Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen

by Jeff Burger

  SLD: Yeah? Do you really?

  LC: I have. Of course, one likes to be praised and one likes to be loved and appreciated. It’s always gratifying but generally when I read a review, I am the reviewer. I read the person’s writing. I see how they express themselves. I don’t read many [reviews] but when I do, I read from the point of view of a critic of the review. That’s in self-defense.

  SLD: Are you going out on tour?

  LC: I don’t think so.

  SLD: I have a special order from Stockholm to beg you to come and read your poems at a poem cinema or now it’s called a people cinema. I guess you’ve been asked this before.

  LC: I think it was mentioned but I need eight musicians behind me to get the courage to go up onstage.

  SLD: Why don’t you bring them then?

  LC: If I do go out on tour, I have a good band. But I don’t know, I hope I don’t fall over tomorrow but I’m going to be sixty-seven in a few weeks and naturally a sense of limitation begins to arise that is quite tangible.

  SLD: Physically?

  LC: Not physical, no. Fortunately, because of the training at Mount Baldy, I’m in pretty good shape. No, it’s not from the point of view of stamina; it’s about the point of view of time.

  SLD: What is it that you’ve got to do?

  LC: I’d like to do another record and I’d like to finish this book.

  SLD: The Book of Longing.

  LC: The Book of Longing. And maybe after that I’d go out. But it seems to me that’s a priority. Because when you go out on the road, it involves at least a year of work and you can’t really do anything else while you’re doing it.

  SLD: How do you cope without the discipline, the rules and the regulations of the monastery?

  LC: Well, it’s lovely to sleep in past three o’clock in the morning. It’s a delicious feeling, although I often get up at three just out of habit. But that kind of discipline I never lacked. I was always disciplined in regard to my work. It was the wider sense of a life and I put on a pretty good show. My cover story was pretty good. It looked like my life was orderly because it revolved around writing and recording. But the interior sense I had was of deep disorder and that’s one of the reasons I went up to Mount Baldy and why for thirty years I would spend a part of each year up there, just to depend on the routine so that I could stop having to improvise. It was the improvisation of the life that finally got me. But we began to work almost immediately after I came down. So the days have been very, very structured.

  SLD: But when I was there, you said that if I didn’t follow these rules and regulations, I would be lying in bed watching TV and scratching my back all day long.

  LC: Oh, yeah. Well, these girls won’t let me do it.

  SLD: Is it just a coincidence that they happen to be women, the people you are working with?

  LC: Well, it’s certainly a delightful coincidence that they’re women and they’re women I’ve known for a long time and they happen to be beautiful but their stunning competence is what deeply attracts me to them. Sharon is a prodigious talent and Leanne is to my mind the best engineer around. So the fact that they happen to be women is a wonderful bonus.

  SLD: What about the Book of Longing?

  LC: Yeah, there are about 250 poems there now and these songs come mostly from that period of the past ten years.

  SLD: But will you publish the book actually?

  LC: I don’t have any deep sense of urgency about publishing. I’d like to keep it around for a while.

  SLD: You can actually read some of the poems on your homepage. “The Moon” … this one I like very much, too.

  LC: Oh, “The Moon.” That I wrote up at Mount Baldy. Yeah, that’s from Jarkko [Arjatsalo]’s site [leonardcohenfiles.com]. It comes out of Helsinki [Finland].

  SLD: He sent you his regards, too.

  LC: Oh, thank you so much.

  SLD: And this. [Hands him another poem.] As you’re not coming to Stockholm, we can have the poetry reading here.

  LC: “Sorrows of the Elderly.” [Reads poem, then laughs.]

  SLD: Can you explain it?

  LC: Oh, it’s just a joke … on us.

  SLD: On the elderly?

  LC: On the elderly. [Laughs.] I shouldn’t include you.

  SLD: Yes you should. [Laughs.] You know you should.

  LC: [Points to a page on the table with one of his drawings.] Where’s that picture from?

  SLD: This is from a German magazine.

  LC: Oh yeah.

