by Ira B. Nadel
This indictment of the Montreal Jewish community confirmed their worst suspicions: Cohen had turned against them, first in print in The Favorite Game and now in person. The reaction at the meeting was strong, but because of the late hour the chair, Dr. Joseph Kage, curtailed discussion and suggested that the symposium be continued the following Sunday. At this second meeting, a packed hall was disappointed to learn that Cohen would not be there. The community took his absence as an insult, but in a later interview Cohen said no one had confirmed to him the date of the second meeting. In his absence, several speakers lashed out at him, launching personal attacks. They quoted from his novel and identified Cohen with anything that was critical or vulgar in the book. A few of the younger members of the audience attempted to defend Cohen, although with little success.
Cohen frequently found his Jewish identity tested. The structure of his Judaism, like his quest in music, became a plea for union with a higher being and confirmation of his priestly function. “Draw me with a valuable sign, raise me to your height. You and I, dear Foreign God, we both are demons who must disappear in the perpetual crawling light, the fumbling sparks printing the shape of each tired form.”
The controversy initiated by his December 1963 talk did not abate when early in the new year Cohen traveled to Western Canada. He stopped in Winnipeg for a reading/performance with the Lenny Breau Trio at the Manitoba Theatre Center and a reading at the University of Manitoba, then moved on to Vancouver, where he spoke at the University of British Columbia, the Jewish Community Center, and the Vancouver Public Library, all the while promoting the image of the poet as alienated spiritual iconoclast—cool rather than beat, mysterious rather than angry. His readings were uniformly successful and sensational.
In Vancouver he spent time with Earle Birney, who had promoted his work. In a letter thanking him for his hospitality, Cohen playfully chided him: “Please quit soon. Layton and I will take over. Then we will quit.” At the Jewish Community Center on February 12, he again spoke on “the distinction between the Prophet and the Priest, probably sparking a religious revival.” The library talk generated the most displeasure, however:
there’s something about the West that invites you either to disarm or consider yourself in a state of permanent seige. I chose the latter. Went slightly insane before crowd at Library giving them “new insights into my irrelevant Eastern complexities.”
Many found his behavior offensive, especially his use of frank language and his invitations to the women in the audience to join him in his hotel room after his talk. Despite the furor, he wrote to a Canada Council official who sponsored the tour that “Vancouver is a beautiful Polynesian city and I will stay there forever.”
By March, he told his U.S. agent, Marian McNamara, that his trip had been “fairly triumphant…. As far as the prose goes,” he complained, “much work, many breakdowns,” adding that he would “tap Easter and Passover and all festivals of renewal.”
Cohen felt a new purpose and desire: “Most of all what I want is to be able to seize some discipline and consecrate myself to ten years of real labor.” This consecration occurred with Beautiful Losers, which was written in two intense eight-month periods, the first in 1964, the second in 1965. His goal was to prepare a “liturgy, a big confessional oration, very crazy, but using all the techniques of the modern novel … pornographic suspense, humor and conventional plotting,” as he told Eli Mandel and Phyllis Gotlieb. In February 1964 he said that he wanted to isolate himself “in the country and work on the new lunatic novel.” Seven months later, he wrote Jack McClelland that his “new novel, PLASTIC BIRCHBARK, is deep into its asylum.”
When he started, he worked only long enough to write three pages a day, sometimes one hour, sometimes eight, typing away on the terrace of his house in Hydra with a portable record player beside him. After the book began to take shape, he would work for longer periods of time, up to twelve or fifteen hours a day, aided by amphetamines and a Ray Charles record, The Genius Sings the Blues. His favorite song, played over and over, contains the line “Sometimes I sit here in this chair and I wonder.” Speed, he thought, would strengthen his mind, but at a certain point “the whole system collapsed. It isn’t a very good drug for depressed people because coming down is very bad. It took me ten years to fully recover.”
