The tour ended with two dates in Tel Aviv. Sharon remembers Leonard taking the band on a trip to the Dead Sea and also to visit a kibbutz. When it was over, Leonard flew to New York. In his room at the Algonquin Hotel, he prepared to celebrate Hanukkah with Adam and Lorca. He had brought candles and a prayer book with him, and also a notebook. When Hanukkah was over and the children gone, he opened it to the page where he had started to write a powerful and beautiful hymn of surrender, titled “If It Be Your Will.”
And so the curtain came down and Leonard stepped out quietly through the backstage door. It seemed as good a time as any to make an exit from the music business. The tour was over and, though the concerts had been good, his album had not sold well. The world had other things to occupy it; Leonard did not think he would be missed.
Had you lost interest, or simply run out of steam?
“I don’t know, I suppose it reflected a certain insecurity about what I was doing. I kind of lost the handle of it, I thought. Although in retrospect, even in examining the work of other writers, that’s a very common and almost routine assessment of one’s work at different periods. Often one’s best work is at the time considered inadequate or incompetent. I certainly struggled with those notions, and not just as a writer— but, as any man or woman locates a large component of their self-respect in their work, it’s always an issue.”
Did you have any plans for how you would spend this time away?
“My children were living in the South of France and I spent a lot of time visiting them there and going back and forth. The pieces in ‘Book of Mercy’ were coming and I was writing the album that ended up being called Various Positions. At a certain point my work was so slow and it became such an ordeal that I was discarding much of what I did, so I think it was legitimate for me to say that my life and my work was in disarray.”
The next four years were spent out of the public eye. If you were looking for Leonard you might find him in the monastery on Mount Baldy, in his apartment in Montreal, in his house on Hydra or in France, in a trailer at the bottom of a path leading to the house where Suzanne and the children lived. Leonard flew to France often.
Adam Cohen, speaking some three decades later, described it as “admirable, the way in which he managed to keep in touch with us, despite the . . . domestic unrest, shall we say, the post-divorce antagonisms.”20 Things between Leonard and Suzanne remained contentious, although in Suzanne’s opinion, “We worked it out—over many years with many highs and lows—better than most that I’ve ever met and heard of since. The voyeurs and gossipers will only want to exaggerate the difficult times and the ill-willed will be suspicious of the best.”
The house that Suzanne found and Leonard purchased was on a seventeenth-century farm in Bonnieux that had been owned and run by monks. The surrounding countryside was littered with old, rural churches. Sometimes Suzanne took the children there, “although,” she says, “I didn’t whisper sweet nothings in the children’s ears about Jesus walking in the Garden.” She was aware that Leonard “would have liked me to educate them with at least the knowledge of the Jewish tradition in some way,” but there were no synagogues in the area, she says. Later, when she and the children lived in Manhattan, she “looked into it in earnest, but the rabbi I spoke to just didn’t make it accessible to me and I gave up. And to do it without Leonard didn’t make sense to me.” Leonard took on the children’s Jewish education himself. “I told them the stories, I told them the prayers, I showed them how to light the candles, I gave them the A to Z of the important holidays,” he says, and he celebrated the holidays with them.
When he was on Hydra Leonard fell gratefully into his old rhythm of swimming, writing and socializing at the bar by the harbor. He heard from Anthony Kingsmill about a concerto that Terry Oldfield, one of the younger expat residents, was working on, and asked Oldfield if he could hear it. Having heard it, he offered to go to Athens with Oldfield and have it recorded. “A very generous guy,” says Oldfield. “I was somebody trying to make it with music and really trying hard at it, and I think he identified a bit with that. Maybe it took him back to his early days on the island when he was writing.” Leonard invited Oldfield to his house and showed him the room where he wrote. “It was in the basement, very dark, and looked like a kind of womb, and it had a little electronic keyboard he played around with, one of those battery-operated Casios. And this was the room where he wrote a lot of his best stuff. He said, ‘This room has been very kind to me.’ ”
In early 1982 Leonard’s friend Lewis Furey came to Hydra for a month with his wife, Carol Laure. With them was a friend of theirs, a French photographer named Dominique Issermann. Furey, who had made two records as a singer, was, like Leonard, “not that thrilled with the music industry and the idea of making records.” He says, “I was more interested in theatrical song, song cycles that told a story.” One reason for his visit was that he had the idea for a musical, a rock opera, and was hoping that Leonard would write the song lyrics.