  SLD: I must say, I don’t like complimenting people that I interview but you are a fantastic artist as well.

  LC: Oh, thank you.

  SLD: Did you never have an exhibition?

  LC: No, the great pleasure of drawing and painting for me is that it has absolutely no professional application. It’s not at all connected with anything. So I do it freely and with a great deal of pleasure.

  SLD: And the fact that a lot of people would love to buy these paintings for huge amounts of money …

  LC: I’ll put them on the Internet. They can download them.

  SLD: No, but does that not mean anything to you?

  LC: I wouldn’t like to think of it that way. It’s one of those private matters. I love people to see it and I give drawings to anybody who wants one or I’ll make a copy. A lot of them are done on the computer so I can just email them to people. Whoever wants one is welcome. But for it to enter that world of commerce and anxiety and presentation … it is just too intimate a pleasure. I love to sketch.

  SLD: So you don’t look upon yourself as an artist? You look upon yourself as a musician and a songwriter and a singer.

  LC: Yeah, I think of myself as a songwriter.

  SLD: And what about the author?

  LC: Yeah, I write books and people have given me the title poet. But I always think that poetry is a verdict given by others, by the next generation. If your work has a certain kind of intensity and a capacity to endure, after twenty-five or thirty or fifty or a hundred years, I think it’s legitimate to call it poetry. The fact that you describe it as poetry means very little. The fact that the lines don’t come to the end of the page doesn’t mean it’s poetry. So I never think of myself that way. I think of myself as a writer, as a journalist, someone who is describing a small corner of the universe.

  SLD: But you’re not a journalist, because a journalist describes reality but you describe the essence of reality.

  LC: Well, that’s my reality. This is the only interior predicament that I have any access to and I try to describe it as accurately as I can. In that sense, I think of myself as a journalist and that’s why I feel a certain solidarity with journalists.

  SLD: Yeah?

  LC: Yeah. My arena, my landscape, is very, very small. But it’s the same kind of activity to report as precisely as I can the conditions that pertain.

  SLD: I think you said or wrote somewhere that you wanted to keep a diary of your life. You wanted to report.

  LC: It seems to be the nature of the work … a kind of diary keeper, a kind of journal keeper.

  SLD: But aren’t you too shy to keep an honest diary?

  LC: I may be too dishonest to keep an honest diary but I’m not too shy. [Laughs.]

  SLD: Are you dishonest?

  LC: One is struggling with that all the time, especially in this kind of work. Every writer learns certain tricks, so that’s OK. There are certain techniques and tricks that you have and maybe you can fool others but you can’t fool yourself in these matters. And you don’t want to fool yourself so you keep digging for the authentic tone. Of course it’s unfair to present yourself socially with brutal honesty. It’s like if someone asks you, “How are you?” and you tell them, they don’t want [to hear it] … It’s unfair to tell people how you are. That’s what poetry or writing a song is for.

  SLD: I think your sense of humor has developed a lot. A lot of the new poems are very—

  LC: Some of them are funny, yeah.

  SLD: They
’re very funny.

  LC: My friends always thought I had a sense of humor. I got the reputation [for being humorless] and I think it’s not altogether illegitimate because my songs were about stressful conditions, sometimes with no resolution. I think a lot of them had a dark feeling. I hope that the writing of the song penetrated the darkness somehow, but for a lot of people it didn’t, so I understand that I got labeled as a depressed, pessimistic sort of guy.

  SLD: But you were not?

  LC: No, I wasn’t, no.

  SLD: But you have managed now to put down your sense of humor in words.

  LC: Well, a lot of that book, the Book of Longing, is a kind of sendup of the monks’ life, an ironic reflection on the religious vocation.

  SLD: Almost every one is very funny.

  LC: Yeah, ’cause they’re not poems. They’re really jokes.

  SLD: [Laughs.] So the Book of Longing is a book of jokes?

  LC: The whole thing is a joke. [She hands him a poem.] Ah, yeah, what is that?

  SLD: You don’t know them by heart?

  LC: This doesn’t look like it’s finished … yeah, maybe it is. It’s called “The Correct Attitude.” [Reads poem.] Haven’t read that since I wrote it.

