by Jeff Burger
AM: In the song “I’m Your Man,” you say that you would do anything that your lover asked you to. Are you her slave? Do you really think that one should accept all the terms imposed by love, whatever they are?
LC: That was a song in which I said to myself, “What would I do to be accepted by the woman and what does the woman want? What does a woman want from a man?” Many men have addressed this problem: what kind of a man does she want me to be? And it’s only the hunger for the woman, the necessity to live in her presence, whether this is love or not.
We can’t fool ourselves. We can’t think that we can escape each other’s presence. Whatever the relationships between men and women are—how good, how bad, clear, unclear, modern, postmodern, whatever, chauvinistic, emancipated—the fact is we are each other’s content: the woman is the man’s content and the man is the woman’s content. We cannot live without each other.
So accepting that as one of the aspects of being in love, or dying of love, a man dying of love writes this song: Whatever you want me to be I’ll be. I don’t know what it’s all about. If you’ve got to be angry at me, be angry at me. I stand here as the object of your anger, ’cause that’s what it takes to live in your presence. If you’ve got to take me for a ride, if that’s what it takes to live in your presence, take me for a ride. The only thing I know is that I cannot exist outside of your love.
AM: In all your records, there have always been songs with some reference to war, although they have been short notes like in “Stories of the Street,” “The Old Revolution,” or “Joan of Arc,” and more extensively in “There Is a War,” “The Traitor,” or “The Captain.” What difference is there between “First We Take Manhattan” and these other songs?
LC: I think “First We Take Manhattan” is crazier and a more honest song. The other songs, I don’t want to judge or value or even analyze but I think they’re more analytical, intellectual, or cerebral pieces. “First We Take Manhattan” is a direct response to the boredom, to the anxiety, to the sense of weightlessness, that I feel in my daily life. I don’t know whether anybody else feels this way. I suspect some people do feel this way—that the world has disappeared, that the catastrophe has already taken place, that the flood has already come, that we don’t have to wait for the nuclear holocaust, that the world has been destroyed somehow.
But you can’t take these ideas out with you on the street. You can’t operate with them, you can’t wear them like a parrot on your shoulder and go up the street and say, “I’ve got the truth, and this is the way it is.” But I got some sense that the thing has been destroyed and is lost and that this world doesn’t exist, and this is the shadow of something, this is the fallout, the residue, the dust of some catastrophe, and there’s nothing to grasp onto.
AM: Then why to take Manhattan and Berlin?
LC: Most of us are living in cities that only exist as traffic jams. Athens, New York, Paris, Barcelona, they all are cities that nobody has defined yet. All of us are thinking that we live in that small area which surrounds the cathedral, but this is only a tourist attraction now. So in this mythical sense these cities don’t exist anymore. There are few people living in their own time. Most are living in a mythological period that is the legacy of literature and political manipulation. We are not living in our own time. People don’t look at what is around them, and I am one of them, one of those who don’t look around. But from time to time you have the desire to embrace reality. So this is what the song is really about.
AM: And “First We Take Manhattan” is your response to this new situation?
LC: Yeah, it’s coming out of the hard sense that the world has been destroyed and that somehow an effort has to be made and a response has to be made and so it’s not addressed to any power that exists. I’m not sure they are just the agents of paranoia. They are just a projection of the paranoia that everybody contributes to, that everybody feeds, so in a certain sense I was also attracted by the extremist position, by the fundamentalist Islamist position, fundamental Orthodox Jewish position, fundamental newborn Christian position, PLO, Terrorist Red Army, Direct Action, new fascist groups. All these people seem to be operating in a beautiful world of certainty of action, action being the response to this dispersion of the moral universe, direct action.
It’s nothing that I can support, any of these movements, although I’m very attracted to the freedom that this certainty gives you. So I wanted to create a movement of my own that I could inhabit, that was just a response to this landscape that I’m trying to describe. I offer myself as a point of irritation around which some kind of gathering can take place, like a pearl.
