Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen

by Jeff Burger

  Cohen’s emotional state varies as much in these conversations as his subject matter, but his moods can be hard to read, particularly in his early and middle years. Half a century ago, he was already developing a reputation for being depressed—and for protesting that he didn’t deserve that reputation. “If we assume the role of melancholy too enthusiastically, we lose a great deal of life,” he told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Jed Adams in a brief radio conversation that aired on June 16, 1961. “Yes, there are things to protest against and things to hate but there are a vast range of things to enjoy, beginning with our bodies and ending with ideas…. If we refuse those or if we disdain them, then we are just as guilty as those who live complacently.”

  When Adams expressed surprise that Cohen didn’t seem angry about anything, he replied, “There are lots of things that anger me [but] let us not destroy ourselves with hostility, let us not become paranoiac. If there are things to fight against, let’s do it in health and in sanity. I don’t want to become a mad poet, I want to become a healthy man that can face the things that are around me.”

  Cohen seemed earnest throughout this interview, but when he talked with the CBC’s Bill McNeill for a December 19, 1963, radio broadcast, he sounded somewhat like the early Bob Dylan, who was known for putting on reporters with silly answers to serious if sometimes inane questions. Cohen said he’d been living on the Greek island of Hydra for four or five years “but I keep coming back to Canada to get sick. But it’s a very special divine kind of sickness that’s absolutely necessary for my life.” Asked whether he was preoccupied with sex, he said, “A man’s a fool if he isn’t. But I didn’t write this thing [The Favorite Game] to titillate, although if it does titillate, it’s an extra bonus.”

  When journalist Beryl Fox talked with Cohen for CBC-TV on May 8, 1966, you couldn’t miss the twinkle in his eye. He told Fox he’d pondered getting a tattoo and when she asked “Where?” he deadpanned, “There’s this place on Saint Lawrence Boulevard.” He also mentioned that “sometimes I go down the street and when I’m not in a particularly liturgical mood blessing everything, I divorce everybody … in all the houses and I see people bursting out of the front doors and running in different directions and I feel that I’ve really cleaned up the streets … just divorcing people. A lot of people want a divorce.”

  As comments like these suggest, Cohen in his early and mid-period interviews could be alternately sarcastic, cynical, or playful. He could also be less than fully candid, perhaps even with himself; he sometimes seems more focused on projecting a persona than on speaking from the heart. But hang in there; he is never less than interesting, even—or sometimes particularly—when he’s repeating or contradicting himself. And there comes a time, starting around the late 1990s, when he begins to refer to his longtime public image as a “cover story.” At that point, he increasingly discards the cover and talks much more openly about his depressions, his relationships, and his career.

  I’ve never met him, but after reading the interviews and interview-based features collected here, I feel as if I’ve spent many revealing hours in his company over many years. I suspect you will, too.

  I’ve standardized style in the pages that follow with regard to numbers, punctuation, and the like; Americanized British spellings; and fixed some grammatical and factual errors, especially outside of quotes. But I’ve preserved the original magazine and newspaper articles as much as possible and have not done the kind of editing I’d do to a previously unpublished manuscript. I’ve fiddled just a bit more with the transcripts of audio and video recordings, to remove redundancies and transform the spoken word into something that’s workable in print. To the extent possible, interviews appear in the order they occurred; when the interview date is unknown, the publication or airdate dictates placement.

  My thanks to everyone at Chicago Review Press, particularly senior editor Yuval Taylor and project editor Amelia Estrich. This is my second book with the folks at CRP, and I still think they’re terrific. Thanks, also, to all of those who contributed articles and audio and video recordings and transcripts to this book. Special thanks to the many who provided new reflections and reminiscences and to Alberto Manzano for his help with photography and translations. Thank you to Kathryn Duys for transcribing and translating French passages and to the fans who maintain such helpful websites as leonardcohenfiles.com, leonardcohenforum.com, and 1heckofaguy.com.

  My gratitude goes to my coworkers at AIN Publications, especially colleague extraordinaire Jennifer Leach English. Thanks to my brother and sister, Todd Burger and Amy Downs, and to my lifelong friend Ken Terry. And thanks always to my wife, Madeleine Beresford, and children, Andre and Myriam, all of whom resisted the urge to complain—well, mostly resisted the urge—when I disappeared into my home office for hours and days at a time.

  Finally, thanks to Leonard Cohen for contributing to the soundtrack of our lives for nearly half a century. I’m glad he’s now receiving the degree of praise he has long deserved. As I write this, he is seventy-nine years old, and I know he can’t go on forever. But as he sings, “You’ll be hearing from me baby, long after I’m gone / I’ll be speaking to you sweetly, from a window in the Tower of Song.”

  —JEFF BURGER

  Ridgewood, New Jersey, 2013

  PART I

  THE SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES

  Cohen draws attention with his poetry and fiction, then picks up a guitar and delivers classics like “Suzanne,” “Sisters of Mercy,” “Bird on the Wire,” and “Famous Blue Raincoat.”

