Famous Steak House, he gave midnight readings, sitting on a stool, softly illuminated by a rosy spotlight and accompanied by a six-piece band. He was there to entertain. “I hope there are no atheists here I may offend by this reverence,” he would say, introducing his poem “Prayer for Messiah” as the pianist tapped out a prelude by Chopin. He was no less fluid offstage: A friend who had assigned him to review a scholarly book for a student magazine arrived at his place late the night before it was due and found him lounging on the bed, chatting about the I-Ching and the spiritual benefits of masturbation, his piece unwritten.18

  Such mannerisms weren’t merely tolerated, they were adored. These were, after all, the late 1950s, years of white T-shirts and blue jeans and black leather jackets. Strong, rationally argued convictions were suspect. To be hip you had to be a little lost. And Cohen was the first to claim his own aimlessness; his path, he told a television crew following him around in 1964, was infinitely wide and without direction.19 For the generation that rose between Howl and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a touch too young to have dug Ginsberg and Kerouac and just slightly too old to turn on, tune in, and drop out, it was a perfect pace.

  Here is what he looked like to the young men, still wearing ties, and the young women, skirts still below the knee, who came to see him perform in the early 1960s. Despite having had two collections of poetry published and the press being fond of calling him the finest poet of his generation, when he took the stage, he was perpetually timid, clasping his book of poems tight to his chest, averting his gaze. His smile was nervous, his voice flat. But then he spoke, and his rhythm was perfect.

  “The other time I was in quarters such as these,” went one anecdote, “was in the Verdun mental hospital in Montreal. I was visiting”—break for laughter—“visiting a friend. He was on a top floor. And I asked him, for he was still lucid, where can I get a coffee. He said, downstairs. That was one of those famous last words. I commenced a descent of similar stone corridors, and I found myself in a kind of arena, which was surrounded by closed doors. It had been a hot afternoon, and I had removed my jacket, as I am wont to do.”—chuckles—“I had left it with my friend, who although mentally ill, was no thief.”—rolling laughter—“I suspect he wasn’t even mentally ill. He was doing this instead of college.”—laughter, applause—“I stood watching the four or five doors, wondering about all the possibilities. Except the one that occurred: door opened, and two large men in white uniforms walked out. And they said, ‘where are you supposed to be now?’—nervous giggles—I said, ‘in the cafeteria.’ They nodded to each other. ‘Where are you supposed to be now?’ ‘In the cafeteria!’ Well, you see, as their questions continued, my answers, which started innocent enough, began to sound like I was protesting too much. In fact, after being interrogated three or four more times, I was shouting, pushing them aside, causing them to run after me down the corridor. It was only when a guard identified me that I was able to go back to my friend, who had eaten my jacket.”20

 
“Quarters such as these,” “as I am wont to do”—that formal language, intricately laid down, all to serve a wisp of a story.

  Or perhaps Cohen was smarter. Perhaps he realized that the only way for a young man to talk seriously about religion in a world that seemed too distracted to care for it was to provide more distractions, to tell jokes, to baffle his listeners so profoundly that they lost all sense of place and had to stop and wonder what was going on. Such, at least, was Pierre Berton’s reaction: The bow-tied éminence grise of Canadian journalism had Cohen on a panel early on in the poet’s career, and had little idea what to do with him. Grave-faced, Berton asked Cohen about his concerns.21

  “I,” Cohen responded, staring at the desk, “I haven’t a single concern.”

  “Come on now,” Berton insisted. “What do you care about, really? Don’t you care about anything? How can you be a good poet and not care about something?”