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

by Liel Leibovitz

  “Some moment in time,” Cohen said as the speech drew to an end, “very brief, there must have been, among the ancient Hebrews, men who were both prophet and priest in the same office. I tease my imagination when I try to conceive of the energy of that combination. Their lives burned with such an intensity that we here can still feel their warmth. I love the Bible because it honours them.” But the two roles had separated, and now artists had a choice to make. Klein stuck with the priesthood. He wrote speeches for the Bronfmans and edited the Canadian Jewish Chronicle and ran for office. He, like Cohen’s own ancestors, was a guardian of institutions. What he defended was the abstract idea of a Jewish community and its ancient ways. But those ideas were no longer relevant by the time Cohen gave his speech. “I believe we have eliminated all but the most blasphemous ideas of God,” he said as he ended his speech. “I believe that the God worshipped in our synagogues is a hideous distortion of a supreme idea—and deserves to be attacked and destroyed. I consider it one of my duties to expose [the] platitude which we have created.”

  That was a job for the prophet. It was also the path Klein himself had traced so well in The Second Scroll. The prophet, like Uncle Melech in the novel, could try on new and conflicting identities and shed them whenever he pleased, because his commitment was not to staid rituals but to a throbbing story. The story had kept the Jews alive. It captivated them even when the somber and accurate accounts of their progressions—thousands burned here, millions gassed there—were too much to bear. Canada, too, was surviving on account of a story: Its own chronology seared by divisions and stained by war, it told itself that it existed, that it was a real nation with a real unifying force, and, encouraged by that story, it persevered. While all nations are, to some extent, imagined communities that come together only when all of their inhabitants envision them into being, Canadians and Jews had to imagine harder, hard enough to override history’s long odds.14

  That is what so infuriated Cohen about Richler’s flippant comments: The moment you believed that it would be better to blur the border and join the United States, you’d brought the Canadian story to an abrupt end. The moment you argued that the Jews surrounding you were just too repellent with their customs and their tongue—that one was better off running away to where they couldn’t be found—you’d closed the book on Jewish life. Do that, and the world becomes nothing more than a collection of disinterested and disconnected facts, an empty space in which individuals float alone, like particles, some surviving and some not. To create order, to make a community, to shape time, to find hope where logic and reason saw none: This is what the story accomplished. It was the prophet’s job to tell the story. And speaking to his fellow Montreal Jews, Leonard Cohen declared it his task to take on, although to do it properly, he noted, he would have to go into exile, like Melech, and stay stoic as his fellow Jews labeled him a traitor for daring to think up other possibilities for spiritual life—possibilities, like love and sex and drugs and song, for which there was little room in the synagogue. He was ready.

  As he finished his talk, the shouting began. His words about killing God, prophets as traitors, and the soulless rich enraged many in the audience. Some catcalled. Others demanded the time to debate. It was late at night, and the event’s organizers suggested that the discussion be continued the following Saturday night. Grumbling, irate, the audience scattered. The following Saturday the library was packed once again. On the dais, rabbis and community leaders sat gravely, ready to chastise Cohen for his impudence. But Cohen was gone.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Notes from a Greek Isle

  * * *

  He was on Hydra. He had bought the house on the hill several years before, cobbling together royalties, literary prize money, and a small family inheritance. How he ended up in Greece is the subject of another one of Cohen’s favorite stories—this one, too, possibly apocryphal. It was the winter of 1960, and Cohen, then the author of two collections of poetry, several short stories, and one rejected novel, decided to leave Montreal and travel to recharge his creative drive. London was an obvious choice for a young man raised by Anglophiles who wore British tweeds and looked to the motherland as the source of all that was proper. It was also a place where a young poet could try to connect with the ghosts of Byron and Shelley and Blake. He lived with friends, bought an Olivetti typewriter, and worked for hours each day on his poetry as well as on what was shaping up to be a quasi-autobiographical novel comprising scenes depicting the adolescence of a clever and lost Montreal Jew named Breavman. One day, while strolling around London’s East End, he spotted a branch of the Bank of Greece. The weather was London dreary, colorless and soggy, but inside the bank, behind the counter, stood a tanned man wearing shades. Cohen could not resist his siren song—“It was,” he told an interviewer some years later, “the most eloquent protest against the landscape that I’ve seen”1—and walked inside. A quick conversation revealed that the man was himself Greek, and he and Cohen began chatting about the weather. In Greece, the tanned man said, it was always springtime. The next day Cohen was Athens-bound.

