Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen

by Jeff Burger

  In 1956, Cohen self-published his first poetry collection, Let Us Compare Mythologies. It met with praise, and his next, The Spice-Box of Earth, in 1961, fixed his position as Canada’s major new literary voice. By then, however, Cohen was living on the Greek island of Hydra with a fetching Norwegian woman named Marianne Ihlen and her son. The relationship began a pattern: Like many before and after him, Cohen would find himself drawn in by the assurances of domestic and sexual commitment but also confined by the realities of the same. Although he lived in what seemed like paradise, he remained restless.

  Cohen kept writing, publishing the semiautobiographical The Favorite Game in 1963, and then, in 1966, Beautiful Losers. It is a formally daring and startlingly sexual work about a man’s search for transcendence amid romantic and historical betrayals, and many still cite it as a major event in postwar literature. It makes plain that if Cohen had desired, he could easily have reached for the sort of literary standing accorded authors such as Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, and Henry Miller.

  But Cohen’s ambitions were changing. “I’d get some very good reviews for Beautiful Losers,” he says, “but it only sold a few thousand books. It was like facing a hard truth. I really worked at this; I’d produced two novels, three books of poems, and I couldn’t pay my rent. This was serious, because I had people who depended on me.”

  By the late 1960s, Cohen had drifted to New York City, where he realized that the ambitions of literature and the effects of popular music were not antithetical. “I bumped into Lou Reed at Max’s Kansas City,” he recalled, “and he said, ‘You’re the guy who wrote Beautiful Losers. Sit down.’ I was surprised that I had some credentials on the scene. Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs: all those guys knew what I’d written. I realized I hadn’t really missed the boat.”

  His songwriting caught the right ears, and Columbia released Songs of Leonard Cohen in 1968. [Actually, December 27, 1967. —Ed.] With classics like “Suzanne” (already popularized by Judy Collins) and “Sisters of Mercy,” it established Cohen as a spokesman for lost souls.

  But despite his new reputation, Cohen was increasingly forlorn, and his relationship with Ihlen was fading. “After my record came out, I theoretically had access to interesting people. But I still found myself walking the streets, trying to find someone to have a cup of coffee with. I began to develop this idea that some catastrophe was taking place. I couldn’t see why I couldn’t make contact.”

  In 1969, Cohen met twenty-four-year-old Suzanne Elrod, the woman with whom he would share his longest and most tempestuous relationship. (She was not the legendary “Suzanne” of his most famous song, though Cohen admits her name was part of the attraction.) The two formed what Cohen describes as a marriage, though it was never formalized. In the coming years, Cohen’s recordings (including Songs of Love and Hate and Death of a Ladies’ Man) were often-stark portrayals of the struggle for romantic faith amid sexual warfare and of hope in the face of cultural dissolution. Much of the work was about his stormy relationship with Elrod. (She “outwitted me at every turn,” he says.) They had two children together and separated in the midseventies.

  Although Cohen’s music was growing more imaginative, his records sold modestly in the US. Legend has it that when Cohen first played 1984’s Various Positions for Columbia pooh-bah Walter Yetnikoff, Yetnikoff said, “Leonard, we know you’re great. We just don’t know if you’re any good.” Columbia declined to release the album stateside.

  By 1988, however, things are looking up. I’m Your Man, a grimly catchy record with moody electronic orchestration, is doing better than any other album Cohen has released in the US and is even a bona-fide hit in parts of Europe. When a newly enthusiastic Columbia grants Cohen an award for the album’s successful international sales, he replies, “Thank you. I have always been touched by the modesty of your interest in my work.”

  After our talk over chicken soup, I travel to New York City to see Cohen perform a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall. It is a powerful show, and the song that seems to stir the audience most is “First We Take Manhattan”—a sinister tale of a terrorist’s revenge from I’m Your Man. Live, at the heart of a show full of songs about acquiescence and grief, it’s like a call to battle. (And thirteen years later, when Jeff Buckley’s version of Cohen’s “Hallelujah” becomes VH1’s chosen requiem in the wake of the attacks on New York’s World Trade Center, “Manhattan” will sound like rueful prophecy.)

