by Jeff Burger
The interview, which Djwa conducted while earning her PhD at the University of British Columbia, ran on page eight of the school’s student newspaper and was not touted on the front page. When I emailed current editor Jonny Wakefield to ask about including the piece here, he replied, “Wow, we had an interview with Leonard Cohen?”
Djwa remembers the conversation well, however. “I had written an essay called ‘Leonard Cohen: Black Romantic,’” she told me, “and had sent it to the journal Canadian Literature. In it, I had argued that Cohen was a ‘black’ romantic, and writing the essay had given me some sense of the questions to ask in the interview.” Djwa added that during her conversation with the singer, “I sensed that he was a little spaced out but he was very helpful and spoke of his sense of ‘wipe-out’ while in Greece.”
The interview was not Djwa’s last encounter with Cohen. “He phoned me in the mideighties from California, regarding his friendship with Canadian poet, lawyer, and political activist F. R. Scott, whose biography, The Politics of Imagination, I was then writing,” Djwa recalled. “He said he had attended law school at McGill for a time because it had been a good place for Scott, who was then McGill’s dean of law. Scott gave Cohen permission to stay for a time at his summer cabin at North Hatley [a village in Quebec, Canada—Ed.], where he wrote much of [his first novel] The Favorite Game. Cohen was doubtful about leaving the family clothing business to become a writer, but he recalled that Scott ‘gave me the courage to fail.’” —Ed.
Sandra Djwa: At one point, when reading Spice-Box, seeing all the poems that you simply call “song” and later, when you started singing on the TV show Sunday, I thought of you in connection with that Yiddish word “ngin.” I think it means “singer of the people.”
Leonard Cohen: Ngin, yes. That’s close to the tradition. We have all somehow lost our minds in the last ten or fifteen years. Whatever we have been told about anything, although we remember it, and sometimes operate in those patterns, we have no deep abiding faith in anything we have been told, even in the hippest things, the newest things. Everybody has a sense that they are in their own capsule and the one that I have always been in, for want of a better word, is that of cantor—a priest of a catacomb religion that is underground, just beginning, and I am one of the many singers, one of the many, many priests, not by any means a high priest, but one of the creators of the liturgy that will create the church.
SD: Is that one of the reasons why the dominant personalities in most of your books are poet-priests? Even in Beautiful Losers the narrator-historian is a priest by election.
LC: Yes, and since this is the vocabulary we are using for this discussion, I would say that Beautiful Losers is a redemptive novel, an exercise to redeem the soul.
SD: I also thought it was a pop-apocalypse. LC: Yeah, sure, that’s good.
SD: But how do the two go together? That’s what I don’t understand.
LC: When there’s a complete wipeout, there’s a renewal. In that book I tried to wrestle with all the deities that are extant now—the idea of saintliness, purity, pop, McLuhanism, evil, the irrational—all the gods we set up for ourselves.
SD: But isn’t there a kind of artistic dishonesty in setting up ideas to wrestle with and then trying to pin the structure of a book on it? It doesn’t always work.
LC: If you could see the man who wrote that book. I have always said that my strength is that I have no ideas. I feel empty. I have never dazzled myself with thought, particularly my own thought—it is one of the processes that my heart doesn’t leap out to.
When you said “a singer,” that’s it. A singer is one who embodies in his person the idea. I have never felt myself to be a man of letters. I’ve always felt that whatever there was, was me, and there was never any distance between myself and the reader. I’ve never had the feeling of writing a book but of going up and seizing somebody’s lapel or hem.
I’ve always wanted to be created just like the priest creates the prayer for the mass for the congregation. It’s not the idea of imposing a prayer but that he creates the finest part of themselves. It’s that job more than anything else that I’m interested in.
SD: There seems to be a certain pattern in your work, that of creation, moving between aspiration and disintegration. It seems to me that your myth of art has two women figures, that of the beloved, the aspiring figure, and that of the mad-woman, the destructive. The whole structure seems to be that of the Orpheus myth.
