That miffed Cohen. “I do the poetry,” he quipped at the host, “you do the commentary.”
But Berton wasn’t letting go. “Let’s get this straight,” he said calmly, staring at Cohen. “Are you saying that there’s nothing that worries you, nothing that bothers you? How can you write poetry if you’re not bothered by something?”
Leaning forward, picking up steam as he spoke, Cohen replied. “I’m bothered,” he said, “when I get up in the morning, my real concern is to discover whether or not I’m in a state of grace. And I make this investigation, and if I’m not in a state of grace, I try to go to bed.”
It’s a charming statement, and its vague absurdity helps it linger for a spell longer than a quip usually does. It compels you to imagine what a state of grace might feel like, and why, really, you should bother getting out of bed graceless at all. The sound bite blossoms into a moment of meditation; that’s as great a poetic achievement as any carefully wrought stanza.
To the suited adults who paid him around one hundred dollars per television appearance, the Poet was skillfully walking the line between genuine artist and smirking con man. Everybody knew that Leonard Cohen was playing the part of Leonard Cohen, just as Irving Layton played Irving Layton and another young man who was considered a poet down south in New York’s Greenwich Village, Robert Allen Zimmerman, was playing the part of Bob Dylan. What was less obvious was that behind all the quips and the jokes, the outrageous performances on TV and the spotlights in seedy clubs, Cohen was never lost in the fun house. Jokes, he realized, and televised spectacles, were the only language his generation spoke fluently. Even if he could fashion himself into a Canadian Lorca, who, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, would want to listen to his sad and soulful tales? What they wanted was for their idols to be cool, and Cohen knew just how to deliver. But his performance pieces were nothing like Layton’s. They weren’t empty explosions of confidence and style. They were cluster bombs. They dropped fast, penetrated deeply, and set off a series of ongoing explosions that resonated long after they were first heard. In the years of being the Poet, Cohen’s aim had grown accurate. What he needed now was a target.
CHAPTER THREE
The Prophet in the Library
* * *
If Leonard Cohen was the Poet, Mordecai Richler was the Novelist. With his first novel published in 1954, two years before Cohen’s first poetry collection, Richler was soon celebrated as an important young voice in Canadian letters. He was also, in almost every way, Cohen’s opposite. Cohen grew up in affluent Westmount; Richler in the working-class Jewish neighborhood downtown, along St. Urbain Street. Cohen was fascinated by mythology; Richler wrote gruffly about everyday life. Cohen was subtle and elegant; Richler dived right in for the kill. “Yentas, flea-carriers and rent-skippers,” he wrote of his fellow Jews in one characteristically disdainful paragraph, “goniffs from Galicia, couldn’t afford a day in the country or tinned fruit for dessert on the High Holidays. They accepted parcels from charity matrons (Outremont bitches) on Passover, and went uninvited to bar-mitzvahs and weddings to carry off cakes, bottles, and chicken legs. Their English was not as good as ours. In fact, they were not yet Canadians.”1
This tension between divergent attitudes and competing worldviews antedated the two young writers. Hirsch Cohen, Leonard’s great-uncle, and Yudel Rosenberg, Richler’s grandfather, had decades earlier been involved in a violent feud: Both were rabbis, both vied for control of Montreal’s Jewish community, and both presented radically different approaches to Jewish life. Hirsch Cohen was a measured man who reached out to all members of the community, even those with whose opinions he disagreed, and embraced many of the facets of modern life. Yudel Rosenberg, on the other hand, was a mystic and a scold, fond of reproachful speeches and distrustful of many of his fellow Jews.
Like his grandfather, but for different reasons, Richler looked around him and saw a community largely beyond redemption. Rosenberg was furious because Jews had become too secular and read unholy books; Richler was riled because Jews were not secular enough, retaining something of the ghetto wherever they went. Grandfather and grandson alike, however, addressed their dismay in the same fashion: by looking away. Rosenberg transcended the humdrum by turning to the otherworldly realms of the kabbalah, while Richler’s escape was more literal—he spent nearly twenty years living in London, making light of his roots. The only way for Jews to overcome their fundamental predicament, Richler believed, was to keep wandering and hope that they would one day go far enough to reach a place where the constraints of their religion could no longer confine them. He felt the same way about being Canadian: The only way to make sense of that identity was to abandon it.
