by Ira B. Nadel
The cover photograph showed a youthful Cohen in a white suit sitting between two attractive women in a Montreal Polynesian restaurant. One of the women is Suzanne and the other is Eva La Pierre, a French-Canadian model Cohen had met on Hydra some years earlier. Cohen disassociated himself from the album before its release in November 1977. He had initially agreed to the project because Spector liked his songs and he thought he might, with Spector’s help, break through to a wider audience. “I know my work has a popular element but somehow it can’t readily manifest it,” he has remarked. In the press, he called the mix of the album a “catastrophe” and said that Spector had annihilated him. Cohen said he would shortly pay twenty thousand dollars to release himself from any promotion of the album. He did, however, conduct several New York interviews in the 54th Street offices of Warner Brothers to discuss the album. But in a February 1978 Crawdaddy interview, he was critical of Spector: “The listener could have been invited into the track rather than be prohibited from entering it … there is something inaccessible, something resistant about those tracks that should not have been there.” Still, Cohen admitted that Spector was “capable of stunning melodies and production.” But music, he added, “does not come out of the mansion and the kind of tyranny he wants to impose.” Cohen later called the orchestrations “brilliant,” although he still criticized the use of the first voice takes and secret mixing. At one point, he thought, “I should get myself some bodyguards and settle the whole affair on Sunset Boulevard.” Cohen sent Spector a pair of red holsters as a comic gesture of reconciliation.
Reaction to the album was largely negative. Rolling Stone headlined its review with “Leonard Cohen’s doo-wop Nightmare.” The Toronto Star was less generous, declaring in large type, “Leonard Cohen is for Musical Sadists.” An English paper described the union of Cohen and Spector as, Doyen of Doom meets Teen Tycoon. Saturday Night, however, was more welcoming, saying the album was Cohen’s “most significant step forward as a recording artist since his disc debut in 1967.” The album, Rolling Stone pronounced, is “either greatly flawed or great and flawed.”
In the title song, “Death of A Ladies’ Man,” Cohen described a powerful but destructive love:
She took his much admired oriental frame of mind
And the heart-of-darkness alibi
His money hides behind
She took his blonde madonna
And his monastery wine
“This mental space is occupied
and everything is mine.”
The song was a revealing coda on the death of longing, an update of his relationship with Suzanne. It was a time when “every relationship I had broke down. Every single relationship broke down. There was nothing left standing.”
11
NEW SCRIPTURE
IN MARCH 1976, Cohen submitted the manuscript for what would become Death of a Lady’s Man, originally titled “My Life in Art.” He chose the singular rather than plural form of “lady’s” to emphasize his focus on an individual woman; for his album, with its similar title, he wanted to stress a multitude of women that may have caused his demise. After reading the work, one editor at McClelland & Stewart wrote, “I must say that it is truly-to-God the most depressing thing I have read in a very long time.” But the editor did add that it was publishable and in many ways “superb.” Another editor, Lily Miller, began her report by saying that “Leonard Cohen was one of the reasons why I came to Canada.” She thought that the manuscript marked a new phase in his work, since each significant sequence ends with an expression of inadequacy, replacing the “constant bragging” of his earlier work. There was a new depth of thought and self-criticism. “I suggest,” she wrote, “that long discussions will be necessary to either justify or eliminate this turn of a new leaf.” Miller thought that “the earlier arrogance, the more recent sense of doom and impotence, seem here to have given way to something more mellow: an acceptance of human limitations, foibles, failures—and a love which can rise out of these very weaknesses.” She wanted to publish it.
