Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen

by Jeff Burger

  VS: I would imagine the group was so small because you immediately got rid of the pretenders. Because that sounds really frightening—“defend.”

  LC: It was. You had to defend your poem. You had to defend your writing. I saw grown men cry under those circumstances. But generally it was filled with good humor and drink and a sense of fraternity that seems to have passed from any of the other literary communities I’ve bumped into before or since.

  VS: Who were your prime influences as a writer, first starting out writing poetry?

  LC: It’s hard to say. I was very much encouraged by a friend of mine by the name of Irving Layton. Not influenced by his work but by the man himself, by his manner, by his generosity. We became friends and we remain friends. He is, I think, without any argument the greatest poet that English Canada ever produced. And maybe the best poet for my money writing in English today. He lives in Montreal. He’s not known here.

  VS: I don’t know him. It’s a shame if you describe him that way.

  LC: You might quarrel is he the Mississippi or the Himalayas? These are just matters of personal taste but it’s indisputable that there is a sense of greatness about his work. The man is eighty now. He’s published over sixty volumes of work. He deserves to be read throughout the world. He’s finding an audience in Italy now. For some odd reason the Italians have begun to translate him.

  VS: When you started performing, you were performing as a poet. You were on a circuit where you became a kind of pop rock star before you began playing music.

  LC: Well, in a very, very minor capacity because we’re talking about a country where an edition of poetry that did gloriously well meant that you sold two or three hundred copies.

  VS: Gloriously well? So The Spice-Box of Earth, a book like that, would sell only a few hundred copies?

  LC: My first book sold four hundred copies. It was called Let Us Compare Mythologies, and that was considered a stunning success and it was reviewed in all these mimeographed journals that no one read—there’s a readership of a few hundred people in the country. Well, very much due to the work of Irving Layton and Frank Scott, Phyllis Webb, Raymond Souster … certain people that started promoting the idea of poetry and then our nationalist energies were tapped and we started to feel like we had to produce a culture and protect it and so laws started to be passed and that sort of thing but in those days … when you’re talking about stardom, you’re talking about a very, very tiny landscape.

  VS: But you were performing at that time.

  LC: We didn’t think of it as performing although I think you’re quite right. We were showing off. We were trying to be loved in whatever terms were available. But those were tiny poetry readings of twenty, twenty-five people at the most.

  VS: But have you always felt that the spoken tradition in poetry is important to your work? Is it important to have it read out loud?

  LC: You know, you were trying to get ahead in some way and you were ready to accept any invitation to publish a poem in a mimeographed magazine or to read in a tiny bookstore on a Thursday night. Our commitment to the enterprise was absolute. We didn’t want to be or do anything else. None of us wanted to teach in university. I don’t know what the other alternatives were but the commitment was really very impressive now that I look back on it. My own and my friends’. What we brought to it then, because there were no rewards, there was nothing else going on.

  VS: It was pure.

  LC: It had a certain purity that I think produced some very good work.

  VS: As I’ve said many times on the air, I have avoided on a couple of occasions accepting an invitation to have you come up. Record company people have said, “We know how much you love Leonard Cohen.” I’ve said, “Ah, I don’t know, I’m a little nervous, I think I’m intimidated by him.” Plus, I respect the man so much and you’re such an important part of my life that I didn’t want to see the man behind my image, my myth, that I had created for you.

  LC: I think that there’s a certain wisdom in that position. Because I think that people do get in the way of their work, their own personalities, their own moods, their own daily moment that you might find them in. I think there are exceptions, of course, but I don’t know why one would really want to meet someone whose work is … would you really like to meet Isaiah or King David? Not necessary.

  VS: [Laughs.] Yeah, right. I’m one of those people who spent countless hours in my attic bedroom in my parents’ home devouring Beautiful Losers, the novel, devouring your poems, listening to that first album when it was on vinyl and ruining it because I played it so many times that I had to go out and buy another copy of it. So for me you’ve always been a real important figure. And something has changed in me, I guess, over the last couple years, because this time I went to them and said, “Please, if Leonard is in town on a Sunday night, could he come by?” So something happens in our own ability to deal with our heroes.