  After the show, I visit Cohen in his room at the Mayfair hotel, just off Central Park. It is a hot, sticky afternoon, yet Cohen is dressed obliviously and impeccably in a dark, double-breasted pinstripe suit, with a crisp white shirt and a smart tie. Cohen insists that I take the most comfortable chair in the room, then calls room service to order me an ice-cold drink.

  “These are extreme times,” he begins, after a few moments. As he talks, he stands up from his chair, unzips his slacks, removes them, and folds them carefully over the back of another chair. Cohen keeps his jacket and tie on as he sits back down. “I think we are now living amidst a plague of biblical proportions. I think our order, our manners, our political systems, are breaking down. And I think that redemptive love may be breaking down as well.”

  I’ve heard this sort of thing from him before. But is it depression or enlightened realism? He continues: “There is no point in trying to forestall the apocalypse. The bomb has already gone off. We are now living in the midst of its aftermath. The question is: how can we live with this knowledge with grace and kindness? That’s how I arrived at ‘First We Take Manhattan.’ We can no longer buy the version of reality that is presented to us. There’s hardly any public expression that means anything to anybody. There’s not a politician speaking who touches you. There’s hardly a song you hear—”

  There is a knock at the door. “Excuse me,” says Cohen. He stands up and carefully pulls his pinstripe slacks back on, opens the door, and signs the bill for my cold soda. He closes the door, hands me the drink, takes his pants back off, sits down, and smiles warmly. There is nothing coy or ironic here—it’s a truly gentle and compassionate expression. I realize then that Leonard Cohen is demonstrating how one behaves with grace and etiquette, even though he’s consumed with the dreadful knowledge that we are all living on borrowed time.

  On 1992’s The Future, Cohen would traverse emotional lines he had not crossed before. “Things are going to slide in all directions,” he sings on the title track. “The blizzard of the world / Has crossed the threshold / … Get ready for the future: it is murder.”

  I have always liked songs and art that are both honest and merciless, but I have to admit that “The Future” scared the fuck out of me. I decide that first chance I get, I will catch up with Cohen again and see how he is holding up. But by then, he is gone—moved on to a place where questions about his art would seem to have no further usefulness.

  2001. I am knocking on the same door to the same house in Los Angeles. The man who answers again wears a beautiful suit and again insists I take the most comfortable seat. Of course, Leonard Cohen has also changed a bit. He is sixty-six now, and he wears his pepper gray hair in a shaven crop.

  Cohen left the Mount Baldy center in 1999, after a five-year residency. We are meeting now to discuss Ten New Songs. The record begins in reverence for things past and ends with a prayer:

  For the millions in the prison / That wealth has set apart / For the Christ who has not risen / From the caverns of the heart… / May the lights in the Land of Plenty / Shine on the truth some day.

  Conceptually, it seems miles apart from The Future’s fearful fatalism. “The Future came out of suffering,” Cohen says simply. “This came out of celebration.”

  When he first returned from the Zen center, Cohen had no immediate plans for recording. Then, one night at the Beverly Center mall, he ran into Sharon Robinson, a good friend who had done backup vocals on some of Cohen’s earlier work (Cohen is godfather to her son, Michael). Before long, the two began swapping tunes. A
s it happened, Ten New Songs was written and performed almost entirely by Robinson and Cohen. “I think it’s a fine piece of work, and Sharon did most of it,” he says. “Occasionally I would make some adjustments. I’d say, ‘Sharon, does this tune have more than four notes? You know the limitations I have.’”

  Cohen picks up a pack of Vantage cigarettes and lights one. He smokes them almost nonstop throughout our conversations. “I started smoking again about a year ago,” he says apologetically. “Got to quit again.”

