Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen

by Jeff Burger

  LC: Women did play a great part. We are meant to be here with each other and it’s appropriate to treat that subject. But I think I had a quotation—I don’t know if it was in my first book—from William Faulkner’s The Bear. It goes like this:

  “All right,” he said. “Listen,” and read again but only one stanza this time and closed the book and laid it on the table. “She cannot fade though thou has not thy bliss,” McCaslin said. “Forever wilt thou love and she be fair.”

  “He’s talking about a girl,” he said.

  “He had to talk about something,” McCaslin said.

  I mean, you have to talk about something; otherwise you’re writing theology or you’re doing abstract mathematics, and I think we do have an appetite to worship and it’s appropriate that we find each other, the mystery, men and women, and that some sacramental relationship has to be discovered between us.

  PW: Was there a greater projection of yourself on the persons you encountered when you were younger that is disappearing now? There seems to be a motif of self-effacement, certainly in Death of a Lady’s Man. I don’t know whether you’re playing with us there or whether that’s your genuine investigation, but I’d like to know if there’s been a movement from the real preoccupation with stating I am finding myself out there to a withdrawal of the self into some other kind of investigation.

  LC: Yeah, I think I’ve exhausted the whole process of subject/object and seeing the world from that particular point of view for a little while. Death of a Lady’s Man is a closing statement on a certain chapter. I do have a feeling that I would like to write a book or even live a life where the I is not so prevalent—

  PW: The capital I—

  LC: Yeah, I think that the only way out of suffering is to somewhat dissolve or attack that particular point of view.

  PW: Do you think you would have come to that perception with the normal maturing of a middle-class Jewish Montrealer or has it had a lot to do with the travel, with the exposure to Eastern thinking—

  LC: Well, I am a middle-class Jewish Montrealer—

  PW: Yeah, but you’re not a normal one. You haven’t followed the patterns of your family.

  LC: I think that every man who’s growing up goes through those processes. This is one of those things that we’re getting into bad shape about, regarding what an artist is.

  PW: Who’s the “we”? The Western world?

  LC: Yeah, all of us, even the artists themselves, that our life is special.

  PW: You don’t think it is?

  LC: It’s special because it manifests itself in a durable form, but I think every man who works and raises a family is going to be up against these things and is going to have the same kind of process of maturing.

  PW: It’s said that you’ve said that having children is the only thing that really keeps you in contact with mankind and is an appropriate assault on the ego.

  LC: I do feel that marriage and children are the only things that move you out of center stage. Otherwise it’s just dating for the junior prom and exchanging identification bracelets and getting them back when the music is wrong.

  PW: Leonard, are you surprised to find yourself viewing the partnership of men and women in this way and talking about it in language which now sounds very traditional and very square, very old-fashioned?

  LC: No, I’m not surprised. It seems appropriate right now. On the other hand, I don’t feel evangelical about it. I don’t feel that everyone must get married and have children. I don’t even know if it’s right for me. I just feel like the institution is under such attack and there’s something in me that comes to the aid of it. It is the foundation of human life, and whether one’s marriage fails or not or one tries again or not is really irrelevant. This is the sacramental relationship, the foundation of human society, and it has to be affirmed.

  PW: A businessman a few years older than you and me who knows you pretty well said to me once that you are the most saintly person that he knows. I don’t know whether he was talking about the you now or the you that he’s known over the years because he’s known you a long time, but obviously he was perceiving a guy who has had some experience and has demonstrated a will to reduce the ego, reduce the I, to serve other people, to make his will transparent to the intentions of other people. Does that reflect the you that you know?

  LC: That’s a nice compliment.

  PW: Is that an important thing to say about it, by the way, that it’s a compliment? I was surprised that you said that.

  LC: Well, if someone feels that someone is a saintly person, it means that there’s been a special kind of transmission between those two people and rather than treat it heavily I chose to treat it lightly. I don’t know who the guy is. It’s obviously someone who has touched me and whom I have touched. But whether or not I am that thing … one never feels that way, anyways. But reducing the ego is the prudent thing to do as you grow older.

  PW: “Prudent” has nothing in it of morality. Prudent is simply a strategy for getting on.

  LC: Yeah, I think so. It’s a pragmatic enterprise because you cannot hold onto the things that support the ego. Those things dissolve with time anyhow and our work is small and our bodies are fragile and our relationships are impermanent so to try to support an ego on those pillars is fruitless and just leads to suffering.

  PW: When you said that we’re in bad shape about our view of the artist, you were complaining in part about the terrific elevation of the ego within the artist community—I guess the whole world of media hype and puff about every artist, and that’s a world that you inevitably get into when you go make records and [enter] the world of the performing artist. But you have enjoyed that. You have found that there is at least a transient satisfaction. You want to do it again.

  LC: Oh yeah, I’d like to go on the road again with a band. I remember at Glasgow [Scotland] at the Apollo Theater … a few years ago, the stage manager pulling down the curtains and he said, “You’ve sent a lot of happy people home tonight, Mr. Cohen.” Those are good feelings.