  Whether or not the story of how he got there is true, once installed on the shores of the Aegean, Cohen was ready to begin his exile in earnest. Every now and then, when his finances permitted—the Hydra years are dotted with frequent letters to friends, relatives, and publishers, stressing Cohen’s lack of funds and asking for advances or loans—he returned to Montreal for a short spell, to “renew my neurotic affiliations.”2 The rest of the time he was on Hydra, drinking at Katsikas’s taverna or sitting on top of the whitewashed well just outside Douskas’s taverna, singing and strumming on his guitar. The men and women with whom he spent his days belonged to the same class of itinerant artists; they were writers and painters and filmmakers from the United States, England, Australia, and elsewhere, sensitive enough to resent the humdrum of popular culture and affluent enough to hide from it on some beach. On Hydra they found the sort of virginal beauty that they hoped would facilitate their immaculate rebirth. The island looked the part: Approached by boat, it juts out of the sea like a pyramid, its houses tumbling into the blue bay. In 1962, when the director Jules Dassin, another wandering Jew, retold Phaedra with Melina Mercouri and Anthony Perkins as the cursed lovers, he set it on Hydra; the movie’s strong eroticism owes as much to its caressing shots of sun-splattered shores and lush gardens as it does to the two characters whose indiscretion it depicts.

  Two months after his arrival, Cohen was tangled in an affair of his own, with Marianne Ihlen, the twenty-five-year-old girlfriend of the Norwegian writer Axel Jensen. Jensen took the boat back to Athens shortly after the birth of their son, also named Axel, met another woman, and slowly faded from Ihlen’s life. Cohen had seen the family ambling on the island before, but never approached them. After Axel had decamped and left Marianne alone, he sought an introduction. “I was standing in the shop with my basket waiting to pick up bottled water and milk,” Ihlen recalled years later. “And he is standing in the doorway with the sun behind him. And then you don’t see the face, you just see the contours. And so I hear his voice, saying: ‘Would you like to join us, we’re sitting outside?’ And I reply thank you, and I finish my shopping. Then I go outside. And I sit down at this table where there were three or four people sitting, who lived in Hydra at the time. He was wearing khaki trousers, which were a shade more green. And also he had his beloved, what we in the old days called tennis shoes. And he also always wore shirts with rolled up sleeves. In addition he had a beautiful little sixpence cap. What I didn’t know when I met him was that he knew everything about what had happened before I returned. Because after all he had been there, and realized what was going on. So I think that already when he saw me he had enormous compassion for me and my child. But I remember well that when my eyes met his eyes I felt it throughout my body. You know what that is. It is utterly incredible.”3 Eventually Ihlen said her good-bye and sweated as she labored up the hill with her heavy bag of groceries. Whe
n she got home, she thought of Leonard. He was immensely attractive, but he also emitted the sort of comforting warmth that reminded her of her grandmother. It was a heady combination. She got up and started to dance.

  Before too long Ihlen moved into Cohen’s sparsely furnished home. She was afraid that her child would disturb Leonard’s work, but was delighted to discover that Cohen had the same calming effect on the boy that he had on her: Each morning, Cohen would call out to Axel, telling him that he needed help in the study. Axel would rush in and, lying on the floor beside Cohen, would draw silently while Cohen wrote. This peaceful routine was dotted with daily strolls down to the beach, lovemaking with Marianne on a cast-iron Russian-made bed, dinners with friends, and the other discrete pleasures of living on an island where the power was often down for all but two hours of the day and you had to bribe the garbage man to pick up your trash.