  TV INTERVIEW

  ADRIENNE CLARKSON | May 23, 1966, Take 30, CBC (Canada)

  Though Leonard Cohen gave a few brief interviews in the early sixties (several of which are quoted in this book’s preface), he spent most of the period living in semi-seclusion on the Greek island of Hydra. He was nearly as reclusive in the late sixties and early seventies, when he granted only the occasional interview.

  One such interview was with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Adrienne Clarkson, who decades later would describe herself as a Leonard Cohen groupie who has been to dozens of his concerts all over the world. Clarkson talked with Cohen shortly after the publication of his second novel, Beautiful Losers. At the time, Cohen’s debut album release was still a year and a half away, but the thirty-one-year-old artist was already receiving lots of attention for his novels and poetry, particularly in his native Canada. As the introduction to Clarkson’s interview makes clear, however, that attention wasn’t exactly all favorable. —Ed.

  Adrienne Clarkson: Listen to what some of the critics said about his latest book.

  Announcer: [reads from reviews.] “This is, among other things, the most revolting book ever written in Canada.” [Robert Fulford, Toronto Daily Star.] “I have just read Leonard Cohen’s new novel, Beautiful Losers, and have had to wash my mind.” [Gladys Taylor, Toronto Telegram.] “Verbal masturbation.” [The Globe and Mail.] “We’ve had overdrill and overkill and now we have oversex.” [The Globe and Mail.] “At its best Losers is a sluggish stream of concupiscence exposition of … nausea.” [Time.]

  [Cohen reads a poem.]

  AC: How does it affect you when you read a poem that you’ve forgotten? Is it like reading a poem by someone else?

  Leonard Cohen: Well, this time I was just faking it because for the purposes of continuity I had to read this poem but I hadn’t read it for some time, and I left out a verse and I’d forgotten the meaning of the whole poem.

  AC: Does it in any way disturb you? Isn’t every poem a part of you as a poet?

  LC: It doesn’t disturb me ’cause I don’t think anything was at stake. But I think that the message comes through with the body, with the eyes, and the voice. You could really be reading the instructions from a shoe-polish can.

  AC: What’s the point of writing poetry if you could just as well read instructions on how to polish your shoes?

  LC: It depends. If you want people to have shiny shoes, you want to write
those kinds of very good instructions. And if you want to polish other parts of yourself, you do it with poetry.

  AC: How can you relate the creating of a work of art with an act of polishing shoes?

  LC: It depends on where you’re looking. It depends exactly where you’ve got your binoculars trained. If you stand far enough away, it’s probably the same thing. You know the story of that juggler who performed his acrobatics and plate balancing in front of a statue of the virgin? Well, I think it really comes down to that. You really do what sings.

  AC: Is that the key to your diversity?

  LC: I’m all in one place.

  AC: You may seem so to yourself. But you must admit that for other people looking at you, the poet, the novelist, the man who lives in a white house on the [Greek] island of Hydra, scion of a Jewish family from Montreal, pop singer, and writer of pop songs … all these things may add up to Leonard Cohen but they do look rather complex at first.

  LC: Well, I think the borders have faded between a lot of endeavors and people are no longer capable of those kinds of poses, like the poet on the mountain with the cape or the singer catering to the masses. All those kinds of expression are completely meaningless. It’s just a matter of what your hand falls on and if you can make what your hand falls on sing then you can just do it. If someone offered me a building to design now, I’d take it up. If someone offered me a small country to govern, I’d take it. Anything going I’d like to try.

  AC: Would you feel bad that maybe the building you designed would fall down or the country that you were trying to govern would turn into chaos?

  LC: I don’t think the building would fall down and I have perhaps an arrogant dream that the country would [endure] … I knew a fellow [Michael X. —Ed.] who was trying to take over a country. He’s a friend of mine in England. He’s the head of a large Negro movement there and he will probably take over a country soon. I asked him what the purpose of his government will be and he said, “It will be to protect the people from government because they’re fine as they are. Just let ’em alone and my government will just keep everything away.”

  Things are really a lot more substantial than we think. And I think that my building would probably last. It would either last or fall down depending on the needs of the people inside it. Some people may want a building to collapse over them at a specific time. A friend of mine designed a mural for a coffee shop in Montreal with a special glue on it. This glue dried every winter and the mural fell to pieces and he would have to be engaged to repair the mural. He said, “Cars are designed with built-in obsolescence—why not murals?”

  AC: What about poetry?

  LC: I think that history and time pretty much build obsolescence into poetry unless it’s really the great stuff and you never know whether you’re hitting that.

  AC: Don’t you ever?

  LC: Sometimes you know about it. But I’m not interested in posterity, which somebody said is a kind of paltry form of eternity. I’d like to see headlines … instead of the Spencer case [An apparent reference to Vancouver mail clerk George Victor Spencer, who was caught collecting information for the Soviet Union. —Ed.], something like “[Canadian painter Harold] Town Finishes Painting Today.” I’d like the stuff I do to have that kind of horizontal immediacy rather than something that is going to be around for a long time. I’m not interested in an insurance plan for my work.

  AC: What about the kind of diversity that you want to do? Do you want to write musical comedies like Town wants to do?