“The best influences in the world reach us from New York,” Richler once wrote in a Canadian magazine. “The longest unmanned frontier in the world is an artificial one and I look forward to the day when it will disappear and Canadians will join fully in the American adventure. To say this in Canada is still to invite cat-calls and rotten eggs. We would lose our identity, they say, our independence. But Texas or Maine still have distinctive identities and we are even now economically dependent on the United States.”2
Leonard Cohen read Richler’s article when it first came out in 1964. He was living on the Greek island of Hydra, in a white house on top of a cliff, with a Norwegian woman and her son. The island, he wrote to his sister, had “no tourists except the occasional burning-eyes, badly dressed, miserly, worried looking, pubic bearded individuals who by their expression and dress take pains to advertise the already loosely guarded secret that they are Artists. One hides behind fishermen to avoid them only to find one staring at you in the mirror of your vestibule.”3 And yet, if Cohen himself was a miserly and worried-looking artist, he was very much a Canadian miserly and worried-looking artist, and talk welcoming the co-optation of his homeland by the United States felt like betrayal. On a brief visit to Montreal, he told a reporter that if he’d met Richler, “I’d have punched him in the nose.”4
Violence was merited; Richler had offended not some impotent sense of patriotism but the very foundation of the creative process. “Only nationalism produces art,” Cohen stated, denying the common perception that exaggerated patriotism inspired nothing but simplistic, chest-thumping drivel. For him art and nationalism both originated from the same drive, the desire to speak passionately and without restraint about one’s origins. “It’s only when people start deploring the erosion of their natural resources that they start to worry about their poets.”5 Jingoism, chauvinism, excessive pride—only by tilling the earth with such blunt tools would poetry bloom. Richler’s article, Cohen concluded, was an “outright betrayal.”6
He was speaking at an impromptu press conference at the Museum of Fine Arts. He wore a tight leather jacket and a skinny black tie, and the cigarette dangling from his mouth at a sharp angle made him look less like a person and more like a collection of straight lines that had temporarily coalesced into human form. As was his habit when speaking to the press, every other reply was a quip or a joke. Asked where he was going next, for example, he smiled and replied, “Suicide!”7 But he wasn’t joking when he spoke of Richler and Canada and the arts.
“What it boils down to is that we’re frightened of making fools of ourselves politically and artistically. That’s exactly what we must do … produce with the courage to fail and shed this phony sophistry, this dream of urbanity that isn’t ours. I’m tired of this critical attitude that pontificates on what is good and what meets required standards. In this country, we’re scared of being labeled hicks, yet no one cares: They don’t care in London, they don’t care in New York. I don’t go along with the sophisticated attitude that ridicules all talk of a new Canadian flag and the rest of the Canadania that we’re immersed in each and every day. Unless we explore our own possibilities—these things we consider corny—then we’ll lose something valuable.”8
He wasn’t talking only about Canada. By 1964 Leonard Cohen was th
irty. The boy poet, Layton’s student, the grinning con man—the act was wearing thin. In his hillside home overlooking the Aegean, unfurnished save for a bed and a large wooden table, he spent hours each day writing. There were no jazz clubs in Hydra for him to fill with his poetry, and no one in Greece was particularly impressed by assigning new meanings to old myths. It was the perfect disinterested atmosphere in which Cohen could find his preoccupation, the one theme that, with slight variations, would consume him throughout his career.
That theme was redemption. He had gleaned it from being a Cohen and noting the commanding way in which his clan imposed its will on its surroundings. He was taught it in downtown dances, where he pined after the laughing Catholic French-speaking girls who wanted nothing to do with him and his world. On the wall of one Montreal café he had scrawled one of his finest poems about being saved: “Marita Please Find Me, I Am Almost 30.”9 Redemption was a discretely Jewish affair, a wholly Canadian affliction, an entirely universal obsession. It was more than enough for a lifetime of work. And it wasn’t easy to grasp: Cohen’s early poems twinkled with moments of sudden clarity, the poet here and there catching a glimpse of his guiding star. But by the time he sat down in the Montreal museum gallery and talked about socking Mordecai Richler, he was well on his way to becoming an artist in full.
