Various Positions

by Ira B. Nadel

  But I have to keep going. I can’t remain fifteen and a virgin. So now I’m thirty-six and greedy. I’m willing to be this.

  I was once never able to stay in the same room with four people. Only a girl who adored me. I feel better now. The more vulgar I get, the more concerned with others I get. I’m trying to cure myself and the only way to cure myself is to take over the world.

  This is my adventure. My greatest need is to be interesting to myself.

  “Suffering,” he admitted, “has led me to wherever I am. Suffering has made me rebel against my own weakness.” For nearly a decade he would be unable to free himself from the new pain that was about to descend on him. He tried various cures, from LSD and cocaine, to Scientology and the I Ching. He felt that a certain amount of suffering was educational. “You’ve got to recreate your personality so that you can live a life appropriate to your station and predicament.”

  9

  TRUMPETS AND A CURTAIN OF RAZOR BLADES

  THE TITLE of Cohen’s third album, Songs of Love and Hate, reflected the double-edged nature of Cohen’s life following his tour. As Zen was becoming more important to him, his relationship with Suzanne was becoming strained. They had a son, Adam, in 1972, and two years later their daughter Lorca was born. He adored his children but continued to leave to further his art as he had always done. Between 1971 and 1977 he released five albums, but only two books appeared. But his productivity did not bring popularity, and Cohen felt marginalized; his alienation and doubts increased. He thought that his voice wasn’t appropriate for the material. He was depressed, and doing drugs, and there were rumors that he was about to retire. He continued to work, but his audiences dwindled and his support from the recording companies waned.

  Recorded in March 1971 in Nashville, Songs of Love and Hate was again produced by Bob Johnston, although overdubs were added in London. Many of the songs were from earlier periods and had been reworked for the album. “Joan of Arc” had been written at the Chelsea in New York; “Avalanche” and “Dress Rehearsal Rag” dated from earlier years. Another song, “Love Calls You by Your Name,” was a minor rewrite of an unpublished 1967 song, “Love Tries to Call You by Your Name.” This practice of reshaping old material marked Cohen’s musical career and continues with his recent albums.

  “Joan of Arc” was something of an experiment for Cohen, in that he both sings and speaks the lyrics on overlapping tracks. This technique was Cohen’s idea, drawn from the literary form of the palimpsest: “I had, as the model, manuscripts that you’d see with lines written over lines. I just thought it was appropriate at that moment. It’s like the line of a Larry Rivers painting, you see the variations.” “Famous Blue Raincoat” also appears on the album, a retelling of a romantic triangle. Originally titled “The Letter,” the song outlines the dismal loss of love with no hope of recovery. Cohen based the song on a Burberry raincoat he purchased in London in 1959, later stolen from Marianne’s loft in New York. Elizabeth, his London friend, “thought I looked like a spider in it … it hung more heroically when I took out the lining, and achieved glory when the grayed sleeves were repaired with a little leather.”

  His melancholic tone persisted, reflecting his unhappy situation and increasing depression. “Last Year’s Man” had taken Cohen five years to finish but its theme of paralysis and decay was timely:

  But the skylight is like skin

  For a drum I’ll never mend

  And all the rain falls down amen

  On the works of last year’s man.

  Cohen was not entirely pleased with Songs of Love and Hate and later commented that “with each [of my first three] records I became progressively discouraged, although I was improving as a performer.”

  Franz Schubert had once noted that whenever he sought to write songs of love, he wrote songs of pain, and whenever he wrote songs of pain he wrote songs of love. Cohen found himself facing the same problem. Few people responded to the relentless despair of his songs. He had been celebrated for his melancholy, but he had crossed some commercial line into depression. Cohen’s critique of the album was, “the same old droning work, an inch or two forward.” He also thought his voice was “inauthentic,” full of anxiety and conflict, and labeled his work the “European blues.”

  Critics warned listeners that it was impossible to listen to a Cohen album in the sunshine. In his unpublished novel Perennial Orgasm, Don Lowe details the adventures of a woman named Oressia who arrives on Hydra looking for Cohen but falls into the hands of an Irish poet. His attempted seduction is thwarted by the droning of a Leonard Cohen album in the background which deflates the desire of both parties. And although his first two albums went gold in Canada with sales over one hundred thousand, his third did not. Publication of the arrangements in a songbook of the same name also failed to generate new sales.

