Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen

by Jeff Burger

  It appears that in the Cohen scenario of life there are the defeated and there are the heroes. The defeated, the truly defeated, inhabit the mental hospitals and graveyards. They either commit themselves or choose to quit living. The heroes struggle on with the business of living in the face of the meaningless.

  “I see tremendous heroism all around me,” Cohen says, “people getting up, doing their work and going to bed at night. When you use the word ‘insanity’ it seems to indicate that some people are beyond the pale, that they’ve stepped into an irredeemable world. But it is my experience of people who are called insane that they are not much different from us in this room, except that they’ve said ‘Ah shit! I’m not going to continue to play these games anymore. I’m going to quit. Do what you want with me.’

  “For many of them, I think that their perceptions are even wider than mine or yours, because they see things that are true that really do cause them to quit trying on the conventional plane. It’s maybe because we don’t see the things as clearly as they do that we continue to try to cope with the realities that are really overwhelming.”

  Cohen says that in the past he has considered suicide, but that he has always rejected it on the grounds of the effects upon those left living. “It’s really an act of aggression against the people you leave behind,” he says. “It’s such a messy thing! You leave people with that taste for the rest of their lives. It’s an act of such long and continuing implications that you have real control over. But I suspect that suicides really do care and really do understand the implications of their act—that it’s not a thing that ends with themselves.

  “You know, they leave their bodies around for one thing and they leave notes and incriminating evidence, but worst of all they leave all their closest friends with a sense of guilt, deserved or not. If I committed suicide Avril [his publicist] would wonder what she’d done wrong and … you might wonder whether you’d pushed me over the edge!”

  Finally I ask him whether he finds a lot of joy in his life. He laughs a little to himself. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t look at it in that way.

  “I don’t go around looking for joy. I don’t go around looking for melancholy either. I don’t have a program. I’m not on an archeological expedition.”

  INTERVIEW

  ROBIN PIKE | September 15, 1974, interview | October 1974, ZigZag (UK)

  Robin Pike talked with Cohen soon after Steve Turner did—and only weeks after New Skin for the Old Ceremony hit the stores. Like Turner, he was a longtime fan.

  “I first met Leonard Cohen in about 1967 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London where he was giving a poetry reading,” Pike told me. “What I particularly remember about our interview, which occurred seven years later, was his great courtesy towards me. I arrived at the hotel totally unannounced when he had just had a most stressful journey—his coach had broken down. Many artists would have refused to be interviewed under the circumstances, but Cohen wrote out a guest pass on the back of a laundry card so that we could meet in his dressing room.

  “Strangely, on the way home, my car broke down on the same motorway Cohen had arrived on. I was far less relaxed about it than a certain Mr. Cohen would have been.”

  Pike covers a lot of interesting and often fresh ground in this interview, which touches on everything from Judaism and psychedelics to Fidel Castro and the Rolling Stones. —Ed.

  September 15 this year was a Sunday. The day after Wembley. It was raining when we left Aylesbury and when we reached Bristol. We had been told that the tour party was staying at the Royal Hotel but they were not expecting us. At three fifteen in the afternoon we stood in the foyer of a deserted hotel and asked for Mr. Cohen. After a brief telephone call by the receptionist we were sent up to the second floor.

  The door of the room was open and there on the bed, phone in hand, was Leonard Cohen. We were asked to wait in the next room and talked with John Miller, the bass player. The tour had opened at the CBS convention in Eastbourne the previous week. From there the band traveled to Paris to play at the Fête de l’Humanité, a gathering run by the French Communist Party, which was attended by three hundred thousand people and featured [Greek composer Mikis] Theodorakis, Cohen, and other literary figures.

  The British tour had opened in Edinburgh and the previous night had played Liverpool. Everything had gone smoothly until the tour coach got within twenty miles of Bristol. At this point it broke down, its cooling system having totally failed. So they got out and hitched. Only nobody would stop—it was pouring rain, you may remember. Eventually Leonard and John were given a lift by a kindly man who happened himself to be a coach operator. The rest of the party didn’t get in until much later. By this time they had missed lunch and the hotel had no food on a Sunday afternoon, so John went out to look for something to eat. He found a Wimpey Bar and returned with four hamburgers, four Cokes, some chips, and a piece of chocolate gateau. We ate and interviewed at the same time. John the bass player showed a lively interest in photography and proceeded to take shots of us from the most unlikely angles. He was particularly fond of one taken from inside the wardrobe.

  The [Bristol] Hippodrome is a delightful theater, more like an opera house than a concert hall. There is a back street that runs past the stage door at the side of the theater. Almost opposite the stage door is a seedy snack bar. Five minutes before the performance was due to start, an observant passerby would have noticed a familiar figure seated at a table drinking a cup of coffee. It was Mr. Cohen. In the dressing room there was no alcohol and no cigarettes. Nothing. Just the artists waiting to go onstage. Only the tour manager appeared in the slightest way nervous. The theater was full, the audience warm and responsive, and at the end of the evening they could not leave. Audience and performers alike sang the words of the songs they all knew so well. “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.”

