It was a vision too subtle for many of his fans to embrace. In 1994, two decades after Robert Altman artfully used Cohen’s songs in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and four years after Allan Moyle harnessed them to Pump Up the Volume, Oliver Stone tethered Cohen’s music to his new film, Natural Born Killers. As one fan, Ted Ekering, had noted,25 Stone shared with Cohen a dismay with art’s inability to capture the most fundamental of human emotions. Just as Cohen had done with Flowers for Hitler, Stone designed Natural Born Killers as antiart, making sure that each cut called attention to itself and stacking the film with references to other films, including his own. “I been thinking ’bout why they’re makin’ all these stupid fuckin’ movies,” muses the movie’s lead character, Mickey, played by Woody Harrelson, as he watches Brian De Palma’s Scarface in his hotel room. “Doesn’t anybody out there in Hollywood believe in kissin’ anymore?” Stone himself, of course, had written that Scarface’s screenplay; the monologue, Ekering observed, wasn’t that different from Cohen’s gambit when he began one of his poems by stating that he had no more talent left. But Cohen had outgrown his despair, crept out of his experiments with form, and taught himself to write about human life with gentleness and persistence. Stone had neither the patience nor the capacity for such intricacies. In one particularly dismal scene, Cohen’s “Waiting for the Miracle” plays as the two protagonists, both psychopathic serial killers, make love. “I know you really loved me,” Cohen croons as they grind into each other; then, the camera pans, revealing a young woman, their victim, bound and gagged in the corner, terrified. Cohen’s song continues: “But you see, my hands were tied.” The same thing that had happened to “Hallelujah” was beginning to happen to Cohen’s other songs, and to Cohen himself—he was being taken literally.
It was the worst thing that could happen to Cohen. With the reinvigorated interest in his music came a demand to see him live. In 1988, promoting I’m Your Man, he went on a twenty-five-date tour, with a leisurely four-month break in between; in 1993, supporting The Future, he played twenty-six shows in Europe, and then proceeded almost directly on an intensive two-month, thrity-seven-show tour of North America.26 It was exhausting. Cohen drank. For reasons known only to them, he and De Mornay ended their engagement.
When he returned home, Cohen drove up to Mount Baldy, convinced that caring for Roshi was the panacea he needed. He stayed there for five years. He wore gray robes and marched with the other monks in a line amid the compound’s gray rocks and slim trees. He sat at a long wooden table and drank water from a small bowl. He was silent most of the day, as were those around him. An artist trained in abandoning his art, Cohen might have decided to condemn his music to the same fate as his poetry and his novels. He could have stopped writing songs, or written rarely, or concluded that he no longer felt any need to communicate his enlightenment to others. But writing, he now realized, was ritual, remarkable less for bringing its practitioner closer to God than for enforcing a sort of maniacal discipline, a commitment to control and austerity not so different from the one constantly on display on Mount Baldy. Speaking to a reporter visiting him at his quarters there in 1996, he equated writing with sitting zazen and meditating. “You have to dive into it,” he said. “You have to sit in the very bonfire of that distress, and you sit there until you’re burnt away, and it’s ashes, and it’s gone.”27 By “it” he meant his songs: They, he stated repeatedly, were like ashes, blowing in the wind, blowing right through their listeners, pure in their essence but nothing more than remnants of a life once lived.