  PW: If at the end looking back you were able to say, “Well, the poems were OK, but at some point I touched the life of one individual and healed or redirected or helped,” would that latter really be a greater satisfaction? That’s what I think I hear you say.

  LC: If you really could help somebody, I guess it is. It would have to weigh pretty heavily. But there’s something about putting a song into the world and just letting it take its path that is wonderful, too.

  PW: But nobody puts a song into the world except individuals. It is an I who saw that particular way of putting together some sounds and words and experiences. It’s not done by committees and institutions.

  LC: It’s when the I steps out of the way of that willing being and something from the world takes root or takes form and then is given back. It’s the I, the self-importance, that really defeats the process. A poet can’t feel important; he doesn’t get anything if he feels important.

  PW: When Will Shakespeare sits down at his desk with his dirty pen and [his friend, actor Richard] Burbage says, “You’ve got to have a play by this week Friday” and Shakespeare says, “Watch me, boy, I can do it,” and he whips off Macbeth—

  LC: That’s because he’s not thinking of himself as Will Shakespeare sitting at the desk and will he succeed or will he not succeed. He has the whole structure of craft and willingness to fall back on and he just lets it flow through him. By “flowing through him” I don’t mean that in any light sense. It flows through him but doctored and modified by the great skills that he has. But he can’t oppose himself to the world, which really is what self-importance is.

  PW: Is there an example in your recollection of an artist or would-be artist who has opposed himself to the world and within that kind of glorying in his selfhood has screwed things up in a spectacular way. Dali?

  LC: The persona that the guy develops to protect himself in the world is another question. What kind of image you really go into collu
sion with and encourage is another thing from the man sitting in front of a blank canvas.

  PW: What’s your inclination in that respect, at this point, at forty-four? To pull back and forget about persona and just be a very private person? Or to find some new social structures that can put you into contact with people?

  LC: I don’t really have a program. Events rush in too quickly for me to develop a real program about it. Songs come along and after a couple of years you have ten or twelve of them and you start to make a record, and then the demands of the technology and of the craft and of the career kind of carry it along.

  PW: Is making contact with people an issue for you? A difficulty? A challenge?

  LC: I like to make contact with people. It’s nice to do it within a forum of work.

  PW: A shared submission to the discipline.

  LC: It’s a wonderful thing. Writing a song of course is easy to talk about because it’s so immediate and it’s so easily used. It has such utilitarian value, songs. People do their washing up and make love and court, and a lot of the most mundane and important parts of their lives are enacted to music. And to be one of the people who score those activities … it’s really very gratifying.

  PW: As we finish, would you find something in Death of a Lady’s Man that you feel would send people out of the theater feeling happy?

  LC: I don’t know if I can find one that will do that. [Looks through book.] Ah, there’s a poem about marriage called “Slowly I Married Her.”

  PW: I don’t know if it’s going to make them happy but it’s going to make them joyfully sad maybe. [Cohen reads poem.] I think I’ll strike the word “sad.” It made me sad when I first read it. Hearing you read it made me feel warm. That’s a good poem, isn’t it?

  LC: Yeah, I think that one’s a good one. Harry Belafonte’s wife had been very suspicious about my presence because I had suggested that he change his show and stop singing calypso and start singing about himself. He’s a very great singer, and we were drinking late into the night at the Four Seasons hotel. And I got out this poem. I thought he could set it to music. I don’t know whether it was the vodka or not, but she wept a few tears that sealed the night very nicely.

  PW: Thank you, Leonard. You never changed your name to September Cohen.

  LC: No.

  PW: You’re stuck with Leonard.

  LC: Too late now. Too late to change the name. Too late for suicide.

  COHEN CLIP

  On Becoming a Folksinger

  “I thought I’d do just one album. I’d published Beautiful Losers, and I really couldn’t meet any of my own bills. So I thought, I’m going to become a country-and-western singer. I was on my way to Nashville. I’d written some songs that I thought were country songs. That was the kind of music I’d grown up with. So on the way to Nashville, I came across some people in New York and somebody introduced me to Judy Collins, and I somehow got into the New York musical scene, which I knew nothing about at the time. I didn’t know that there was Dylan and Phil Ochs and Judy Collins and Joan Baez.”

  —from “Conversations from a Room,” by Tom Chaffin, Canadian Forum, August/September 1983

  A CONVERSATION WITH LEONARD COHEN

  STEVE VENRIGHT | May 1983, interview | August 1983, Shades (Toronto)

  The early 1980s was one of Cohen’s quiet periods. He did not tour for four full years—from 1981 through 1984—and after he put out Recent Songs in 1979, he issued no records until 1984. Instead, he spent much of his time practicing Zen Buddhism. He did, however, offer the occasional interview, including one with a twenty-one-year-old waiter and aspiring journalist named Steve Venright.

  In 2008, in the Toronto-based online magazine Mondo, Venright recalled the unusual circumstances that led to the conversation:

  Twenty-five years ago, almost to the day, I sat in the bar of Toronto’s King Edward Hotel asking Leonard Cohen questions about Art and Life, Truth and Beauty, the Sacred and the Profane. A week earlier, in a different establishment across town, I’d been asking him whether he wanted fries or salad with his chili dog. He’d just come down from the mountain—Mount Baldy near L.A., that is, where he’d been rigorously observing an ascetic lifestyle in a Zen monastery—and there he was, in my section, ordering a hot dog and Coke.