AM: Listening to “Everybody Knows,” I can imagine skeletons dancing. The music is cheerful, but the text is apocalyptic. You write: “Everybody knows it’s coming apart…. The Plague is coming…. The deal is rotten [like Gurdjieff used to say]…. The boat is sinking…. The Captain lied.” I mean, it’s a strange funeral, with that cheerful tone.
LC: Yes, without the music “Everybody Knows” would be pretty hard to take and without, as you say, that kind of skeletonic funeral dance that comes out of the Great Plague, the Black Plague Death … and also the language rhymes, like “everybody talking to their pockets, everybody wants a box of chocolate.” Those kinds of rhymes have got to also modify the funeral quality of the message. The language is not serious language; it’s street language, it’s nonsense rhymes.
It also pushes things very, very far just to get a laugh and that makes it amusing. It gives a jingle effect that as I say modifies and mitigates the heaviness of the vision. I think that everybody does know these things…. These ideas were started a long time ago in my work, but the romantic world is over just as Lorca said in that poem “Take This Waltz.” These romantic images that he’s using … he knows they’re rotten, he knows they’re old, he knows they’re finished. That’s why it’s such a modern poem. He’s using the conventions of popular song, that kind of puppy love which in a way is the most beautiful love—the innocent love, love that has not been defeated yet—to take these images from that experience and graft them on this world where huge women smile down from these billboards and everybody knows that the thing is rotten.
AM: They remain old ideas…. You have been repeating these apocalyptic ideas like a parrot, through your books and songs. It has always been a reiterative subject, with the spirit of the prophet Isaiah always in the background.
LC: There seems to be some appetite to say those words: “Everybody knows it’s coming apart.” Maybe I’m wrong, maybe it’s because I’m middle-aged and maybe nothing’s coming apart and I’m quite aware of that too. I say in “Tower of Song” that “there’s a mighty judgment coming but I may be wrong / You hear these funny voices in the Tower of Song.” I may be just hearing some funny voices but for me it’s coming apart. To me those images, those romantic expectations, those religious expectations, the political vocabulary, are obsolete. I’ve never felt so much difference between the private life and the public life. There doesn’t seem to be a public life and there’s nobody speaking in a way that seems to address me.
I go to the movies, I watch the political drama with interest. It’s educating, but I don’t get a sense that anybody’s speaking to me. That gap between the private world and the public world is very, very wide now. And we got to criticize that when it gets wide, and in the sixties it was close. I guess that’s why we call it the sixties, because the public life and the private life seemed to have some rapport and some response to one another. There doesn’t seem to be a public life that addresses me today. I don’t know why. Maybe I’m just getting old, maybe not, maybe I’m right, so I wrote a song like “Everybody Knows” to close that gap and the only way to close it is by speaking of it humorously, speaking of it as a joke, and saying the things that we all know.
AM: After Book of Mercy and Various Positions, two works markedly devotional, I even began to think that you had become a monk…. But here you are again in the wo
rld with I’m Your Man, a much more social and political album …
LC: I thought I couldn’t make any relationships, with a woman, with a friend, or with the public, even in terms of a career or a profession. I thought I was breaking down, but why was I breaking down? There was something I had to protect, some image of myself that I had to protect, and what was the image? A nice guy, a decent guy, a religious guy, a compassionate guy, a smart guy, a beautiful guy? Whatever the images of myself that I had to protect, to defend, they were making me unhappy, and the unhappier I got the more withdrawn I got.
So I was a singer, and a voice was telling me, “OK, if that’s what you are, if you want to be a singer, write some songs that people like and be a singer.” I had grandiose ideas that I couldn’t realize, I couldn’t live. So I was very seriously withdrawing and going to a monastery, although that is not a solution. I even knew that at the time, because life in a monastery is very abrasive.
In fact, it’s the same in the Zen tradition. Like pebbles in a bag, the monks polish each other. If you’re very close, if you’re getting your rough edges knocked out by the other guys that you’re living so close to, there’s no refuge in a monastery, but we keep this mythology alive that you know somehow it’s solitude and pure and holy and you can speak to God in the wilderness. But that isn’t what a monastery’s about—it’s just the opposite. You’ve got to be ready to speak to God, lying next to somebody in the dormitory, washing next to a guy in the shower, working next to a guy, eating next to a guy, and you’re never gonna be alone; there’s no solitude.