At the time, Leonard was “working experimentally, for my own instruction, on the form of the Spenserian sonnet,” he said, “which is a very complex metrical and rhyme form—just to keep my chops up in meter and rhyme.” When Furey asked if he wanted to write lyrics for his rock opera, his answer was “Not particularly.” But Furey was persuasive, and when the conversation turned to their releasing it on video disc—a new format the size of a record album, one not destined to survive—Leonard was intrigued. “He gave me some very elementary plot outlines,” said Leonard, “and I wrote lyrics to them as an exercise.”21
Over the next four weeks Leonard came up with “at least four or five complete lyrics,” Furey recalls, “very technical and all perfectly structured,” like sonnets. Furey began writing music to them. The project, which they titled Night Magic, was “very much a Faust story,” says Furey, “only the Mephistopheles character is three teenage angels who appear at the window, and the price you have to pay is suffering joy, redemption and decay.” Leonard and Furey worked on the musical on and off over the next year and a half—mostly in Paris, where Furey and his wife lived and where Suzanne was planning to move with Adam and Lorca. Dominique Issermann also lived in Paris. Leonard had begun an enduring relationship with the beautiful photographer on Hydra.
While Furey set about getting funding, Leonard started work on a short musical film for CBC television called I Am a Hotel, whose plot revolved around characters in an imaginary hotel. Leonard made an appearance in the film as a long-term resident of the hotel, smoking a cigarette and watching as the various characters’ stories played out—with no dialogue—to five of his songs. These were “The Guests,” the song that had been the inspiration for the project; “Memories”; “The Gypsy’s Wife”; “Chelsea Hotel #2”; and “Suzanne.” It was broadcast in 1983 and won an award at the Rose d’Or, the Montreux television festival. Leonard, meanwhile, was meeting with McClelland & Stewart about the new book he was writing, which he first titled The Name, then The Shield, and finally Book of Mercy.
Dennis Lee, whom McClelland had quite recently hired to head the poetry department, is a poet and essayist, author of a 1977 book called Savage Fields: An Essay in Literature and Cosmology—a joint study of Leonard’s novel Beautiful Losers and Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Says Lee, “For ten or twelve months, Leonard and I lived in each other’s back pockets and got to know each other very intensely within this one very narrow sphere of the new book he was working on.” Leonard described this new book as “a book of prayer . . . a sacred kind of conversation.” It was “a secret book for me,” he said, “meant for people like myself who could use it at a particular time.”22 He wrote it, he said, because he found himself “unable to speak in any other way. I felt I had been gagged and silenced for a long, long time, a number of years. It was with the greatest difficulty that I could communicate with anybody, even for the simplest thing. And when I was able to s
peak it was in these terms, an address to the source of mercy.”23
In utter defeat I came to you and you received me with a sweetness I had not dared to remember. Tonight I come to you again, soiled by strategies and trapped in the loneliness of my tiny domain. Establish your law in this walled place.
“6,” Book of Mercy
“The content, the prayerful quality of what he was doing had in some ways always been there,” says Lee, “but he really took off his gloves and went into it more directly and explicitly than he had before. I was very conscious that he was breaking new ground for himself.” Lee remembers that the first draft he saw of Book of Mercy “was much sketchier than what you read in the book now. A number of the very best pieces were written later in the process. I remember we were working away in Toronto and partway through he took off for a month or two to France—he told me that he was very much on his own when he wasn’t with his kids—and he told me when he got back that, while he was there, he kept hearing my voice in his head saying what I’d said before he left: ‘I think there’s still more.’ There was no prima donna ‘I’m Leonard Cohen, you shouldn’t be making any suggestions.’ He was the most charming and thoroughbred human being, and really focused on trying to get the book right, despite the other stuff going on in his life. In the evenings there was nothing to do but hone in on the manuscript, probing for more material. He came back with some things that really knocked my socks off.”