  I ask Cohen the obvious: Why did he withdraw from his career? He studies his cigarette. “The whole market application felt remote to me,” he says. “I was fifty-eight; I had the respect of my peers and another generation or two. But my daily predicament was such that there wasn’t much nourishment from that kind of retrospection. I went up to the monastery in 1993, after my last tour, with the feeling of, ‘If this works, I’ll stay.’ I didn’t put a limit on it, but I knew I was going to be there for a while.

  “Also, I was there because I had the good fortune to study with Roshi [as Cohen refers to Sasaki, his Zen master]. He’s the real thing, man. He is a hell-raiser—there’s not an ounce of piety about him. This guy is smart enough to be rich, and yet he lives in a little shack up there in the snow. He’s a very exalted figure.”

  The phone in the hallway rings. Cohen pauses to hear who might be calling, but the caller hangs up when the machine answers. Cohen smiles. “I offer a prayer of gratitude when no one leaves a message.”

  Cohen begins to tell the story of the time he told Roshi that he wanted to leave the monastery and return to his life. “We are very close friends, Roshi and I. We were the two oldest guys up there, even though there were many years separating us. I had been cooking for him and looking after him for some time. So when I asked his permission to leave…disappointment is not the right word. He was sad—just like you would be if a close friend went away. He asked me why I wanted to leave. I said, ‘I don’t know why.’ He said, ‘How long?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, Roshi.’ He said, ‘Don’t know. OK.’”

  Cohen stubs out his cigarette and sits quietly. After a few moments, he offers to fix me lunch. (I learned long ago that it is impossible not to partake of food when you visit Leonard Cohen’s home.) Afterward, Cohen takes me to his recording studio, built above his garage. He lights up again and settles into a sofa.

  “I can’t talk about what really happened to me up there, because it’s personal. I don’t want to see it all in print,” he says. “The truth is I went up there to address the relentless depression that I’d had all my life. I’d say that everything I’ve done—wine, women, song, religion, meditation— was involved in a struggle to somehow penetrate this depression, which was the background of all my activities. But by imperceptible degrees, something happened at Mount Baldy, and my depression lifted. It hasn’t come back for two and a half years.

  “Roshi said something nice to me one time,” he continues. “He said that the older you get, the lonelier you become, and the deeper the love you need. Which means that this hero that you’re trying to maintain as the central figure in the drama of your life—this hero is not enjoying the life of a hero. You’re exerting a tremendous maintenance to keep this heroic stance available to you, and the hero is suffering defeat after defeat. And they’re not heroic defeats: they’re ignoble defeats. Finally, one day you say, ‘Let him die—I can’t invest any more in this heroic position.’ From there, you just live your life as if it’s real—as if you have to make decisions even though you have absolutely no guarantee of any of the consequences of your decisions.”

  It’s now late in the afternoon. Cohen trades one cigarette for another and pauses to admire the shadows cast by the lowering sun. “I’d like to continue working,” he says. “I hope I don’t fall over tomorrow. I have a whole new set of songs I’m working on, and I’ve returned to writing on guitar. Also, I’d like to publish my writings from Mount Baldy. It isn’t that in my life I had some inner vision that I’ve been trying to present—I just had the appetite to work. I felt that this was my work and that it was the only work I could do.”

  Cohen puts on his suit jacket and walks me outside. “I’m in my mid-sixties now,” he says. He looks up at the sun, which beats down hard. “I don’t pretend to have salvation or the answers or anything like that. I’m not saved.” He smiles. “But on the other hand, I’m not spent.”

  COHEN CLIP

  On Lyrics

  “It’s just how they resonate. You know they resonate with a truth that is hard to locate but which is operating with some force in your life. I often feel that about a Dylan song or a song even with Edith Piaf … the words are going too fast for me to really understand them in French but you feel that they are talking about something that is true, that you can’t locate by yourself and someone has located it for you and you just feel like you’ve put in the last piece in the jigsaw puzzle for that moment. That that moment has been clarified. The moment that you’re in at the moment that you’re listening to it. Yeah, the pieces fit … Isn’t that wonderful when all the pieces fit?”