Work on the novel was interrupted by his October visit to Canada to receive the four-thousand-dollar Prix litteraire du Québec for The Favorite Game. He also participated in a reading tour organized by Jack McClelland. Four poets traveled in two cars; an exuberant Irving Layton, a white-bearded Earle Birney, a nervous Phyllis Gotlieb, and the leather-jacketed Cohen. Beginning with a October 25, 1964, reading at the North York Public Library, they visited six eastern Canadian universities in five days: Waterloo, Western, Toronto, Queen’s, Carleton, and McGill, reading to audiences of up to three hundred students. Receptions, book signings, and publicity accompanied them, as well as tv and radio broadcasts. The poets, however, did not mix well with each other. According to McClelland, Birney drank and was shy; Gotlieb was withdrawn; Layton was a showman; and Cohen went along but didn’t enjoy himself. At Western, Time reported that “Leonard Cohen in a black leather jacket, Caesar haircut and expertly mismatched shirt and tie looked around and asked, ‘Is this a church?’” The report unfavorably described Cohen’s book as “more shackled by despairs exclusively his own” than by history. When an undergraduate demanded to know ‘What makes a poem?’ Cohen replied, “God. It’s the same kind of operation as the creation of world.”
Although the poets made no money—five months later, after all expenses, they had only one hundred and fifty dollars to divide four ways—the venture did result in an added benefit, especially for Cohen. Donald Owen filmed the tour for the National Film Board of Canada. He dutifully traveled with the group, filming their various readings. Birney’s and Gotlieb’s were remarkably dull. This resulted in a re-edited and partially re-shot film by Donald Brittain about Cohen rather than the group. Ladies and Gentlemen … Mr. Leonard Cohen, released in 1965, was the first of several films about Cohen.
The tour did generate publicity, but Cohen complained to Jack McClelland in March 1965 that: the reading-tour made me an enemy of the whole country and ruined my Canadian life. This was not due solely to my obnoxious personality. It also resulted in the minimum attention for the book it proposed to promote. And worst of all it doesn’t look like we’re going to get any money out of it. Yankel, Yankel, why did you lie to us?
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DURING HIS VISIT political events in Canada intruded into Cohen’s artistic world. To Marian McNamara in New York he explained he had been:
torn on the conflicts arising from the so-called quiet revolution here in Quebec. The separatist feeling is very powerful and many of us are engaged in an agonizing reappraisal of the idea of Canada, the value of Confederation, and what the risks of independence would be … It is not easy to talk or resist the dreams of people who feel they have been humiliated and who are ready, today, now, to throw bombs.
On his return to Hydra, he got down to work and began to rewrite Beautiful Losers, often listening to a radio tuned to the Armed Forces network broadcast from Athens, which played mostly country and western music. Cohen incorporated Canada’s political turmoil into his work. The Quiet Revolution was changing the landscape of Montreal, turning it into a secular, francophone city, quietly assaulting the ruling anglophone business class. In 1963, the Front de Libération du Québec began its campaign of violence; in May, the explosion of a time bomb in a Westmount mailbox seriously injured an explosives expert. In a October 26, 1963, interview, Cohen remarked that the exploding mailboxes were an invitation to Canada to re-enter history and that the survival of the nation depended on the response to this event. On July 12, 1963, a bomb destroyed the statue of Queen Victoria on Sherbrooke Street. The brass head of the lifesize statue hurtled fifty feet away and the statue toppled. Chalked on the monument were the words “You’re coming to your goal,�
� and on the street, near the severed head, was scrawled “Here is the answer.”
Cohen refers to the bombing in Beautiful Losers as a proposal by F., who tells the narrator that he will commit suicide as he lays sticks of dynamite in the lap of the statue. “Queen Victoria and Me,” a poem in Flowers for Hitler, emphasizes the symbolic power of the figure. Cohen included the poem, with minimal musical accompaniment, on his Live Songs album of 1973. Cohen includes the October 1964 visit of the Queen and Prince Philip to Montreal in his novel, contrasting the new revolutionary fervor of Quebec with its decaying ties to the monarchy. The erotic mood of a separatist rally in the text is testimony to the link between politics, history, and sex.
Cohen’s own response to the movement was complex, although in a February 1964 letter from Montreal he wrote that “in ten years Quebec may not be part of Canada and I will stay in Quebec. Our government has recently established a Ministry of Culture, the first in North America.” He told George Johnston on Hydra, “I have made a commitment: to Art and my Destiny. All the other commitments are not commitments at all, but contracts, and I don’t like the legal world of compulsion.”
