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

by Liel Leibovitz

  The few American communists he met on the island were less kind. To them he was a “bourgeois individualist.”15 To show his contempt, Cohen met the communists the following day, clean shaven and wearing a seersucker suit. He kept the same amused air when writing to his publisher in Toronto, Jack McClelland, who was about to publish his second collection of poetry, The Spice-Box of Earth. “Just think how well the book would sell if I’m hit in an air-raid,” he wrote. “What great publicity! Don’t tell me you haven’t been considering it.” Then he delivered a matter-of-fact report on the invasion: “There was a prolonged round of anti-aircraft fire tonight. An unidentified (but we know Yankee) plane. I think the guns were in the room next door. I looked out the window. Half a platoon running down the Prado, then crouching behind an iron lion. Hopelessly Hollywood.”16

  With the invasion’s catastrophic end came many arrests, some of them targeting tourists. Cohen decided to leave. So did many of Cuba’s wealthier residents, terrified by Castro’s renewed zeal. Every day throngs swamped the shelled airport in search of a visa. Cohen joined them, and, eventually, on April 26, managed to secure a ticket out of Havana. But when he lined up to board the plane, the clerk called the person before him, and the person after him, leaving Cohen stranded. Glancing at the passenger list, Cohen saw that his name had been crossed off. He was taken aside by an officer and told he couldn’t leave. The reason given was a photograph found in his bag, featuring him, khaki shorts and stubble, hugging the soldiers who had arrested him a few days earlier. It was just too suspicious. He was clearly a troublemaker, not a Canadian poet. He was placed in detention and guarded by a fourteen-year-old with a gun. When a scuffle elsewhere in the airport distracted the armed youth, Cohen got up, left the room, boarded the plane, and told himself everything was going to be all right. A short while later he landed in Miami.

  It was in Havana that he wrote the poem about Eichmann, and much of Flowers for Hitler soon followed. He had seen power corrupt. “Power chops up frightened men,” he wrote to Corlies Smith, his editor at Viking Press in New York. “I saw it in Cuba.”17 And having seen it, he wanted to write about it with the urgency of an Isaiah.

  To much of the rest of the world, however, he was a dilettante, hopping from his Greek island to Havana to play at revolution. After the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, he wrote a lighthearted letter to his sister, Esther, poking fun at much of the Cold War’s hyperbole and paranoia.18 Soon her husband wrote back, accusing Cohen of being a pseudointellectual who wasn’t morally serious enough to grasp that the conflict pitted good versus evil. Cohen, usually sanguine in his letters, replied harshly, and his reply ran more than seven pages of block text.

  “Listen very carefully, Victor,” he writes.19 “I’m no intellectual at all, not pseudo, not neo, not proto, and not even real. Having written at least three respectable books (published) I might be justified in claiming the title, but I’m not even reaching. But I happen to know a fair amount about Cuba, having read almost everything there is on it, and having gone to see it in the raw, with some risks to my person which I haven’t ever mentioned to anyone.” He goes on to describe his brush with Castro’s soldiers, his detention at the airport, and his opposition to “all forms of collectivization, censorship, or control, whether it happens to be on behalf of the enslaved proletariat or the holy values of the free world.” His tone heats up: “Don’t heave slogans at me. I’m one of the few men of my generation who cared enough about the Cuban reality to go and see it, alone, uninvited, very hungry when my money ran out, and absolutely unwilling to take a sandwich from a government which was shooting political prisoners. So if I sound off a little cynically and flippantly in a letter to my sister, let’s put it down to fun and not to ignorance.” Then the tone shifts once again, and Cohen, long before his speech at the Jewish Library in Montreal, evokes his prophetic theme. “If I am not mistaken,” he writes, “the dramas we are moved to applaud are those in which the prophet resists priestly organization, the man of peace resists the king, the philosopher resists the dogmatists, the scientist resists the theorists, and in general, the wild, obsessed, inspired, gifted, talented individual resists everything that is smug, comfortable or respectable. I invite you to switch sides.”

