Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen

by Jeff Burger

  After performing for much of the first half of 1985, Cohen again largely disappeared from public life. There were no new albums that year or in the two years that followed, nor were there concerts or many interviews.

  But there were a few, including one interesting discussion with journalist Robert O’Brian, who spoke with Cohen by phone in January 1987. “He was in Los Angeles,” O’Brian told me. “When I said it was an honor to speak with him, he replied, ‘I thank you for the opportunity.’ So Old World. A gentleman. ‘I thank you.’ Throughout the interview, I could hear him taking pulls from his cigarette.” —Ed.

  Leonard Cohen, Montreal-born poet, novelist, and songwriter, became something of a cult figure when his novel, Beautiful Losers, appeared in the midsixties. The content was heady and dynamic, absorbed as it was in sexuality and salvation. In 1968 [Actually, 1967. —Ed.], at the tender age of thirty-four, Cohen released his first album, simply titled Songs of Leonard Cohen. This album is an indisputable classic among purveyors of the acoustic song form. Cohen’s “singing” voice, a deep, solemn monotone, nearly devoid of melody, has become his trademark.

  When asked about his future plans, Cohen repeats the Middle Eastern saying: “The devil laughs when we speak of tomorrow.”

  Robert O’Brian: You have a reputation for being a devout yet sensuous man. There are those who believe that spirituality involves the renunciation of sex.

  Leonard Cohen: I don’t have that view. I don’t think it’s appropriate for our Western culture. Perhaps, at a certain point, it was appropriate to Eastern cultures, but even now the Roman Catholic church is experiencing great revision on the celibacy of priests. I don’t think it’s essential for salvation, for the mercy and grace of God, to shun those activities. In the Jewish tradition, of course, one is encouraged to be fruitful and multiply and both the procreational and recreational aspects of sexual activity are affirmed.

  RO: In “The Captain” [from Various Positions], you sing, “Complain, complain, that’s all you do, ever since we lost. If it’s not the crucifixion, then it’s the Holocaust.”

  LC: What I mean to say is that there are many things about Christianity that attract me. The figure of Jesus is extremely attractive. It’s difficult not to fall in love with that person. The notion of self-sacrifice, the notion that one has to be resurrected in oneself is a powerful idea that exists in most religions. There has to be an idea of rebirth, of being able to be born again. I think humanity needs that because you feel the sense of pain and moral destruction all the time. When we have this notion that there is no mechanism for resurrection, there is no redemption from sin, then we are forced to embrace evil and we get the kind of activity like genocide.

  RO: But isn’t resurrection written all over the Old Testament?

  LC: The idea of redemption, of course, is in the Jewish tradition. But religion, when it becomes defensive and organized, gives its truth a sense of exclusivity. We find that in many religions: “We’ve got it and you don’t.” For many centuries, the Catholics had that papal doctrine—“Outside the church, there is no salvation.” If Jesus was and is truly the Messiah and did die for our sins, as Christians often say, we are all saved. I think it’s very inappropriate for one religious organization to exclude the rest of humanity from this aspect of redemption.

  RO: What about the other extreme? Someone like Tolstoy who divided his land up among the peasants. You couldn’t really do that here.

  LC: Well, he [Tolstoy] couldn’t do it, either. It leads you to some very absurd although poignant and touching situations. For instance, in his rather large house—I think it was in the living room with a salon—he set up a little shoemaking shop. His wife and daughter were wearing gowns from Paris, they were completely involved in opera and anything else they could manage at the time, and he was wearing peasant clothing and making sandals. So it leads you to some very conflicting stances. We don’t love Tolstoy for his solutions; we love him for his appetite for justice.

  RO: The best of art, even painting, has qualities that the eyes don’t immediately apprehend. Like Chagall—peeking into heaven.

