Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen

by Jeff Burger

  The sixties “litters” believed they’d—we’d—end the war, that love would conquer all. Really.

  The older cats of the seventies—remember that AP photo of the little Vietnamese girl, naked, napalmed, fleeing the firestorm?—were giving up. Leonard Cohen went political.

  Back from an idyll in his “First Mate’s House” on the Greek island of Hydra, and the arms of a Norwegian blonde he’d immortalize in “[So Long] Marianne”—ah, the man has loved women—he came out with Songs from a Room.

  The lyrics were more bitter. One song, “Story of Isaac,” was a sermon on the sacrifice of purblind kittens. It was also, as are all of Cohen’s songs, more personal than that. (Isaac is nine in the song; Cohen lost his father and composed his first poem at nine.)

  You who build the altars now / To sacrifice these children / You must not do it anymore / A scheme is not a vision / And you have not been tempted / By a demon or a god / You who stand above them now/ Your hatchets blunt and bloody / You were not there before / When I lay upon the mountain / And my father’s hand was trembling / With the beauty of the Word.

  So I and my peers teethed on a distant war and the bittersweet Eucharist of Cohen. Twenty years have passed, as I write here. Cohen is middle-aged and visits Hydra seldom now. But his 1988 world tour, introducing an album titled I’m Your Man, has brought him to Athens, and the Lycabettus Theater.

  Twenty years have passed, and I’m no longer a longhaired hippie literature and journalism major with a peace sign on the seat of my purple bellbottoms. I may—in that interval—have become a fairly pushy woman-scribbler, because I somehow managed to pull off dinner, dinners, alone with Leonard Cohen.

  It was June 18th, and Cohen, wearing a suit tailored in Milan, looked for all the world like a cross between Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino, impersonating a flat-bellied Mafioso. He enjoyed his fassolada and spaghetti that first evening, and he talked for some five hours about everything from the Talmud, his Lithuanian mother, Greece in 1959, Bruce Springsteen, and the unnamed woman (I finally guessed her identity) he intended to marry to journalism. Cohen claims to be not a lyricist, not a poet, not a singer, but a journalist now. The shoe fits: the songs are still reports from the militarized zone(s).

  Part of the interview I taped and can share. Much of it, however, was sung or conducted on elevators or behind the piano in the Ledra-Marriott Hotel bar. But “dinner with Leonard” I got on tape: a dream come true.

  Elizabeth Boleman-Herring: Why didn’t you carry on your family tradition?

  Leonard Cohen: I did.

  EBH: You became a “priest”?

  LC: I became a bad priest.

  EBH: There’s no such thing as a bad priest.

  LC: That’s what Graham Greene thought …

  EBH: What comes first for you, lyrics or melody?

  LC: They’re usually born together, like twins. Maybe one comes out a little ahead of the other, but they’re close. Maybe one line comes and then just a chord change in a certain key: C to F—always a beautiful change; one of the most beautiful there is. Just a chord change will suggest a line or two. I’ll work like that until maybe the first verse is done. Then, I have a musical form. Then, there’s the bridge.

  EBH: At nine, you understood—

  LC: —the connection. Instinctively made the connection, between language and deep feeling.

  EBH: Who gave you the raw material at home? My own mother read Shakespeare to me in my cradle in 1952.

  LC: Nobody was ever that mean to me! They read me fairytales, nursery rhymes … lullabies. [Waiter appears with huge platter.] Oh boy, am I ever lucky: spaghetti Bolognese!

  EBH: Leonard, that’s the only thing I can cook …

  LC: … so, can you get a divorce?

  EBH: There’s no death in your lyrics.

  LC: No death …

  EBH: No death in your lyrics or no death, period?

  LC: Well, something between the two.

  EBH: How long have you known that?

  LC: I’ve always known that.

  EBH: Do you put other people’s poetry to music often?

  LC: Lorca’s poem, I translated. I translated a good poem, “Take This Waltz,” and I put it in a nice musical setting, and I know it will live forever.

