by Jeff Burger
Then her story started to emerge. She sent me long, long letters and books that she’d written to me and of course there were these excessive kinds of letters that she would write to me that she wanted to come and stay with me or—you know. On the other hand, her doctors and the people in her hospitals that she would come in and out of—they didn’t believe that she was in communication with me at all. They thought that this was a complete pipe dream.
So she was living a completely strange sort of life. They were strapping her down and that sort of thing and she would say, “Leonard Cohen, I’m going to be working on his book.” I said, “I’d like you to illustrate my book”—she was a very fine draughtsman—and I had intended her to illustrate my last book, The Energy of Slaves. She’d be screaming at the doctors, “You’ve got to let me out! I’m illustrating Leonard Cohen’s next book.”
I did go over on my last tour and we arranged to meet and I met her for the first time and she was a very attractive girl in her thirties, and really nice and of a style and bearing that was very close to people that I know. I knew she had experience in mental hospitals. We arranged to do this book together and I looked at more of her drawings and I was very impressed. Then I went back to America. And it was just one period when I was out of touch with my correspondence and I came to this correspondence and I found telegrams and letters saying, “Please help. I’ve been put away again. They won’t believe me. I need your help, please help.” I got on the phone to my agent in London and I said, “Get ahold of Daphne right away, she’s in trouble. I’m already late, it’s a month since these telegrams had come.” I said, “Tell her that the work on the book is on and I want her to start these illustrations. I’ll get the manuscript to her.”
And she’d just committed suicide three days before.
I was just too late.
Another three weeks or a week or anything. She was just holding on to this kind of activity.
RP: Yes, I can see that.
LC: She mentioned me in her suicide note. It was horrible.
RP: Why did you put it on the back of the record?
LC: Oh, she always wanted to be published. She couldn’t get anyone to publish her. The letter was to me. There was a book she wrote to me from the mental hospital. I tell you, it was shattering. A testimony of pain. I’ve never read anything like it.
JM: What’s the difference between that and the “Pyramid of Suffering”?
LC: Very close, but a suffering that is not enlightened. Daphne was like somebody sitting in this room. She was completely aware. There were no blank spots. She was not a compulsive or an obsessive kind of person. She went into pain that was so overwhelming that she couldn’t function. But she always knew where she was and what she was doing. This girl is like under it—it’s really a pyramid—that’s a beautiful description of where she is. She’s buried under a pyramid of suffering like there is no other. Daphne, however, had a sense of humor. She was attractive. She was a much more attractive figure. Warm. This girl was insane. The black girl was insane. There was no question about that. Daphne was … I really blew that. I felt bad about that.
But you’re right, and it’s made me much … the point that you just very delicately suggested that I ought not to meddle around with these things if I’m not going to be there day after day to really follow through. I really feel that way now.
RP: Yes, I think one thing one has to learn as a therapist is to be very careful to prepare one’s patient for the time of parting if that is going to happen. It can be very painful.
Well, perhaps if I could change the subject again and ask you about one or two of your songs. About “Suzanne” and about Pearls Before Swine. Am I right in thinking they recorded that before you did?
LC: [To Miller.] Did you ever know that group?
JM: I never knew that. They recorded “Suzanne” before you?
LC: They recorded “Suzanne,” yes.
JM: But not before you?
LC: Around the same time—very early.
JM: They were very interesting, Pearls Before Swine.
RP: Were they friends of yours? Or how did that come about?
LC: I think the song was just making its way through New York at the time. They just picked up on it. Are they still together? Is there such a group?
RP: I don’t believe so. When I went to school there was a Buffy Sainte-Marie concert and I reviewed it for the paper and she sang “Suzanne.” I wrote in my article that I swore she said, “I’m going to do a song now that I wrote.” Was there any question as to who wrote “Suzanne”?
LC: Not really, no. The song was stolen from me in terms of legal copyright, but nobody has ever suggested I didn’t write it. You may have got it wrong, but she is fantastic. I actually taught it to her mouth to mouth.
JM: She did it great.
LC: She is a greatly underestimated singer. I think she’s one of the greatest.
RP: She has recorded one or two of your songs that you haven’t recorded, is that right?
LC: She did a version of a long passage from Beautiful Losers called “God Is Alive.” She did a beautiful job with that.
RP: And there is a song called “Bells,” I think.
LC: She recorded “Bells.” An early, early version, which we do. I just recorded that now. It’s a version completely changed from the one I taught her.
RP: Could you say something about Nico?
LC: I hope I can see her when we get back to France. Or in London, if she’s in town.
RP: She’s been recording in London.
LC: She’s incredible. She’s a great singer and a great songwriter. Completely disregarded from what I can see. I don’t think she sells fifty records, but I think she’s one of the really original talents in the whole racket.
RP: Is it right that you wrote “Joan of Arc” particularly with her in mind?
LC: Oh, I wouldn’t say that. How did you know that?
