Leonard had given up the Tennessee cabin. He left his jeep in Bob Johnston’s drive and went back to Montreal and Suzanne. He bought the house next door to his cottage—they were a matching pair, with a shared dividing wall—and designated the ground floor a sculpture studio for Mort and the upstairs his writing room. A place to escape to when domesticity became too much. To all appearances, a man not cut out for domesticity was making a real effort to make his domestic situation work. What Leonard was writing, though, did not give much cause for optimism.
In April, Columbia released Leonard’s fourth album, Live Songs. Although it failed to make even the UK charts, it was a contender for the most somber live album ever. The album contains nine songs recorded on the 1970 and 1972 tours and one that Leonard recorded alone, in the cabin, on a tape recorder borrowed from Johnston. It opens with “Minute Prologue,” a despairing rumination on “dissension” and “pain,” improvised over a slow solo guitar, and closes with the doleful cabin recording of “Queen Victoria,” a poem from Flowers for Hitler (“my love, she gone with other boys”) to which he had given minimal musical adornment. In between, alongside naked and emotional performances of songs from his first two albums, are “Please Don’t Pass Me By (A Disgrace),” a thirteen-minute revival meeting sing-along with a Holocaust reference (“I sing this for the Jews and the gypsies and the smoke that they made”), “Passing Thru,” performed as a weary country hymn, and “Improvisation,” a mournful riff on the instrumental intro to “You Know Who I Am.” The bleached-out photograph of Leonard on the front sleeve was taken by Suzanne. He is thin and blank faced, ashen, his hair shorn, his white-clad body fading like a ghost into the backdrop of white bathroom tiles.
The liner notes came from a letter to Leonard from a young British writer and artist named Daphne Richardson, with whom he had a correspondence. Richardson had first written to him about an experimental book she was working on, which included collages of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen poems. She asked for permission to use them, which (unlike Dylan) Leonard gave. Some time later Richardson, who had been in and out of mental hospitals, wrote to Leonard from a hospital, sending him a book she had written while she was there. Leonard had found it “shattering. A testimony of pain I’ve never read anything like.”2 When he was next in London, they arranged to meet; he found a “very attractive girl in her thirties” and a talented artist. He asked Richardson if she would like to illustrate The Energy of Slaves. During a period when he failed to check his mail, a pile of letters from her had accrued. She wrote, with growing desperation, that she had been readmitted to the hospital and had insisted on leaving because she had work to do on Leonard’s book. They did not believe her, she said, and strapped her down. Leonard tried to get in contact, but he says, “I was just too late.” She had killed herself three days before. Leonard was mentioned in her suicide note. He published her letter on the album sleeve, he said, because she had always wanted to be published and no one would do so.3
In February 1973, Leonard was back again in London, this time to meet with Tony Palmer and Marty Machat and see Bird on a Wire, Palmer’s film of the previous year’s tour. As he watched himself, there were tears in Leonard’s eyes. “He wept for a good 50 percent of the film,” Palmer says. “He kept saying, ‘This is too true, this is too true,’ repeating it like a mantra.” Machat liked the film; “I’m very happy about this,” he told Palmer. So did the BBC, who bought it on the spot, effectively covering 75 percent of what the film had cost to make. A week later, Machat called Palmer. There was a problem. Leonard thought the film “too confrontational.” A meeting was set up during which, according to Palmer, a film editor named Humphrey Dixon, who had worked as his editing assistant on the film, stepped up and said that he could rescue it. “Go ahead,” said Palmer, and the long, expensive business of remaking Bird on a Wire began. “I’ve read that, according to Leonard’s testimony, a further half a million dollars was spent,” Palmer says. “Marty looked at me somewhat wryly and said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s not my money this time.’ ”