  —response to Lian Lunson, director of I’m Your Man (2005),

  who had said “The Traitor” was one of her favorite songs in the

  film but “I can’t get my hands around what it’s about”

  COHEN CLIP

  On Embezzlement of His Money by a Former Manager

  “What can I do? I had to go to work. I have no money left. I’m not saying it’s bad; I have enough of an understanding of the way the world works to understand that these things happen….I said, ‘I can walk away with nothing.’ I said, ‘Let me start again. Let me start fresh at seventy. I can cobble together a little nest egg again.’”

  —from “A ‘Devastated’ Leonard Cohen,” by Kathleen Macklem,

  Macleans.ca, August 17, 2005

  COHEN CLIP

  On His Lover, Marianne Ihlen

  “There wasn’t a man that wasn’t interested in Marianne. There was no one who wasn’t interested in approaching that beauty and that generosity….She was a traditional Nordic beauty; that was indisputable. But she was also very kind, and she was one of the most modest people about her beauty. You know, looking at her from a distance of forty, forty-five years almost, I see how very rare those qualities are. And she just knew things about the moment, about graciousness, about service, about hospitality, about generosity. And she had that other side too, where she drank wine and danced and became wild and beautiful and threatening and dangerous, you know, if you were a man with her…. We had to catch the boat back to Hydra. And we got up and got a taxi. And I’ve never forgotten this. Nothing happened, just sitting in the back of the taxi with Marianne, lit a cigarette, and thinking: ‘I’m an adult. I’m with this beautiful woman, we have a little money in our pocket.’ That feeling … I think I’ve tried to re-create it hundreds of times unsuccessfully. Just that feeling of being grown up, with somebody beautiful that you’re happy to be beside, and all the world is in front of you. Your body is suntanned, and you’re going to get on a boat.”

  —from If It Be Your Will, NRK (Norway) radio documentary

  by Kari Hesthamar, 2006

  COHEN CLIP

  On Why He Left Mount Baldy

  “I don’t know if I could tell you the whole story because it’s very private. I’d gone to see [Zen master] Roshi and had become a monk….But the life is very rigorous. It’s designed to overthrow a twenty-one-year-old. I was already in my late sixties. So there was that part of it but I had the feeling that it wasn’t doing any good and it wasn’t really addressing this real problem of distress, which seemed to be the background of all my feelings and activities and thoughts. So I began to feel that this is a lot of work for very little return…. There were other feelings that are ambiguous or too difficult to describe. They probably should be described in song or poetry rather than conversation.”

  —from interview with Terry Gross, Fresh Air,

 
National Public Radio (US), 2006

  RADIO INTERVIEW

  SHELAGH ROGERS | February 7, 2006, Sounds Like Canada, CBC (Canada)

  Cohen must have felt talked out after all his 2001 interviews, because another long period of relative silence followed. He did release an album, Dear Heather, on October 26, 2004, but he talked little to the press until late 2005, when he alleged (see page xvi) that his former manager Kelley Lynch had misappropriated more than $5 million of his money, leaving him with a nest egg of just $150,000.

  The following year brought better news. On February 3, 2006, the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame inducted Cohen and five of his songs—“Ain’t No Cure for Love,” “Bird on the Wire,” “Everybody Knows,” “Hallelujah,” and “Suzanne.” That same month, Cohen won a $9.5 million civil suit against Lynch. And in May, he published Book of Longing, a new collection of poetry. That month also witnessed the release of Blue Alert, an album by his then-girlfriend, Anjani Thomas, that he had produced. When Cohen and Thomas showed up at a Toronto bookstore on May 13 to promote both releases, the event marked Cohen’s first public appearance in thirteen years.

  A few days after the Hall of Fame induction, Cohen talked about that honor—and the forthcoming poetry book and Anjani CD—with the CBC’s Shelagh Rogers. —Ed.

  Shelagh Rogers: Let me ask you about “Everybody Knows,” because this is another inductee [into the Songwriters Hall of Fame]. “Everybody knows that the dice are loaded / Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.” What kind of song is this?