  SLD: Is that true or is it—

  LC: It’s just a joke. It’s all just a joke.

  SLD: But do you have the correct attitude? Do you care if it ends or if it goes on?

  LC: [Pauses.] Not really. [Long pause.] You?

  SLD: Sometimes I don’t, sometimes I do.

  LC: Well, that’s it. I think your answer is better.

  SLD: [Laughs.] But it’s not interesting.

  LC: Yeah, it is. It takes two people to answer that question.

  SLD: So when you were little, were you more known as this funny little bloke or were you this serious little chap?

  LC: I don’t know. In the time that I grew up, psychological profiles were not fashionable. You just followed orders more or less and whatever you could do on the sly you did but it was a pretty disciplined kind of existence when I was a kid. There wasn’t the kind of youth rebellion that we see today and authority and parental control were very strong and nobody cared what your inner condition was, as long as your shoes were underneath your bed in the right way. We weren’t close with our parents. We didn’t really discuss our inner condition with our parents. It was a very wise kind of upbringing. It didn’t invite self-indulgence.

  SLD: But you learned discipline.

  LC: You learnt good manners, which is better than discipline.

  SLD: And your dog?

  LC: My dog? I’m very happy these days because my daughter who lives in the same house as I do has dogs. I love dogs and she’s brought two dogs into my life. It’s really wonderful. And I play with them every day and teach them tricks.

  SLD: What kind of dogs?

  LC: Mutts. Just street dogs. She got them from the pound.

  SLD: Did you have a dog when you were little?

  LC: Yes, I had a Scottish terrier. My mother named him Tovarich—comrade. We called him Tinky. Yes, I guess the closest being to me during childhood. The dog would sleep under my bed and follow me to school and wait for me so that was a great sense of companionship.

  SLD: Because you sometimes write about a dog.

  LC: Well, I have his picture on my dresser in Los Angeles. We loved that dog. My sister gave me his picture framed, as a present.

  SLD: And what happened when he died?

  LC: He died when he was about thirteen, which is quite old for a dog. He just asked to go out one night. You know how a dog will go and stand beside the door? So we opened the door, it was a winter night, and he walked out, and we never saw him again. And it was very distressing. I put ads in the newspaper and people would say, “Yes, we have found a Scottie” and you’d drive fifty miles and it wouldn’t be your Scottie. And we only found him in the springtime when the snow melted and the smell came from under the neighbor’s porch. He had just gone outside and gone under the neighbor’s porch to die. Some kind of charity to his owners. But we loved that little dog.

  SLD: And after that you didn’t have any other dog?

  LC: No, then I finished university and I started living a kind of vagabond life and never living anywhere for [long]. When I lived on Hydra, there was a dog named Flopsy who kind of belonged to a lot of people, and sometimes she’d stay at my house.

  SLD: But now …

  LC: Now my daughter has these dogs.

  [The cameraman changes tapes. When the video resumes, Cohen has moved on to a new subject. —Ed.]

  LC: How else would you dare to get married if you weren’t confused?

  SLD: [Laughs.] Are you confused?

  LC: I don’t think so.

  SLD: You’re not getting married.

  LC: No.

  SLD: You were never married.

  LC: No, I was never married.

  SLD: Why?

  LC: [Pause.] Coward. Cowardice. I had these children, fortunately, but I never … I also grew up in a period where there was a great deal of antiauthoritarian feeling, so some of the people of my generation never felt they had to consult an authority or have the affirmation of a church or a state to seal their union. I guess I participated in that kind of …

  SLD: So you’re a child of your time?

  LC: Of course.

  SLD: I asked a couple of my female friends for help with questions to you.

  LC: How’d they do?

  SLD: They did fine but they all had the same question.

  LC: What is the question?

  SLD: Ask him if he wants to make love to me.

  LC: [Laughs.] I’m not so active in this front anymore. But I suppose I could make an exception.