  LC: Oh, yes, sure. I’d like to write a musical comedy.

  AC: What would it be about?

  LC: I’d really have to fall on an idea. But I’d like to do that. Maybe Town would sing the lead.

  AC: Does he sing?

  LC: All the time. He’s a very good singer.

  AC: Do you mean with notes and everything?

  LC: He’s not tied down to anything.

  AC: Does that help—to sing?

  LC: I think it helps everything.

  AC: Does that mean you have to opt out of society? It’s a terrible phrase but it’s the only way I know how to put it to you.

  LC: Well, it’s a good trick if you can manage it, but I don’t know anybody who’s managed to do that. Everybody’s on the crust of this star. I don’t know anybody who’s opting out, except a couple of astronauts and they always come back. And they bring their own smoked-meat sandwiches with them. Nobody really wants to leave.

  AC: When you go off to your house in Hydra, do you want to leave? Do you leave things behind?

  LC: Well, I have no plans to go back there. I’ve been in Greece off and on for six years now. I’ve just been discovering Toronto for the past couple of days. It’s really nice.

  AC: Is it exciting?

  LC: I think it’s a happy revolution.

  AC: A revolution?

  LC: Well, that’s how we describe all phenomena today. But there’s a quiet one in Quebec and I think there’s a happy one here. I was walking on Yorkville Street and it was jammed with beautiful, beautiful people last night. I thought maybe it could spread to the [other] streets and maybe even … where’s the money district? Bay Street?

  AC: King and Bay.

  LC: King and Bay. I thought maybe they could take that over soon, too.

  AC: Do people need the kind of happiness that you can sing about?

  LC: I don’t establish any of those criteria for happiness. I just like to sing. I don’t have a program to establish with my singing. I just like to get up and sing my piece and sit down, listen to other people.

  AC: Do you actually not make value judgments about what you like to do better or less? Right now you’re writing songs. You’re not writing poetry, you’re not writing a novel, so you’re liking [songs] better.

  LC: I’ve got a new book of poems ready to go out … but I don’t want to be glutting the market with my work so I’m holding that back a while. No, everything keeps on going or it stops. You know when you’re happy. There’s been so much talk about the mechanics of happiness—psychiatry and pills and positive thinking and ideology—but I really think that the mechanism is there. All you have to do is get quiet for a moment or two and you know where you are.

  AC: And so this knowing where you are … you don’t need the help of anything like drugs or liquor?

  LC: It’s not a matter of the help. You can cooperate with the vision that alcohol gives you. You can cooperate with the vision that LSD gives you. All those things are just made out of plants and they’re there for us and I think we ought to use them. But also there’s another kind of high to get from refusing to use them. There are all kinds of possibilities. Asceticism is a nice high, too. Voluptuousness is a high. Alcohol is a high. [Harold] Town gets beautiful under alcohol. I just get kind of stupid and generally throw up. But some people get beautiful with alcohol.

  AC: Do you see things in terms of highs and lows or is this just an appeal to sensation?

  LC: It’s not just a matter of sensation. What I mean by high is not a manic phase of swinging, knocking down buildings, and laughing hysterically. I mean that you’re situated somehow. There’s a nice balance. You’re in the center of your own orbit or as Dylan said, you fade into your own parade.

  AC: In one of your poems [“Why I Happen to Be Free,” in Flowers for Hitler], you say, “Now more than ever I want enemies.” This is in your poem about how people conspire to make you free. Do you feel this way about the criticisms of your book?

  LC: Oh yes. I’d feel pretty lousy if I were praised by a lot of the people that have come down pretty heavy on me. I think, first of all, in a way there’s a war on.

  AC: What kind of war?

  LC: Well, it’s an old, old war and I think that I’d join the other side if I tried to describe it too articulately, but I think you know what I mean—that there’s a war on, and if I have to choose sides, which I don’t generally like to do, I’d just as well be defined as I have been by the establishment press.<
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  AC: Thank you, Leonard Cohen.

  COHEN CLIP

  On Self-Discipline

  “It takes a fantastic inner compulsion [to write]. Nobody writes who doesn’t really drive himself. I feel secretly that I am much more highly disciplined than anybody I meet. I know what it is to sit down at a desk for long periods of time and lay it on. Beautiful Losers I wrote every day until it was finished. I wrote a minimum of four hours a day and a maximum of twenty. The last two weeks I worked twenty hours a day. That was when I flipped out.”

  —from “Is the World (or Anybody) Ready for Leonard Cohen?”

  by Jon Ruddy, Maclean’s (Canada), October 1966

  AFTER THE WIPEOUT, A RENEWAL

  SANDRA DJWA | February 3, 1967, the Ubyssey (Vancouver, Canada)

  By the time Sandra Djwa interviewed the then thirty-two-year-old Cohen, he was on the verge of receiving serious acclaim for his music. The release of his first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen remained more than ten months away, but Judy Collins’s recordings of his “Dress Rehearsal Rag” and “Suzanne” appeared shortly before this conversation. (Both were on her November 1966 sixth album, In My Life, which spent thirty-four weeks on the US pop charts.)