RP: It appeared in one of your recent interviews.
LC: Oh really? I don’t remember if that’s true. I know that I was after her—I was sniffing around. I was very taken by Nico in those days. I did write that song around that time.
RP: How about Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground?
LC: I knew those people in New York. When I first came to New York—I guess it was around 1966—Nico was singing at the Dom, which was an Andy Warhol club at the time on Eighth Street. I just stumbled in there one night and I didn’t know any of these people. I saw this girl singing behind the bar. She was a sight to behold. I suppose the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen up to that moment. I just walked up and stood in front of her until people pushed me aside. I started writing songs for her then. She introduced me to Lou Reed at that time. And Lou Reed surprised me greatly because he had a book of my poems. I hadn’t been published in America, and I had a very small audience even in Canada. So when Lou Reed asked me to sign Flowers for Hitler, I thought it was an extremely friendly gesture of his. The Velvet Underground had broken up at the time. He played me his songs. It was the first time I’d heard them. I thought they were excellent—really fine. I used to praise him.
RP: How well did you know him?
LC: I can’t say I know him well at all. He was an early reader of Beautiful Losers, which he thought was a good book. In those days I guess he wasn’t getting very many compliments on his work and I certainly wasn’t. So we told each other how good we were. I liked him immediately because Nico liked him.
RP: Could I ask you about other people in the music business, like Van Morrison?
LC: I’m very fond of his work. I don’t know him. I love his work, as a matter of fact. [To Miller.] Do you?
JM: Great. He’s another one who’s great and will never be a great star and possibly doesn’t want to be.
RP: Could I ask you about the Rolling Stones? Whether you’ve ever had any contact with them, whether you think anything about their music?
LC: I met Mick Jagger once in the lobby of the
Plaza Hotel and he said, “Are you in New York for a poetry reading?”
Some of their songs I like very much. I think it’s wonderful, the phenomenon of the Rolling Stones—the figure of Mick Jagger. They are the bread and wine of the pop groups. I was a little bit older than other people when I came into contact with these figures, and I’d already had my mind blown by older and much more outrageous people that I’d met in my youth, so I wasn’t about to succumb to the kind of fever that they produce in younger people. But I’ve always admired them from the slightly humorous point of view. I never did seriously ask myself if Mick Jagger was the Devil. But I think as figures they’re quite interesting.
RP: You are in some senses rather an alien figure to a lot of people in the music business and I wonder to what extent you do consider yourself as quite separate from it.
LC: I feel totally separate from it. I love the phenomenon, but I don’t live as one of those figures. My own personal style is very, very different. I don’t perform in the same kind of field. My life is completely different and it developed on different grounds that came to my mind much earlier than the pop movement. My lifestyle was formulated in the middle fifties and has changed very little since then. The kinds of rooms that I could find myself in.
RP: Could I ask you about one or two more songs? “The Story of Isaac,” for instance. Could you describe a little how you came to write that? It does include a reference to a father. Is this your father?
LC: It is hard to step outside the center of a song when you’ve written it and explain it to anyone, including yourself. All you know as a writer, as an artist, or as someone who deals and manipulates symbols is whether it has an interior integrity. I think this song does have that kind of interior integrity. It has fathers and sons in it and sacrifice and slaughter, and an extremely honest statement at the end. And that’s all I can say about it.
The antiwar movement claims the song as its own and that’s fine. The Fascist Party movement could also claim it as its own, and that’s fine. I know that song is true. It does say something about fathers and sons and that curious place, generally over the slaughtering block where generations meet and have their intercourse. As to its meaning or anything else, I don’t know, except that it exists as a psychic reality. That’s about all I can say about it.
RP: There wasn’t a particular circumstance at the time that you wrote it?
LC: I think probably that I did feel that one of the reasons that we have wars was so the older men can kill off the younger ones, so that there’s no competition for the women. Or for their position. I do think that this is true. One of the reasons we do have wars periodically is so the older men can have the women. Also, completely remove the competition in terms of their own institutional positions. I also understand that the story of Isaac in the Bible has other significances, which have to do with faith and absurdity and what they used to call, in the fifties, existential religion.
Outside of all those cultural attachments, which the song has gathered to itself as it moves through society in its limping way, I just know that as an experience it’s authentic psychically. It doesn’t betray itself. That’s all I mean. The song doesn’t end with a plea for peace. It doesn’t end with a plea for sanity between the generations. It ends saying, “I’ll kill you if I can, I will help you if I must, I will kill you if I must, I will help you if I can.” That’s all I can say about it. My father died when I was nine, that’s the reason I put that one of us had to go.
RP: Would you like to say anything about “The Butcher”?
LC: “The Butcher” is another one of those little songs that has that kind of psychic integrity. You could dignify it with a religious interpretation. I’m not interested in that, if people want to do that. If they want to dignify it or elaborate it on altars or dissecting tables or whatever it is—it’s cool with me. Everybody’s job should be protected. To me, when the energy is somehow generated within somebody to create something, the thing has to stand or fall by its own internal construction. To me that’s another little song that has an internal authenticity or accuracy that allows it to exist.
