Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen

by Jeff Burger

  “I said, ‘I know it was enormously successful, but I haven’t seen it. Is there anything else that you’ve done that I might know?’ ‘Well, I did a picture that’s been completely buried, that you wouldn’t know about. It was called Brewster McCloud.’

  “I said, ‘Listen, I just came out of the theater, I saw it twice. You can have anything of mine you want!’

  “I did do some additional music—only one thing that was used. I did a guitar background for a little soliloquy by Warren Beatty; it’s just barely perceptible but that is one of the nicest things I ever did. I love that piece.

  “Then I saw the picture, the finished picture without the music. The soundtrack hadn’t been completed. And I said, ‘Listen, man, I’ve got to tell you—if we ever work together again I want you to know you can get an honest opinion from me—I don’t like it.’ He was quite hurt, as I would be too, but …

  “Then I went to the theater in Montreal, and I saw the picture with the music and everything, and it was great! I called Altman in London—it took me two days to track him down—and told him, ‘Forget everything I said, it’s really beautiful.’”

  Cohen’s life and his art seem to fit together very nicely. A sense of who and where he’s been and what he’s been doing began to emerge for me as our conversation ranged across different subjects:

  About being a Canadian:

  “The Canadians are like the Jews—they’re continually examining their identity. We’re on the edge of a great empire, and this throws the whole thing into a very special kind of relief. Canadians have always understood that we have to go along with the United States to a certain extent. But even though article after article [in the Canadian press] threatens us with the extinction of our identity, I don’t think anybody in Canada seriously believes that we’re going to become Americans. It’s a curious kind of paranoia.

  “I live in Montreal, which is a French city, in Quebec, which is a French country—especially now, it is a country. I live as a minority writer, almost in exile, because there is no English writing community where I live. These are very special Canadian problems, which to me form the Canadian character, because we’re very much involved in this notion of what is minority and what is majority; and yet while these questions are in the air, it seems that everybody has space. Because we don’t have the melting-pot notion at all in Canada, we have a federal system that runs right down into the psyche of the country.

  “So in a sense I live like a foreigner in my own city, cut off by the fact that I don’t speak French that well. I can get by, but it’s not a tongue I could ever move around in in a way that would satisfy the appetites of the mind or the heart.

  “And because I live in French Canada, we’re estranged from the writers who live in Toronto and Winnipeg and Vancouver. So all these things are curious walls that either insulate or protect or exclude, depending on how you look at it.

  “I don’t think anybody knows me as a writer or as a singer in Montreal. Quebec has its own movie industry, its own music, its own theater; it’s much more lively than Canada. And of course the language my books are translated into is not Quebecois, it’s French, and the Quebecois have a certain superiority that their language is a little more vital. In any case, it is different. Certainly the rhythms are different. Michel Garnot, who lives up the street from me, has always said my stuff—my colloquial and often experimental English—should be translated into Quebecois, not into French.

  “Montreal is a good base for me, my center in the world. We have a very little house, two or three rooms, in an immigrant section of town. It’s mostly Portuguese and Greek immigrant workers, right in the middle of the city, the English to the west of us and the French to the east. Several friends of mine that I grew up with also live on that street. We bought a couple of houses that stand together.

  “I spend time in Greece, in Tennessee, in Mexico, but I always go back to Montreal.”

  About the subject matter of the songs:

  “A lot of people wonder if you are as depressed as your songs sound; and if so, why?” I asked. “It is the popular image. Where do these depths of despair come from?”

  “I can’t really answer that,” Cohen said. “I think that when people hear a song, they hear it in a realm where these questions are irrelevant. It’s only after they stop listening that the questions arise. The songs themselves don’t partake of a description like elation or depression. It’s like a sexual embrace—there are no questions until you step outside of the embrace, separate yourself from it.”

  I have to agree. I don’t find Cohen’s songs depressing. I once lived with a lady who played his songs on the guitar all the time when she was depressed. She could relate to them, but I assume she liked them because they gave her comfort; I don’t think they depressed her further. The blues as an art form didn’t come from the black man being more miserable than the white man, but rather from his being more honest with himself about it. I changed my approach.

  “There’s a real quality of intimacy, it seems to me,” I began, “in everything you’ve written that I’m aware of—intimacy in terms of what you’re saying about yourself or just in the nature of the situation you’re describing. Is this something you feel art or writing should do, or something you find you have to do, or … ?”

  “Of course, one is aware that there are different degrees, different styles of approaching, in other men and other works, but I’ve never had an aesthetic that commanded me to approach my material in a certain way. It is my style, it’s the only way I know how to talk; it’s not something I’ve planned or that I thought was better than a more general or more withdrawn or more objective approach.

  “I always thought I was being objective. I always thought I was being clear. I always thought I was being factual. It’s just a relative sense that it’s intimate. In my own interior landscape it’s not intimate enough, it’s still much too far from the interior reality. That’s what I’m working on.