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IN Beautiful Losers F., a young Montreal poet, asserts that “the texts had got to me.” This was true of Cohen himself, who based his novel on several core readings: P. Edouard Lecompte’s Une vierge iroquoise: Catherine Tekakwitha, le lis de bords de la Mohawk et du St. Laurent (1656–1680) (1927); Kateri of the Mohawks by Marie Cecilia Buehrle; a volume entitled Jesuits in North America; an American comic book from 1943, Blue Beetle; a farmer’s almanac; a passage from Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols; and Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha.
Cohen had become very interested in the life and history of Catherine Tekakwitha, the Mohawk who may become the first Native Canadian saint. He found her fascinating because she “embodied in her own life, in her own choices, many of the complex things that face us always. She spoke to me. She still speaks to me,” he said in 1990. He most likely learned of her through her picture in the apartment of his friend Alanis Obamsawin, an Abenaquis Native, though Kahntineta Horne, a First Nations woman who later became a politician, may have told him about her. A statue of the saint sits on the stove of his Montreal house, and prints of her hang in his Los Angeles home and office. When he was in New York he would put flowers on her bronze statue in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
He also drew from Swedenborg: Arcana Caelestia or Heavenly Arcana, volumes 1 and 2, the Divine Providence, and Divine Love and Wisdom. He studied these volumes in January-February 1966 and each is heavily annotated and marked. He refers to the I Ching in his work, echoing his poem, “How We Used to Approach the Book of Changes: 1966,” published in The Energy of Slaves.
At this time, Steve Sanfield, Axel Jensen, George Lialios, and Cohen regularly met on Hydra to discuss such texts as the Book of Revelation, the I Ching, or Book of Changes, The Secret of the Golden Flower, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Jensen provided the key texts, which also included Tibetan Yoga and the Secret Doctrine and the translations of Evan-Wentz. Cohen introduced Hasidic thought into this mix, notably the work of Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem, as well as the Jewish prayer book.
In an unpublished essay from 1965, Cohen summarizes the importance of his education on Hydra in “esoteric enterprise”:
We have among us adepts of telepathy, telekinesis, levitation, apporte, teleplasty, dematerialization, telesthesy, psychometry, kryptoscopy, and other minor ocular skills which at best assume the importance of parlour games in relation to our ultimate goals, and which at worst may be viewed as a dangerous distraction from those high purposes. I, for one, am rather disposed to the more pessimistic interpretation of these phenomena, but the charity we all practice in regard to another’s discipline forbids me to treat the subject with any further aggression. We also have among us students of tantric sexual systems, and I regret to say, misplaced as my regret may be, that these students have often found themselves in adulterous predicaments.
In March 1965 Cohen told Jack McClelland that Beautiful Losers would be finished in a month “and if it gets by censors it could make money. I need cash—so would you decide how much you’d like to pay me.” Three weeks later Cohen reported that he had “written the Bhagavad Gita of 1965” and that “what happens to this book doesn’t matter because I have discovered a way to write a novel in three weeks and will turn out four in 1965. That is serious.” He then proposed new titles:
SHOW IT HAPPENING or SHOW IT HAPPENING EVERY DAY is the novel’s new title, or maybe THE HISTORY OF THEM ALL, or maybe THE BEAUTIFUL LOSERS, or just BEAUTIFUL LOSERS. Just these titles are worth a fortune to Ideal Hollywood. So you’ll get the mss. in April.
One of us is cracking up.
Two separate draft title pages of the novel read “BEAUTIFUL LOSERS / A Pop Novel” and, correspondingly, PLASTIC BIRCHBARK / A Treatment of the World.” Note sheets contain other variant titles: IT WAS A LOVELY DAY IN CANADA, INDIAN ROCKETS, INDIANS. One experimental section has the prose set to guitar chords.
The narrative of Beautiful Losers encompasses history, politics, and sex. As F. outlines it to the narrator, “You have been baptized with fire, shit, history, love, and loss.” The novel uses a multiplicity of narrative forms and languages, incorporating journals, letters, grammar books, historical narratives, advertisements, catalogues, footnotes, poetry, and drama. Encyclopedic, all-encompassing, and energetic, the text almost bursts its form, and at times the narrator must interject to remind the reader that “a man is writing this … A man like you.” Writing Beautiful Losers taught Cohen “how to treat big themes with a fast, personal technique,” although his work still went through many transformations.