  Over the next several months, Cohen continued to perform and improve his sound as he prepared to go on tour, and he received new publicity with the release of Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller. In August 1971, Cohen formed a publishing company in London with the pop music magnate Tony Stratton-Smith, head of Charisma Records. The first book they planned, under the new Charisma Books imprint, was a selection of Irving Layton’s poetry, although the book, printed from the McClelland & Stewart plates of Selected Poems, didn’t appear until 1977. Earlier in 1971, Cohen had set up Spice-Box Books, Ltd. in England but had found that he needed a British connection to produce books effectively.

  In March 1972, Cohen was back in Nashville rehearsing for a twenty-three city European tour. Two days before the band was to leave for Dublin, two singers, Donna Washburn and Jennifer Warnes, auditioned for Cohen in Studio A of Columbia Records. Warnes lived in Los Angeles but was in Nashville taping a TV show. She had heard through a secretary that Cohen was looking for backup singers. Both of their voices—especially Warnes’s alto—constrasted beautifully with Cohen’s. He explained to them that “the reason I need girls to sing with me is that my voice depresses me. I need your voices to sweeten mine.” They were both hired.

  Cohen grappled with the logistics of the upcoming tour while trying to deal with his personal problems. “I’m just reeling. Sometimes in the midst of the thing, I don’t know how I do it, you know. Like I manage to get my daily life together to get this [1972] tour together. But most of the time I’m staggering under the blows. It’s no doubt that I contrive these blows for myself. I think everyone is responsible for their own condition.”

  Cohen took a shotgun approach to his malaise; he fasted, exercised, and practiced yoga and meditation. In an effort to re-establish his Montreal roots, Cohen bought a cottage on St-Dominique Street and a duplex beside it in the winter of 1972. This marked his return to Montreal, although he periodically went to Nashville to record, despite giving up his lease on the farm.

  One floor of the duplex became a sculpting studio for Mort Rosengarten, another became a music studio for Cohen. Cohen made the cottage his home with Suzanne and, by September, his son Adam. He enjoyed the ethnically diverse neighborhood and three years later bought three more properties.

  Bob Johnston had suggested making a film of the upcoming tour and Tony Palmer, who had made a movie about Tom Jones, was hired to direct. Cohen’s lawyer Marty Machat produced. Titled Bird on the Wire, it premiered in London at the Rainbow Theatre in 1974 and shows Cohen performing, clowning with his musicians, and trying to pick up women. Cohen was initially unhappy with the arty look of the film and wanted a stronger, documentary texture. He spent nearly six months editing the work, shifting its focus away from visual clichés to the deeper realities of his music. Control was crucial for him, as it was in the production of his first book of poems and his first album. What Cohen wanted was a film that showed the live context of his music and his rapport with his audiences. Bird on the Wire did that but it also showed Cohen emotionally wasted. He felt exposed in the film and thought that his vulnerability was inappropriate for public viewing.

  Touring remain
ed an adventure. In Vienna their instruments had been held up at the German border and weren’t available for the concert. When Cohen was told of this (in the bath), he said, “Oh boy, we get to do the concert a cappella.” At the theater the band asked the audience to go home and bring their instruments; after a delay, the concert began. In Copenhagen, a poor sound system upset the crowd and money had to be refunded, with Cohen himself handing out cash and dealing with disgruntled and angry fans. In Germany, where he gave six concerts, he greeted an unruly crowd at the Berlin Sportpalast with Goebbel’s own fateful words, spoken on the very same spot: “Wollt Ihr den totalen Krieg?” (“Do you want total war?”)

  In Frankfurt, where he thought he played poorly, he told the following story:

  Once I was walking along in a snowstorm in New York and I came up very quickly behind a man who had a sign stuck to the back of his coat. The sign said

  Please don’t pass me by

  I’ve been blinded totally,

  But you have eyes and you can see,

  Please don’t pass me by.