If the songs were ashes, Roshi, increasingly, was the fire. “I don’t feel like acting on a sense of despair,” Cohen said. “Or maybe this whole activity is a response to a sense of despair that I’ve always had. The quality of the relationship that is possible with Roshi is very instructive. He’s both a friend and the enemy. He is just what he is. And of course he’s going to be an enemy to your self-indulgence, an enemy to your laziness, he’s going to be a friend to your effort.… He’s going to be all the things that he has to be to turn you away from depending on him. And finally you just say this guy is absolutely true, he really loves me so much that I don’t need to depend on him. His love is a liberating kind of love and his company is a liberating kind of company, so he’s only interested in you making an effort to be yourself. So that’s a very, very helpful kind of friend. And that’s the kind of friend we should be to each other.”28
The most important liberation his friend facilitated was the liberation from being Leonard Cohen. “As he said to me in one of our first personal encounters, formal encounters,” Cohen recalled, “he said, ‘I not Japanese, you not Jewish.’ So, Roshi not Zen master, and Leonard not Zen student. Other versions of ourselves might arise that are more interesting. And so he became a part of my life and a deep friend in the real sense of friendship, someone who really cared, or didn’t care, I am not quite sure which it is, who deeply didn’t care about who I was, therefore who I was began to wither, and the less I was of who I was, the better I felt.”29 And on Mount Baldy, with Roshi, Cohen felt good, good enough to spend a significant portion of the 1990s there. For a decade, he neither performed nor released albums, but his old songs continued to win new fans. He had fulfilled the conditions of artistic ascendance described by Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s alter ego, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. “The personality of the artist,” Dedalus opined, “at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”30
“Refined out of existence”: That is what it must have felt like for Cohen on Mount Baldy. “It’s a place where it’s very difficult to hold fast to one’s ideas,” he said of his new home. “There is this sort of charitable void that I found here in a very pure form.”31 When a Swedish television journalist came to visit him, he mused that he might never again return to songwriting; he might, he said, get a real job, maybe at a bookstore. Or maybe he’d remain committed to his monastic undertakings: “I can’t interrupt these studies,” he said. “It’s too important for me to interrupt.… For the health of my soul.”32
But Cohen was never one for mere transcendence or for selves overcome. He was too much of a connoisseur of the flesh and of worldly joys. Even on the mountain, reflecting on emptiness, he was aware of, and amused by, his earthly affiliations. A poem he wrote, “Early Morning at Mt. Baldy,” captures this sensibility well. After describing the elaborate ceremony of putting on his kimono and other ceremonial garb—the “serpentine belt,” he observed, resembled a braided challah—he tumbles right down to the punch line: “all in all / about 20 pounds of clothing / which I put on quickly / at 2:30 a.m. / over my enormous hard-on.”33 The flesh beckoned; it wanted more than the company of silent monks. The mind, too, reeled—all that meditation hadn’t freed Cohen of his acute depression, an affliction with which he had wrestled all his life. The only thing that could satisfy both, he knew, was work.
And with that, after an awkward good-bye to Roshi, it was back to Los Angeles, and back to the studio. In his absence, his record label had released a best-of compilation and hoped, like many of Cohen’s fans, that when he finally stepped back into civilization, he’d do so with an album to match The Future in daring and tone. But everything about the new album—starting with its humble name, Ten New Songs—was subdued. Released in October 2001, the album’s cover features a blurry photograph, taken by Cohen on his computer’s webcam, of him and Sharon Robinson, one of his former backup singers who had become a friend and who cowrote and produced all of the album’s songs. Cohen wasn’t eager to take credit or reassert himself; collaboration, perhaps, was what
one gravitated toward after years of training to overcome one’s ego. Unlike its predecessor, the new album offered no anthems and no answers. Neither did Cohen; when a reporter called to ask him how he felt about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, he replied that “in the Jewish tradition, one is cautioned against trying to comfort the comfortless in the midst of their bereavement.”34 It was meant as a spiritual and political statement, but it applied as an artistic one as well—Cohen had little comfort to give. The best he could muster were hesitant sentiments like “I fought against the bottle, / But I had to do it drunk / Took my diamond to the pawnshop / But that don’t make it junk.” The album was dedicated to Roshi, and was every bit a failed disciple’s tentative tribute, beautiful and haunted by uncertainty and the fading sting of defeat. The album sold strongly in Europe and in Canada, but in America, Cohen seemed to be retreating quietly to the position he had held before his brief spell in the limelight—that of a connoisseur’s choice, writer of fine and obscure songs. Whatever chance the ten new songs had of breaking out of their anonymity was quashed when their creator refused to tour. He wasn’t ready, he said, and doubted if he could still fill seats.