  Leonard Cohen was born in Montreal in 1934. He has a sister. His father died when he was nine years old. Leonard describes his upbringing as strict in a Victorian sense. The family was of a conservative Jewish tradition. It made full observance of Jewish faith and customs without the rigidity of the Orthodox tradition. Leonard’s grandfather was a Hebrew scholar. An imposing figure with long uncut hair, Rabbi Solomon Klinitsky was greatly revered by his grandson. [Cohen himself has spelled his grandfather’s last name “Klinitsky” and “Klinitsky-Kline”; but the original spelling was apparently “Klonitzki-Kline.” —Ed.] Leonard was educated at a Christian school. These years are remembered but without feeling. School days were boring. He edited the school newspaper, played hockey, and was a cheerleader. At college he played guitar in what he describes as a “barnstorming” group. At the age of fifteen he left school to take a course in English literature at McGill University. At the same time he left home to live in a flat in downtown Montreal. The novel The Favorite Game deals with this period of his life.

  Robin Pike: Nobody got thrown out or anything like that?

  Leonard Cohen: The worst that could happen to you was that you’d fail a year and you’d start over again. The life was downtown—meeting the artists and the poets and discovering what café life was. I was young in those days. There was no oppressive tradition or anything so you were doing it yourself. It was fun. Just a few people around.

  RP: I was wondering if you went through the business of reading all the Shakespeare plays—whether you read a lot of more stylized poetry.

  LC: I read a lot of poetry—but not specifically connected with the course I was taking. There are some Shakespearean plays I haven’t read. There are some I have read very, very thoroughly. I went out with a Shakespearean actress for a while so I used to have to learn all her plays so I could follow what they were about. But I didn’t have a very thorough background in English literature at all.

  RP: Do you have any favorite plays, particularly, say, Shakespearean plays?

  LC: I like Timon of Athens very much. I think that’s quite a late one.

  RP:
I’m thinking of the tragedies like [King] Lear or Hamlet or Macbeth.

  LC: Well, to me it’s like saying how do you feel about the high Himalayas or something. They’re great, huge articulations of human experience, by the master poet of our race. It’s hard for me sitting here, eating a hamburger, to say what I like or don’t like. I stand in a certain reverence to these masters. Those people I don’t take casually at all.

  RP: Can I change the subject and ask you about your political involvement, particularly with, shall we say, revolutionary movements?

  LC: I guess my interior connection with these movements approximates to Camus’s experience, although of course I didn’t take any of his risks. I went down to Cuba to observe and associate myself with that revolution just before the Bay of Pigs.

  RP: Did you meet Castro?

  LC: No, never on that level. Just as a foot soldier. It’s hard for me to speak about those things. My feeling these days is very different. I don’t think that armed revolution should be encouraged in industrial societies. I think it would be a disaster if such a thing ever happened. It really would be awful. What do you feel?

  RP: Yes, I don’t see revolution as achieving very much in those terms. More through infiltration than armed uprising. I believe you were involved with the Black Power movement at one time.

  LC: Well, I knew some people in it. Michael X I knew very well. He’s just waiting to be hung. I had many talks with him. For some races, there are men of imagination who are really oppressed and there is absolutely no other way. They have got to take up this position whether they really believe it in their hearts or not. They have to have a structure to which they can attach themselves. To wait and see, it just doesn’t satisfy their hunger or their imagination. They can only see themselves extended through society with that kind of thrust behind them. There’s no argument you can have with them. You can’t say cool it out, or whatever is achieved by this or that except more violence? OK, let us be the ones who are making the violence on you guys, we’re tired of being on the other side.

  But he himself knew the limitations of this position. That’s what we don’t understand. The leaders of the Movement (to have that kind of power in the Movement means they’re quite bright) understand perfectly the limitations of their position all the time. Michael said to me—he was completely against arming the blacks in America; he said it was crazy— they would never be able to resist that machine. They own the bullets and the armaments factories and the guns. So you give the blacks a few guns and have them against armies? He was even against knives. He said we should use our teeth. Something everybody has. That was his view of the thing. It was a different kind of subversion. The subversion of real life to implant black fear. He would invite me over to his place and he would serve me a drink, a delicious drink. I would say, “God, how do you make this?” He would say, “You don’t expect me to tell you. If you know the secrets of our food, you know the secrets of our race and the secrets of our strength.” You know, it was that kind of vision that he wanted to develop. Pretty good, too.

  RP: How do you feel about your position as a Jew? Do you support, for instance, the movement to free Jewish prisoners in Soviet Russia? Particularly artists like the Panovs.

  LC: Yes I do. Also Ukrania. I would like to see the breakup of the Russian empire. I think there are a lot of Russians who feel that way too. A lot of Russians are not really interested in the domination of Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Ukrania, and Latvia. It’s a difficult position they’ve got themselves into. The Jews come under that kind of heading also.

  RP: Do you actively work in this sort of area? Do you really lend your support?