On Leonard’s last trip to Toronto before the book’s publication, the main discussion between the two of them was the title. “One question Leonard had was: was there a danger of putting a title out that might sound pretentious or guilty of religiosity, that would invite suspicion from a reader even before reading it? But in the end, for Leonard it came down to a question of whether it should be called The Book of Mercy or just Book of Mercy, and we decided the ‘the’ should be omitted so that it didn’t sound like this was the definitive book of mercy, or a book in the Bible. It’s a more modest title. Maybe he doesn’t like to appear to be making a larger claim than he wants to.” (Perhaps for the same reasons, Leonard often dispensed with the definite article in titles of his albums and songs.) After their work was done on Book of Mercy, Leonard and Lee went to the set of Fraggle Rock, a children’s television series made in Toronto by Jim Henson. Leonard wanted to meet the man who invented the Muppets. Says Lee, “He got a real kick out of watching him shoot the show.”
Book of Mercy, Leonard’s tenth book, was published in April 1984. Its front cover was illustrated with a symbol designed by Leonard that he called “the emblem of the Order of the Unified Heart.” It took the form of a hexagram, the Star of David, made up of two interlinked hearts, or as Leonard described it, “a version of the yin and yang, or any of those symbols that incorporate the polarities and try and reconcile the differences.” The book was dedicated to his “teacher.” What Leonard had learned from studying with Roshi had also brought him a deeper understanding of the Talmud, the Torah, the Kabbalah and the Jewish prayer book. He said he had reacquainted himself with his Jewish studies after having “wrecked [his] knees”24 and finding himself unable to sit for long periods in zazen—seated meditation. “I had decided to do what I had never done which was to observe the [Jewish] calendar in a very diligent way, to lay tefillin every day and to study the Talmud. Book of Mercy came out of that investigation.”25 Although there are Christian and Buddhist, as well as secular, references in the book, Leonard’s aim in writing it was, he said, “to affirm the traditions I had inherited” and to “express my gratitude for having been exposed to that tradition.”26
The book is made up of fifty short, numbered prose pieces, one for each year of Leonard’s life. In them, he talks, pleads, confesses and prays—to himself, to his friend, to his teacher and to his woman, but mostly to his God—for deliverance and mercy. The pieces are written with the rhythm, tonality and implied music of psalms, and in “the charged speech that I heard in the synagogue, where everything was important.” Leonard said, “I always feel that the world was created through words, through speech in our tradition, and I’ve always seen the enormous light in charged speech, and that’s what I’ve tried to get to.”27 When one finds oneself “unable to function,” he said, the only option is “to address the absolute source of things. . . . The only thing you can do is prayer.”28
The review in Canada’s Globe and Mail described Book of Mercy as “an eloquent victory of the human spirit in combat with itself.” The Canadian Author’s Association gave it the CAA Award for Poetry. Rabbi Mordecai Finley (whom Leonard would come to know later) remembers that one day, after synagogue, he said to Leonard, “So many of your poems have the feel of Jewish liturgy. Did you consciously write something liturgical?” Finley continues, “He said, ‘That’s what I thought I was always writing, liturgy,’ meaning, something out of the heart so that, in recitation, you’re brought to a deeper place. His poetry had a liturgical feel, rhythmic; it almost bypasses the brain and enters straight into us. We have a liturgical tradition in Judaism where great Jewish poets wrote poetry and then they incorporated it into the prayer book—they didn’t try to write prayers—and I think Leonard is actually the greatest liturgist alive today. I read his poems aloud at high holidays, from Book of Mercy. I think Book of Mercy should be in our prayer book.”
Seventeen
The Hallelujah of the Orgasm
Psalms were meant to be sung. As soon as Leonard was back in Los Angeles, he called Henry Lewy. The two went into the studio to make an album of Leonard reading Book of Mercy, accompanied by a string quartet. The record was not released. Instead Leonard flew back to New York and called John Lissauer, to make another album whose content was different from, but in its own way a mirror to, Book of Mercy.