To the extent that Cohen owed his clarity to anyone, he was probably indebted to Abraham Moses Klein. Irving Layton may have been the mischievous big brother teaching Cohen how to be in the world as a young poet, but Klein was the elder statesman whose ideas Cohen found too intoxicating to ignore.
As a student at McGill in the late 1920s, Klein was attracted to the pride of poets, led by F. R. Scott, who were then trying to infuse the staid local scene with shots of Continental modernism. He soon became one of Canada’s most important poets in addition to being a lawyer, a journalist, a leader of the Jewish community, and a speechwriter for Samuel Bronfman, who had made a vast fortune with his Seagram distillery.
For young Canadian Jews, born as Klein began his literary ascent, the poet was a seminal figure. Richler, in his finest novel, Solomon Gursky Was Here, reimagines Klein as L. B. Berger, a brilliant writer forced to sell his soul and waste his talent in the service of a whiskey baron. Cohen was far more generous in his assessment. After an unsuccessful run for parliament, Klein’s sanity began to flicker. He attempted suicide, was hospitalized, and upon his release spent two decades in self-imposed solitude. Observing Klein’s disintegration, Leonard Cohen wrote “To a Teacher,” a poem that was included in his second collection, The Spice-Box of Earth, published in 1961. “Did you confuse the Messiah in a mirror,” Cohen asks Klein, “and rest because he had finally come? / Let me cry Help beside you, Teacher. / I have entered under this dark roof / As fearlessly as an honoured son / Enters his father’s house.”10
Although known mainly as a poet, Klein’s most accomplished work was his single novel, The Second Scroll. Written in the wake of a trip Klein took to the newly founded state of Israel in 1949, it tells the story of a young Canadian Jew who sets out to find his elusive uncle, Melech, Hebrew for “king.” Melech had been a Talmudic prodigy, a scholar so radiant as to earn the nickname the Ilui, “the exalted one.” Seeing the town’s rabbi murdered by his pogrom-happy Catholic neighbors, the Ilui has a crisis of faith and finds comfort in another religion. Now called Comrade, he rises through the ranks of the Soviet Communist Party, a renowned authority on the decadence of bourgeois European culture. Then the Nazis invade, and Comrade survives by hiding with a local Catholic family and pretending to serve Christ. When the war ends he finds his way to Rome, makes powerful friends in the Vatican, contemplates conversion, but eventually boards a ship headed to Palestine. His nephew, the novel’s narrator, chases him around, always arriving just a few days after Melech has left. The uncle leaves behind a trail of crumbs—long, detailed letters that espouse his worldview. An inspired consideration of the Sistine Chapel is presented in full as an appendix: Sent there by his Catholic friends in the hope that Michelangelo’s work would make him succumb to the one true faith, Melech sees each biblical scene as a metaphor for the suffering Christians inflicted on Jews.
In Melech, Klein created a strange messiah. Melech toys with many isms, yet remains fundamentally Jewish. He is never spotted in the flesh, yet the stories he tells—and the stories people tell about him—help his adherents believe that a better, more moral world is possible. The more we read of Uncle Melech’s journeys, the more we realize his stories are not meant to reshape history but to replace it altogether. It’s a radical idea, but it grows more and more appealing as the novel progresses. Faced with a history so rich with savagery, Jews retreat to fiction and tell themselves that if they believe enough in their stories, the Promised Land will turn from fantasy to fact and the death camps will fade from memory, becoming a distant, grim fable. This is how the Jewish messiah redeems his followers: not by whisking them off to a better world, but by teaching them how to see this one differently. Some assembly is required—those who want to be saved have to go ahead and, like the novel’s narrator, learn how to save themselves—but once the art is mastered, change is imminent. As the Klein scholar Linda Rozmovits elegantly put it, “The Jewish narrator is forced to respond to the alarming paradox that it is in actual fact and not in the recounting of fact that Jewish existence has been rendered most nearly fictional. As the only remaining source of cultural continuity, it falls to the narrator not simply to re-tell but in fact to reconstruct, or to quote one of Klein’s favorite puns, to literally ‘re-member’ what has been dismembered.”11
As a young poet Leonard Cohen was never particularly close to Klein. But when Cohen was invited to give a talk at the Jewish Library in Montreal, a few days after Christmas in 1964, it was Klein he wanted to talk about.