LC: Absolutely. I’ve always honored both the wrathful deities and the blessed deities and I’m in this completely. There are no functions that I have in my daily life that give me any distance from what I do and I systematically cut all the things that might. I’ve burnt all my bridges. What you say is true and I acknowledge it as we sit here. As it comes out I just feel that I’m a child. There’s a poem about this. I just wrote it yesterday and can’t quote it exactly: “I have come to this green mountain / I am thirty-three / a child of the double trinity.” One is dark and one light and the third that comes from it like a braid that takes its color from both, like a salamander. That seems to represent me to myself. That’s the way it’s always been and I don’t think I have control over it myself. I can tell you honestly, I’ve tried a lot of disciplines—yoga, Hebraic discipline—in an effort to control my mind but I find that I have no control. It’s not that a man chooses the gods that he worships—it’s the gods who choose him. And it’s only when we come closest to the gods that we engage in creation. But I feel that these parts are unreachable parts of myself. There are times when I feel that I’ll never do another thing. Creating a work is a lot of pain and that’s all I’m trying to get across. And because of the pain you haven’t got the opportunity to see the whole arena.
I’m not trying to dramatize or anything, but I vomit a lot at ideas. It’s not that I put things in. It’s just that certain things obsess me and I get nauseous. There are things I have to do. Of course you’ve got to watch yourself to see that you don’t get addicted to pain and remember that there is another deity and that ecstasy is the other side. The one is the way to the other.
SD: Let’s talk about Leonard Cohen, the folksinging personality.
LC: I wouldn’t call myself a folksinging personality. I think this nation has a great case of schizophrenia. There’s no contact, in a sense, between the people who watch me on TV and the other half. I really don’t care what they call me. I’m not a particularly good painter but I’m doing a little painting now, putting together a collection. I have this feeling that if you liberate yourself, anything you lay your hand on can sparkle. Professionalism is the enemy of creativity and invention. There’s a possibility for men to live in a way of continually changing their environment. It’s a matter of whether or not you believe a man can change his environment. I believe he can. My painting and my singing are the same thing.
I don’t care what people call me, whether you call it folksinging or some people call it a priestly function or some people see it as a revolutionary activity or acidheads see it as psychedelic revolution or poets see it as the popularization of poetry. I stand in with all these people. These are all the people who say we can change, get out of pain. That’s why I’m interested in pop. In a way this is the first time that people have ever said, “This is our age and we exalt in it and we delight in it, it is ours.” It’s an assault on history and it’s an assault on all these authoritarian voices who have always told us what was beautiful. I like to be created by pop because it’s an ally in my own time. My time says it’s beautiful and it’s part of me and I want to be created by it.
SD: Is that why you choose an excerpt from a Ray Charles record— “Somebody said, lift that bale” [from “Ol’ Man River”]—as an epigraph for Beautiful Losers?
LC: Yes, I think that’s the real news on the streets today. Somebody saying it can be better … maybe it can’t but somehow we can get closer to our center. Somebody saying whatever there is around that we don’t like can be changed�
�the monolith has begun to dissolve.
SD: Are you suggesting the disintegration of personality when you quote from [Italian Jewish writer] Primo Levi at the beginning of Flowers for Hitler?
LC: That quotation is, “Take care not to let it happen in your own homes.” He’s saying, “What point is there to a political solution if in the homes these tortures and mutilations continue?” That’s what Flowers for Hitler is all about. It’s taking the mythology of the concentration camps and bringing it into the living room and saying, “This is what we do to each other.” We outlaw genocide and concentration camps and gas and that, but if a man leaves his wife or they are cruel to each other, then that cruelty is going to find a manifestation if he has a political capacity and he has.
There’s no point in refusing to acknowledge the wrathful deities. That’s like putting pants on the legs of pianos like the Victorians did. The fact is that we all succumb to lustful thoughts, to evil thoughts, to thoughts of torture.
SD: In this admission you’re suggesting that you’re working in the same structure as are the contemporary writers—maybe it starts with [Louis-Ferdinand] Celine—[William] Burroughs, [Hugh] Selby, Gunter Grass, and for that matter, [Jean-Paul] Sartre in Nausea.