  LC: I think—I can only speak of my own work—any great art has many harmonics, many resonances. The division of color art touches so wide a realm of the inner landscape. In my own work, I don’t think I’ve ever suggested that the world isn’t good, that a Messianic age should be brought about, or that we should all live in peace and harmony. What I’m trying to stress is the inner strength that will enable you to meet the inevitable and impossible moral choices that are going to confront you. What is the inner resource that you have to tap to be able to get through your life? In “The Captain” song, he says, “There is no decent place to stand in a massacre,” but nevertheless, that does not absolve us from trying to be decent. I think it’s important that we are aware that these choices are difficult, that we are humans and we live in a dualistic world, and we still have to take responsibilities for our decisions. We can’t resign from them.

  RO: So a thousand years from now, everything will be pretty much the same.

  LC: From what I gather in reading ancient texts, right up to the present, human beings have always been confronted by the same kinds of problems. I think that this world is not a realm that admits to a solution. That isn’t what this world is about. It’s a different kind of activity that we have here. We have to deal with good and evil continually. With joy and despair, with all the antinomies, all the opposites and contraries. That’s what our life is about. We can’t abdicate that. I, myself, am not attracted to the easy solution, the dogmatic solution. I think that when you have large numbers of people attracted to the dogmatic solution, you get a very static, stolid kind of society that is quite unpleasant to live in. That’s why I like our society. Nobody can quite dominate it.

  RO: Your songs are so complete and mature. Not even Dylan maintains that continuity.

  LC: A couple of years ago, Dylan and I met in a café in Paris to compare lyrics. Let me preface what I’m going to say by saying that there’s no guarantee of anything, but my songs take a really long time. They come one word at a time. It’s real sweat. Dylan and I were exchanging lyrics that day. I admired a lyric from Slow Train Coming. I said, “That’s really beautiful,” and he said, “Yeah and I wrote it in fifteen minutes.” He was admiring “Hallelujah” and I told him, “It took me a year to do that!” Some people write lyrics in the back of a taxicab. For me, it’s always been one word at a time.

  RO: How do you find women friends who can tolerate your roaming ways?

  LC: It depends on what the commitment is. If the commitment is fragile, then people cannot surround each other with freedom. If the commitment is profound, then other solutions are set up and that becomes the activity of the marriage or the relationship. In other words, there’s nothing fixed. It has to be explored day by day, but the exploration takes place on the foundation of the commitment. It’s only when we hold onto this fixed idea of the self that we get into trouble. But when you relinquish the fixed idea of the self, and lean on the commitment, then at least you have a chance to move around and explore.

  RO: “Story of Isaac” and “The Night Comes On” hint at the Middle East.

  LC: Well, I’m gonna tell you a little story I just heard. There was this scorpion that was trying to get across the stream. He was too small to get across and he came to a camel and said, “Will you carry me across the stream?” The camel said, “Of course I’m not going to carry you across the stream. You’re a scorpion and you’re gonna sting me.” Well, after many hours of persuasion, the camel was finally convinced to take the scorpion across the stream. Midway across the stream, the scorpion stung the camel. They’re both going down. They’re both being swept away and the camel says, “Why did you sting me?” and the scorpion says, “Because this is the Middle East.”

  [The following exchanges from Robert O’Brians interview with Cohen did not make it into the article published in RockBill. —Ed.]

  R
O: How do you keep the Sabbath?

  LC: I light a candle every Friday.

  RO: If there is true justice, where is Hitler today?

  LC: Oh, probably drinking tea somewhere with Franklin Roosevelt. We have to embrace a kind of modesty when we discuss these things.

  RO: According to Edie, the book about Edie Sedgwick, you could tell beforehand that there’d be a fire in her room at the Chelsea Hotel. How?

  LC: It was nothing supernatural. I just noticed that her candles were situated too close to the curtains.

  RO: The painting featured on your first album jacket is beautiful. What does it mean? Beauty in chains?

  LC: These things cannot be explained; they must be embraced.

  LEN

  JON WILDE | December 1987, interview | February 1988, Blitz (UK)

  “Few names in music have more cool cachet than that of Leonard Cohen,” journalist Jon Wilde wrote in the online magazine Sabotage Times in 2012. “Back in early 1988 it was all very different. Cohen hadn’t delivered an album in more than four years. Various Positions, his 1984 release, was (wrongly) deemed so substandard that his US record company chose not to release it. By 1988, Cohen’s music-biz stock was at its very lowest. To the post-punk generation he was, in the words of [rock artist] Paul Weller, ‘the bloke who makes music to slit your wrists to.’ Somehow, during those post-post years the ocean had rolled over Leonard Norman Cohen, leaving him so out of fashion as to be almost forgotten.