  But when I looked at the man’s face I saw that he wasn’t really blind, at least not physically, and so I caught up with him at the next corner and asked him why he had that sign. He said to me, “Man, do you think I’m talking about my eyes?” so I wrote this song.

  In London he again played at the Royal Albert Hall. “One got the feeling,” a critic wrote, that “although the place was full to the brim, everybody sat next to an empty seat … you could have heard an unused tissue drop, such was the silence that followed. It was a silence, a concentration that in many ways was awful with its intensity. It was a sin to cough.” Cohen left the stage, returning for the encore to thunderous applause. Surprisingly, though, he grabbed the mike and said, “I have no more songs left in me.” The concerts usually concluded with Cohen silently walking off stage, leaving his guitar and books behind.

  In Jerusalem, at the Yad Eliahu Sports Palace, there was pandemonium when Cohen stopped mid-performance and left the stage, agitated and in tears, saying that he could not go on and that the money should be refunded to the audience. Drugs and the pressure of performing the final concert of the tour in the holy city of Jerusalem had contributed to his state. In the dressing room, a distraught Cohen rejected the pleas of his musicians and manager to return to the stage. Several Israeli promoters, overhearing the conversation, walked out to the crowd and conveyed the news: Cohen would not be performing and they would receive their money back. The young audience responded by singing the Hebrew song, “Zim Shalom” (“We Bring You Peace”). Backstage, Cohen suddenly decided he needed a shave; rummaging in his guitar case for his razor, he spied an envelope with some acid from years ago. He turned to his band and inquired: “Should we not try some?” “Why not?” they answered. And “like the Eucharist,” Cohen has said, “I ripped open the envelope and handed out small portions to each band member.” A quick shave, a cigarette, and then out to the stage to receive a tumultuous welcome. The LSD took effect as he started to play and he saw the crowd unite into the grand image of “the Ancient of Days” from Daniel’s dream in the Old Testament. This image, “the Ancient of Days” who had witnessed all history, asked him, “Is this All, this performing on the stage?” Deliver or go home was the admonition. At that moment, Cohen had been singing “So Long, Marianne” intensely and a vision of Marianne appeared to him. He began to cry and, to hide his tears, turned to the band—only to discover that they, too, were in tears.

  The high emotions soon brought the concert to an end but before they boarded the bus, Cohen and Ron Cornelius, his guitar player, walked to a wooded hillside nearby. When they turned back to look at the concert hall, a visionary light from the night sky illuminated its roof. When Cohen had first gone out to perform, he told the audience, “There are nights when one is raised from the ground, and other nights when [one] cannot raise oneself.…This night we can’t get off the floor … This night my masculine and feminine parts refuse to meet each other.” But in the end he triumphed; the concert was a success.

  Cohen had always been petrified of touring, feeling that the risks of humiliation were too great. By the end of the tour, the tedium of travel, hotels, sound checks, rehearsals, press conferences, fans, and performances had exhausted him. To a British journalist who asked during the tour what he had been doing since 1970, Cohen replied, “Trying to maintain a balance between standing up and falling down.” Cohen was never so vulnerable as he was on this tour, Jennifer Warnes recalled, opening himself up to his songs and his audiences. Working with Cohen Warnes realized that “life was art and God was music.” His presence and his manner could, and often did, make the audiences weep. One of the most remarkable elements was the on-stage spontaneity of Cohen and the musicians, who would frequently improvise new songs and melodies. Warnes thought she sang badly on the tour and remembers Bob Johnston yelling at her to listen more carefully to the notes and to attend more sharply to the nuance of the material. During the tour she also recalled Cohen writing constantly, drafting an early version of “Chelsea Hotel.”

  One day while traveling through northern France, Warnes had showed Cohen a series of letters she had written about herself. When she was born, she was named Bernadette, but her mother later changed her name to Jennifer. Now she was writing to this earlier self, engaged in a search for her essential being. Cohen immediately thought there was a song there and began to compose; he wrote the lyrics and Warnes wrote the melody to “Song of Bernadette,” which she would later record on Famous Blue Raincoat.