  LC: No. No, I give my name if anybody asks for it. I don’t feel that my talents run in those directions. I’ve never disguised the fact that I’m Jewish and in any crisis in Israel I would be there. I was there in the last war and I would be there in another war. I am committed to the survival of the Jewish people. I have a lot of quarrels inside that camp with Jewish leadership and Jewish value and that sort of thing. I am committed to the survival of the Jewish people and I think that survival is threatened in places like the Soviet Union. I think it’s threatened in America on another level. It’s just a tribal feeling. There’s nothing enacted.

  RP: You mentioned that you went back to Israel at the time of the last war and you sang. Can you say a bit more about that? How did you actually take part?

  LC: I just attached myself to an air force entertainment group. We would just drop into little places, like a rocket site, and they would shine their flashlights at us and we would sing a few songs. Or they would give us a Jeep and we would go down the road toward the front and wherever we saw a few soldiers waiting for a helicopter or something like that we would sing a few songs. And maybe back at the airbase we would do a little concert, maybe with amplifiers. It was very informal and very intense. Wherever you saw soldiers you would just stop and sing.

  RP: It strikes me as being rather dangerous. You didn’t feel any personal anxiety about being killed?

  LC: I did once or twice. But you get caught up in the thing. And the desert is beautiful and you think your life is meaningful for a moment or two. And war is wonderful. They’ll never stamp it out. It’s one of the few times people can act their best. It’s so economical in terms of gesture and motion. Every single gesture is precise, every effort is at its maximum. Nobody goofs off. Everybody is responsible for his brother. The sense of community and kinship and brotherhood, devotion. There are opportunities to feel things that you simply cannot feel in modern city life. Very impressive.

  RP: Obviously you found that stimulated you. Did you find it stimulated your writing at all?

  LC: In a little way. But not really. I wrote a song there.

  RP: Wars have in the past been times when people have written great things after or during.

  LC: I didn’t suffer enough. I didn’t lose anyone I knew.

  The conversation at this point turned to Leonard’s experience of singing to patients in mental hospitals. He believes that it is good for a band to play free concerts and he has done a lot of this work in Canada.

  RP: Do you see yourself then as an entertainer or as a therapist?

  LC: I have a lot of admiration for the professional point of view. I think a therapist should be an entertainer. Whatever you are you should be an entertainer first. If you’re going to present yourself to people they have to be entertained. Their imagination has to be engaged and they have to enter into the vortex of imagination and relaxation and suspense that is involved in entertainment.

  RP: I’m thinking that if you go into a group of people and then you go away from it, perhaps without any measure of supervision, it might be difficult. Or would you expect the professional staff to take part in the entertainment as well and then to be able, perhaps to catch up anything that happened as a result of your work with them? It would be a very fleeting visit, wouldn’t it?

  LC: It just takes a tiny moment to receive a scar. It can be with you for the rest of your life. Similarly I think the things that touch us—I don’t know, incidentally, if I’m one of these people, I’m just in a tradition—I’m probably just like a ninth-rate operator in a great tradition. I also have very clear ideas about where I stand in a great tradition. The kind of healing that goes with song or with art or whatever you care to mention is almost impossible to talk about because it happens to one person in an audience. Something out of the work touches them in some way. In any ordinary audience, also. Some connection is made. I don’t think it’s anything that all but the most sensitive doctor or worker could ever pick up on. And certainly, not guaranteed that it will happen to very many people. Mostly it’s just entertainment for an evening. To get through the night.

  RP: I just wondered whether possibly it might not be rather frightening and alarming if this particular spark did happen to strike and you were there, and then you’d gone and whatever had happened wouldn’t have been supported by your presence a
gain. And this is something that could really destroy what little bit of strength they had.

  LC: I agree with you. This certainly happens outside of the hospitals, if you’re dealing, as I do, with a certain kind of material. It happens to even the most casual of pop singers. You don’t have to be dealing with very rarified or specialized material. Every singer has had this experience. Tom Jones has it. The people start to see the work as having a special kind of healing or visionary element and they assume that you are the master and the creator and the engineer of this balm, this unguent, this healing substance, and somehow that contact with you will guarantee the cure. They come forward in a certain kind of way through letter or through the person and, of course, they are doomed to disappointment and after all, of course, the artist himself can’t function in the capacity of a healer, in a professional sense. So it does, as you say, often throw people into states of mind that are difficult. I had this happen just a couple of days ago. Did you see that girl, John? That black girl? Her manuscript, called “A Pyramid of Suffering,” is a document of suffering.

  John Miller [Cohen’s bass player]: Where were you in it?

  LC: All through it. References to my songs. She is a mental patient.

  RP: How about Daphne Richardson, whose letter you had on the back of the Live [Songs] album? Could you say something about her? Because this seems possibly to tie in with this area.

  LC: I knew her first of all through the mails. I try to read everything I get and I was struck by the power of her communications. She was at that time trying to get published a book of poems that were very experimental and were collage poems. And they weren’t by any means inept. They were highly skilled. They were a collage of Dylan, myself, and her own work. And Dylan wouldn’t give her permission to publish his work in scraps. And I did. I entered into this communication with her. I knew there was an edge to her letters that was so fanatic and so intense that she would experience great floods of disturbance. On the other hand, there was something about her mind that I found immensely attractive and delightful.