Various Positions

by Ira B. Nadel

  After the birth of his son, Cohen’s relationship with Suzanne became problematic. “It was a tricky time,” he remembered. For help, he left Montreal and went to California to visit the Zen master Roshi at Mount Baldy. “It began,” he explained, with “a need for self-reform.” He had phoned Steve Sanfield, who was now living north of Nevada City, California, and asked if he could be introduced to his teacher: “I can’t get this cat out of my head. Take me to see him,” Cohen said. Sanfield took him to the Cimarron Zen Center where they had tea with Roshi. The conversation was sparse but Roshi said, “Bring friend to Baldy!” Baldy was an abandoned boy scout camp in the San Gabriel Mountains that had been recently acquired by the Rinzai movement. It became the Mt. Baldy Zen Center in the spring of 1971. Cohen and Sanfield drove to the center, and then Sanfield left Cohen there. His only advice was about the Lotus position: “It’s going to hurt like hell; don’t move. It will just hurt worse.”

  It was winter and there was snow in the mountains. After three days Cohen was convinced it was “the revenge of World War II.” With a Japanese teacher and German head monk named Geshin, “they had a bunch of these American kids walking around in the snow at 3:00 a.m. in sandals.” The snow blew over their food in the dining hall. Cohen lasted a few weeks and then went over the wall: the regime, the mountain cold, and the discipline were too difficult; he headed for the heat of Mexico. In retrospect, he thought Roshi was a nice old rabbinical figure, but he didn’t quite get what he was saying. He felt he didn’t need it anyway. He ate a lot of ginseng and drove to Tijuana, then drove back to Los Angeles and called Suzanne. The two of them went to Acapulco, and their experience appears in the poem that begins “O darling (as we used to say)” in The Energy of Slaves:

  Even as we lie here in Acapulco

  not quite in each others’ arms

  several young monks walk single-file

  through the snow on Mount Baldy

  shivering and farting in the moonlight:

  there are passages in their meditation

  that treat our love and wish us well

  In Acapulco, a photo of Cohen with his Buddhist haircut, taken in a hotel bathroom, shows him glaring at the viewer, one hand holding a cigar, the other looped in a belt. The picture first appeared as an uncaptioned, rear jacket photo on The Energy of Slaves (1972) and was later used as the cover for his 1973 album, Live Songs. A second photo taken in Acapulco shows him sitting on the edge of a bathtub, looking slightly less menacing and more relaxed.

  Despite his initial escape, Cohen eventually returned to Zen: “I dreamed about this, I longed for something like this. I didn’t know it existed; the formality of the system, the spiritual technology was there; it was no bullshit. You could do it if you wanted, if you developed your will.” He started to practice with some regularity, and for a time in the early seventies he became Roshi’s secretary and accompanied Roshi to various Trappist monasteries where Cohen would occasionally lead the sesshins for the monks. Roshi’s koan for the monks consisted of one question: “How do you realize Jesus Christ when you make the sign of the cross?”

  In The Energy of Slaves he addressed the ambiguous problem of art no longer being able to remove him from his personal responsibilities. He was upset at the absence of creativity:

  Where are the poems

  that led me away

  from everything I loved.

  The Energy of Slaves was a difficult and troubling book that dramatically shifted from the mythology of Let Us Compare Mythologies, the romanticism of The Spice-Box of Earth, and the historical focus of Flowers for Hitler to a personal self-loathing and even a loathing of sex. “In many ways, I like that book the best of anything I’ve ever done,” Cohen said in a 1993 interview, because it is one “of the strongest pieces that I’ve ever done.” A poem summarizing his life concludes with:

  Welcome to this book of slaves

  which I wrote during your exile

  you lucky son-of-a-bitch

  while I had to contend

  with all the flabby liars

  of the Aquarian Age

  There is some humor in the book, usually in the form of satire: “Come down to my room / I was thinking about you / and I made a pass at myself.” He is candid about sex, describing his four months with the twenty-year-old Valentia or his time with Terez at the Chelsea or his desire for a woman he sees: “Why don’t you come over to my table / with no pants on / I’m sick of surprising you.” With his belated fame he can at last have “the 15-year-old girls,” he could never acquire in his youth:

  I have them now

  it is very pleasant

  it is never too late

  I advise you all

  to become rich and famous

  As Cohen comically admits to himself, “I am no longer at my best practising / the craft of verse / I do better / in the cloakroom with Sara.” His goal is to “write with compassion about the deceit in the human heart.”