RP: How about drugs?
LC: I don’t use them myself. I think they’re very bad for you. I think grass is terrible. I don’t say this to anybody because nobody believes me. There’s a great grass culture and far be it from me to intrude upon the pleasures of the young. I smoked grass for a long time. I know what it is, I know what it does, and I think we’re a culture that is not yet wise enough to handle it. I’ve spoken to Moroccans who’ve observed Americans smoking and they think we’re crazy. And they smoke a lot.
JM: Why?
LC: Because we smoke all the time.
JM: We smoke less than they?
LC: Much, much more. We smoke all the time.
JM: Am I wrong to think that in Morocco all they do is sit around with hash pipes?
LC: I am sure that there are those who do that. I could find those guys in Ireland who sit around the pubs drinking all day. But by and large we handle our alcohol. But American youth will smoke all the grass they have, all the time, until it’s gone. I think there are other peoples who handle it better. I don’t want to make a point about this. As far as I can see, they’re not in such good shape either. The inscrutable Orientals are not that great in the handling of these problems either. Obviously people use grass and write beautiful things on it. I don’t dispute any of the excellent and magnificent products that the thing has done. To me personally, I have seen the damage that it has done to myself and others. I don’t think it’s all that great. And that’s the one [marijuana] that’s supposed to be harmless.
RP: I asked you that after we were talking about “The Butcher” because of the line in “The Butcher.”
LC: I have used drugs. I have used almost everything that I could ever get my hands on. I have taken them in every possible way. I think that drugs without a sacrament, without a ritual, without a really great understanding of their power are dangerous. I’m not talking about banning or not using drugs. I’m talking about the casual and indiscriminate and social use of drugs can be very, very dangerous. And is dangerous. I think that LSD is by far the most powerful substance in society. There’s no question about that.
RP: Is it true that you were in a monastery?
LC: I have ties with certain monasteries that I visit from time to time.
RP: Do you visit as a retreat or do you visit as a novice, or would you consider taking vows?
LC: I visit them as a friend of the abbot rather than in any other capacity.
RP: What order is the monastery?
LC: There are one or two Trappist monasteries that I have visited and one or two Buddhist monasteries that I have visited. I don’t like to speak too much about it—it tends to advertise myself as a virtuous person or something and my feeling has nothing to do with virtue. There are a couple of men who are very strong and interesting, whose company I enjoy tremendously. They happen to be in the religious industry or whatever you want to call it. They put you through changes, they make you work and you’re not likely to sleep more than three or four hours a night.
RP: You observe their rules?
LC: Oh yes. I observe their rules. If you want to study with a very good professor at Heidelberg you’d have to learn German. It’s just their vocabulary. I’m more than willing to learn their vocabulary in order to enjoy their company. It’s just the way they operate. It’s something they’ve inherited from their own tradition and are very good at it. Outside of that tradition is another situation. Within their tradition they really flower and they flourish. To get the benefits of their personalities you have to learn their vocabulary.
RP: We had a broadcast last Sunday—or was it the Sunday before?—in which Mick Jagger had to pick twelve records. They were really very interesting because he picked some classical Indian music which he liked to listen to, and as one can imagine a lot of black American music. But you probably couldn’t do anything like that?
LC: I’m not too interested in music. I don’t have a record player most of the time. I’m not that close to that side of things. If you asked me if there were some songs that I would like to remember, that I would like not to forget if the world was going to be overwhelmed by a vast amnesia, six songs that I would like to remember, I might be able to do that. But in terms of records and books—it would really be an effort to sit down and write an authentic and accurate list.
It is unlikely that we shall see Leonard Cohen touring in Britain again in the near future. He plans to reappear every few years to show us what he is doing. He believes that an entertainer is likely to develop an inflated idea of his own importance if he is constantly recording and touring. In any case, it takes him about three years to complete a song. He does not like the commercial hassles of the music business. In fact, he prefers his earlier film, Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen, to his latest, Bird on a Wire.
The British tour ended at the Albert Hall on September 19th. He did not say good-bye. His last words to the audience were:
“Thank you for remembering the songs which I wrote, all those years ago, in a room.”
INTERVIEW
JORDI SIERRA I FABRA | October 12–14, 1974, interview | 1978, Leonard Cohen (Spain)
In September and October of 1974, Cohen supported New Skin for the Old Ceremony with 29 concerts in Belgium, France, England, Denmark, Germany, Holland, Austria, and Spain. Two of the last of these gigs took place in Barcelona in mid-October, and famed Spanish journalist Jordi Sierra i Fabra used the occasion to have a wide-ranging, multiday conversation with the artist. The interview, which was translated to English by Jane Danko, appeared four years later in the Spanish book Leonard Cohen, which was edited by Alberto Manzano. —Ed.