Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen

by Jeff Burger

  [Speaking now to Cohen.] Can I assume that when you’re making a poem you are finding out where you are in the process of doing it? That it’s not something you’ve thought about and you say, “Ah, right now I know I’ll write it down,” but rather that as you construct it you learn what you’re seeing?

  Leonard Cohen: That’s one of the aspects of it.

  PW: So in Death of a Lady’s Man, I think I trace a growing yearning for certain kinds of stability and repose and unity of human relationships and unity of perception. Am I right in assuming that you found your way into that as you were doing this book or the work that led up to it?

  LC: I think the longing exists on a conscious level but the deployment of the energies is somehow illuminated through the work. I know that I want to be in one place. I know that I don’t really feel like moving around too much anymore. But I think that’s because I want to try something big and I need stable surroundings to be able to really take flight.

  PW: When I read the dedication to Masha Cohen—“to the memory of my mother”—and then came right through to the lines that end the book, saying, “I am satisfied and I give in. Long live the marriage of men and women, long live the one heart,” I wondered if Masha Cohen, wherever she is now, is saying, “Leonard’s on his way home.”

  LC: [Smiles.] I like that description.

  PW: What was she saying either tacitly or explicitly to you in the period of roaming, reaching, very hungry Leonard Cohen? I mean hungry for experience—the man, it seemed to me in a lot of your early work, who wanted to know and have and test everything. Was she reacting to that in you?

  LC: I think her reaction was twofold. I think she was critical of my life and the details of it she examined with not too much pleasure at certain points. But I always did feel that underneath it all there was a great support and somehow an affirmation of what I was doing.

  PW: Thinking about you and her and the movement through Death of a Lady’s Man, I remembered the story about Jack Kerouac and some young enthusiasts for his work coming to find him and there he was, forty, wearing a woolen knitted cardigan and living with his mom. And they were a little bit dismayed and turned away because he wasn’t the Kerouac of On the Road. What happens to you now as you meet the fans, go on the road, meet the interviewers, and they’re still looking for the Leonard of “Suzanne” or the earlier work? Or are they still looking for that? What are they asking you to be now?

  LC: I find people very sympathetic and sensitive to where you are. I have no idea where I am or where they are, but I think both of us are willing to make those minute adjustments, moment to moment, to ourselves. I was really impressed with the people I met across the country and the kind of questions and just the kind of presence of people.

  PW: You didn’t feel you were being eaten then?

  LC: Not at all.

  PW: That’s great. I’d like you to do a little reading while we talk and there’s one that I found myself laughing out loud at yesterday, partly because of an image that came into my mind as I read it. I said, “You know what this is? This is T. S. Eliot writing a script for All in the Family.” Do you know what I’m talking about?

  LC: Well, I like All in the Family …

  PW: This one. [Points out poem in book.]

  LC: Oh, yeah.

  PW: Can you read? Because the movement through the whole page is terrific.

  LC: This is called “This Marriage.” [Cohen reads poem.]

  PW: You said a while ago you don’t know where you are and you don’t know where they are. When I read that for the first time yesterday, I put the book down with a very strong sense of having just run my fingers over a jewel that was very wonderfully crafted. Do you ever feel that when you go back over some of the better work? Are you ever able to say to yourself, “Good. OK. That’s pretty damn good.”

  LC: Sometimes I do that but I don’t really reflect on the work from that point of view too often. But sometimes you hear a song on the radio and it sounds OK or someone draws your attention to something that seems all right.

  PW: Was there a time when it was of really vital importance for you to go on the road with the bands, sing to people, hear the reaction? And has that changed at all as your focus has gone toward a singular place and singular relationships?

  LC: That process changed. I’m still interested in doing it and if I do finish another record I would like to tour behind it, but at the beginning it was rock and roll and that life and the unlimited range of possibilities that was offered you on the road.

  PW: What kind of possibilities? Women? Companionship? Excitement? Drugs?

  LC: Everything. All that. The life of the appetite. After a while, after the second and third tour, you begin to get very interested in the music and the performance and the test of character that the performance involves. And I think you get a more athlete’s vision of the whole process. You just want to keep in the right kind of shape so you can deliver that concert every night. And the whole day focuses toward those three hours that you’re in front of people.

  PW: What role does instant response play? The difference between the time lag that’s entailed when you labor over a book of poems for a year or two years and then it comes out and you wait and then you may get a review and you may get an interview and it slowly trickles back on the one side and then on the road, hit record, wham, everybody yelling and cheering on the other. Levels of importance in those two kinds of response for you?

  LC: That instant response is gratifying, of course, but also you have the risk of the other thing going all the time, which is instant humiliation. But I’ve tried to design the work so that it can last beyond that immediate perception of it. The poems are designed to last at least until the next season and the songs too. So it’s really time that I’m most interested in when it comes to a real evaluation of the work.

  PW: How much time?

  LC: Oh, I’m not greedy. I don’t think of a thousand years or anything like that. But just if a song lasts for a few years or if a book keeps on turning up, people are still interested in it. Or if I myself can pick it up and not be totally embarrassed by it.