  ————

  DURING the spring and summer of 1972, Cohen’s life with Suzanne became more difficult and his love for her was clearly faltering. He turned, once more, to drugs and mystic teachings and “to squeezing memory and vocabulary for descriptions of some ritual appetite many nights ago.” He wrote, “I left you for a song above my name … [but] I want to stand up straighter than a promise and face the sins that make me suffer, to give up what is holding me in this painful crouch, or do anything you say.” He realized that Suzanne did not love his “pious moods; you disdain my formal meditation,” yet when he came home “after loving another” and then went off to write, she quietly joined him at the bar of the Rainbow on Stanley Street, “only pulling back a little as I write this down.”

  During this turbulent period he kept a journal in which he described, in a revealing paragraph, his process of writing:

  You ask me how I write. This is how I write. I get rid of the lizard. I eschew the philosopher’s stone. I bury my girl friend. I remove my personality from the line so that I am permitted to use the word I as many times as I want without offending my appetite for modesty. Then I resign. I do errands for my mother, or someone like her. I eat too much. I blame those closest to me for ruining my talent. Then you come to me. The joyous news is mine.

  In a spring 1972 interview, Cohen refers to a work he has just completed, The Energy of Slaves, a work that records his pain and indicates the depressive state that characterized his work for several years. Originally titled “Songs of Disobedience,” which he had previously submitted and then withdrawn from his publisher, he retitled and reworked the manuscript as The Energy of Slaves. He explains that in the book he doesn’t explicitly describe his pain because it can’t be stated: “It took me eighty poems to represent the situation of where I am right now. That to me totally acquits me of any responsibility I have of keeping a record public. I put it in the book.” Unhappy with the generally limited range of his material, he nonetheless felt that it represented his state of mind. He was interested in the book’s reception, more so than any other book he wrote, “because I have the feeling that by making it public I may be making a mistake.”

  One early and sympathetic reader of the book was Irving Layton. In a December 4, 1972, note, Layton defended Cohen’s position. He wrote “what alone matters are the memorable words you leave behind. For power in these one must have the strength to be weak—for this and m
any others to follow. One must somehow—for talent, for immortality—name the strength (courage?) to be weak in one’s own way … God sometimes reveals his wisdom through a poet’s weakness.” This creed justifies much of Cohen’s confessional poetry and state of longing.

  In September 1972 Cohen was in London anticipating the birth of his son in Montreal when he received unexpected news: his close friend and confrere Robert Hershorn had mysteriously died in Hong Kong. The news was devastating and only partly mitigated by the call telling Cohen that his son Adam had been born. He departed immediately to welcome a son and bury a friend. Painfully, Cohen shoveled in part of the dirt on the coffin in the Shaar Hashomayim cemetery, a Jewish custom of the living honoring the dead once they are lowered into the ground. “Partner in Spirit, Laziness and love, Hershorn is now gone,” Cohen lamented, adding in a notebook, “O Hershorn, first-born, first tired, first dead of anyone I knew, these ignorant papers are for you.” An unpublished draft dedication to Death of A Lady’s Man, written some four years after the death of Hershorn, enlarges his importance for Cohen, who refers to him as

  the Lion of our Youth, the Eagle of Experience, the Grizzly Bear of our Forest and the highest leaping Deer of our Imagination …My Pupil in Music, my Teacher in War, Addict of God, Original as an Explosion … Companion, Companion, Companion murdered by Mid-wives in Hong Kong, buried in Montreal snow weeks later, black and bloated, under Hasid supervision.

  In 1979, Cohen remembered Hershorn in the dedication of his album Recent Songs with these words: “To the late Robert Hershorn, who many years ago put into my hands the books of the old Persian poets, Attar and Rumi, whose imagery influenced several songs, especially ‘The Guests’ and ‘The Window.’” In 1994, Cohen published a prose poem entitled “Robert Appears Again,” in which Cohen, stimulated by a tab of speed, holds an imaginary conversation with his friend in a Paris cafe. Admitting to him that “I can’t seem to bring anything to completion and I’m in real trouble,” he comically ends the meeting by castigating Hershorn for not excusing himself before “disappearing again for who knows how long.”