  LC: I think when you make your treasures your own and you really claim them, you can use that strength to sell out into the world. I think that’s what we’re all doing with our work is pitching in at this point. These are very grave times and they’re not times to stand on ceremony. We’ve all got to pitch in. I know that sounds like a fatuous observation but I mean from moment to moment, whoever you’re talking to. This is not a moment for false modesty or pretentions or attitudes. I remember when I came down to New York by myself in the fifties, I’d heard that there was a kind of generous community of artists and writers and people and that they lived in Greenwich Village. And I came down and I felt such a cold shoulder from everybody and everywhere. A naive reaction, of course, but I remember sitting in some cafe in the Village at that time and writing on my place-mat, “kill cool” and holding it up for the patrons to see. And that’s what I feel right now. Kill attitude! What a drag. It’s about time that we started pitching in. I mean, moment to moment in the conversation with whoever you happen to be with. Help out because these are times that try the souls of men.

  VS: And there’s no room for that attitude.

  LC: I think that that attitude is very poor advice in terms of an emergency. I don’t think that attitude has any place at all. Everybody thinks that that’s where the edge is, that’s where the sex is, that’s where the fun is, that’s where the thrust is, that’s where it’s happening. But it ain’t. It’s just getting worse and worse.

  VS: So where it’s happening is within you and how you deal from moment to moment—

  LC: Whoever you’re with, whether you’re buying cigarettes or having an interview, there’s no need for you to pull this shit of attitude. What could it possibly serve? We’ve got our professional attitudinists and we should cherish them. But there is such a thing as courtesy.

  VS: Who’s a professional attitudinist? Dylan?

  VS: Oh, I think he’s long ago abdicated. I think he was a grand and shining and probably immortal example of that position and, like any great one, the imitators that come after are very tedious. The man who develops that is, of course, cherished. But Dylan long ago has abdicated that. Dylan is a working musician who goes from town to town singing his songs.

  VS: Constantly.

  VS: And for whatever reasons, and they’re his own, he has completely left the scene of fashion and influence. And my hat’s off to him. He’s just a working stiff. The pay is good but it’s still rough to go from town to town singing your songs on whatever level you do it.

  VS: Well, you’ve been out now for what? A couple of months? And more to come?

  LC: Mmm hmm.

  VS: Do you like performing?

  LC: I like it when it goes well. I like it when I don’t humiliate myself. I like it when I’m not ashamed of myself at the end of the evening. But you set yourself up for those disgraces and when you can avoid them, you think that you still know how to do the step or you can still pull it off.

  VS: But when you go out onstage, do you feel comfortable or do you feel alien somehow up there?

 
LC: I feel that if I’m in the right kind of shape, I can deliver. If I haven’t sold myself some bill of goods about who I am. If you can overlook the version of yourself that you’ve bought and that people have helped you buy, especially when you’ve had a little success. In a sense it was easier in those years when I was more or less a kind of joke, and the records weren’t selling and the whole deal was not considered terribly important. Then, when I could get out on the stage and I could sing a song like, “A singer must die for the lie in his voice, I thank you, I thank you for doing your duty, you keepers of truth, you guardians of beauty, your vision is right, my vision is wrong, I’m sorry for smudging the air with my song” [from “A Singer Must Die,” on New Skin for the Old Ceremony].

  That’s hard to sing when you’re more popular. People have been very kind to me over the past couple of years and I’ve enjoyed a resurrection and I’m very pleased about it. But it invites you to buy versions of yourself that stand in the way of delivering the song in the best way possible and I fall for it sometimes.

  VS: That’s human to fall for that. It’s very easy to get caught up in that. And I suppose with age and, hopefully, with the wisdom that you get from just living longer you learn how to deal with that—or not. Are you saying that maybe you don’t learn how to deal with that?