Instead he worked, and immersed himself in a new romance with his longtime backup singer, the Honolulu-born Anjani Thomas. In 2004, just a few weeks after his seventieth birthday, Cohen surprised his fans by releasing another album, Dear Heather, an uncharacteristically speedy production for an artist who worked at a glacial pace. He had wanted to call it Old Ideas, but was concerned that it would come across as another greatest-hits compilation. Still, much about the album was unmistakably old. It included a cover of Cohen’s beloved “Tennessee Waltz,” the song he’d grown up listening to Patti Page croon on the radio; as well as a reading of “To a Teacher,” the poem Cohen had written to A. M. Klein and that appeared in his very first collection of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies, in 1961; another reading—underscored by brushes on a snare drum—of F. R. Scott’s “Villanelle for Our Time,” and a song based on Un Canadien Errant, a Québécois folk song. Despite the occasional musical experimentation—vocal tracks doubling on themselves, or a few passages of free jazz—the album felt like what Henry James called “the rest that precedes the great rest,”35 the kind of equilibrium one achieves only when all aspirations are abandoned and all desires quelled.
The quietude pleased: Dear Heather was Cohen’s highest-charting album since 1969. “I know it’s hard to get a grip on, kids,” wrote Robert Christgau, “but people keep getting older. They don’t just reach some inconceivable benchmark—50 or, God, 60—and stop, Old in some absolute sense. The bones, the joints, the genitals, the juices, the delivery systems, and eventually the mind continue to break down, at an unpredictable pace in unpredictable ways. Leonard Cohen has had No Voice since he began recording at 33. But he has more No Voice today, at 70, than he did on Ten New Songs, at 67—the tenderness in his husky whisper of 2001, tenderness the way steak is tender, has dried up in his whispered husk of 2004, rendering his traditional dependence on the female backups who love him more grotesque.” He meant it in a nice way. Cohen’s “diminished inspiration” was only normal for a man his age, Christgau seemed to imply, and it was inspiration enough that he was singing at all. He gave the album a B, but not before distancing himself from the singer and his vision. “Not only do I like the guy, I’m Old enough to identify with him,” Christgau concluded. “But I doubt I’ll ever be Old enough to identify with this.”36 Still, it was a more dignified pursuit than those of many of his contemporaries, and, lacking the burdens of a tour, a perfectly fine and intimate album with which to begin and conclude a rich and strange career. To most of Cohen’s followers Dear Heather was the sound of things to come; if more albums were forthcoming, surely they would sound like this, a series of sweet and increasingly soft farewells.
And then came the avalanche.
It began with a cryptic visit to the Los Angeles store of Cohen’s daughter, Lorca. A man came in and said he was dating an employee of Kelley Lynch, Leonard Cohen’s manager. He told Lorca that her father ought to take a look at his accounts. She alerted her father, who rushed to his bank and was surprised to learn that Lynch, a onetime lover and a longtime close friend, had stolen most of his money. It was impossible to say how much of it was gone, but the outcome looked grim.
With the help of a lawyer—Anjani’s former husband, Robert Kory—Cohen began an investigation into his affairs, and each discovery bruised him more. Lynch hadn’t just stolen between ten and thirteen million dollars, but had left him liable for hefty tax bills as well. Worst, she had forged documents and sold the rights to many of his songs. Kory reached out to Lynch, but she refused to compromise. In August 2005 came the lawsuits; soon thereafter the harassment began.
After he severed their seventeen-year professional engagement the year before, Cohen later testified in court, Lynch started calling him frantically, sometimes twenty or thirty times a day. She would leave ten-minute messages on his answering machine, mumbling about the Aryan Nation and saying that he “needed to be taken down and shot.”37 She also took to the Internet, where she wrote long posts that saw conspiracy theories everywhere and, at some point, even tried to connect Cohen with Phil Spector’s trial for the 2003 murder of the actress Lana Clarkson. On April 18, 2012, Lynch, wearing a blue jumpsuit and cuffed to her chair, was sentenced to eighteen months in jail. She continued to portray her predicament as a “vicious attack”38 against her by Cohen and others. Cohen, in turn, was gracious. “It gives me no pleasure to see my one-time friend shackled to a chair in a court of law, her considerable gifts bent to the service of darkness, deceit and revenge,” he stated in court. “It is my prayer that Ms. Lynch will take refuge in the wisdom of her religion, that a spirit of understanding will convert her heart from hatred to remorse, from anger to kindness, from the deadly intoxication of revenge to the lowly practices of self-reform.”39
It was a beautiful sentiment, but it left much unresolved. He had some property—a house in Montreal, another in Los Angeles, and his old place in Hydra—but he was in his seventies and depleted of all of his life savings. The music industry, he knew, had changed; the money was in touring, and he hadn’t toured in a decade and a half. Slowly, hesitatingly, uncertain whether or not he’d actually once again step out before an audience, he began to think about the road, collecting band members both veteran and new, rehearsing, arranging, and rearranging songs. A tentative tour, limited at first to small and intimate venues, was booked, beginning on May 11, 2008, in an auditorium in Fredericton, New Brunswick, that seated 709.