  But if his days on Hydra were tranquil, Cohen’s writing was anything but. He was obeying Flaubert’s old dictum, which held that a writer ought to be orderly in life so that he may be violent in his work. And violent he was. His poems were no longer the careful juxtaposition of the profane and the sublime. He no longer cared for balance. He was, in the words of one insightful critic, an “author auditioning himself for all the parts in an unwritten play,” engaged in a “process of self-recovery and self-discovery.”4 This meant that style and subject matter alike had to be bludgeoned; what still lived after the blows would be the real Leonard Cohen.

  Often this process made the poems read more like lists, purely informative and bereft of artifice. In the poem “All There Is to Know About Adolph Eichmann,” for example, Cohen provides a mundane list of attributes, the sort usually associated with a passport or a driver’s license—“EYES: Medium / HAIR: Medium,” and so on—before concluding with acerbic observations, casually delivered: “What did you expect? / Talons? / Oversize incisors? / Green saliva? / Madness?” Decades later critics labeled Cohen’s work from this period as postmodern. But, unlike his postmodern contemporaries, Cohen was never particularly interested in form as such and did not set out to deconstruct poetry. He was trying to touch the rawest synapses of the Jewish and Western psyches. Written in 1963, Cohen’s poem must have been influenced by Eichmann’s trial, taking place that year in Jerusalem. Although he doesn’t mention her by name, Cohen sides with Hannah Arendt, who, covering the trial for The New Yorker, advanced the theory of the banality of evil. There was nothing particularly rotten about Eichmann, Arendt wrote; he was not a psychopath but merely a painfully average man who regarded the state-sponsored madness around him as normal and therefore never hesitated to partake in its crimes.

  To most American intellectuals, many of them Jews, Arendt’s essay slid dangerously close to an absolution of the perpetrator, and her tone conveyed a cold disgust for the meek Jews testifying against Eichmann and the prosecutors promoting their case. “What struck one in reading Eichmann in Jerusalem—struck like a blow—was the surging contempt with which she treated almost everyone and everything connected with the trial, the supreme assurance of the intellectual looking down upon those coarse Israelis,” wrote Irving Howe. “Many of us were still reeling from the delayed impact of the Holocaust. The more we tried to think about it, the less could we make of it. Now we were being told by the brilliant Hannah Arendt that Adolf Eichmann, far from being the ‘moral monster’ the Israeli prosecutor had called him, should really be seen as a tiresome, boring, trivial little fellow, the merest passive cog in the machine.”5 Others were less measured in their criticism of Arendt, causing Arendt’s friend Mary McCarthy to write: “This Eichmann business is assuming the proportions of a pogrom.”6

  The pogrom was in full force in 1963, and Cohen had chosen to enter it on Arendt’s side, even if he didn’t share her odd distaste for the victims. He was preoccupied with the Holocaust. When his collection of poems was finally published—in 1964, under the provocative title Flowers for Hitler—he prefaced it with the following quotation from Primo Levi: If from the inside of the concentration camp, Levi, a survivor, wrote, “a message could have seeped out to free men, it would have been this: Take care not to suffer in your own homes what is inflicted on us here.”7 The capacity for evil was dormant in us all; if we wished to purge it, we needed to learn how to speak about it first.

  Increasingly—and tellingly for a poet about to become a singer and a songwriter—Cohen’s way of speaking in verse hardened into rhyming couplets. The imagery of his previous two collections—intricate and soft—was now replaced by lines like these: “History is a needle / for putting men to sleep / anointed with the poison / of all they want to keep.”8 It was the same neat trick he’d learned on the stages of clubs and auditoriums in Montreal, disguising painful truths as aperçus; but as his explorations got deeper and darker, his lines grew more stunning, feeling simultaneously immediately familiar and profoundly incomprehensible—and less personal. Flowers for Hitler is densely populated with fathers and grandfathers and family members, none of them Cohen’s recognizable kin, all of them stand-ins for the coarse and callous members of the Jewish community that he had come to loathe. If a father appeared in Let Us Compare Mythologies, he was, with a few embellishments, Nathan Cohen, and was addressed warmly and elegiacally; in Flowers for Hitler there are fathers building the ovens in which millions perish, and others who fill their homes with twisted fears. They are there to be exorcised, leaving their sons “free as a storm-severed bridge, useless and pure as drowned alarm clocks.”9