The manuscript went back to Cohen for revision, and six months later he returned it, retitled “The Final Revision of My Life in Art.” Plans had been made for a fall publication, and announcements and advance press galleys began to circulate. Initially, there were delays with the printers. Cooper & Beatty turned down the job “because of language in the manuscript.” A second printer said that it could not meet the McClelland & Stewart schedule. A third printer, Accutext, finally set galleys for a September publication. But Jack McClelland was becoming frantic because he could not contact Cohen to finalize last-minute changes. Cohen had originally drawn illustrations for the back cover and the endpapers, but Miller had now rejected the use of Cohen’s illustrations and criticized the photo intended for the front cover. She wanted a strong front cover, possibly a drawing, and a photo of Cohen on the back: “His drawings will only diminish the power of the book,” she wrote in a June 1977 memo. A subsequent memo said that without Cohen’s illustrations, they would be left with four blank pages. She suggested they get more poems from Cohen and, because of layout problems, four more lines for “The House.” The manuscript was again revised and resubmitted in November 1976 with a new title: Death of a Lady’s Man.
On August 10, 1977, Cohen notified Lily Miller that he was again delaying the book. In reworking it, he had written as much new material as they presently had. “He feels very excited about the new work,” Miller wrote in a memo, “He feels it would add a whole new dimension to the book. However, it could not be available for another month’s time …” Written on the bottom of the note in Jack McClelland’s handwriting is the following: “This is a grim development. I am most reluctant to postpone. He called and left number. Naturally, no answer when I called back. Will do my best.”
The following week a new problem emerged with the title: a prospective co-publisher objected to Cohen using the same title for his book and record album. Cohen was also “pulled apart and uptight,” requiring a further delay. While McClelland told Cohen he would slow production for a while, he vented his frustration in an internal memo: Cohen “says he is re-writing the God-damn book which is nice news at this stage…. I should tell you this is typical Cohen, [but] we’ll have to live with it. The book will be late but I don’t think there is any point putting the pressure on him now.”
On August 11, McClelland reported that he had spoken to Cohen in California where he said that he hoped to finish the manuscript in less than a month. “He says he is writing a 90-page commentary on the book itself. What ever the hell that means. I fear the worst.” Promotion plans remained incomplete, since a fall publication was now impossible. On August 18, a telegram arrived from Mt. Baldy, announcing, “I DOUBT THAT I CAN FINISH BOOK IN 2 WEEKS OR EVEN 4 WEEKS. THERE HAS BEEN A FICTITIOUS URGENCY CONNECTED WITH THIS PROJECT FROM THE BEGINNING.” Cohen told McClelland that he would simply have to wait for the finished book. McClelland replied the next day:
LEONARD THERE IS NO SWEAT ABOUT IT. MY REAL PROBLEM IS THAT WE REALLY BELIEVE YOU HAD A FINE BOOK COMPLETED AND THAT YOU ARE PROBABLY SECOND GUESSING YOURSELF UNNECESSARILY. IN ANY CASE WE WILL WAIT. BEST AS ALWAYS. JACK
By October, McClelland was becoming less patient. In a long and detailed letter, he told Cohen that he had been forced to make an announcement to the book trade that the volume had been postponed again. The reason for the notice was that Saturday Night was about to do an article on Cohen and the delay of the book. McClelland pleaded with Cohen to tell him “where we are heading so we can deal with the story.” The problem is that “the whole goddamn situation is in the public arena and we have to have some answers.”
The November 1977 article by Sandra Martin reviewed the situation, beginning with a November 1976 night in New York when Cohen gave McClelland the manuscript of the poems after sipping vodka and watching hockey on TV. “Christ, Leonard,” McClelland was reported as saying, “Death of a Lady’s Man! With a title like that we don’t even need a manus
cript.” Twice since that evening, McClelland had advertised the book in his catalogue of forthcoming books and twice had withdrawn it. By June, Cohen had finished his second version and appeared at a McClelland & Stewart sales conference to promote the book and the new album. A day later he was at the Courtyard Cafe in Toronto, pulling out a tape recorder and playing a few of the tracks from the album for his friends. In mid-August, with the second manuscript typeset, and at least three magazines ready with advance reviews from galleys, Cohen called and then cabled McClelland with the request to delay. M&S stopped its promotion of the book and put aside nearly ten thousand orders for the title. McClelland defended his position by saying, “If Leonard were a normal author, I would be phoning once a week. But he always has been and always will be special.”