  LC: I don’t think it’s written anywhere that you get wiser as you get older. I find that you get a certain kind of vulnerability, a certain fragility also. Or maybe just the range gets wider. You get more strong and more weak. You get more generous and somehow more miserly at the same time. Yeah, as Layton says, the tricks that every poet learns eventually … you do find a way through it but I’m not so sure it gets easier or better.

  VS: I said before that I wanted to take you back to that moment where you decided to sing your songs rather than write them as poems. What was the impulse to pick up a guitar and start to create songs?

  LC: Well, it started with the guitar and I’d always played guitar. When I was about seventeen or eighteen, a couple of us formed a group called the Buckskin Boys in Montreal. So it preceded my formal writing. I didn’t know about formal writing. I wasn’t terribly interested in it. I was interested in country music and what they called folk music in those days. We sang all those songs and we sang at barn dances, at square dances, in school auditoriums and church basements. That was my first paying job and that was really the first time I ever stood up in front of people, was to play rhythm guitar in the Buckskin Boys.

  I then got really interested in the lyric. I thought, “Jesus, these are beautiful.” As I started researching songs, I went down to the Harvard Library of folk music and spent a summer there just listening to all the songs, all these incredible lyrics, and I got really deeply into it.

  VS: You mean like the mountain ballads and those things, all that John Jacob Niles stuff that he compiled?

  LC: Oh yeah. And you’d sit there in that library at Harvard and you could listen to everything that was recorded. And then the whole [Alan] Lomax and People’s Songbook and the Almanac Singers … that whole tradition touched me very deeply. Their passionate concern. These kinds of attitudes now that are so belittled and so scorned. Where people actually would dare to sing songs about brotherhood. Those songs touched me very deeply in the lyrics. Also as a way to approach young women. I was shy. I didn’t exactly know how to do it, so there was something about the words on the page, that I could arrange it in some way to get some kind of attention. So all those streams combined to give me a passionate interest in blackening the page in a certain kind of way, where the lines don’t come to the end of the page.

  VS: Can you tell how you got to know Judy Collins and she came to record “Suzanne”? I know it wasn’t the first recorded version of the song but it was the one that really introduced you—

  LC: Judy Collins was extremely generous to me, extremely kind. She was there long before I was there and we had a mutual friend and I’d borrowed some money to come to New York. I had some songs. Must have been about ‘65. And we had a mutual friend and I went over to her house and you know who was there? One of the writers of “Ballad for Americans”—I think Earl Robinson.

  VS: Part of that tradition that you were just talking about.

  LC: I knew his work. I sang her a couple of songs and she received them very kindly, very compassionately. I can’t even think of these things happening today, it’s become so tough. I mean, you really don’t want to help anybody out anymore. Those impulses seem to have been blunted.

  VS: Too much competition?

  LC: Yeah. Not in her case. And she said, I really like these songs but there isn’t anything … please keep in touch,” but in the kindest way possible. And then I went back to Montreal and I knew that I was on top of a good song. I had the fingerpicking worked out and I knew that it was connected to the harbor in Montreal and then I started writing verse after verse and finally when I came upon a version that I liked I called Judy and I sang it to her over the phone. And she said, “I want to record that immediately.” That was “Suzanne.” [This account differs from the one given by Collins in I’m Your Man, Sylvie Simmons’s Cohen biography. Collins told Simmons that she decided to record both “Suzanne” and “Dress Rehearsal Rag” on the day Cohen first played them for her, not after a subsequent phone call. -Ed.]

  VS: It has been said by many—sometimes in a joking fashion, sometimes quite seriously—that Leonard Cohen’s albums and songs are the soundtracks for depressed, suicidal people. The songs can be very bleak, very sad, but is that you? Are you a depressed, suicidal person? Have you been at times in your life?