  EBH: Come on: Which of your songs will survive?

  LC: “Take This Waltz”: about twenty-three years, and then it will be completely forgotten. They’ll all be forgotten: everything I ever wrote.

  EBH: Does that bother you?

  LC: Not in the least. I couldn’t care less.

  EBH: Why do you keep singing?

  LC: Who knows? There were other things I was interested in.

  EBH: Such as?

  LC: World domination!

  EBH: [Willing to have my leg pulled, again and again, throughout this and following evenings.] You like Cavafys, you said.

  LC: “The God Abandons Antony.” [Declaiming.] “Like a man long-prepared …” That poem is good.

  EBH: It’s pretty close to your worldview.

  LC: You’re there by the window. You see them going by. The ghostly clamor. The high-pitched voices. The atmosphere of abandon and ecstasy … [Pauses.]

  EBH: … and?

  LC: … you don’t say to yourself: “Am I imagining this? Is it really happening?” It’s really happening.

  EBH: And do you try to hold onto it?

  LC: [Grins.] For a second or two, why not? And you see that that fails …

  EBH: … like relationships?

  LC: … like relationships and all things.

  EBH: Have you ever written anything mean, cruel?

  LC: Never.

  EBH: No, not the man who wrote “The Guests.” Where did that one come from?

  LC: “The Guests” was the nicest song that ever happened to me. The music I’d had for a long time, unusually, but I didn’t know what it was for. And then there was this girl who went to Persia to study with the Sufi order of the Whirling Dervishes. She became entitled to teach the dance and went back to America and began to teach. To be “entitled” to teach the dance, you must not only have mastered it, you must have mastered its implications.

  So, I’d written my song, and this girl had begun to form Sufi groups and, when she was in the Middle East, she’d formed an association with a Sheikh who was interested in her personally. After she’d been teaching for a couple of years, this man came to America to review the progress of the various Sufi groups and he told her his own were dancing to a song written by a Westerner. And she asked what song. And he said, “The Guests”—it has the spirit of Rumi in it. Rumi, who lived in the thirteenth century, was the founder of the Dervishes. He was probably the greatest ascetic religious poet—in the same league as King David.

  EBH: Do you aspire to dance naked, like David, in the streets? [Forgive me, dear readers, but I was then a jejune thirty-six to his fifty-three.]

  LC: I have no aspirations. My mind doesn’t work that way. I think more like … a dog, a TV set, and a woman by my side when I think of the really wonderful things.

  EBH: You’ve got that in alphabetical order …

  LC: Well, in those moments when those things can be appreciated, they all have the same value, the same weight. That’s what brings the peace…. Those are the really lovely moments.

  EBH: Few and far between?

  LC: No—going on all the time.

  EBH: … but there’s your deep sadness. It permeates your songs.

  LC: “The sad thing” that has the same weight as “the happy thing” and “the indifferent thing,” “the beautiful thing,” and “the thing.” Boy, is this fasolada good! I’m eating your dinner, too. [And, he did just that: everyone does, as I talk so damned much.]

  EBH: How readily do you answer personal questions?

  LC: There’s a certain type of question that has the appearance of a personal question that you can take a position on and speak about with a certain amount of intimacy. But I don’t think anybody can a
nswer really personal questions. I think we’re all too shy.

  EBH: How many times have you been in love? You’ve never married, but you have two children …

  LC: Well, I started in love, but people finally weaned me away from it …

  EBH: [Shouting.] Did you have to say that?

  LC: But they were not successful! [The room fell silent around us: we were really shouting.]

  EBH: But you’ve never married.

  LC: No. [Singing.] I never really fell in love, so I never saw the point. If I understood what “they” were trying to tell me, I was in love, but they all said that wasn’t good enough: I had to “fall.”

  EBH: And that’s never happened?

  LC: It’s finally happened … if by falling in love they mean that life becomes impossible to live and you hardly know how to get from one moment to another, and that you cannot entertain the idea of living without the approval and love of “the object.” If that’s what falling in love is, I know what it’s like.