  It would have been a fine point on which to end the letter. But Cohen had another page in him. He didn’t want to end on a general note. He wanted to be concrete. He wanted to talk politics. Noting that Victor had started his letter referring to the U.S. government as “the greatest going government on earth today” and ended up admitting it was merely a preferable shade of gray in a world in which there were no blacks and whites, Cohen launched into a study of morality in monochrome:

  The cotton-jobbers, politicians, ad-men, generals of Charcoal Grey easily become the distribution experts, commissars, propagandists, generals of Oxford Grey. It is only my profession that risks annihilation, and perhaps, the health of my profession really defines the difference between societies. The America I choose is not your grey America, which, at most levels of safe living, is very close to their grey Russia. The America I choose is not the one you hold up to me, to be adored because it does not “persecute” me, restrict my movement, or starve me. Forgive me, if, bred on Whitman, Thoreau, and Emerson, I choose a different America. The truth is, Victor, that war was declared a long time ago, is being fought today on both sides of the Curtain, and its outcome is more important than the temporary and perhaps fictitious struggle between east and west (fictitious not in the sense that it doesn’t exist but that there is no real conflict of values). It is the war between those who conceive of existence as a dynamic rainbow, and those who conceive of it as a grey monotone; between those who are willing to acknowledge the endless possibilities, agonies, delights, mysteries and destinies of the human predicament, and those who meet every human question with a rigid set of answers, some immutable inheritance from a father or a god or a revolution. This is the old war, Athens against Sparta, Socrates against Athens, Isaiah against the priests, the war that deeply involves “our western civilization,” the one to which I am committed.20

  Cohen had identified his war. But how to fight it? His poems were one way, but increasingly they seemed unfit for the task. He would publish another attempt at unaffected poetry, Parasites of Heaven, in 1966, a slim volume whose greatest—and only—shining moments would soon be set to music and made famous as songs. This new style of poetry must not have appealed, because in 1972 he made his views on poetry perfectly clear: Each poem in his newly published collection, The Energy of Slaves, had a small illustration of a razor blade printed at the top of the page, announcing that the author was in a cutting mood. “The poems don’t love us anymore,” he wrote in the volume’s most striking poem, “they don’t want to love us / they don’t want to be poems / Do not summon us, they say / we can’t help you any longer.” Rather than remain on the page, the poems “have gone back into the world / to be with the ones / who labour with their total bodies / who have no plans for the world / They never were entertainers.”21 After that, Cohen wrote poetry very sporadically, and, when he did, took care to do it violence. When, in 1978, he published Death of a Lady’s Man, he coupled each poem with a commentary bearing the same title, the effect being that verse and criticism canceled each other out. The two remaining collections of new poetry he would publish in his career—1984’s Book of Mercy and 2006’s Book of Longing—continued this trajectory of experimentation, the first consisting mainly of modern-day psalms, and the second of line drawings and erotic musings. The poet has abandoned poetry.

  Why? Cohen leaves only a few clues, one of which is a song. In “A Singer Must Die,” a track on his 1974 album, New Skin for the Old Ceremony, he captures the ordeal shared by the singer and the poet alike:

  Now the courtroom is quiet, but who will confess.

  Is it true you betrayed us? The answer is yes.

  Then read me the list of the crimes that are mine,

  I will ask for the mercy that yo
u love to decline.

  And all the ladies go moist, and the judge has no choice,

  A singer must die for the lie in his voice.

  And I thank you, I thank you for doing your duty,

  You keepers of truth, you guardians of beauty.

  Your vision is right, my vision is wrong,

  I’m sorry for smudging the air with my song.

  Cohen wasn’t being melodramatic; he was being Greek. In his letter to Victor Cohen, just after declaring his commitment to Western civilization, Cohen called on one of its founding fathers, Plato, and quoted a bit from the Apology, in which Socrates admits that his fellow Athenians’ decision to put him to death doesn’t surprise him in the least. But the convictions he explored in Flowers for Hitler, heightened in The Energy of Slaves, and stated with abundant clarity in New Skin for the Old Ceremony come from another Platonic classic, The Republic. In the final book of his great epic, the philosopher, having devoted most of his attention to questions of government, takes on an unexpected topic: poetry.