So anyway, I was somehow defending all these images of myself and the effort became too great and I broke down. I couldn’t keep these things going and as I started breaking down little by little, the songs started getting clearer and clearer. I don’t want to give the impression that it just sort of came, that expressions came, but the work started. I started bringing up to completion, the language, I started getting the ideas, started getting simpler and yeah, I was able to stand in the frontline of my own life again and thinking of myself as a songwriter, thinking of myself as having work, as having friends, as having a lover. And I put all those ideas into the albums.
COHEN CLIP
On Growing Older
“I like it. On the other hand, a friend of mine [Irving Layton], who’s probably the best poet alive, wrote a [piece], ‘The Inescapable Lousiness of Growing Old.’ [I] don’t want to make a case for it. But my own experience is that you just start to get a handle [on] things, you get to see how [things] work. You observe a couple of generations. Dylan says, ‘Those phony false alarms’ [and you] begin to penetrate those things. It’s the most [interesting] thing around, to see yourself and your friends [and your] children getting older. It really is the most fascinating activity.”
—from interview with Kris Kirk, Poetry Commotion (Canada), June 18, 1988
DINNER WITH LEONARD
ELIZABETH BOLEMAN-HERRING | June 18, 1988 , interview | September 1988, the Athenian (Athens, Greece)
After talking with Albert Manzano and performing in Madrid, Cohen moved on to give concerts in about two dozen other cities throughout Europe, including Athens, Greece, which is where he encountered author Elizabeth Boleman-Herring. Her interview with the singer first appeared there in an English-language monthly called the Athenian and in a different version in a Greek-language magazine called Periodiko. Both publications are now defunct.
In a 2012 article for HuffingtonPost.com, Boleman-Herring recalled how her conversation with the artist came about:
Alone among the clamoring journalists in Leonard Cohen’s second home-of-the-heart, Greece, I was granted an interview with the poet-troubadour whose fan I had been, at that time, for some twenty years. He was in medias res of his I’m Your Man world tour and, upon arriving in the city, granted a press conference at Athens’s Ledra-Marriott Hotel.
Wearing a brand-new charcoal-grey suit (Armani, I believe) and a just-off-the-rack white shirt of quite some cost, he was jetlagged and unprepared for the feeding frenzy of Greek arts reporters.
Cohen is very, very big in Greece, and in Europe, in general, where poetry still has a passionate following.
Alone among the hacks there that day, I was a native speaker. Alone among them, I had two degrees in American lit; had all Cohen’s books and records; had been a student of poet Coleman Barks, the great translator of Rumi; and was a published poet myself. Alone among them, I could quote Leonard’s lyrics back to him … and make sense of them. I could parse him.
But that’s not what got me my exclusive, three-day-long interview with Leonard Cohen. Instead, it was the fact that, alone among those talking-all-over-one-another scribes, I had a needle and thread in my purse … and Leonard’s brand-new suit pants were split (they’d never been sewn, in fact) right up the seat. After he spoke to the crowd, I made my way through the throng, needle and black thread proffered.
“You’re going to want to talk to me.”
“Oh?”
“Mr. Cohen, your pants are split right up the back seam.”
“Can you come up to my room? Now?”
“Of course. With my tape recorder? And, I know you: no hanky-panky?”
A weary smile.
And so, it began. The interview that went on for three days and certain innocent intervals of three nights. Plus one megaconcert at Athens’s Lycabettus Theater.
I sewed up his pants expertly, handed out to me from a crack in the bathroom door. We talked at length. We sang a duet of “Molly Malone,” which I still have on tape. For a few years after, we wrote. He was in love, at the time, with French photographer Dominique Issermann, which I just guessed at (from a cryptic inscription on his latest album). He thought I was psychic: I opined that he must be interviewed primarily by morons.