  In The Energy of Slaves Cohen introduced a theme that his later poetry, especially Death of A Lady’s Man, extended: the failure of imagination and inspiration when love and beauty are attained. He expressed this in the ironically but aptly titled “The Progress of My Style,” in which he shows why his art fails. “Each man / has a way to betray / the revolution / This is mine,” he searingly admits, as he acknowledges the betrayals of his past, his love, and his art. Both poetry and love deceive him as his very identity shifts: “I have no talent left / I can’t write a poem anymore / You can call me Len or Lennie now.” In a 1975 interview he said of The Energy of Slaves, “It was like dipping all the parts into tetrachloride to clean them—I wanted to get back into my own baroque from a clean position.” Introducing each poem in the book was the silhouette of a razor blade.

  ————

  LIFE in 1973 was troubling on every front, as a candid unpublished autobiographical account from that summer indicates:

  I’m thirty-eight years of age, five feet eight inches tall, a hundred and thirty-five pounds, brown hair, hazel eyes. I live in Montreal. It is the summer of 1973. Right now I have the solemn violins of the radio to accompany me. I’ve had [the] usual jobs. I was a popular singer for a while with my own band. I had a chance to meet a lot of girls on the road. I was very girl-crazy, after a while just cunt-crazy.

  I don’t give a shit about your idea about human dignity because none of them ever include me. I don’t care who you are and what noble form of torture you represent. You can shut this book.

  Don’t come to me when you are sweet and cold. Come when you are nasty and warm if you want to hear a story. This is a fascinating story. It’s about the fat, dead world.

  By now, Cohen had an infant son and an impressive body of work but little peace of mind. He had stopped writing songs and stopped loving Suzanne. “While she suffers, I have a chance to breathe the free air and look under the flab for my body,” he wrote in March. Two days later, he added, “Listening to gypsy violins, my jeep rusting in Tennessee, married as usual to the wrong woman.” His relationship had deteriorated to no more than “fighting over scraps of freedom, getting even.”

  Live Songs came out in April 1973 to little notice. For more than a decade, it was the last of Cohen’s albums to even make the U.S. charts. The album contained a range of concert songs drawn from the 1970 and 1972 tours and was uneven but spontaneous. The mood was somber, the songs full of darkness, and the cover photo haunting. The unusual liner notes by the little-known (and often institutionalized) artist and poet Daphne Richardson read in part that a transformation occurred because of “the mad mystic hammering of your body upon my body [and] your soul entered mine then and some union took place that almost killed me with its INTENSITY.” She had begun communicating with Cohen while trying to publish a book of collage poems using pieces by Cohen, Dylan, and herself. Cohen found her letters engaging and often wrote to her, excusing her excesses as part of her illness.

  Cohen found the intensity of her imagination attractive
and her work as an illustrator appealing; he wanted her to illustrate The Energy of Slaves. He met her in London during his 1972 tour. A month later, he called his London agent requesting her to tell Daphne that her illustrations for his poetry book would be needed, only to learn that she had committed suicide three days earlier by jumping off Bush House in London. Cohen was mentioned in her suicide note.

  The music on Live Songs continued the themes of Songs of Love and Hate. Bob Johnston again produced the album, essentially a mixing of live tapes from the two previous tours. It opens with “Minute Prologue,” from London (1972), a recitation on the dissension and pain in the world that won’t disappear, although music can heal any damage it causes. One of the most important songs on the album, “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy,” continues the focus on death and despair and, as the liner notes explain, is about a suicidal woman from Montreal whom Cohen knew in 1961. The daughter of a judge, she had had a reckless life, sleeping with everyone and eventually giving birth to a child, who was then taken away from her. She shot herself in her bathroom. As he wrote, “In the House of Honesty / Her father was on trial / In the House of Mystery / There was no one at all.”