  “Speaking in confidence,” thunders his Socrates, “I do not mind saying to you, that all poetical imitations are ruinous to the understanding of the hearers, and that the knowledge of their true nature is the only antidote to them.”22 Their true nature, Socrates explains further, is that of the deceiver: The poet doesn’t see reality as it is—only the philosophers have that distinction. What he describes in his poems, then, is not truth but appearance, and, being a poet, he applies a host of tricks—clever words, pretty sounds—to make this appearance more appealing than it really is. Any poet, then, is a liar twice over, and a dangerous one at that: Poetry is calculated to move us, and the only direction in which it can move us is further away from the truth. Not even Homer is spared; the writer of The Iliad, Plato warns us, excites our senses, and in our impassioned state we fail to see that he is hazardous to us because he fails to give us what we really need. And what we really need is complex. Plato, as the classicist Eric Havelock noted, “expected poetry to perform all those functions which we relegate on the one hand to religious instruction or moral training and on the other to classroom texts, to histories and handbooks, to encyclopedias and reference manuals.”23 Plato, in other words, wanted poetry to bridge the heavenly world—where everything known to man exists in perfect form—and our world, which is imperfect and marred by so many distractions. Lorca could have defined his duende just the same, an attempt at capturing a deep truth not immediately evident, an effort at calling on knowledge and feeling to unite and inform us as no other form of education can. But unlike Lorca, Plato believed that poetry was too artificial to deliver on the promise. And Leonard Cohen agreed. The more he understood what he wanted to say—all that prophetic stuff—the less enamored he was of poetry. He needed to find other means of expression.

  Novels were one logical detour. Having written the ill-fated Ballet of Lepers, he resolved to try again. Originally called Beauty at Close Quarters, written mostly in his early years in Hydra, the novel struck many people as wrong for all sorts of reasons. Jack McClelland, who enthusiastically published Cohen’s poetry, thought it was too autobiographical and too steamy, its crude concentration of carnal matters a sure put-off for the decent Canadian reader. The folks at Viking Press liked it, but wanted Cohen to cut it by half. He did, revising as he went along and producing, eventually, a wholly new novel, now entitled The Favorite Game, which was published in 1963.

  There’s much of Leonard Cohen in Lawrence Breavman, the book’s protagonist. He’s in his late teens and Jewish and fond of leaving his home in Westmount—he lives with his mother, his father having died when he was a boy—and taking long walks to downtown Montreal. He is short, and puts tissues in his shoes to appear taller, which Cohen did as well. He is an enthusiastic hypnotist, and uses his skill to charm the pants off the young maid. The book is told in short anecdotal bursts, which are propelled forward mostly by conversations between Breavman and his best friend, Krantz—modeled after Morton Rosengarten, Cohen’s childhood pal—followed by the narrator’s own observations, which place their youthful bravado in some world-historical context. Like this:

  “Krantz, is it true that we are Jewish?”

  “So it has been rumored, Breavman.”

  “Do you feel Jewish, Krantz?”

  “Thoroughly.”

  “Do your teeth feel Jewish?”

  “Especially my teeth, to say nothing of my left ball.”

  “We really shouldn’t joke, what we were just saying reminds me of pictures from the camps.”

  “True.”

  Weren’t they supposed to be a holy people consecrated to purity, service, spiritual honesty? Weren’t they a nation set apart?24

  The boys in the book talk the way smart and insecure boys talk, an elaborate verbal ritual designed to conceal their voluminous anxiety with a thin layer of icy wit. And the narrator made sure we knew they were not just shooting the breeze; the conversation they were having was the central conversation of Jewish theology, one that began millennia ago and will not end anytime soon. Krantz and Breavman’s rendition may have been a touch more profane, but their souls were reaching heavenward. Like every Jew since Abraham, they, too, were baffled by the idea of having been chosen by God, and were trying to figure out just what that meant. And when they weren’t thinking about God, they were out to find girls.

