Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen

by Jeff Burger

  Steve Venright: Can you say what effect on your life Zen has had?

  Leonard Cohen: It’s just house cleaning. From time to time the dust and the dirty clothes accumulate in the corners and it’s time to clean up.

  SV: That reminds me of a poem of yours in Death of a Lady’s Man—which I think is called “How to Speak Poetry”—where you’re saying that [speaking poetry] is analogous to going over a laundry list.

  LC: Yeah—nothing special.

  SV: But does that apply to the songs, with your singing voice? I’d say there’s so much emotion in your songs …

  LC: Oh, I see what you mean—that’s a good question. [Ponders.] I also go for natural expression, in singing.

  SV: You seem to be placing some focus on Canada these days, as far as work goes. Are you involved in any projects at the moment abroad?

  LC: No, I’m not. I’ve always been a bit of a patriot and I wanted to reconnect with Canada because I haven’t really done anything here in a long time. I’ve lived here, but all my concert tours in the last seven or eight years have been in Europe.

  SV: And I think you’d explain that as a matter of the audience already being there.

  LC: Exactly.

  SV: Whereas in Canada perhaps it would take more effort …

  LC: It’s also much more expensive because the space between the cities is so much farther. And another thing is, I think that because of what I’ve experienced in Quebec—that is, more or less an attack on the language I work in—I think that had something to do with me wanting to work in this country in English.

  SV: Do you plan to tour with the album eventually?

  LC: I would like to. I haven’t toured for three years now, and I don’t know if it has to do with the album, but sometimes you just get to miss the road and the kind of friendships that grow up when you’re playing with people night after night.

  SV: That’s good to hear. How does the reception to your work in general differ from, say, in Europe?

  LC: This city has always been very warm to my work, from the very beginning. From the very first book I put out there’s been extremely generous attention to my work here.

  SV: How does Toronto differ from Montreal in either respect for what you’re doing or attention given to it?

  LC: Well, Montreal to me is like Kyoto or Jerusalem.

  SV: The Jerusalem of the north.

  LC: Yes. It’s a holy city, and they’re properly not concerned with this sort of secular expression. They have heavier things on their mind, like the destiny of their blood and things like that. And Toronto is the cultural center of the country—I suppose they don’t want to hear this in Edmonton—so it’s appropriate that I work here.

  SV: You were very involved in the pop culture of the sixties. How do you feel about the present pop culture that has been generated or engendered by punk rock and approaches like that?

  LC: I feel there’s been a general vulgarization of society—which I can’t get too upset about one way or the other.

  SV: You’ve probably been accused of it yourself at one point or another.

  LC: Oh, I’ve been accused of selling out ever since I played a guitar chord in public.

  SV: I guess by “vulgar” I was referring to responses you received to Beautiful Losers in particular. The sacred and the profane …

  LC: That elegant book?

  SV: That’s going back a ways, I realize.

  LC: It’s still around. I guess “vulgar” is the wrong … things seem rather dull. I think we might hope for vulgarity. It seems rather dull and repetitive. But maybe that’s just the observations of middle age.

  SV: In what was intended as a private statement about your book Flowers for Hitler you once wrote, “All I ask is that you put it in the hands of my generation and it will be recognized.” That was almost twenty years ago. Has your work attained the nature of recognition you would hope it to?

  LC: Yes, and beyond. And beyond.

  SV: It seems there was a change in either course or maybe sentiment when you came out with Recent Songs. There seems to be a peace in that album that maybe wasn’t visible before.

  LC: What was that?

  SV: I just felt that either you were becoming a little more at peace with anxiety, or at least that there was a level to the album which was less aggressive. [Cohen nods agreement.] Do you feel this is sort of a natural course, or is there anything you attribute it to?

  LC: I think I’ve stopped whining.

  SV: [Lengthy pause.] How does that feel?

  LC: A lot better! [Laughter.]