  Reaction to the album was negative. A rumor began to circulate that Cohen was going to retire from music, a rumor that upset his lawyer and record company. There was also the suggestion of suicide. In a March 1973 interview, he smoked the interviewer’s cigarettes almost continuously and appeared withdrawn. He answered questions vaguely and lapsed into long, uninterrupted silences. The threat of suicide had always accompanied his morose persona and funereal songs but he later admitted, “I’m too old to commit suicide. It would be unbecoming.”

  The Toronto Star unknowingly promoted the retirement controversy, picking up an English story reporting that Cohen had quit the music business. Thinking that he was speaking in confidence following receipt of a Gold Album award from Melody Maker for two hundred and fifty thousand sales of his first LP, Cohen told reporter Roy Hollingworth, “I just cannot stand to remain part of the [music] business. I’ve reached a state when I’m just not writing anything.” A week later, he enlarged on the theme of disillusionment and his decision “no longer … to be tangled up in the mechanisms” of the industry. The industry viewed his comments as an attack. He said that his decision had been made ten months earlier when he entered a Buddhist monastery in California. He planned to continue to write songs only “if I feel they are good.”

  In a later interview in the Toronto Star, Cohen explained the confusion about his remarks on retirement, declaring, “I never did retire. I didn’t announce that. It was a completely mischievous adventure on the part of a journalist in England.” The two had been discussing the state of the music business and its depressing character. “And I said, ‘But I don’t want to see a headline: Leonard Cohen quits music business and goes into monastery. And the next week I pick up the paper and it’s been reprinted all around the world.” No one was more surprised than his lawyer Marty Machat, who spent days phoning music publishers and record company executives to tell them Cohen was very much in the business. But what’s to quit, Cohen added: “I mean how can I quit? I’ve never been in it. Nobody’s making me do anything. I’ve done three tours, only a record every two or three years—that’s not much for a singer. I’ve always been able to play it as I wanted. What is there to quit?”

  Ironically, at the time of the controversy, his work was being celebrated. In July 1973 at the Shaw Festival, Gene Lesser, a New York director, was preparing a production of “Sisters of Mercy.” Its opening led to this headline in a Canadian paper: “Bed-centered play aimed at open-minded people.” Based on Cohen’s songs and work, the play went to New York after its Canadian premiere and opened off Broadway at the Theatre de Lys. Clive Barnes of the New York Times panned it, writing that if the play was a “musical journey into the words of Leonard Cohen,” as the program stated, “it is, to be frank, a journey that I would rather not have taken.” Barnes also criticized the play’s autobiographical element: “Unfortunately, while Mr. Cohen may very well be … God’s final gift to women, he doesn’t shape up so well as either a poet or a musician. As a poet he is cute, as a musician he is familiar.” Cohen himself disliked the production.

  ————

  COHEN FELT that his life was becoming a battle for survival, and the opportunity to participate in a real war was too tempting to resist. He and his family had returned to Hydra in August 1973. But to test himself and to escape the turmoil of his personal life, Cohen flew to Israel from Athens a few days before the Yom Kippur War began in October 1973, partly out of a determination to help, partly “to recover from vanities of the singing profession,” and, as he wrote in the unpublished prose work “The Final Revision of My Life in Art,” partly “because it is so horrible between us I will go and stop Egypt’s bullet. Trumpets and a curtain of razor blades.” When he arrived, he told the press that he flew to Israel to entertain troops during the conflict and “to make my atonement.” He added that in the past he sided with the Arabs in their demands that Israel return territory taken by it in the 1967 war, but now he supported the Jewish state.

  Cohen left Hydra and the difficulties with Suzanne. “What a burden for the woman being born to carry still-born blessings up the hill … I must study the hatred I have for her, and how it is transmuted into desire by solitude and distance.” He felt she restrained him and curbed his success: “I never became a sign for everything that is high and nervous … the band ran down like an unwound music-box, too slow and too sweet. A fungus became attached to the spirit of song and high pretensions infected the gift of words.” He made a pact: “I won’t fuck in the Holy Land unless she is my True Wife.”