In an interview Leonard gave Melody Maker’s Roy Hollingworth while in London, he described the film as “totally unacceptable” and said that he was paying from his own pocket just to get it finished. When it was done, he said, he would “get out of the scene.” Asked what he meant by that, Leonard answered, “Well, I’m leaving. I want to return to another rhythm. Somehow I haven’t organised my life within rock very well. Somehow it—the rock life—became important rather than the thing that produced the song. I don’t find myself leading a life that has many good moments in it. So I’ve decided to screw it, and go. Maybe the other life won’t have many good moments either, but I know this one, and I don’t want it.” Throughout the interview, various people from Leonard’s UK record company fussed about him. They had brought him a gold disc for UK sales of Songs of Love and Hate, which he had put on the floor, with no great regard for its well-being. By the end of the interview it was covered with trash, including an upturned coffee cup. “I’ve found myself not writing at all,” he said, lighting another Turkish cigarette from the butt of the one he had just finished. “I feel that I’m no longer learning. I began to feel I was doing some of the songs a disservice. So I have to get into something else.”4
Leonard hired Henry Zemel to work on Bird on a Wire with Dixon as coeditor; he needed someone he trusted to watch his back. Zemel, watching the footage from the tour, could see his friend’s struggle with celebrity and how hard he worked at trying to maintain the sincerity of his engagement with both the audiences and his songs. He knew that Leonard felt that celebrity had taken a toll on his work. “He very much saw himself as a lyric poet,” says Zemel, and “a lyric poet has a certain kind of innocence and naïveté and an uncompromising relationship with the world and with what they’re doing. When something cracks that vision and idea of what the world could be and what they’re devoted to making it be, can they ever put the pieces back together again? The quality of the work, the voice, is never the same.”
Marianne was back on Hydra, in the house where she and Leonard had lived, when one day Suzanne appeared at the door. She had a baby in her arms who was crying loudly. She told Marianne, over her son’s sobs, that she had been staying at a hotel and wanted to know when Marianne was moving out. Marianne packed her things and left. “That was a sad scene,” says Marianne quietly. When Leonard heard about this he offered to buy Marianne a house—she had sold her own back in their impecunious days—or, if she wanted to stay, he would buy another house for Suzanne. “He was always very generous,” says Marianne, who declined his offer. It was time to return to Norway. When Leonard joined Suzanne and Adam in the little white house on the hill, it is hard to imagine that, as he tried to find his old rhythm, his thoughts did not turn now and then to life there with another woman and child in more innocent, nurturing times.
He resumed his old routine of a morning swim in the harbor. Afterward “he just hung around on the port, sitting on rocks and staring at people, for hours,” says Terry Oldfield, a young composer and musician who had moved to Hydra in the early seventies; for a while he gave flute lessons to Marianne’s son. Leonard was one of the first people Oldfield met on the island. Leonard, who struck Oldfield as being “in a very lucid state of mind,” told him that he had recently been staying in a monastery.
On Hydra Leonard painted and also worked on the book of prose he had begun in Montreal, its title since changed from “The Woman Being Born” to “My Life in Art.” Meanwhile, several of his old poems and songs were strutting the boards without him, sometimes in curious guises. “The New Step,” from Flowers for Hitler, had been turned into a one-act ballet-drama of the same name, which was aired on CBC television, and an assortment of his lyrics and poems on the subject of women made up Gene Lesser’s off-Broadway musical Sisters of Mercy. What Leonard was writing about women—or one particular woman—in “My Life in Art” was not pretty. “Fuck this marriage [and] your d
ead bed night after night.”* He needed, he wrote, to “study the hatred I have for her and how it is transmuted into desire by solitude and distance.”5 He voiced the sentiment less savagely in a new song:
I live here with a woman and a child
The situation makes me kind of nervous
The title he gave the song, which was in great part about his domestic situation, was “There Is a War.”
On October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria launched the attack on Israel that began the Yom Kippur War. The next day Leonard left Suzanne and Adam on Hydra and flew from Athens to Tel Aviv. His plan was to enlist in the Israeli Army: “I will go and stop Egypt’s bullet. Trumpets and a curtain of razor blades,” he wrote.6 His motives, as these words might suggest, were complex: commitment to the cause certainly (“I’ve never disguised the fact that I’m Jewish and in any crisis in Israel I would be there,” Leonard said in 1974. “I am committed to the survival of the Jewish people”7), but also bravado, narcissism and, near the top of the list, desperation to get away. “Women,” he said, “only let you out of the house for two reasons: to make money or to fight a war,”8 and in his present state of mind dying for a noble cause—any cause—was better than this life he was living as an indentured artist and a caged man.