  SV: I don’t know if this is a heavy question or not, but I believe you said in the past that Beauty no longer mattered to you as much as Truth did. Do you find yourself ever sacrificing Beauty for the sake of Truth, or vice versa? Or is that impossible to discern?

  LC: I feel the conversation flies in the face of Keats’s famous observation that “Beauty is Truth and Truth Beauty is all you need know,” or something like that—the end of “Grecian Urn.” I don’t know how I was ever tricked into talking about Truth and Beauty anyhow! [Laughter.]

  SV: You’ve probably said as much on that subject through your work as anyone would need, in this lifetime, to know. Well, what’s next? Do you see beyond December at this time with the album, the Book of Psalms [Original title for what became Book of Mercy. —Ed.], and the opera? Or are you going at that as it comes to you?

  LC: More or less as it comes to you. And as you get older, with a certain gratitude that it’s coming to you at all.

  SV: Is it coming to you as strongly as ever?

  LC: I meant just the time. You mean inspiration or work or the capacity to work.

  SV: I’m thinking along the lines of the hunger, of the necessity to create.

  LC: Yeah, I feel that very strong. And after a while you realize that when you’re in good health, part of that good health is the song.

  COHEN CLIP

  On His Responsibility to Audiences

  “I think about that a lot…. You think about whether you’ve failed … whether you’ve been a responsible voice or whether you’ve blown it or what you can do to set things right. It leads to all kinds of crises of feeling.”

  —from interview with Peter Gzowski, Morningside,

  CBC Radio, May 1, 1984

  RADIO INTERVIEW

  VICKI GABEREAU | May 1984 , interview | September 6, 1984, Variety Tonight, CBC (Canada)

  Cohen still wasn’t touring when he talked with Vicki Gabereau for a Canadian radio broadcast, but he was at work on Various Positions, which would be released in Canada on December 11, 1984, and would introduce such classics as “Hallelujah” and “If It Be Your Will.” (As noted earlier, Columbia at the time declined to issue the album in the United States.) In this rambling conversation, Gabereau managed to coax Cohen into discussing everything from his kids to his exercise habits to his taste in clothes. —Ed.

  Announcer: Leonard Cohen is probably a Canadian legend. Whether you see him as a soulful poet, a successful novelist, an habitué of Montreal bistros, or an expatriate on a Greek island, you probably know something about the man. He has eight albums out now and when Vicki spoke with him last May he was still working on his latest recording and he had just published his eighth book of poetry, The Book of Memory. [Actually The Book of Mercy. —Ed.] Vicki was pleased to meet him—finally.

  Vicki Gabereau: I’ve often wondered if you really existed. I’ve seen you in performance but years ago and … you’re so ethereal. You’d disappear all the time.

  Leonard Cohen: Well, it takes a long time to prepare the work that I put out so I generally don’t do anything for three or four years between anything I’ve done.

  VG: Does it alarm your publishers when you don’t appear for six years or something?

  LC: No. Well … I bump into [publisher] Jack McLelland and have a drink with him from time to time so we know each other. We know that each of us exists.

  VG: And eventually something wil
l be produced.

  LC: Hopefully.

  VG: After each and every time that you do produce something, do you feel as if maybe this is the last one? Does that ever occur to you?

  LC: You’re always grateful for what you get and there’s always anxiety that it’s all used up.

  VG: When did you start writing these fifty [poems in the book]?

  LC: About two years ago. It took about a year to assemble. And they’re the result of a certain kind of place that I found myself for three or four years when I felt the need to look into my own traditions and scriptures and roots.

  VG: Do you make that decision one afternoon walking down the street?

  LC: No, I don’t think this is a book you can write on the basis of a decision. You either find yourself up against the wall in some kind of trouble and this is the only thing that can penetrate the silence that you find yourself in [or not].

  VG: I would think that the order in which these are found now is not necessarily the order that they were written.