Now, listening to the tracks on one of his more recent CDs, Ten New Songs, I realize that something I asked him about, something we spoke of, in that long-ago interview (and the column I wrote framing it) might have, must have, stuck, somewhere in that fertile, magpie’s mind of his.
I asked him about a favorite poet, a favorite poem, of mine, “The God Abandons Antony,” by Constantine Cavafys, as translated by my friend and mentor, Edmund “Mike” Keeley. He knew it by heart. I knew it by heart. In Mike’s English translation.
Now, in Ten New Songs’ “Alexandra Leaving,” Cohen has “transposed” Cavafys’s great lyric about courageous resignation, dignity in defeat, from Marc Antony, on the eve of his and Cleopatra’s death in Alexandria, to a contemporary lover facing the end of a tutoiment. The Roman emperor about to lose absolutely everything becomes—in a stroke of Cohen-genius—Alexandra’s lover; Alexandra having left him now, in spirit if not in the flesh, for another:
Suddenly the night has grown colder / The god of love preparing to depart / Alexandra hoisted on his shoulder / They slip between the sentries of the heart.
As someone long prepared for this to happen [That line, and one other, taken directly from Cavafys] / Go firmly to the window, drink it in / Exquisite music / Alexandra laughing / Your firm commitments tangible again / And you who had the honor of her evening / And by the honor had your own restored / Say good-bye to Alexandra leaving / Alexandra leaving with her lord.
Sweet God, it’s a magnificent song! And, if you know your Plutarch, know your Cavafys, know your Cohen, it is even so much the richer. The Greeks will all “get” this song; the Greeks now being crushed by The Crisis, being crushed by the great powers of the European Union. And they will thank, are thanking, Leonard Cohen now for writing this song, an anthem that encapsulates their sorrow, their strength, their wistful acknowledgment of complicity in their own defeat.
There are other songs on this CD that will “live and breathe” as well, long after their author no longer lives and breathes: “In My Secret Life,” “A Thousand Kisses Deep,” “You Have Loved Enough,” and “The Land of Plenty,” in my opinion. Leonard told me, twenty years ago, that only one of his compos
itions would “endure.” I believe, strongly, that he was wrong, and this compilation, released as the poet regards a world, and even himself, being “abandoned by the god,” contains many lasting gifts to future, unborn audiences.
And so, it is now 2012, and Leonard Cohen is yet again going out on tour. I have not again seen him, in the flesh, since that last day, in 1988, in Athens, but I know he remains very much the same man I met, and hung out with, for three days so very long ago, when we were both so very much younger.
And, wherever you’re singing tonight, Mr. Cohen, I pray that there are many, many more members of your audience now who “get” you, and stand up to applaud long and hard at the end of each song; audience members both cerebral and big-hearted. For “You have loved enough / Now let [us] be your lovers.”
Here’s Boleman-Herring’s 1988 interview. —Ed.
Sometimes, I feel I was really born in 1967, the year I entered university. I was sixteen, the Vietnam War was going great guns, and I felt like a purblind, newborn kitten whose eyes were just opening. What the kitten saw was ugly.
Time and Newsweek covers featured such people as North Vietnam’s General Giap and the US’s [General William] Westmoreland and, in uniform, the young and moribund.
We were all learning catchphrases such as M-16 and MIG; the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the DMZ. (In 1967, Oh Best Beloved, there were still DMZs in our world.) But an October cover of Time, featuring Dana Stone’s photograph of a fallen marine, ran with a banner reading: “Rising Doubt About the War.”
That year of this purblind kitten, Leonard Cohen’s first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, came out around Christmastime, and the poems written and scored and sung by the rabbi’s grandson from Montreal became part of her vocabulary as well.
I was seventeen when I first heard Leonard Cohen sing. The songs, for that first album, weren’t as political as those that came later. “Suzanne” and “Sisters of Mercy” and “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” were love songs tied up with ribbons of spirituality and cynicism, despair and compromise. (Love in our ruins.)