  Most critics liked the novel, albeit with some reservations. The London Daily Telegraph captured the collective enthusiasm by declaring The Favorite Game “an odd, off-beat book, with a great deal of muted poetry and some beautifully observed scenes.”25 The Guardian called it “a lyrical and exploratory bit of semi-biography.”26

  But Cohen, while grateful for the praise, saw it as nothing of the kind. He shared his frustrations with Layton. “Irving,” he wrote, “will you understand, will you understand what no one else will understand, that The Favorite Game is a third novel disguised as a first novel? Will you see it as a great detective story in which a body is lost in every paragraph?”27

  He wasn’t joking, or at least not entirely. He didn’t set out to write an odd and beautiful and poetic bildungsroman. He wanted to write about what it was like to be young and try to take flight and realize that life was a terrain made of many plains and very few mountaintops. He wanted to write about small pleasures and big struggles, and to tell other young men and women like him that they needn’t look for transcendence because there was so much beauty right here, in dirty streets and dirty talk. He wanted, in other words, to write a very intimate epic. “That’s what I always missed when I heard my first fairy-tales—the small talk of giants,” he wrote to Layton. “I longed to hear how they lived away from crises. I hated it when they came tumbling down and left the world to the sneaky Davids, the loop-hole artists, the lawyers. Why are the giants always asleep in one part of the story? Because their real enemy was boredom, interior despair, and the worst temptation: a landscape into which they could fit, that is, a world they did not dwarf, that overwhelmed them and limited their freedom. Giants cannot take their landscape seriously, so they fall before clever Jack, Sammy-on-the-run, the bright ambitious son of simple people, who settles with his stolen treasures into the safe life, who bores and trains his grandchildren with the tale of how he tricked a sleeping God. I meet them all and read their manuscripts on their palms. Their successes are not important and their failures are not moving or instructive.”28

  Even though many of the reviewers were enthusiastic, none seemed to get what the book was about. It was the same predicament he’d experienced as a poet: He was lauded for writing well, but forced to play the part of the smooth young prodigy, stripped of nuance, easily explained. Praise held little appeal for Cohen; he was seeking comprehension, and was delighted when, on rare occasions, it appeared. Kenneth N. Cameron, for example, a leading expert on Shelley, wrote Cohen an insightful note, saying that the novel’s “episodic appearance is deceptive,” and that his work, unlike the more unstructured wo
rks by the Beats, had movement, “a total flow which is subtle but strong.” Cohen was so thrilled with Cameron’s note that he went on to retype almost all of it in a later letter to his sister. “My impression of the book,” Cameron wrote, “is that it is very beautiful, very moving and, in spite of some roaringly comic scenes, a very sad book. It is full of a kind of drifting pain that at times is almost unbearable; and it must have been so to you in writing it.”29

  Whether or not it had been, Cohen didn’t let on in his notes or his correspondence. But he soon began work on a second novel, and, as he had done before with his verse, was ready to abandon the comforts of a well-received style and reach for deeper truths.

  Beautiful Losers was published in 1966. It is one of those rare novels before which commentary and criticism stand helpless, pedantic, and dumb. If The Favorite Game was a subtle but strong current, Beautiful Losers was the deluge. To the extent that it was about anything, it was about three friends—one of whom possibly imaginary—and their devotion to Catherine Tekakwitha, a seventeenth-century Algonquian Mohawk who was baptized a Catholic, became a saint, and is remembered for her self-mortification and for maxims like “Take courage, despise the words of those who have no faith.”30 The novel is told from shifting points of view, and its prose is liquid. It reads more like a vision than a story. An erotic vision: “Her breasts were small, somewhat muscular, fruit with fiber,” Cohen wrote in one representative passage. “Her freakish nipples make me want to tear up my desk when I remember them, which I do at this very instant, miserable paper memory while my cock soars hopelessly into her mangled coffin, and my arms wave my duties away, even you, Catherine Tekakwitha, whom I court with this confession. Her wondrous nipples were dark as mud and very long when stiffened by desire, over an inch high, wrinkled with wisdom and sucking.”31

  Cohen wasn’t juxtaposing nipples and saints for literary effect, as he’d done earlier in his career. He was doing it because he now knew that both were essential components of the world, both vessels of pure emotion, deserving of close study and devotion. And he had no other way of capturing these complications than with the manic stream of language and thought that was his new novel. Comparisons to that other practitioner of the same method weren’t long in coming: “James Joyce is not dead,” declared the Boston Globe. “He is living in Montreal under the name of Cohen.”32 Other reviewers were far less gracious: The Toronto Globe and Mail called the novel “verbal masturbation,”33 Time announced it to be a “sluggish stream of concupiscence,”34 and the influential critic Robert Fulford provided the most memorable judgment when he declared Beautiful Losers “the most revolting book ever written in Canada.”35