  EBH: When did this happen?

  LC: A few months ago.

  EBH: Where is she?

  LC: [Singing.] “Where, where, where is my gypsy wife tonight?” Not far. Just a heartbeat away.

  EBH: Will you stay fallen?

  LC: Well, that really awful feeling has gone. I took a lot of antidepressants and spent several months in a monastery [grins] and that finally went. I never fell in love till I was a man of fifty-two. And this new album is for her.

  EBH: “For D.I.,” wherever she is. Have you gone from sad to tortured, then?

  LC: Oh, no! Nietzsche called love “the gay science.”

  EBH: Well, here’s the scholar who wrote “O tangle of matter and ghost …”

  LC: I was a superb lyricist.

  EBH: Was?

  LC: … and completely unrecognized. And that’s the beautiful thing about it …

  EBH: “Humbled in love”?

  LC: I wrote for years and years and people laughed. They thought it was the funniest stuff in the world. I sang my heart out. Everything I felt, I wrote down.

  EBH: Why?

  LC: Be free from “why.”

  EBH: Well, I’ve got past “should.” Maybe “why” will take a few more years.

  LC: You’ve got a great big heart, Elizabeth, but you’re very, very cerebral.

  EBH: A lobotomy might help, but, then, I couldn’t make sense of: “Do you remember the pledges / That we pledged in the passionate night? / They’re soiled now and torn at the edges / Like moths on a stale yellow light.”

  LC: Cerebral is OK. That’s Raja Yoga, the path of the mind.

  EBH: I would have preferred a different path.

  LC: Well, we never get what we prefer.

  COHEN CLIP

  On Breaking Down

  “When I finished Beautiful Losers I was living on Hydra. I went to another island and when I wanted to come back I hired a boatman to get me to another, bigger boat that was headed that way. It was about 110 degrees, very hot sun. The fisherman said to me, ‘You’d better come in under the tarp.’ I said no. He said, ‘Sea Wolf, huh?’ When I got back to Hydra I couldn’t get up the stairs to my house. They got a donkey and took me up. I went to bed and I couldn’t eat for ten or fifteen days. They finally called a doctor and I was hallucinating and going crazy and went down to 116 pounds and, you know, a breakdown of some kind. But that seemed right: I’d been working pretty hard and taking speed. I’d had a sunstroke, obviously. And I’d just finished this book.”

  —from interview with Mark Rowland, Musician (US), July 1988

  RADIO INTERVIEW

  TOM SCHNABEL | July 13, 1988, Morning Becomes Eclectic, KCRW-FM (Santa Monica, California)

  Tom Schnabel interviewed Cohen live on the radio. “I stayed up late the night before,” he later wrote, “preparing for my conversation with the gravelly voiced poet who always seemed to keep his knife sharpened in his lyrics. I hoped he wouldn’t turn that knife on me.

  “When he walked in, I was struck by how good-looking he was. My anxiety was disarmed somewhat by his gentle handshake and the kindness in his eyes. I had no doubt, after repeated listenings, that his new LP, I’m Your Man, was a masterpiece: dramatic, caustic, comic. Thirty minutes was little time to explore twenty years of work, but I jumped at the chance to talk with this gracious and fascinating man.” —Ed.

  Tom Schnabel: Did it surprise you that this new album has been so successful?

  Leonard Cohen: Well, you hope but you never expect.

  TS: Do you take it as a compliment that you’re more popular in Europe than in America?

  LC: I’m grateful to have an audience anywhere. The audience in Europe is wide. I seem to have struck deep into some of the countries. I have small pockets of listeners in America. I like singing in the United States because my language comes out of this language and people can follow the real meaning of the songs. I use the cadences and rhythms of the American language. I know that in Norway, for instance, or in Scandinavia where English is a second language, there still is some kind of translation process going on.

  TS: Do you identify more with a European cultural tradition of songwriters—Jacques Brel, Mikis Theodorakis, Georges Moustaki, [Georges] Brassens?