  At the airport he got the last seat on the flight to Tel Aviv and his attitude quickly changed:

  Nothing can stop me. My luck has changed. The girls in uniform smile at my airport style. I hate to leave them all behind. This man’s traveling. I am thin again and loose. I suntan myself from within. We can fall in love now, we already have, it doesn’t matter, goodbye.

  Sitting on the floor at the airport with his leather bag, he felt conspicuous, and after a quick visit to the airport post office, he was stopped by a plainclothes security officer, who questioned him in the men’s room about his destination. When the officer discovered that Cohen spoke some Greek and that he was flying to Israel, he was released. The unexpected expression of democratic ideals expounded by a poet in Greek convinced the police to let him go. As he waited to be searched before boarding the plane, his thoughts shifted: “I could see that certain people had recognized me. No one I wanted to fuck but some I wanted to look at naked, especially a girl whose eyes are looking at me now.”

  He arrived in a tense and nervous country, admitting, “I am in my myth home but I have no proof and I cannot debate and I am in no danger of believing myself … Speaking no Hebrew I enjoy my legitimate silence.” He accepted the invitation of a married couple he had met on the flight to stay with her mother and sister in Herzliyya, a suburb of Tel Aviv. The sister immediately inflamed him, but he deflected his interest when he learned that the war was not that easily found, despite the sad news about the fighting on the radio every hour. The mother and daughter still went to the beach every day; “The war was somewhere else.”

  Despite his nominal pact with himself, Cohen became involved with a series of women in Israel. A tall, red-haired woman with “long, stainless steel legs” and a body he called “a sexual construction;” a Yemenite broadcaster who had interviewed him two years earlier; and a girl who recognized him in the lobby of a movie theater. One incident, he said was symbolic:

  I went immediately to the Cafe Pinoti, looking for Hanna. There was nobody on the street. I decided to quit looking for her. This event has the essential quality of my life in art.

  After returning from the beach, he continued his search. “After I had showered and changed, I walked up and down the vacant blacked-out streets looking for Hanna, l
onging for her. Such patrols are a usual feature of my life in art.”

  Most of his assignations occurred in the Gad Hotel on Hayarkon Street in Tel Aviv. After checking into the Gad, Cohen heard footsteps outside his room. It was the tall and striking woman he had just met at the desk. He heard an interior voice saying, “You will only sing again if you give up lechery. Choose. This is a place where you may begin again.” Another voice countered, “But I want her … Please let me have her.” The inner voice that won advised him to, “Throw yourself upon your stiffness and take up your felt pen.” His attitude toward women remained shameless; he invited women reporters to undress for him, or at least bare their breasts during an interview.

  Shortly after moving to the hotel, he went to see the singer/promoter Sholomo Semach, who was attached to the air force. Cohen wanted to volunteer, and Semach immediately lined him up with an entertainment group in the air force. Before he started, however, the Israeli singer Ilana Rovina invited him to perform one night at an air base near Tel Aviv, which he did. He then joined her group for performances in the Sinai, flying in on a Dakota aircraft. At a desert airport he stole a .45 pistol from a deserted shed, armament for the battle. Soon after his return to Tel Aviv, he had a new assignment: Cohen, Matti Caspi, and a third entertainer drove around and sang at rocket sites, tank encampments, aide stations, and army posts. They were flown by helicopter across the Suez to a former Egyptian air base, where they performed in a concrete hangar. Cohen was startled to find there a leftover Egyptian calendar and a can of mashed potatoes that had a label which read, “A Gift from the People of Canada.” A helicopter arrived with wounded men, and Cohen began to weep as he stared at the bandaged soldiers. When someone told him that the troops were Egyptian, his relief disturbed him. But when an Israeli soldier gave him some Egyptian money found on a dead soldier, he could not take it and buried it in the sand.