  PW: So there is an important kind of satisfaction in that. A moment ago, when I talked about feeling the craft of “This Marriage” in Death of a Lady’s Man, I may have misunderstood, [but] I thought you were saying, “That’s not important to me, that expression of the craft.” I thought I heard you saying, “I’ve done it, it’s gone. If it brings some pleasure fine, but it doesn’t matter to me.” But it does matter.

  LC: Well, it matters when you’re in that role of evaluating your work but I myself take that role rarely. I don’t think it’s a role that one should dwell in. I am there from time to time, but it’s not very often that I assume that viewpoint because then you’d just be looking back all the time and examining your career from a kind of stock-market point of view. I do do that from time to time but that isn’t really where I dwell. Anyways, events rush in too quickly to allow you the luxury of that kind of reflection.

  PW: Death of a Lady’s Man, though, appears to be exactly that.

  LC: Well, that kind of reflection is appropriate to the desk and to the meditations that go into the work but I think outside of that they’re somehow inappropriate. The proper time to evaluate your life and the events in your life is when you’re sitting in front of the table. Otherwise, you become a bore to others and a bore to yourself if every time you meet someone you say, “How am I doing?”

  PW: Some of the motive in seeking a singular place and some kind of stability was to do something big. What’s that mean?

  LC: Just really to embrace that regime of a novel or a long prose work or a symphony or whatever it is. I just love that regime: getting up in the morning and having your coffee and playing guitar for half an hour or so, then going to the typewriter and doing a quota every day. It just locates your whole day.

  PW: Are you doing that now?

  LC: No.

  PW: Or will you sho
rtly?

  LC: I hope so.

  PW: Does that depend on having sorted out the personal messes to the point where you can get a physical space and a daily routine of bread, butter, and—

  LC: I’m not so sure it involves sorting it out. I think you have to bite through. Maybe just establish yourself and begin the work and then let the mess gather around it in whatever way it does. I think that’s what stops a lot of people from writing.

  PW: Waiting to sort it out?

  LC: Yeah. I don’t think anything gets done that way.

  PW: “If only I had the time, I would …”

  LC: Yeah.

  PW: Have you found that you can write well according to your own canons when you’re in turmoil and driven and feeling a lot of pain?

  LC: Well, I think there’s a degree beyond which it becomes impossible to work.

  PW: Oh, sure. When the noise level goes up.

  LC: Yeah. I think it’s just a matter of what grade of hair shirt you wear. I think some discomfort is necessary.

  PW: I know that lots of people, through the history of poetry, through the history of literature, and to a very small extent some of my own experience, have resolved or at least found some illumination of the dark places they’re in through the process of just writing about them.

  LC: Well, I think you do a lot to affirm your worthiness by writing. I remember a prose poem by Baudelaire in which he says, “Today I betrayed three friends, I refused to give a recommendation to someone who deserves it, I gave one to someone who doesn’t, I lied six or seven times. And now that I’m in my room and I’ve locked my door, let me do one thing that will justify myself to myself.” I think that’s a very accurate picture of the process with this particular racket.

  PW: Leonard, during the hungry period—or what I’m arbitrarily calling the hungry period—the time when you were reaching out into everything, the mythology of a lot of our contemporaries and younger people about drugs was that they would take you into a new space where a lot of the horrors and the weight of the immediate physical world would vanish. Did you look for that through acid and other drugs and did you find it at all?

  LC: Well, I’m not quite sure what the motivation was. I did try those drugs. The drugs and their effects are so different that it’s hard to generalize about the experience, although I suppose you can in some way. I don’t feel evangelical one way or the other. I think it’s a dangerous process. I think it does break down a lot of the structures for better or for worse. In many individuals it’s an unfortunate thing to have these landmarks dissolve. But there is something beyond that and I think it’s appropriate for a certain period of experimentation, but it’s certainly nothing to embrace as a lifelong enterprise.

  PW: Can you point to anything in your work and say, “There’s a door I stepped through that I might not have even seen the outlines of had it not been for some of that experience”?

  LC: It’s very hard to say what drugs do. LSD is a very, very powerful drug, which certainly does dissolve the foundations of your ordinary life and does afford a point of view that is usually not related to anything that is going on. But on the other hand, it binds you to a certain vision. It isn’t really liberation; it really is another kind of bondage. But as a stage in our very rigid society, perhaps if a young person comes from a very rigid kind of background, it does blow the thing to pieces.

  PW: So there’s a chance of a fresh start …

  LC: Yeah, as I say it’s a dangerous process because many people are not really equipped to make fresh starts. Sometimes it’s just a paralysis. You don’t make a fresh start at all, you just stop what you’re doing and don’t do anything else. There are a lot of people burned out by acid.

  PW: I find I’m laughing along in Death of a Lady’s Man, and then starting back to see who it is I’m laughing at, who’s being laughed at, and who’s laughing. But reading quite a lot of your [other] poetry, I am aware of a kind of preoccupation with a multitude of depressing aspects in the world, really quite hideous, burdening aspects of the world that you have been grappling with in one way or another.