  LC: It’s more or less the order but there are things that had to be moved around.

  VG: Do you remember which one you did first? I have a bet with myself but which one?

  LC: No, I don’t recall. It was one of the early ones.

  VG: I thought it might be number thirty-three. Do you know them by heart, which one number thirty-three is? It’s the one to your son, a prayer about your son.

  LC: That one I remember very well. That wasn’t the first, no, but I remember the circumstances of that one very much.

  VG: Was there any great joy in preparing these? Did you feel relieved each time you would prepare one?

  LC: I felt a certain release because they are prayers. It’s difficult to talk about this but in the midst of the writing, the prayer is answered and that’s when the psalm ends—when the deliverance comes.

  VG: And you feel the release?

  LC: You feel the release, yes.

  VG: Where did you write these? In any particular place?

  LC: I wrote these mostly in a little trailer. I was living in a trailer in the south of France in the countryside.

  VG: Like a caravan?

  LC: A caravan, yeah.

  VG: In a camping ground?

  LC: No, it was on a piece of property that was owned by someone I knew and they just let me park it at the corner. It was great.

  VG: I’ve been in France quite a bit. I used to be married to a Frenchman so we would make the yearly trek to visit the mother and father and I would look at the camping grounds and I would think, “What a horror.” They were cheek by jowl, these little caravans, and they would go from living cheek by jowl into the same situation, always dusty and—

  LC: —and right on the edge of the road.

  VG: Just a nightmare. I could never figure out how people could do that but I guess escape is escape, isn’t it?

  LC: Yeah.

  VG: We were going to ask you to read some of these things but I think that it’s not the right condition, sitting in the studio, to do this.

  LC: I’ve tried once or twice on this book tour. Interviewers have asked me to read it but you really freeze because these are about as personal as you can get and it’s very hard to pray in public.

  VG: I must say, you’ve never been prone to secrecy about what you do and the way you have lived, but this really goes through the core. It is so personal. It is devastating.

  LC: It is an attempt to speak from the deepest place.

  VG: Do you think that that takes a certain kind of bravery? Reviewers have all said that it was extremely bold of you to do this.

  LC: I sometimes worried about the indiscretion of the thing. I thought, first of all, there’s a very good Book of Psalms that we already have and there’s no urgency to produce another one. But it was the only thing I could say and that confers on it a certain legitimacy. And I know that they’re true and I think that they could be useful to one or two people here and there.

  VG: I would think so. I think they’re quite uplifting.

  LC: Well, one is driven into these kinds of words that are unfashionable but they saved me—

  VG: From what?

  LC: From despair. I don’t think you approach this subject unless you’re driven to it, unless all the other avenues of expression are blocked.

  VG: You were going to call it the Book of Psalms, but you changed your mind, I take it.

  LC: Yeah, because first of all, I wanted to avoid a reference to the great book that David wrote and all of them are not properly psalms, so I tried to stay away from that.

  VG: When are they not properly psalms?

  LC: Well, I think that psalms by their nature have to have an element of rejoicing and though that’s not entirely absent, I think these are more conversations with the absolute. They find themselves in a certain kind of intimacy that involves doubt, involves anger, involves despair, and asks for help, where I think the psalms are more of a celebration.

  VG: Yes. Were there more than fifty?

  LC: There were a few more than fifty but some of them weren’t as true. And on assembling them it became very, very clear—it wasn’t a difficult choice. Some of them just didn’t ring [true].

  VG: Might they later, reworked?

  LC: I don’t think I would rework these. I was ready to stay in this landscape as long as it was necessary. I don’t think it’s one you want to return to and as soon as the deliverance came, the inspiration went.

  VG: Do you still go on your retreat?

  LC: Well, I’ve been studying with an old Japanese gentleman for many years who’s a friend.

  VG: With whom you drink—

  LC: With whom I drink cognac. He taught me how to drink. People ask me what did I learn from him: how to drink cognac.