  LC: I’ve never been suicidal. It doesn’t come to me, that version of the bleakness but, yes, I have known real depression and a lot of the songs come out of that experience and I think people are beginning to understand how this is not the blues—this is a different kind of experience. I think William Styron wrote about it recently. That kind of experience I’m not unfamiliar with. So it is a landscape that I know about and a lot of those songs have come from that place…. Music is a matter of taste and a lot of people just don’t want to hear that kind of sound in a man’s voice or music. It’s quite fine. The curious thing is that people who know that kind of landscape have written me and said it gets them out of it. That it gets them through it.

  VS: Yes. Well, in much the same way that blues music gets people out of the blues. Blues is an exuberant music and there is a great deal of hope and love in your songs. I’ve always had to argue with people. They say, “Leonard Cohen’s music is to slit your wrists by.” No it’s not!

  LC: It is if you’re not familiar with that landscape. Why should people be invited into a place that is uncomfortable and the value of the piece is that it’s going to get you out of it? But if you are familiar with it, it does help to get you out of it.

  VS: What has allowed you to get out of those moods?

  LC: The work itself is an element. Studying the mood very carefully in a very concentrated way has been helpful. And I’ve tried everything.

  VS: Have you been in analysis?

  LC: No, I was never drawn to analysis. I’d read a great deal of Freud and of other analysts and the approach never seemed to invite me. What did invite me was the kind of empty self-examination of the Zendo, of Zen meditation. And that helped me very, very much.

  VS: Who taught you that?

  LC: I bumped into a man who was about my age at the time he came to America. He’s now eighty-six. I bumped into him about twenty years ago and I began to study with him and drink with him. And as he said to me two or three years ago, “Leonard, I never tried to give you my religion. I just poured you saki.” And it’s true.

  VS: A potent combination, I guess, the study and the saki.

  LC: If he’d been a professor of physics at the University of Heidelberg, I probably would have learned German and studied at Heidelberg. There was something about the man that touched me deeply. I’ve been very fortunate to have very close men fr
iends in different generations. So the example of Layton in relation to his work, the diligence and the passion that he’s brought to his work, with this other man whose name is Sasaki Roshi, his huge embrace of the disparate elements in which we operate, his very wide humorous and compassionate embrace of all things, has touched me very much. So to drink with him is a great honor and I’ve been drinking with him for a long, long time now.

  VS: Let’s go back to the Chelsea Hotel. You spent some time in the Chelsea Hotel.

  LC: That was a dangerous place. I don’t know what it’s like these days. After a while, you got very wary about accepting a potato chip from anyone.

  VS: You didn’t know what was going to be on it.

  LC: I went on a lot of involuntary trips, just accepting the hospitality of fellow lodgers.

  VS: Joan Baez talks jokingly … she says she was the only straight person at the party. She was the only one who didn’t take drugs.

  LC: It’s true. And I had an argument with her that was based on her investment in her own straightness.

  VS: [Laughs.] Really?

  LC: It concerns Mahatma Gandhi, whom she revered. And this argument took place in the Chelsea Hotel. She had formed this nonviolent group and I had just finished a biography of Gandhi in which it was mentioned as a footnote that he chewed rauwolfia, which is a weed that grows by the side of Indian country paths and is the active ingredient in Valium or whatever the popular tranquilizer was at the time. So I suddenly had a different version of the whole nonviolent movement in India, where everybody’s chewing rauwolfia and sitting down and the British troops are coming at them and they’re not exactly Nazis, the British, so [the Indians] did get beat up and pushed around and suffered terribly but they didn’t get put into ovens. But they’re sitting there on the road and they are feeling very, very relaxed—way beyond the normal capacity for relaxation.

  So I brought this up to Joan Baez. And she was very, very annoyed that I suggested that drugs were a part of the nonviolent movement because she had this deep investment in being the straight girl around. Well, she was, and she did it magnificently. Now she also had a certain antipathy to the idea of mysticism and she didn’t like the last line of “Suzanne”— “She’s touched your perfect body with her mind.” She felt that this was succumbing to the dark forces of religion and mysticism, which she also felt [determined] to defend society against. Which I cherish in her. So she had another line that she would sing when she sang it. I don’t know what it was … “She touched your perfect body with her thumb [or] with her hand.”