Suzanne says, “I felt proud about Leonard’s heroic actions and acts of generosity but fear about something happening—there was much hostility at that time—which turned into a fear of loss and dread of the worst. Knowing his mind couldn’t be changed, I remember putting a blue ribbon inside his breast pocket without telling him, so that—in my mind—he’d be safe. And I was truly praying those first days.” Leonard, on the other hand, sitting on the plane, heading for what he called his “myth home,” felt free. He was “thin again and loose.”9 Shortly after arriving in Tel Aviv, Leonard met Oshik Levi, an Israeli singer. Levi was putting together a small team of performers to entertain the troops—Matti Caspi, Mordechai “Pupik” Arnon, Ilana Rovina—to which he was pleased to add Leonard. This was not what Leonard had in mind. He protested that his songs were sad and not known for their morale-boosting qualities. But Levi was persuasive and there had been no better offer from the Israeli Army. For the next few weeks Leonard traveled by truck, tank and jeep to outposts, encampments, aircraft hangars, field hospitals, anywhere they saw soldiers, and performed for them up to eight times a day. The soldiers would gather closely around—sometimes barely a dozen of them—and, if it was night and too dark to see, they would shine their flashlights on him as he played.
“Every unit we came to, he would ask what is the position of this or that soldier, and each and every time he wanted to join the forces and be one of them,” Levi told the newspaper Maariv. “I used to tease him: ‘Make up your mind, do you want to be a pilot, or an artillery man, or a naval commando diver? Each day you get excited by something else.’ ” The musicians would camp with the soldiers and talk to them all night long. “He was a modest person, with the soul of a philosopher, wondering about the meaning of human life,” said Levi. “He had many talks with Arnon about philosophy, astrology and the Bible. He used to talk often about the essence of Judaism, and about his Hebrew name, Eliezer.”10
In the notebook Leonard always carried with him, he made notes of what he had seen in Israel—the beauty of the desert, the kinship of the soldiers, the dead and wounded, who had made him weep. As he had in Cuba, he also wrote fantasies of glorious escapades, such as stealing a gun and killing the officer who bugged him “with relentless requests to sing ‘Suzanne.’ ”11 He wrote a song in Israel—miraculously quickly—called “Lover Lover Lover.” Caspi remembered Leonard improvising it in front of the soldiers during their second performance.
May the spirit of this song
May it rise up pure and free
May it be a shield for you
A shield against the enemy
On his 1974 tour Leonard would introduce it as a song “written in the Sinai desert for soldiers of both sides.”12 That same year, when describing his experience to ZigZag magazine, he said, “War is wonderful. They’ll never stamp it out. It’s one of the few times people can act their best. It’s so economical in terms of gesture and motion, every single gesture is precise, every effort is at its maximum. Nobody goofs off. There are opportunities to feel things that you simply cannot feel in modern city life”13—all of these, and the last in particular, having been things that had long exercised him.
From Israel he flew directly to Ethiopia, a country that was also on the brink of war. He appeared to be courting danger, tempting fate. Instead of attempting to take up arms, this time he took a room in the Imperial Hotel in Asmara. While the rain poured down outside, freed up, Leonard wrote. “I had my guitar with me and it was then I felt the songs emerging—at last, the conclusions that I had been carrying in manuscript form for the last four or five years, from hotel room to hotel room.”14 He refined “Lover Lover Lover,” changing its opening line from “I saw my brothers fighting in the desert” to
I asked my father . . . “Change my name.”