  Fortunately, the restaurant happened to be empty apart from Mr. Cohen and his female companion (the distraction of serving my biggest idol might have doomed my other tables). Not so fortunately, as the chef tardily informed me, we’d run out of chili dogs. After working up the courage to break this news—which (must’ve been the Zen thing) he accepted with admirable composure—I worked up the courage to ask him for an interview.

  I was a twenty-one-year-old waiter and would-be writer working in downtown Toronto (some things, apart from age, don’t seem to change). The woman I was living with, in a dying relationship, was perhaps an even bigger Cohen fan than myself. When she heard that I’d met Leonard and would be interviewing him at the King Edward Hotel, where he was filming I Am a Hotel, and when it was quite clear that I would not be divulging his room number, she threatened to split up with me. It was one of those let-me-get-this-straight moments: if I refused to provide my girlfriend with the directions to another man’s bedroom, I would be history. But such was the allure of Canada’s “melancholy bard of popular music.” (By the way, Suzie, it was Room 327.)

  My real introduction to Leonard Cohen dates back to the end of a previous relationship, a couple years prior. It was a somewhat sweeter demise but, being my first serious breakup, painful beyond what I thought I could bear. And just when it seemed the moment couldn’t get sadder, my soon-to-be-ex put the needle down on a record that was more soulfully dolorous than any music I’d ever heard. That voice and those words said with impossible beauty what my lover was trying her best to make me understand: it’s over, but what we’ve been to each other will always be a part of us as we go our separate ways into the world.

  The song was “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” and the voice belonged to a poet and novelist from Montreal who’d ventured into songwriting. I’d heard the name before, but from that moment on it would be imbued with a significance that’s only grown deeper and stronger over the years: Leonard Cohen.

  Someone once said that listening to Leonard Cohen’s music made his life not worth living. Critics—and more recently bloggers intent on providing self-help advice—have called it “music to kill yourself by.”

  Thinking back to hearing that first song (actually considered to be one of the cheerier ditties among his early recordings), those sentiments, while not shared, are not hard for me to understand. I was young and my emotional spectrum was broad and intense. Hearing something that resonated so closely with my sorrow was almost, at first, devastating. How could anyone do that, I thought. Now I have to get through this too! But there was something in the voice—hypnotic, slightly frail, empathic, and oddly heroic—that compelled me to listen, that comforted me even as it tore at my heart, and that somehow helped me to feel that my life was, after all, very much worth living. Ever since that first transfixing exposure, the writings and music of Leonard Cohen have been an ongoing source of inspiration.

  When it came time for the interview, I was nervous but well prepared with a list of questions that inquired as much into Cohen’s work as an author as they did his career in music. Being accompanied by a wonderful photographer named Tom Robe, who was known for his live shots of musicians both famous and obscure, helped my confidence considerably. Tom got some terrific photos that day and his presence helped keep me from lapsing into the jitters. Leonard’s warm demeanor, dry wit, and gracious attention to my very serious questions put me further at ease.

  Still, it wasn’t until a small chamber ensemble began playing dreamily as if on cue after the last topic had been addressed and Leonard said, “That was a really good interview,” that I finally relaxed. Maybe it was the scotch talking, but Leonard proceeded to express his approval in a way that suggested ou
r exchange had gone beyond the commonplace, and that he was pleased with the terrain we’d covered. Should he chance upon the fragments transcribed here, I hope he’ll still find aspects of that long-ago conversation agreeable.

  This week my son, an aspiring songwriter who’s just a few months older than I was at the time of the interview, will see Leonard perform for the first time. His deep appreciation of Leonard’s music began earlier than it had for me—Kerry was in the womb when his mother and I attended a concert on the tour for Various Positions (the album Leonard often cites as his favorite).

  The tour that will bring Leonard back to Toronto (where it officially launches) has already received reverential reviews and awestruck ovations in other parts of the country. At seventy-three, he still refuses to perform with anything less than total commitment, playing for nearly three hours with multiple encores. For the shows in Toronto, where he and his nine-member band could easily sell out a stadium, he has chosen to play a more intimate venue, hitting the stage four nights when one or two might have sufficed.

  This tour may have been prompted by financial concerns but it’s clearly about more than money. It’s even about more than music. It’s about Art and Life, Truth and Beauty, the Sacred and the Profane, and it’s about communing once again with the man who has evoked these in song with tremendous honesty, grace, and spirit for over four decades.

  I really hope this isn’t the last time Leonard Cohen brings his song to the world, but if it does turn out to be his farewell tour—well, it sure is some way to say good-bye.

  Venright’s 1983 conversation with Cohen began with some unpublished discussion of current projects, including a planned studio LP (apparently Various Positions) and a proposed spoken-word album based on the forthcoming Book of Mercy. The interviewer then turned the discussion to Zen. —Ed.