  SLD: So I’ll tell them that. I was a bit surprised actually because since ’93 you’ve been so much into the spiritual world and when I talked to you last, we talked about very serious spiritual matters. But it seems that you still come across as the ladies’ man.

  LC: [Laughs.] Yeah, it’s a curious reputation—very inaccurate. There are a lot of women in my life certainly. Somehow I appreciate the competence of women. I like the way women work, so I find myself working with a woman engineer and a woman cowriter, my manager is a woman …

  SLD: In what way are they different from men [in] their way of working?

  LC: More selfless.

  SLD: Less ego?

  LC: Less ego, not so much on the line. Or a more skillful negotiation with the ego. And also very quick. Very, very quick, which I appreciate.

  SLD: But you tried to kill the ladies’ man in the seventies already. Death of a Ladies’ Man.

  LC: Well, women took care of that.

  SLD: How do you mean?

  LC: I didn’t try to kill anyone. I felt I got creamed in a certain way. But everybody has that feeling of the disaster of the heart because nobody masters the heart. And nobody’s a real ladies’ man or a love gangster. Nobody really gets a handle on that. Your heart just cooks like shish kabob in your breast and it’s sizzling and crackling and too hot for the body. So those descriptions of course are easy and a kind of joke, a kind of simple description. I’ve known some men who had real reputations as ladies’ men, who are real lady killers, and they don’t have any handle on it, either. I don’t think anybody feels very confident in that realm at whatever level you’re operating.

  SLD: So how did you feel?

  LC: Well, the reputation was completely undeserved, for one thing. I don’t think my concerns about women and about sex were any deeper or more elaborate than any other guy that I met. Women are the content of men and men are the content of women so everybody’s involved in this enterprise with everything they’ve got, and most are hanging on by the skin of their teeth and, as I say, nobody masters the situation, especially if it really touches the heart. Then one is in a condition of anxiety most of the time. And even the great ladies’ men that I’ve bumped into, and I’ve met some real ones—and I’m not in their le
ague—the sense of anxiety about the conquest is still very much there. Because in any case, the woman chooses.

  SLD: How?

  LC: I think the woman chooses. It’s been told to me that the woman chooses, and she decides within seconds of meeting the man whether or not she’s going to give herself to him. In any case, I think in most cases the woman is running the show in these matters, and I’m happy to let them have it.

  SLD: But in the Book of Longing there is a long poem, and I probably don’t remember the lines right, but it was something like, “My dick is the horse and my life is the chart … ”

  LC: Is the cart.

  SLD: “Is the cart.” Sorry.

  LC: Yeah, very vulgar line, I wish I hadn’t written it. In fact, I’ve changed it.

  SLD: To what?

  LC: I don’t remember what I changed it to now, because I’ve had a growing sense of dissatisfaction with that poem. I must remove it from the site [chuckles] or at least it needs more work. It came out of a time when I’d just come down from Mount Baldy and I was writing very, very quickly and with a kind of wild sense of freedom from the schedule, and I was blackening a lot of pages and sending them off to the website, and that’s one I have to look at.

  SLD: Why? It’s very direct.

  LC: It’s very direct but I think the language [could be] a little bit more musical. Try for a different music.

  SLD: But what did it mean? What was the content?

  LC: I think the content is that that’s where a man’s brain is. And when I watch the young, as I do because I have two young … well, they’re not children, they’re young adults. I remember going to a party that my son invited me to, and I sat there just thanking my lucky stars that I wasn’t twenty-five, because … the level of suffering at one of these events was overwhelming. The mutual displays of attraction, the effort that had gone into each personal presentation, the expectations, the disappointments. It seemed to be one of the circles of hell that I was pleased not to be in.

  SLD: So where are you now?

  LC: Well, I’m not in that inner circle, in any case. Nothing’s over till it’s over but I find myself in a graceful moment, a more or less relaxed situation, and the whole background of the record was a sense of relaxation. The work was very hard and intense and sometimes frustrating but it didn’t have the background of anxiety. It had a background of … I won’t go so far as to say peace but relaxation. And fortunately, that seems to have continued. But there’s no guarantee. You can slip off the path at any time.