LC: The only thing that differs in those writers and myself is that I hold out the idea of ecstasy as the solution. If only people get high, they can face the evil part. If a man feels in his heart it’s only going to be a mundane confrontation with feelings, and he has to recite to himself Norman Vincent Peale slogans—“Be better, be good”—he hasn’t had a taste of that madness.
He’s never soared, he’s never let go of the silver thread and he doesn’t know how it feels to be like a god. For him, all the stories about holiness and the temple of the body are meaningless.
SD: When Sartre talks about the salauds, the cowards who are us all, they’re the ones who refuse the experience of nausea. There’s some point at which you allow yourself to go or you don’t. [D. H.] Lawrence talks about this too.
LC: The thing about Sartre is that he’s never lost his mind. He represents a wonderful Talmudic sense of human possibility, but I know he’s never going to say “and then the room turned to gold.” He’ll say, “The room turned to shit.” But the room sometimes does turn to gold and unless you mention that, your philosophy is incomplete. Like Bertrand Russell, he hasn’t flipped out. Anybody who has flipped and survived, who hasn’t been broken by conformity or pure madness like an incapacity to operate, knows the ecstasy and the hallucination and the whole idea of the planets and of the music of the spheres and of endless force and life and god— enough to blow your head off. And Sartre never had his head blown off. The thing that people are interested in doing now is blowing their heads off and that’s why the writing of schizophrenics like myself will be important.
COHEN CLIP
On Writing Beautiful Losers
“I wrote Beautiful Losers on [the Greek island of] Hydra, when I’d thought of myself as a loser. I was wiped out; I didn’t like my life. I vowed I would just fill the pages with black or kill myself. After the book was over, I fasted for ten days and flipped out completely. It was my wildest trip. I hallucinated for a week. They took me to a hospital in Hydra. One afternoon, the whole sky was black with storks. They alighted on all the churches and left in the morning … and I was better. Then I decided to go to Nashville and become a songwriter.”
—from “Beautiful Creep,” by Richard Goldstein, the Village Voice
(New York), December 28, 1967
COHEN CLIP
On Women
“When I see a woman transformed by the orgasm we have reached together, then I know we’ve met. Anything else is fiction. That’s the vocabulary we speak in today. It’s the only language left … I wish the women would hurry up and take over. It’s going to happen so let’s get it over with. Then we can finally recognize that women really are the minds and the force that holds everything together; and men really are gossips and artists. Then we could get about our childish work and they could keep the world going. I really am for the matriarchy.”
—from “I’ve Been on the Outlaw Scene Since 15,”
by William Kloman, the New York Times, January 28, 1968
COHEN CLIP
On Revolution
“I have the feeling that every time you mention the word revolution you delay it twenty-five seconds. I’ve just found that abstract thought and talk about the revolution—and I see it in big red letters—doesn’t really serve any purpose. Somehow each man has to determine what kind of life he’s going to lead in terms of what he thinks a good life is. As for a political program, I’d have to leave that to the theoreticians. As for street action, I’d have to leave that to the tacticians. Wherever I happen to find myself I try to lead my life as decently as I can, generally falling along those lines. Somehow just to conduct your life as if the revolution had already taken place.”
—from “Leonard Cohen,” by P. Dingle,
Rat Subterranean News (New York), 1969
COHEN CLIP
On Buying Clothes
“I’ve had that raincoat for ten or twelve years now. That’s my coat. I have one coat and one suit because, for one thing, I find it very difficult to buy clothes at a time like this. I somehow can’t reconcile it with my visions of a human benefactor, to be buying clothes when people are in such bad shape elsewhere; so I wear out the old things I’ve got. Also, I can’t find any clothes that represent me. And clothes are magical, a magical procedure, they really change the way you are in a day. Any woman knows this, and men have discovered it now. I mean, clothes are important to us and until I can discover in some clearer way what I am to myself I’ll just keep on wearing my old clothes.”