Leonard said that during the writing of Book of Mercy, “the public almost evaporated”1; he had written these prayers for himself. He also said that he had no intention of becoming “known as a writer of prayers.”2 Once the book was completed, the public had come sharply back into focus. One big reason for this was that Leonard was running out of money. If Leonard lived like a celebrity, if he’d had a yacht or a cocaine habit, it might be easier to understand. But though he did not spend much money on himself, he still had expenses: Suzanne, the children, Roshi’s monastery and various friends whom he supported financially in one way or another. The majority of Leonard’s income came from his songs, not his books, and five years had passed since his last album.
John Lissauer was “a little surprised” when he picked up the phone and Leonard was on the line, saying he was in New York and ready to record again—an understandable reaction given that Leonard had walked out on the last album and had gone on to rewrite or record the songs with two other producers. Upset as he had been, Lissauer—like Ron Cornelius, who had been uncredited for many years as the cowriter of “Chelsea Hotel #2”—blamed Marty Machat. “It was just one of those things, a lesson to watch out for managers, or for managers who were obsessed. Leonard knew that Marty was Marty, but Marty had taken such good care of him, so Leonard was in a little bit of Machat denial. He and I have joked about it since and he has admitted what Marty was really like, but at the time it was an unbroachable subject.” Lissauer did not mention the aborted Songs for Rebecca. “What was the point of making Leonard uncomfortable? It would have put the kibosh on this, and I was happy that he was calling.”
In his room at the Royalton, “Leonard had this shit-eating grin on his face—and Leonard, when he’s grinning like a little boy, is something you never forget. He had this little crap Casio synthesizer which he’d bought on Forty-seventh and Broadway at one of those camera shops for tourists, where you push your finger down on a key and it’ll play a dinky rhythm track. And then he sang me ‘Dance Me to the End of Love.’ ” Leonard played Lissauer several songs in various stages of completion, and only one of them on guitar. On the others he was accompanied by the jaunty parping of the Ca
sio. Lissauer came to the conclusion that Leonard had reached a point in his songwriting where he had “run out of ideas as a guitar player. There were certain things he could do with his guitar playing, but this dopey Casio did things that he couldn’t on his guitar and made it possible for him to approach songwriting in a different way.” Writing songs was certainly proving torturously difficult for Leonard again. But this cheesy little two-octave keyboard that Leonard seemed so fond of gave him a whole new set of rhythms to work with, and he found he was able to come up with things he could never have created with six strings and what he called his “one chop.”
This time Marty Machat made no objection to Leonard’s working with Lissauer. His only stipulation was that the budget be kept as low as possible. The impression Lissauer got from Machat was that Leonard had been spending “a ton of money unwisely and hadn’t been touring.” Lissauer called Quad Recording and negotiated a good deal by block-booking four or five days of studio time. Quad was on Broadway and Forty-ninth, thirteen floors above the Metropole, an upscale strip club “where a guy would stand outside with fliers under a big rotating disco ball.” Lissauer put a small band together: his friend Sid McGinnis, who played guitar in the David Letterman show band; Richard Crooks, a drummer who had played with Dr. John; and Ron Getman and John Crowder, two Tulsans who would later front a successful country group, the Tractors. Lissauer himself played keyboards and Synclavier.
“Instead of basing it around Leonard and his guitar and overdubbing things, we went in and started doing tracks as a band and tried to make a little performance out of it,” says Lissauer, “which is something I don’t think he’d done in quite a while. I brought in my Synclavier, a very early prototype, a phenomenally big thing, four rolling cases and computers and floppy discs, that cost around thirty-five thousand dollars. Leonard’s Casio would have been ninety-nine dollars, if that much, but I couldn’t get Leonard to drop his Casio.” It did not even have an audio output and needed to be miked. “I tried everything, we tried recording it with real drums, but he liked the sound of the Casio, and in a way it was very charming. So we added stuff to it so that it wasn’t quite so embarrassing.”
I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen Page 34