  “I have some songs now in the works that I think are intimate. I feel that these are getting there, but they still aren’t … In a sense, intimacy has not been one of the qualities that I have consciously taken as a goal, or even as a guideline; it’s more accuracy and authenticity of experience.

  “I’ve always tried to make a documentary of the interior landscape. I say to myself, ‘What really happened? What is really happening now, that you are thinking of this woman?’ That’s what I’ve tried to do, is make it authentic and accurate. And precise.

  “That’s where the language comes, of course—one word leads to the next, and as you know, when words happen to be your medium they have their own contagion and their own susceptibility and their own invitations and their own hospitality to other words. You move into the world of language, and it has its own rules and laws.

  “But in terms of the subject matter and the approach, it’s always been a documentary approach, an attempt to establish the authentic events.”

  About his early days:

  “Before coming to New York, I’d performed now and then, in a very limited way; I’d gone around Canada, read and sang. My own early manhood, my early twenties, late teens, were all spent in song. There was no recording or anything like that going on, but that was the style of an evening; they were always musical. We would sit around and we would sing.

  “There was also a very fine group of poets in the city, where I got my training. We’d put out our own books, our own magazines. There was no contract or deals made with any other part of the world. We did consider ourselves self-sufficient, and the training was quite rigorous.”

  “This was in Montreal?” I asked. “Did you travel to speak of in those early years?”

  “I always thought that Montreal was one of the sacred cities of the mind, and I never felt any desire at all to travel out of Montreal. It was not until I was twenty-four, which is quite late in terms of traveling, that I left the city. I went to Europe. I’d gotten an award for a book I had written, Let U
s Compare Mythologies, a very early book of poems.

  “I went to London and then—I’m not a very good traveler—I went to Greece and I stayed there for the next eight years. I’d never been in a sunny place and I’d never known what the sun was; so I fell in love with the sun, and a blonde girl, and a white house.”

  “Were the novels written during that period?”

  “Yeah, most of the work was written there; and even now, though the new songs were at least three or four or even five years in the making, it was in Greece last summer that those ten or twelve golden days came when I was able to see the end of the songs, see them to completion. My house in Greece, which I still have—I’ve heard it described in the European press as a ‘villa,’ which always amuses me, this little house up on a hill—it’s always been a good place to work in.”

  “It’s not difficult to maintain a house in Greece,” I asked, “either politically or economically?”

  “A lot of people criticized me, although I moved out of my house at the time of the coup in Greece and I stopped living there then—I can’t acquire any virtue or merit from this act, because it wasn’t political. There was something in the country that changed, and in myself, and I rarely went to Greece after that.

  “But it had nothing to do with politics; I think the Greek people are in a sense above their own politics—that’s a supercilious thing to say, but … the average guy there, he’ll turn the picture over to the next leader, go down and wave his flag for the next governor, with a sense of, I think, profound contempt and sophistication about the whole process. Because they’re very much in touch with their own existence.”

  “You never felt you were treated bad, as an American/Canadian?”

  “No, I got there with the very first wave of foreigners, when there were only five or six of us, and we were a novelty. We were their entertainment, you know, our goings on with drinking and girls; we were their theater. They gave us credit and they were very nice to us, very helpful …

  “I had a little record player that ran on batteries. I would work outside on my terrace, and if I would forget how fast the sun was moving and forget to move, the record would melt, right over the turntable. I used to play Ray Charles all the time and I lost a couple of Ray Charles records. I still have them; they’re just like Dali watches, just dripped over the side of the turntable.”

  About being a novelist:

  “To what extent,” I wondered, “are you conscious of yourself as a novelist?”

  “Well, I’ve never been intimidated by form…. What we call a novel, that is, a book of prose where there are characters and developments and changes and situations, that’s always attracted me, because in a sense it is the heavyweight arena. I like it—it frightens me, from that point of view—because of the regime that is involved in novel writing. I can’t be on the move. It needs a desk, it needs a room and a typewriter, a regime. And I like that very much.”

  “You haven’t published a work of this sort since Beautiful Losers?”

  “No, I haven’t. This will be the first book of prose since then. The book is called A Woman Being Born—that’s mostly what I’m working on now. I thought it was done but … it keeps suggesting a more and more massive form, so I go along with it. A lot of it is by dictation—I found that the early parts all start, ‘Whatever you say … ’”

  About being more popular in Europe than America:

  I mentioned a novelist friend who was experiencing the same thing, and Cohen responded: “I think this is the traditional path of gifted people in America. It’s obvious. This is what happened to Faulkner, to Frost, to Miller, to a lot of jazz musicians. Americans are very, very provincial. They really are reluctant to accept new things. They are totally ignorant about what is going on in other countries. These countries in Europe are old, old cultures, with a tremendous sense of tolerance and curiosity built into them. So they’re very interested in new American products. We’re not at all interested in theirs, or in our own.”

  About critics:

  “I seem to be caught in the critical establishment between two critical houses. On one side, the literary people are very resentful that I have made money in the rock world. This suggests to them somehow that I have sold out.