  VG: How do you drink it? A lot of it?

  LC: A lot is one of the aspects. He’s just become a close friend. It’s nothing special outside of a friendship. I’ve been fortunate to have friendships with people of other generations up and down. It’s just nice to have an older guy around to have—

  VG: Yeah, they seem to know things.

  LC: They know a bit more than you do.

  VG: Yeah, they sure do. But what I don’t understand is how one can sit—I have trouble with five minutes but I guess that’s because I’m ill-skilled to sit for sixteen hours.

  LC: Well, they say that the Zen people are the marines of the spiritual world. If you have that kind of nature that is attracted to the ordeal or to a certain vigorous kind of practice then that’s a place for you but there’s a saying in Zen, “Better not to begin.”

  VG: [Laughs.] Than to blow it?

  LC: It’s a severe practice and it’s really not for everybody, and the fact that it’s difficult is no guarantee of its effectiveness. There are many traditions around and it’s a matter of finding one in which you can dissolve yourself for a little while.

  VG: I think the first time you went you weren’t convinced.

  LC: The first time I went I couldn’t believe it because there was this Japanese master and there was a German abbot and it was on the top of a mountain and we were marching around in the snow at three in the morning. I thought it was the revenge of World War II. I got out of it as fast as I could but something about it stayed in my mind and I started coming back more and more frequently until I began to understand what it was about.

  VG: What is it about? Please—you tell me. Oh, Leonard, you must know. [Laughs.] What does it all mean?

  LC: It’s just a matter of getting straight with yourself from time to time. These decisions are not made out of luxury. There are times when you just feel that you have to do a little exercise.

  VG: Do you do any physical exercise? You don’t appear to be a tennis player.

  LC: I’m pretty tough.

  VG: Is that so? [Laughs.] In what area?

  LC: Until very recently, when I messed up my knee, I used to work out every day and then when I messed up my knee, I took up lig
ht weightlifting. But then I messed up my back. My knee’s in pretty good shape now so I’m going to try to get back—

  VG: You can get new parts. I was watching television only this morning when they told me I could get new knees.

  LC: I like [Canadian novelist] Mordy Richler’s book about that. Did you ever read that book of his? It’s about this millionaire that keeps a kind of harem of people whose livers and kidneys he uses. It’s a wonderful book.

  VG: Yeah, it’s a good thought, too. Perhaps if we were born two hundred years hence, we could have everything replaced. I think that we’ve missed that boat.

  LC: Yeah. I think whatever the span allotted us is sufficient. I wouldn’t want—

  VG: Sufficiently more for some than for others. [There is a gap in the recording here. Apparently Julian Bream’s recording of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez is played. —Ed.] The Julian Bream thing, Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez. Leonard Cohen, he chose that. That was great, wasn’t it?

  LC: Very beautiful.

  VG: You may think that this is blasphemous to say but I remember when I was a kid my dad took me to the movie, the only movie he ever really took me to, and it was El Cid. You remember that movie?

  LC: No.

  VG: You weren’t going to movies like that, I guess. Anyway, they played that thing all through the whole picture and I sobbed and carried on. It is a tearjerker, isn’t it?

  LC: Yeah, it’s very, very emotional.

  VG: Is that what you listen to? Do you listen to a lot of music?

  LC: Well, I’ve been moving around a lot. I don’t carry cassettes. But that is a piece I like to put on from time to time. A taxi driver was playing it in his car the other day and that’s why I was thinking of it.

  VG: That’s nice for a change. Usually they’ve got the country-and-western music on, which I don’t mind either but it must have been a relief.

  LC: It was completely unexpected. A very tough New York taxi driver talking out of the side of his mouth with a cigar and he says, “Yeah, do you wanna hear the variations now?”

  VG: [Laughs.] I love it. Tell me something: where are your papers? Where are all your things from all of the years gone by? Have you given them to the university?