By November 25, 1977, McClelland told editor Anna Porter that according to Irving Layton, Cohen was still working on the manuscript. There was a distinct possibility that they might not want to publish it when they saw it. The title had to be dropped from the spring list. In late January 1978, Cohen was back in Montreal. He sent a note to McClelland, telling him that he had added sixty pages to the book and had another forty to go. He expected it to be finished by the end of March. Cohen suggested a billboard campaign for the book using the sixteenth-century engraving from the cover—the same engraving used on the cover of New Skin for the Old Ceremony—with the words “Leonard Cohen” above and “DEATH OF A LADY’S MAN, A CURIOUS BOOK” below.
Cohen added commentaries to his work, written as though another person were viewing or judging it. Lily Miller believed that this addition added new insight and originality. A different typeface would set the commentaries apart, and they would appear on the facing pages. Since the sequence of poetry and prose remained mostly unchanged, McClelland & Stewart was able to salvage about eighty percent of the original typesetting.
Thoughts of completion, however, were premature. Throughout the summer, matters of cost, production, typeface, and paper plagued both Cohen and his publisher, with the poet frequently altering the publisher’s decision. He was uneasy with the plan to issue the book in hardcover only, for a price of $10.00. His instinct suggested a $6.95 paperback. He worried about paper and rejected the sample the U.S. printer sent. If it were published in hardcover, he underlined, it should have “bulk and elegance.” Concerning publicity, he wanted “a dignified treatment and a certain formality. He’d like it to be sedate.” He rejected the idea of a billboard with his photo, his signature, and a few excerpts. He did not want to flaunt the personal aspect, he said. He preferred the billboard of the engraving plus the title and the statement that it was “A Curious Book.” McClelland rejected the idea.
Mixed reviews greeted Death of a Lady’s Man when it was finally published in the fall of 1978. Books in Canada said the work was “astonishing” in how it used the theme of poetic failure to move Cohen to “dignity and gravity.” Other reviews cited a lack of talent. It was suggested that the book was simply a hangover from the poor reception the Spector album had received. In Canada, Cohen remembers, the book was “coldly received in all circles … dismissed almost uniformly,” although he himself thought of the work as a “very leisurely and delightful kind of performance.” In the United States Death of a Lady’s Man was not even reviewed. One reason for its neglect may have been that among the literati Cohen had been largely forgotten; he had been identified as a singer and songwriter rather than a poet for too long.
During the publication delays, Cohen was also contending with his mother’s illness in Montreal, his relationship with Suzanne, and his explosive dealings with Phil Spector. This meant constantly traveling back and forth between Los Angeles and Montreal. In late 1977, after the album had been completed, he moved the family back to Montreal to be closer to his mother. She died of leukemia in February 1978. Death of A Lady’s Man is dedicated to her.
In Montreal he spent time with Adam and Lorca, feeling that children embodied an individual’s resurrection. Family life, he told an interviewer, was now an important aspect of his existence. There was a period of mourning in Montreal and Cohen addressed family matters, and dealt with the estate, deciding to keep his mother’s semidetached home on Belmont Avenue. But the Montreal hiatus was shortlived. Cohen decided he had to return to Los Angeles with his family to start a new recording. This time they settled in a larger house on Woodrow Wilson Avenue, high in the Hollywood Hills. In this spare, secluded home, with unobstructed views of Los Angeles from its various terraces, Cohen sought to recreate something of his environment on Hydra. He renewed his daily attendance at the Cimarron Zen Center, worked out at the Hollywood YMCA and began again to write.
In the spring of 1978 Suzanne suddenly left for France with the children, who were now six and four. Cohen was shocked. No single event had precipitated the move; it was simply the growing division between the two of them and a desire on her part to relocate and start a new life. At first Cohen felt a strange sense of elation and later commented that he was too weak for the institution of marriage. “Marriage is a monastery,” he once wrote, implying that marriage enforced abstinence from other relationships on the partners, often disguised as intimacy. Marriage has become “the hottest furnace of the spirit today. Much more difficult than solitude, much more challenging for people who want to work on themselves. It’s a situation in which there are no alibis, excruciating most of the time.”