When Cohen took the stage, the audience rose to its feet and applauded wildly for two or three minutes, howling and cheering, some crying. In the days before the concert, there was still some speculation, even among ticketholders, that this had all been an unfortunate misunderstanding, that Cohen wasn’t really about to break his streak of solitude. But he was really there, in a gray suit and fedora, and if he was moved by the singularity of the moment, he didn’t let on.
“This is the first time in 14 years I have stood before you in this position as a performer,” he said. Back then, he joked, “I was just a kid of 60 with crazy dreams.” He thanked the town for its impeccable hospitality, and expressed his concern for the victims of a recent flooding in the area. Then the band started playing “Dance Me to the End of Love.”40
It sounded like nothing Leonard Cohen had previously produced. Music had always been his dragon to slay: He had refused its adornments in the late 1960s, had tried to trick it in the late 1980s by abandoning the guitar for the keyboard, and, in Dear Heather, tested its tolerance by experimenting freely. There was no sign in Fredericton of the man who, just four years earlier, limited most of his vocals to poetic recitations. On the modest stage, in his first show of the tour, Leonard Cohen sang, his No Voice deep and healed and confident. And he had with him just the band to underscore his newfound vocal courage: From Javier Mas, the aging Spanish master of t
he bandurria, to Neil Larsen, a virtuoso on the Hammond B3 organ, the band, like Cohen, contained musical multitudes, and was sufficiently in command of its craft to play not for Cohen but with him. Introducing each of his musicians several times, Cohen often stepped aside in midsong and allowed for a lengthy instrumental solo. He was no longer the commander of a musical army, lost without his troops. Nearly five decades after he first took the stage with Judy Collins, Leonard Cohen had finally eased into performing. In true Zen fashion, it turned out that all he needed to do to let his songs state their case was nothing but accept Lorca’s definition of the duende and allow the tightly closed flowers of his spare arrangements to blossom into a thousand petals. For nearly three hours onstage that spring night in Fredericton, he did just that.
EPILOGUE
“A Manual for Living with Defeat”
* * *
The Tel Aviv that Leonard Cohen visited in 2009 was very different from the city where he had clashed with security guards in 1972, or the one in which, a year later, he had accepted a temporary appointment as a member of a wartime troupe of entertainers. It was now a sleek city, modern and metallic, eager to forget that it was rooted in loose desert sand and mired in ancient conflicts. It liked to put on the clothes of its older metropolitan sisters, New York or Berlin, and pretend to be all grown up. But when Cohen arrived, it could no longer play it cool. For reasons ethnic, historic, and artistic, Cohen had always been regarded with a papal sort of devotion in Israel, and his arrival sent Tel Aviv into a tailspin. Demand for concert tickets was so fierce that the phone lines and the servers of the sole ticket office crashed seconds after the sale had begun. Galei Zahal, the army’s official and popular radio station, played even more of Cohen’s songs than usual, which was a lot; a few days before Cohen’s show they broadcast a special retrospective of his work hosted by a star of the country’s local version of American Idol. Outside the seaside Dan Hotel, where Cohen stayed, bunches of young men and women huddled in the crisp autumn breeze, hoping for a glimpse of their idol, shrieking whenever a car with darkened windows pulled up. A short distance away, in Rabin Square—the site of the former prime minister’s assassination and the most sacred spot in an otherwise proudly secular town—others gathered with guitars, sitting on the concrete, playing and singing “Suzanne” and “Sisters of Mercy” and swaying gently in unison. Wherever you went in town, people asked if you were going to the show. They didn’t have to specify which one.
A Broken Hallelujah: Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen Page 19