No recording or detailed written account survives of this talk, only a stack of papers—Cohen’s own notes. They’re disjointed and cryptic, with words sometimes misspelled and sometimes crossed out and sentences trailing off as their author’s mind wanders from one budding idea to another. Yet it merits being ranked among Cohen’s most notable works, as it marks his transformation from a young seeker of meaning and experimenter with form to a fierce, adult artist who has found his truth and is determined to tell it and tell it again. What came before the speech12 were good poems, neatly symbolic and pleasantly profound and easy to admire. What came after it was daring work—poems and prose about Hitler and fucking and cruel sacrifice—that baffled critics, repelled many of Cohen’s fans, and, eventually, led to his structural transformation from poet to singer. The title of Cohen’s speech was “Loneliness and History.”13
“I am afraid I am going to talk about myself,” he began. “All my best friends are Jews but I am the only Jew I know really well.” What was to follow, he added, would be a personal statement. “I have been influenced by a remark of Emerson’s,” he continued. “It is this. What you are, speaks so loudly that I cannot hear you, that is, reality speaks so loudly in you that I can’t hear what you are saying. I ask you to apply this insight to me. I shall apply it to you. I will always feel what you are more deeply than what you say.”
With that he was ready to introduce the person at the center of his talk. “I remember AM Klein speaking, whose poems disturbed me because at certain moments in them he used the word ‘we’ instead of the word ‘I,’ because he spoke with too much responsibility, he was too much a champion of the cause, too much the theorist of the Jewish party line.… And sometimes his nostalgia for a warm, rich past becomes more than nostalgia, becomes, rather, an impossible longing, an absolute and ruthless longing for the presence of the divine, for the evidence of holiness. Then he is alone and I believe him. Then there is no room for the ‘we’ and if I want to join him, if, even, I want to greet him, I must make my own loneliness.”
But Klein’s loneliness breeds silence, and his silence makes it clear that he has chosen to be a priest. An artist, Cohen said, should
become one of two things: a priest or a prophet. Before explaining the differences between the two, he berated the Canadian Jewish community, where honor had migrated “from the scholar to the manufacturer where it hardened into arrogant self defense. Bronze plaques bearing names like Bronfman and Beutel were fastened to modern buildings, replacing humbler buildings established by men who loved books in which there were no plaques at all.” This new community had nothing but contempt for the poor and the learned, Cohen said, recalling the dismissive way in which the parents in the affluent neighborhood where he grew up treated their children’s teachers, scruffy immigrants with no possessions and the smell of failure. What such a wicked community needed, he argued, was not a priest but a prophet.
But Klein had chosen to become the former. “He became their clown,” Cohen continued. “He spoke to men who despised the activity he loved most. He raised money. He chose to be a priest and protect the dead ritual. And now we have his silence.” The priest kept the community intact. And the community was “like an old lady whose canary has escaped in a storm, but who continues to furnish the cage with food and water and trapezes in the convinced hope that the canary will come back. The priest tries to persuade her that this optimism is religion.”
The prophet knows better. Realizing that history is just the narrative describing the path of “an idea’s journey from generation to generation,” he continues to chase the idea as it fluctuates, mutates, changes forms, “trying never to mistake the cast off shell with the swift changing thing that shed it.” The prophet follows the idea wherever it goes, and ideas, by their very nature, like to travel to dangerous places. The chase, then, is a lonely sport, and the community, observing the prophet, becomes suspicious. Most people would rather visit lifeless and antiquated things in air-conditioned museums than seek thrills in steaming swamps, running the risk of getting bitten by something wild.
A Broken Hallelujah: Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen Page 6