  “He was about to release his comeback album, I’m Your Man,” Wilde continued. “The press weren’t exactly queuing up to interview him. I’d have happily queued up for six months in the cold to spend five minutes in his company, not least because I’d recently had the best sex of my life to the accompaniment of his debut album, 1967’s Songs of Leonard Cohen.

  “I spent an invigorating two hours in his company. He had a reputation of being reserved to the point of impossibility, but I’ve never met a funnier or more graceful man. We met in the restaurant of a Covent Garden hotel. The next table consisted of a gaggle of blue-rinsed old ladies on a Women’s Institute outing. My abiding memory is Laughing Len congratulating me on lowering my voice when I used the word ‘cunt,’ quoting from one of his poems. ‘Jon,’ he said, gently taking my hand, ‘the word “cunt” should always be whispered.’ Spoken like a true poet.”

  Wilde conducted this thoughtful interview in December 1987, two months before it appeared in print and two months before Columbia released I’m Your Man. In the conversation, Cohen spent almost no time doing what his record company undoubtedly wanted him to do-promoting the new album—and much time talking about love, pain, sex, beauty, and the other factors that clearly rule his life. —Ed.

  For over twenty years, Leonard Cohen’s anguished, monotone ballads have echoed inside gloomy bedsits the world over. The list of Cohen classics is long—“Suzanne,” “Famous Blue Raincoat,” “Bird on the Wire,” “Avalanche,” “Sisters of Mercy,” to name a few—and his work inspires heated devotion in his legions of followers. His latest album, I’m Your Man, shows Cohen attempting to come up to date by dallying with dance music.

  Bing Crosby’s “That’s What Life Is All About” quietly saturates the hotel lounge. Len Cohen, the poet, is whispering, as you might expect, in that deep, trembling, hurt way of his.

  “It’s good, that sandwich. How’s yours? OK? Is yours cheese? It looks like chopped egg from here.”

  I always have a cheese one. There’s something about cheese …

  “Yeah, you’re right about that.”

  Len orders a big roast beef one with salad. Then it starts. I ask him if he thinks his serenity is always on the verge of collapsing into something else—manic laughter, irresponsibility, repugnance even. I say, sorry it’s such a big one to start. Then he smiles.

  “That’s OK. I’ve been ’round the block a couple of times today. I think I can handle it. Basically, I feel that everything is changing into something else. Serenity is not a condition I find myself in too often. When it comes, I tend to wallow in it for as long as it lasts. It’s an excellent thing. We should have more of it. It doesn’t matter whether you need it or not. It comes.”

  Jon Wilde: In the poem “To a Teacher” you write of “a long pain ending without a song to prove it.” Have you been attempting to conquer pain by facing it?

  Leonard Cohen: I think that activity is natural to us. Then there’s the question of one’s work and making one’s living. These things don’t really occur in the metaphysical realm. These are just things that anybody’s got to do. It’s what we’ve got to do between meals. That line is taken from a poem that was written to a specific person, a Montreal poet who went over the edge. Up to a certain point, he’d been able to document his condition very accurately. Then he just went too far. Tried to kill his wife. Was put in a loony bin. Died some time after that.

  JW: Has it been a case of getting to know your sorrow, trying to reach the end of your sorrow?

  LC: I don’t really think you have a luxury in these matters. I don’t think you can regard whatever condition you are in as an experiment. When you’re in it, you are in it and our duty is to transcend sorrow. Nobody wants to stick around in these places. If you’ve got ways of getting out of them, I think it’s your responsibility to do so. As far as joy is concerned, the more the better. At the moment? I have a few laughs.

  JW: What is desperation? Queues? Crowds? Decisions?