—from “An Interview with Leonard Cohen,”
by Michael Harris, Duel (Canada), Winter 1969
LADIES & GENTS, LEONARD COHEN
JACK HAFFERKAMP | Late 1970, interview | February 4, 1971, Rolling Stone
Cohen, who moved to the United States in 1967 to pursue a career in music, began to garner attention in the pop arena after the December 27 release that year of his debut album, Songs of Leonard Cohen. The record—which spent fourteen weeks on the charts, where it peaked at number eighty-three—featured such now-classic tunes as “Suzanne,” “Sisters of Mercy, “So Long, Marianne,” and “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.”
A second album, Songs from a Room, followed on April 7, 1969. Though arguably just a bit weaker than its predecessor, it contained the highly popular “Bird on the Wire” (often referred to as “Bird on a Wire”) plus such masterworks as “A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes” and “The Old Revolution.” This disc charted for seventeen weeks and reached number sixty-three.
Perhaps one reason these albums didn’t sell better is that Cohen granted few interviews to promote them and in fact performed only occasionally between 1967 and 1971. In late 1970, however, he did talk about Songs from a Room and an about-to-be-released third LP, Songs of Love and Hate, with Rolling Stone writer Jack Hafferkamp. The new album, which came out March 19, 1971, included such tours de force as “Joan of Arc” and “Famous Blue Raincoat,” the latter a song/letter about a love triangle that ends “Sincerely, L. Cohen.” Clearly the artist had reached a new creative peak.
Hafferkamp, whose article includes a description of one of Cohen’s early concerts, conducted the interview in Berkeley, California. “At the time,” he told me, “I was in a period of great turmoil: I’d recently been dumped by my young wife, was dodging the draft, and was wondering where and how I would find rent money. Cohen’s studied craziness seemed like an island of sanity. Not much has changed since then.” —Ed.
Leonard Cohen’s fans are word people. They believe a song’s lyrics are more important than its instrumentation, packaging, or the lead singer’s crotch. It could even be that for most of them, words have become the first-aid station in the preventive detention camp of their feelings. Certainly they are all helpless rom
antics, trapped by rage in the age of efficiency.
Cohen, of course, is crazy, but he is cunning enough to keep on the loose. A mystery man with a big nose, he is a “beautiful creep.” He wants to be handsome, but settles for looking better than he expected. And wishing to be slick, he succeeds just enough to keep on wishing. He has no desire to be a pop star, yet he wants to sell records.
Over the house phone at Berkeley’s stately old Claremont Hotel, he agrees to a few questions only after I assure him that we will meet on equal terms. “I never do interviews,” he says. “I prefer an interviewer to take the same risks that I do. In other words, not to make a question-and-answer kind of scene, because I’m interested in … like a description from your side … to practice the novelist’s rather than the interviewer’s art. Say, like what was the feeling of the interviewer and how does that relate to the work we all know. Rather than like … put me on the line for this or that type of question …”
Cohen ordered a scotch and soda for me from room service—at the time it seemed like the perfect drink. He introduced me to Charlie Daniels, a member of his touring band, the Army. Once an eighty-cigarette-a-day addict, Charlie is now down to five sticks of gum at once.
As I set up the tape recorder, Cohen turned down the sound from the TV. He left the picture tuned to Lassie. A definite feeling of uncertainty settled around us, the intruders. Cohen carefully scrutinized us. He repeated his insistence that our meeting be held on common ground. “I had to be reminded of other things I’ve said. It’s just sheer fatigue which has allowed me to conduct this whole scene. I don’t believe in it.
“One of the reasons I’m on tour is to meet people. I consider it a reconnaissance. I consider myself like in a military operation. I don’t feel like a citizen. I feel like I know exactly what I have to do. Part of it is familiarizing myself with what people are thinking and doing. The kind of shape people are in is what I am interested in determining … because I want to lay out any information I have and I want to make it appropriate. So if I can find where people are at any particular moment, it makes it easier for me to discover if I have anything to say that is relevant to the situation.”