The one I’m using now it’s covered up
With fear and filth and cowardice and shame
In Ethiopia he also finally “broke the code” of “Take This Longing”—a song he had written years ago to Nico and that Buffy Sainte-Marie had recorded as “The Bells”—in order “to get a version for” himself.15 He made final edits to the lyrics of “Chelsea Hotel #2,” a second version of the song that described his sexual encounter in New York with Janis Joplin. Leonard and Ron Cornelius had written the music together on his last tour, on a transatlantic flight from Nashville to Ireland. “It was back when you could sit in the back of the plane and smoke,” Cornelius remembers, “and for the best part of this eight-and-a-half-hour flight Leonard and I sat there smoking and worked on that song. When we finally landed in Shannon, it was complete.” Leonard told Billy Donovan, the tour manager, that it was the first song he had ever cowritten. The other song that came together in Ethiopia was “Field Commander Cohen,” an ironic account of his imagined heroic military exploits. But in reality, in traveling to these combat zones, Leonard was avoiding the war that awaited him at home with Suzanne.
He was weary, though, and ready to make peace. He had seen too much blood and death and hatred in Israel. He felt he should go back and tend this little garden whose seed he had planted and see if somehow he could make a success of family life. But first he went to the monastery to sit in retreat with Roshi. When he finally went home to Suzanne and Adam at the end of the year, peace reigned in the cottage in Montreal, long enough for Suzanne to become pregnant with their second child.
In July 1974 the new version of the concert film Bird on a Wire opened in London. It did not stay in circulation long. The BBC by this time had given up on broadcasting it. It was shown on German TV, but effectively it disappeared (bar the odd bootleg copy) for almost four decades. Leonard flew to London for the premiere. He seemed “very cheerful” to the journalist from ZigZag for whom he played three of his new songs—even while recounting that he’d had to give up his writing room, now that there was a new baby on the way, and he was obliged to go to the garden shed to write. This was quite a change in mood from his last visit to London, when his interviews suggested that he planned to quit the music business. “I don’t want to give you the impression that I was very sick and have just come through it, that’s not true,” said Leonard. What had happened was that “two months ago I had a golden week, my guitar sounded good, a lot of unfinished songs suggested conclusions.”16
Leonard had renewed his contract with Columbia Records. He had spent most of the past month in a New York studio working on a new record called New Skin for the Old Ceremony. Drawing a line under his first four albums, on this one he was trying for a different sound, using all new musicians and a new, young producer. John Lissauer was fifteen years younger than Leonard and not long out of Yale music s
chool, where he had studied classical music and jazz. They met by chance in Montreal, at the Nelson Hotel, where Lissauer performed in a band with Lewis Furey, whose first album Lissauer had just produced. Leonard was in the audience; he had known Furey since 1966, when Furey was a sixteen-year-old violin player and fledgling poet. He had asked Leonard to look at his poetry, which Leonard did, giving him homework—read Irving Layton; write a sonnet—and becoming his mentor.
After the show, Furey introduced Lissauer to Leonard. This impressed Lissauer’s girlfriend, who was a big Leonard Cohen fan, rather more than it did Lissauer, who “wasn’t really into the folk singer-songwriter thing.” Leonard told Lissauer, “I like what you’re doing; would you like to talk about recording?” Lissauer said, “Sure.” He heard nothing more for some time until, out of the blue, Leonard called and told him he was at the Royalton Hotel in New York and ready to start work.
Lissauer lived in a large loft space in a four-floor walk-up on Eighteenth Street—it had been a Mafia after-hours club in the fifties—that was strewn with “every instrument known to man.” Lissauer told Leonard to come over. He should ring the downstairs bell, then stand under the window, and Lissauer would throw down the front-door key. Some hours later, as Lissauer sat at the piano, playing quietly, listening for the doorbell, in walked Leonard, a large grin on his face. At the front door he had run into a pizza deliveryman with an order for Lissauer’s neighbor. When she threw down her key, Leonard caught it, paid for the pizza and said he would take it up with him. “She was the biggest Leonard Cohen freak, so you can imagine, opening the door and having her pizza delivered by her idol. She screamed,” says Lissauer. “It was nuts.” He was beginning to get the idea that Leonard was popular with women.
I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen Page 28