  “And on the other side, a lot of people in the rock establishment, in their articles I notice that they always suggest that I don’t know anything about music, that my tunes are very limited, as if I couldn’t work in an augmented chord if I really thought it was needed. And that my voice is very thin, as if we were still in the days of Caruso or something. They apply standards to me that they’ve never applied to other singers in the field.

  “Whereas in Europe this doesn’t exist, there’s no energy wasted on placing me, because the culture is wide enough to include a figure like myself, without any sense of abrasion.”

  “Does what’s written about you have any kind of effect on you or, do you think, on the musician in general?” I wondered.

  “At this point, yes, I am interested in the market journey of the product; but I’m very, very interested also in the mind of the reviewers, how they change over the decades, and how a man approaches new work. Whether he approaches it in a spirit of curiosity, charity, interest, or as a vehicle for his own self-aggrandizement, his own career. Whether he uses it as an opportunity to display humanism or cruelty … I mean, to me, the critic is on trial at this point.”

  (On Cohen’s recent album he himself is put on trial in at least two songs; and he is judged harshly, in one case by the world—“The judge has no choice: a singer must die for the lie in his voice” [“A Singer Must Die”]—and in the other case by himself—“I never asked but I heard you cast your lot along with the poor. How come I overheard your prayer that you be this and nothing more than just some grateful, faithful woman’s favorite singing millionaire, the patron saint of envy and the grocer of despair, working for the Yankee dollar” [“Field Commander Cohen”]. Clearly his own judgment is the harsher, albeit less permanent, of the two. Delightful threads of self-mockery and self-awareness run through the new songs, which are still primarily concerned with the theme of the intense active interrelatedness of male and female beings.)

  About the singer’s sensibility, 1966–1975:

  “I was unaware of rock music when I first came with my songs to New York, I didn’t really know what was happening. I was on my way to Nashville, which I knew a lot more about, because in Canada we listened to a lot of country and western music, and I used to be in a country and western group when I was quite young.

  “So I thought I would head down to Nashville. I thought I could write some songs in that area. This was mostly an economic consideration; I’d published a lot of books but I’d never sold very many. Well, I hit New York and I found myself in the middle of this, what they called ‘folksong’ scene…. It was about 1966. There was Judy Collins, Phil Ochs—I met Mary Martin, a girl from Toronto, who knew me as a writer, and she was working at [folk musician manager Albert] Grossman’s office and trying to get started on her own. She knew Judy Collins as a friend and I sang some songs for her …

  “But I was really very moved when I came to New York by what was going on. There was a sensibility—not in any way new to me, because I was already thirty-two or thirty-three years old—but a sensibility that I thought I was quite alone in. It wasn’t quite Kerouac, it wasn’t quite Ginsberg, it was something after that. I had written books that I felt had that kind of sensibility. And I came to New York and there, five or ten years later, I found that or a compatible sensibility flourishing! So I was very happy. I felt very much at home.

  “I felt the exhilaration of the moment, and I suppose I succumbed to the expectations of the moment, and subsequently to the disappointments of the moment. But I think those are things also that have to do with just the age of the man involved. You do learn a little bit about the world from twenty-five to thirty-five. It is the real educational period, I think, when you do enter into manhood a
nd you do see that things tend to come and go, ideas, spiritual invitations, self-improvement rackets … and that there is another strain of human existence that continues, that is not to be despised. I mean just birth, marriage, death. And that these larger movements seem to be the sounds that really do orchestrate humanity.

  “So at the same time where you indulge yourself with certain feelings of paranoia, disappointment, disillusion, on the other hand another kind of information establishes itself in the heart and the mind and you feel that this is the world and you’re happy to know it.

  “And then you maybe throw your weight behind other kinds of possibilities. You can begin to understand other kinds of human institutions— like marriage, like work, like order. You begin to withdraw … although part of the emotion will always be attached to anarchy, to chaos, to wild creativity, to notions like that. You begin to balance those concepts against other ones, like law and order. And I mean it in the real sense, not just a political slogan but the real law and the real order that seems to govern our existence.”

  About songs and poems and performing:

  “Do the songs and poems,” I asked, “clearly differentiate themselves for you?”

  “Very rarely one crosses into the other realm. But the songs are by and large designed as songs, and the poems designed as poems.” (Leonard gave me a hardcover copy of his recent—and largely ignored—book of poems, The Energy of Slaves. “Would you mind throwing the cover away?” he asked. I did so, and read the book with pleasure and much shock of recognition. The trouble with the cover was it made it look like a book by Leonard Nimoy.) “It could be read as one poem, one long poem, this book.”

  “Do you prefer to write songs or poems?”

  “It depends on what part of the being is operative. Of course it’s wonderful to write a song. I mean there is nothing like a song, and you sing it to your woman, or to your friend. People come to your house, and then you sing it in front of an audience and you record it. I mean it has an amazing thrust. And a poem, it waits on the page, and it moves in a much more secret way through the world. And that also is … Well, they each have their own way of travel.”