  LC: Like what?

  PW: Oh, the ones that get us all: messed-up human relationships …

  LC: Oh yeah …

  PW: Death, personal incapacity, inability to make it work, all of the both serious and joking things around failure that weave through Death of a Lady’s Man. … Failure’s I guess one of the depressing things but there may be much more intricate things that you find depressing, and I’d like to know about that and also if you’re now finding ways to get your head and your heart into a way of seeing the world that isn’t depressing.

  LC: Well, I don’t look at it that bleakly all the time. I don’t think it’s bleak at all. I feel totally responsible for my own condition and there are lots of good moments. I really don’t know what to say about that. I’d like to tell you I’ve embarked on a program of transcendental meditation and I feel a lot better but I don’t really—

  PW: What do you mean, you’d like to tell me that? Have you and do you?

  LC: No, I haven’t. I mean to say there’s no program that I’ve embraced. I think I have had some programs in the past that I’ve grasped at. I get two or three of ’em a day, but I just think that trying to get through is my program.

  PW: But when you say, “trying to get through is my program,” it sounds as if you’re holding on with your fingernails and there’s a great risk that you may not.

  LC: Well … it’s hard right now with your hospitality and the wine…. I really don’t feel endangered at this particular moment.

  PW: [Watson introduces part two of the interview, which CBC broadcast the following week. —Ed.] Leonard Cohen once told an interviewer [CBC’s Beryl Fox, in a conversation broadcast May 6, 1966. —Ed.] that he was thinking of changing his name—to September. “Leonard September?” the incredulous interviewer asked. “No, September Cohen,” Leonard said, with a twinkle. Submerged beneath the doleful songs and the mystical poems there is a mischievous impish inside to Leonard Cohen that sometimes surfaces in his poetry and the novels, but it’s most apparent when he turns an absurdist eye toward the public side of his life—the fame, the reputation, the image, the excesses of the road tour work, and I suppose, most of all, the sadly beautiful vanity of man.

  Last week on the Authors program, Leonard Cohen and I talked at length about the public side and he read from his new book, Death of a Lady’s Man—a funny, bittersweet passage which seemed to me like a script from All in the Family as if it had been written by T. S. Eliot. But it was also a poem about the failure of a marriage, and while Cohen doesn’t look at life bleakly all the time, I sensed in his wonderfully crafted words a deep yearning for stability and repose and unity. This seems to be a time for reflection in Leonard Cohen’s life, for an evaluation of its sometimes-extreme events.

  Well, this week our conversation turns away from the public aspects toward the more personal considerations of art, relationships, and the self. I asked him to begin with a reading of a poem entitled “The Rest Is Dross.”

  LC: [Reads poem.] Haven’t read that for a long time.

  PW: How is it?

  LC: There are a number of flaws in it but I think it comes out as something authentic.

  PW: What are the flaws?

  LC: I think the last three lines, where I try the device of throwing the poem away, really mean to say to the reader, “I’m not throwing the poem away.” I think I really did throw the poem away.

  PW: Do you find yourself analyzing as you work in terms of devices, flaws … “Let’s see how can I get this on to the next stage”? Is there a process of technical craft analysis like a diamond cutter looking at the lines of cleavage and saying, “this is the way I’ll do it”?

  LC: I think there is a technology and, to put it less charitably, a series of tricks as [Canadian poet Irving] Layton says that every poet learns sooner or later. But beyond that, there’s something you can’t fake, and I don’t thin
k that one’s entirely successful. It’s not bad right up to the last part. Maybe it’s OK.

  PW: I thought it was OK. I liked it a lot. Remember when Bob Dylan said that within three or five years or whatever time period he set himself he was going to be a star? Did you ever approach your craft as a public performer with that kind of intention?

  LC: I don’t think I really did, no. I always thought that my work was more eccentric and that if it touched the mainstream from time to time I would be lucky, but I never saw it as dominating a field as Dylan did. He was justifiable in feeling that way because he really did have his hand on all the kinds of music that really did lead to the mainstream and made a synthesis of them.

  PW: But if you set out to do that, can you really be anything more ultimately than a kind of extremely sensitive reactor as differentiated from an initiator and inventor?

  LC: I think in the case of a really good artist, you’re doing both functions at the same time and it’s an immediate, instantaneous reaction to the stimuli.

  PW: So you’re saying you’ve got to be to some extent in tune with the currents, whether or not you’re swimming in the principal one.

  LC: I think it’s more than in tune. You really have to represent them. You have to be so open to the life around you that it isn’t even a matter of translation or interpretation. You are manifesting the deepest feelings of people. I don’t think it’s anything you can plot. You either are one of those kinds of individuals or you aren’t. There’s nothing to be said for being one because it means a very tricky kind of existence.

  PW: What’s the source material for the work that lies ahead of you? I had a feeling that ten or fifteen years ago a lot of the source material was a population of girls that you’d known and your projection of yourself into them—your looking for some kinds of mystery and healing in them but to a large extent a projection of Leonard’s persona on those girls. Is that right and how is that changing?