  LC: I guess that the source of all suffering is a sense of separation between you and everything else. That separation is always fictitious but that fiction is always very powerful. Sometimes, you kneel before it. It is a fiction, though, and it has to be dissolved like all other fictions. There are all kinds of distances. There’s distance that is needed for perspective but there’s also a sinister distance in which you feel totally separate from everything around you. That’s the same as suffering.

  JW: Is love something of a delusion? Julian Barnes talks about the delusion in imagining that other people could possibly find our condition as thrilling and eye-watering as we do ourselves. That makes sense.

  LC: I see everything as a delusion. Love is the reality. [Laughs.]

  JW: Dorothy Parker once remarked, “Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it and it darts away.” This also seems to make sense.

  LC: Yeah, I think Blake said something similar. “He who binds himself to a joy doth the winged thing destroy. He who kisses the joy as it flies lives forever in Eternity’s sunrise.” Everybody, in a certain way, approaches things with a dissecting scalpel. It’s a good idea to leave that on the shelf for a while if you can.

  JW: Maybe it’s better to be in love than to be in most things, though. I mean … it’s better to be in love than to be in Cardiff. Or in trouble with the police.

  LC: That’s probably true. I think that we have a natural affinity for each other and we are all deeply connected but we get into this illusion that we are separate, alone, abandoned. This also produces suffering.

  JW: In “There Is a War” you sing of the war between a man and a woman along with the other kinds of warfare. Getting even. As though the same rules apply …

  LC: A lot of people ask me about that song but a lot of people forget that the last line of every verse is, “Let’s get back to the war.” Of course, there are all kinds of conflicts between men and women, rich and poor, all kinds of castes and classes. I talk of getting back to the war meaning that we have to throw ourselves into the predicament. If we are willing to get into it, to confront it, that’s one of the ways through it.

  JW: Is there anything greater in life than the sight of a naked beautiful woman?

  LC: Not too many.

  JW: Like in “Came So Far for Beauty,” you seem, at times, to be completely under the spell of beauty, almost submissive to it. Could you give up everything for beauty?

  LC: Again, I don’t think these things are decisions one makes. If you have the ki
nd of nature where you are ready to go the whole way, then you’re stuck with that kind of nature and you just go the whole way.

  JW: Does it transform the world?

  LC: I don’t know about the world. Beauty certainly does something for me. [Laughs.] I’m a sucker for it. This is bigger than the both of us.

  JW: What are the sacred things? Sex most of all? Love. Intimacy. The Eyes. The Intensity. The secret? The first kiss. Anything else?

  LC: Well, in all these things, you stand the risk of being rejected. I think that’s mostly what constitutes danger for people, the sense that it’s not going to work. Outside of famine, war, torture, sickness, and death, that’s probably the thing on a daily level that we worry about the most. Is sex the most sacred? I dunno. I forget. [Laughs.]

  JW: You have to be as clear as possible.

  LC: Clarity is one of the things I like to go for. I don’t think we’re ever free from this mysterious mechanism, though. Mystery can go all the way from not knowing what to do with yourself to standing in awe at the vast activity of the cosmos which no man can penetrate. I don’t think we’re ever free from any of that. On the other hand, you can’t go around continually expressing your awe before these celestial mechanics. These are things that maybe we should keep to ourselves. I think that we’re surrounded by, infused with, and operate on a mysterious landscape, every one of us. It’s something to keep your mouth shut about if it really is a mystery.

  Len Cohen comes from Montreal’s moneyed Westmont district. His father died when he was nine but he doesn’t talk about that. One day, he was sitting down at a card table on a porch when he decided to quit his job. He started writing a poem instead. He graduated from McGill University in 1955 and turned himself over to writing. He was barely out of his teens when he published his first collections of poems, Let Us Compare Mythologies and The Spice-Box of Earth. Two novels, The Favorite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966), followed. His first LP, Songs of Leonard Cohen, arrived in 1967, with dark, brooding masterpieces like “Suzanne,” “Sisters of Mercy,” “So Long, Marianne,” and “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.” They were full of beauty; tender, acute perceptions on the vagaries of falling in and out of love. The voice was a gentle, baying monotone. It never rose. It was plaintive and consuming.