  But Cohen wasn’t just the oedipal tinkerer some of his critics accused him of being. He was exploring these family dynamics not to make a personal point, or to explore the machinations of psychology, but rather to comment, for the first time in his career, on politics. Most of the failed fathers in the book are catalysts of grand disasters: There are direct references and allusions to Aleksandr Kerensky, the Russian prime minister ousted by the October Revolution, and to Joseph Goebbels, captured at the moment when he decides to abandon his career as a writer and join the Nazi Party. Both are weak men, misguided by their passions, unable to stop history’s march of folly. They invite nothing from the younger generation—their figurative sons—but pity. And pity Cohen has in spades. He is empathetic in part because he believes, like Arendt, that there’s no inherent evil in the world, just thoughtless men in precarious circumstances. In one poem, “Hitler the Brain-Mole”—Cohen had originally wanted to give his collection that title—he notes, “Hitler the brain-mole looks out of my eyes / Goering boils ingots of gold in my bowels / My Adam’s Apple bulges with the whole head of Goebbels / no use to tell a man he’s a Jew.”10 It’s with that insight in mind, Cohen argues, that we should approach world events: Rather than exert our energy taking sides, we should observe carefully until we see that history doesn’t sweep but saunter, and that the men who make it occupy more than the single dimension we assign them in our limited imaginations.

  This insight had led Cohen to do more than write harsh poems. He wanted to see the broken world for himself. In March 1961 he traveled to Havana. Just before leaving, he wrote a friend back home that he was “wild for all kinds of violence.”11 He was only half joking. Castro had been in power for two years, and Cuba seemed as close as Cohen would ever come to Lorca’s bloody and idealistic Spain. Also, Lorca had lived in Cuba for two months in 1930, written about it enthusiastically, and left enough of an impression to have Havana’s grandest theater named after him.

  But Lorca’s Cuba was long gone, and the island Cohen found was a faded rock. All the glamorous, raucous pleasures of Fulgencio Batista’s regime—the casinos, the brothels—had been outlawed. Instead of Hemingways the bars were now occupied by mirthless Russian engineers sent by Moscow to supervise its Caribbean satellite. Cohen didn’t mind too much.12 He wore khaki shorts and grew a beard and, ambling around town, soon discovered that the prostitutes and the gamblers were not really gone; too vital to the island’s economy, they were merely made less conspicuous,
and were all too happy to embrace, as Cohen referred to himself in a later poem, “the only tourist in Havana.”

  One night a man in a dark suit knocked on Cohen’s hotel room door. He identified himself as a Canadian official, and asked Cohen to accompany him to the Canadian embassy at once. There he was rushed into the office of the vice-consul. “Your mother,” the diplomat said disdainfully, “is very worried about you.”13 Soon Cohen learned that three B-26 bombers, painted to look like Cuban planes, had taken off earlier that evening from Nicaragua. Supplied by the CIA and piloted by anti-Castro Cuban exiles, the bombers destroyed several of the regime’s grounded aircraft near Havana and Santiago. An American invasion seemed imminent, and Mrs. Cohen anxiously called her cousin, a Canadian senator, and asked him to track down her wayward son.

  At first Cohen laughed the whole thing off. Two days later, on April 17, Operation Falcon was launched, and nearly fifteen hundred men landed at the Bay of Pigs. Cuba was under attack, and Cohen, a bearded foreigner, was eminently suspicious. He was walking on the beach at Playa de Varadero one day when twelve soldiers with machine guns encircled him. They thought he was one of the invaders. As they walked him to the police station, he repeated, in Spanish, the most comforting sentence he could think of to convince the soldiers he wasn’t Kennedy’s spy. “Amistad del pueblo,” he said repeatedly, “friendship of the people.”14 It did little to convince the soldiers, but before too long Cohen, stringing together a few sentences in Spanish, turned on the same effortless charm he had shown reading poems in public in Montreal. The soldiers poured him a glass of rum, gave him a shell necklace and a piece of string with two bullets to wear as an amulet, hugged him tight, and let him go.