Cohen assessed the novel in a letter to Cork Smith:
As far as the prologue goes, I can’t think of anything to put in a prologue, and I think it would interfere somehow with the way the whole book is launched, its continual forward motion. A prologue would seem to say to the reader: you see, it was all really make-believe, and here am I, your faithful author, standing with a pipe in my library, just another book in my career. But I swear it wasn’t like that at all. I have written some things, even parts of The Favorite Game, that came out of my sense of a career, but every word of the new book is antagonistic to the very idea of career. Your colleague hit on something very true, I think, in his concern for the reader mistaking the book for non-fiction. It is non-fiction, although it would serve none of us to let this get around, in fact the notion must be rigorously suppressed. I believe this will be a problem of the presentation of the book on the market. It is non-fiction in the sense that there is more of the unscreened author on every page than usually appears in a work of the imagination, and this is because the book is really a long confessional prayer attempting to establish itself on the theme of the life of a saint, meditation on a tight rope, slipping off to circus screams, catching it again in the crotch, and all the men in the audience blink—they know what it feels like. To get pretentious, more than anything the book resembles the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, in the way that he requires the student to Visualize the stages of the life of Jesus, to actually see Nazareth, the real landscape, never to leap into glory, but to move from the fact into mystery, mystery is always grounded in the ordinary fact, mystery has a narrow entrance. It is fiction because I use a fictional construction, characters, scene setting, parodies of pornographic suspense—because all of the apparata of religious perception have withered, in me and in you, and we are offended by any accounts of Mystery which are not presented in fictional or anthropological terms. Because I could not write or believe in a book called Cohen’s Meditations, I had to make a story out of prayer. I believe I had enough craft to be able to pull it off, and a lot of the joy in the book comes directly from pride in craft, ordinary fictional craft. Again and again, I had to reassure myself and the reader that it was only fiction, and when we believed it and relaxed, then I could really dive in
to the prayer which itself (I think) is composed, at the bottom, of real facts, buttons, doubts, garbage, pie-throwing, and you have to move through all the shit before you can use the pure vocative. Anyhow, this is all postmortem. If the book is one of those rare books that is still read three years after it is published, or maybe even five years, it will have become less and less fictional.
During the writing of Beautiful Losers, Cohen had continued his practice of fasting. He felt that it helped focus the mind on creation and also produced a physical manifestation of the holiness of his calling. The absence of food, the denial of pleasure, revivified the importance of his task, following the Judaic tradition of sanctifying the self through exerting control over the appetites. The sanctity was somewhat compromised by the aid of amphetamines, however, which kept him awake and killed his appetite. “My fast has been following me and I have been following my fast,” Cohen writes. His spiritual sustenance diminishes his physical hunger, he explains, and he rejoices in the emptiness of his body.
After he completed the novel, he broke down. With the text finally finished, he decided to take a break and go to another island. He hadn’t prepared himself, however, for the hot afternoon sun when he returned by boat. He nearly passed out when he got home and had to drag himself to bed. He didn’t eat for more than ten days. He hallucinated and lost weight, going down to 116 pounds. Too many amphetamines coupled with sunstroke had caused his breakdown. But the day the storks came to Hydra was the day he recovered. Every year the storks stop over on their way to Africa and nest for one night on the highest buildings, usually churches, and then leave the next morning. When the storks left, Cohen had regained his strength.
The unorthodox nature of the novel made for some difficulties. Viking required eight readings of Beautiful Losers before deciding finally to publish it. Even then, they were not sure of what they had approved. One reader referred to the book as “Canada with the Maple Leaf snatched off—it is a serious put-on, rich and raunchy, terrifying and funny. It is a truly experimental novel, in which, I admit, I don’t always know where he’s going, but I like the way he travels.” Brendan Gill of The New Yorker, Norman Holmes Pearson of Yale, and Leslie Fiedler of Buffalo all offered praise, Fiedler writing that it was an “honest-to-God pop art novel, with an R.C. Pocahontas and all.” McClelland also went to outside readers to confirm his judgment that it was a brilliant book. “It astounds and baffles me and I don’t really know what to say about it. It’s wild and incredible and marvellously well written, and at the same time, appalling, shocking, revolting, disgusting, sick, and just maybe it’s a great novel. I’m damned if I know.”