Immediately after Suzanne’s departure, Cohen’s tension and bitterness disappeared. He enjoyed the quiet and solitude and turned to old friends like Nancy Bacal, who joined him in his Zen practice and in swimming and working out regularly. He also participated in a promotional tour of his book Death of A Lady’s Man, traveling across Canada in 1978.
In Los Angeles Cohen began to work with Henry Lewy on another album, tentatively titled The Smokey Life. Cohen first conceived of the album as representing the kind of life which had “the quality of smoke: fragile, and not attached to anything, but still the only one we’ve got. And we’re leading it, without landmarks and without forms.” Lewy, formerly an engineer, had been Joni Mitchell’s producer for several years and had also produced Stephen Bishop, Minnie Riperton, and others. Mitchell had introduced them and suggested they work together.
One rainy afternoon, Cohen invited Lewy to listen to a rough tape of the song “The Smokey Life.” Excited about the material, Lewy suggested they record it at once. He called the members of Passenger, who had been working with Joni Mitchell, and they arranged to meet at the United-Western Recording studio that evening. Roscoe Beck, Bill Guinn, and Steve Meador appeared and recorded the song with Cohen.
For the album, Cohen gave Lewy the songs and he set to work locating musicians, while Jeremy Lubbock worked on the arrangements. Paul Ostermeyer (sax), Steve Meador (drums), Roscoe Beck (bass), John Lissauer (piano), Raffi Hakopian (violin), and John Bilezikjian (oud, an eleven-string Middle Eastern instrument traditionally played with an eagle’s feather) were among the outstanding studio musicians, several of whom—Ostermeyer and Meador, in particular—would continue to play and tour with Cohen over the next fourteen years. Jennifer Warnes contributed background vocals. Joni Mitchell and other musicians dropped by as well.
The 1978 recording sessions took place at A&M Records, once the studio for Charlie Chaplin. In contrast to the paranoia and frenzy of Phil Spector, a strong sense of musicianship pervaded the sessions with Lewy. Because he wanted to showcase Cohen’s voice amid the striking orchestrations, Lewy had him sit in a separation booth, a small glass-walled room adjacent to the musicians where he would hear only his own voice and guitar. Cohen’s voice was the dominating sound on the tracks, in contrast to the muffled voice heard on Death of A Ladies’ Man. At the studio, Cohen was often accompanied by an attractive Mexican woman, his companion of the moment.
The album had a confident and largely acoustic style, reminiscent of Songs from a Room. In songs like the jazzy, “torch” quality of “Came so Far for Beauty,” or the cool,
sly rhythms of “The Smokey Life,” Cohen was able to “wrap his voice around the words,” always his goal in a song. On “The Guests” and “Ballad of the Absent Mare,” however, the use of a Mexican mariachi band contradicted the near Eastern sound supplied by John Bilezikjian and his oud.
The album became an anchor for Cohen during a troubling time. It was dedicated to “Irving Layton, incomparable master of the Inner language.” He also thanked the late Robert Hershorn and Nancy Bacal but his most significant acknowledgment was to his Zen master: “I owe my thanks to Joshu Sasaki upon whose exposition of an early Chinese text I based ‘Ballad of The Absent Mare.’” The reference to Roshi indicated how Cohen was incorporating Zen material into his work. The early Chinese text he referred to was the “Ten Ox-Herding Pictures,” also called “The Ten Bulls.” At one time Cohen and Roshi worked on a translation of these texts, originally a twelfth-century set of pictures and commentary by Kakuan, a Chinese master. Traditionally, the ten bulls are ten images that represent the ten steps in the spiritual unfolding of the self. Both the song and the story emphasize a search in “the pasture of this world” for the reunification of the true self expressed through the capturing and taming of the bull. In the last two verses of “The Absent Mare,” the singer unites with the horse, unconsciously joining the narrator of the “Ten Ox-Herding Pictures” to realize that there can be no separation between object and subject. He suddenly recognizes the “forms of integration and disintegration” as one, and simultaneously sees “that which is creating and that which is destroying.”