  LC: Of course these singers and songwriters have meant a good deal to me. But so does Chuck Berry.

  TS: Did growing up as a Jew in Montreal during World War II affect your songwriting?

  LC: I suppose everything is part of the composite. It was a very privileged position that I grew up in, so it was only toward the end of the war that I really understood what was going on during it. The only deprivations we suffered was that we couldn’t get American bubble gum, and the comics weren’t in color. We were very protected from the reality.

  TS: You were brought up in a traditional Jewish home?

  LC: Yes, and a family very involved in the community, in establishing hospitals and synagogues, a free loan association. My grandfather founded the first Anglo-Jewish newspaper in North America.

  TS: I was wondering how your songs reflect your own view of yourself, as a songwriter and a musician.

  LC: It’s very hard for me to locate a view of myself. It’s one of the things I’m least interested in. I’m reminded of that story I read in Dalva, a novel by Jim Harrison, who is speaking of certain tribes where the white man tried to introduce the mirror, and certain native American tribes refused to accept the mirror. The reason was, they said, that your face is for others to look at.

  TS: Is songwriting for you a lonely craft?

  LC: That hardly begins to describe it. It’s a desperate kind of activity. I don’t know why it should be that way, but it is. It seems to take an enormous effort to bring work to completion.

  TS: Do the words come first, or do you hear the music?

  LC: It’s generally some uneasy marriage of those two elements. A phrase will come, or a chord change. Then you’ll get maybe the first verse with music and words, but then as the words change the musical form has to change. It usually takes a couple of years to bring a song to completion.

  TS: Do you get tired of hearing “Suzanne”? Would you listen to it if it came on the radio when you were driving your car?

  LC: I think that would be the only occasion that I’d listen to it. Well, I don’t listen to any of my work. I don’t even have a player. I have a little Walkman. I usually have to buy them every couple of months. I leave them in hotel rooms.

  TS: Is it more important for you to be recognized as a poet or as a musician?

  LC: Well, depending on how isolated you feel, any kind of recognition is welcome.

  TS: In reading your bio, I was wondering what motivated you to leave your Greek island of Hydra and head for Nashville, Tennessee. Was it to gain wider exposure of your poetry, or just to make money?

  LC: There was certainly an economic aspect. I’d been living on an island on the Mediterranean for some time. Never completely—I’d always have to come back to Canada to put m
oney together—but I was living for a thousand dollars a year there. I’d come back to make a thousand dollars and my boat or plane fare, then go back for as long as that would last. I wrote a lot of books there and a lot of songs.

  At a certain point I just felt like changing. When I moved back to Canada, I published a novel, Beautiful Losers, which got a lot of stunning reviews, but I couldn’t even pay the rent. In hindsight, it seems like the height of folly—I’ll take care of my financial problems by becoming a singer. But I got ambushed in New York by the so-called folksong renaissance that was going on there. It did take care of the financial problem, actually.

  TS: How did [record producer] John Hammond hear about you?

  LC: John Hammond was an extremely gracious man. Someone arranged an introduction. I was living at the Chelsea [Hotel] and he said, “Would you like to play me some songs?” We went back to my room and I played him seven or eight songs and he said, “You got it.”

  TS: People have been talking about your voice ever since your early songs. Is it the voice that God gave you or did you work in a certain way to develop your … golden voice?

  LC: I think in my first record I had a voice that was appropriate to the songs. Then I think I got lost for a long time. I think that now in the last two records I’ve begun to find the voice that represents me. But it’s not a strategy. I think it’s cigarettes and whiskey.

  TS: I remember reading in an interview that you said that rather than having a dark cast of mind you were merely realistic. Do you think reality is dark?

  LC: I think it participates in all the shades. But I think that people have an appetite for seriousness. And seriousness is neither light nor dark. It’s just the way it is, and there’s a great nourishment when you just name the thing as it is. I think there are certain occasions where cynicism is appropriate. One should be cautious.

  TS: Has your view of romance changed over the past twenty years, since you embarked on your songwriting career?