Leonard Cohen and Philosophy

by Holt, Jason

  When I first read the book in the 1960s, its obscenity did not bother me at all. I was excited to learn what one of my favorite poets was thinking about Canadian politics. My purpose in this chapter is to recover that excitement. But first let me introduce another way of reading it. One way to move past the Obscenity Reading is to note that famous court cases in 1960 had made it legal to publish D. H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. And many readers were finding “redeeming literary merit” in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Cohen was already known as a poet, and some readers were quick to find graceful metaphors and insightful turns of phrase in Beautiful Losers. A saint is someone who “rides the drifts like an escaped ski” (p. 95); or “the old people gathered at the priest’s hem shivered with a new kind of loneliness” (p. 82). It is easy to find individual moments of redeeming beauty, and thus a better way of reading the novel. I’ll call that the Poetical Reading.

  But a reader should not be content with disconnected moments of delight. A good reading of a novel should explain how the various moments hold together, how they form a unity. When a reader offers an interpretation, he or she cites many details from the text and tries to show how they form a coherent story. There are many better ways of reading Beautiful Losers than the Obscenity Reading or the Poetical Reading. I am going to advocate a Political Reading and will claim that it can shed light on other, less satisfactory readings.

  Best Readings

  I have a philosophical theory that I want to put on the table right away. It is a commonplace in discussions of literature to claim that the greater a piece of writing, and the richer a work, the more interpretations it will sustain. I claim that there is a mistake in that idea. True, it is important to keep an open mind, and to try to imagine various interpretations and different ways of reading a work of literature. But some interpretations are better than others, and if that is so, then it is likely that one interpretation will be best of all. I call that the best reading of a work, and I think that that is what we are all looking for when we argue about how to interpret a novel. In what follows I offer some steps in the direction of the best reading of Beautiful Losers. (I also discuss this theory in my article, “Best Readings.”)

  I don’t want that to be an arrogant claim. Here is an argument that supports it. Let’s accept that I am wrong. If there is no best reading, then a work can support more than one equally good reading. Consider the well-known duck/rabbit drawing.

  It is a drawing that does sustain more than one equally good interpretation. There is no more reason to believe that the protrusions are rabbit ears than that they are a duck bill.

  It can be a duck, or a rabbit, but it cannot be both at once. Either explanation is as well supported as the other. I claim, however, that the ambiguity only exists because the drawing is so oversimplified, so schematic. If we were to add feathers or fur to the drawing we would make it richer, make it a better portrayal. But at the same time we would reduce the ambiguity of its meaning. So it goes with greater art. The richer and more detailed a work, such as either of Leonard Cohen’s novels, the less likely it is to sustain ambiguity, and the more likely it is that an interpretation will prove to be the best one. That conclusion, of course, is just the opposite of the one we assumed when we began.

  Why does a more detailed work reduce ambiguity? Because there’s more evidence, more detail about plot and character, for instance, that will support one interpretation over the others. I shall attempt with my Political Reading of Beautiful Losers to give the best explanation of the greatest number of details in the novel. I’ll start with the question, “Who are the losers, anyway?”

  Who Are the Losers?

  Almost everyone mentioned in the novel is a loser. This includes the defeated tribe called “A——s” whom the Historian is studying (p. 4), it includes the New Jews of Montréal (p. 160), it includes the male prostitutes and drug addicts on Blvd. St. Laurent (p. 189), and it includes Mary Voolnd, who nurses F. and is mutilated by police dogs (p. 226). In fact I think that all Canadians are being called losers. But there are four main losers. The novel starts and ends with Kateri (Catherine) Tekakwitha. Here are the opening words:

  Catherine Tekakwitha, who are you? Are you (1656–1680)? Is that enough? Are you the Iroquois Virgin? Are you the Lily of the Shores of the Mohawk River? Can I love you in my own way? I am an old scholar. . . . I fell in love with a religious picture of you. You were standing among birch trees, my favorite trees. God knows how far up your moccasins were laced. . . . Do I have any right to come after you with my dusty mind full of the junk of maybe five thousand books? I hardly even get out to the country very often. . . .

  Catherine Tekakwitha, I have come to rescue you from the Jesuits. (pp. 3–5)

  We learn some things in this passage about the first two losers. One is Catherine, who died in 1680. The second I shall call the Historian. He is first of all an old scholar who is writing “The History of Them All.” That’s what Book One of Beautiful Losers is called. He is also a dirty old man—he is thinking of what is under Catherine’s skirt as well as of her fame and her sainthood. Moreover, we learn something from this opening passage about the style of the novel itself. It has constant comic turns and one-line jokes: as if getting out of the city were a qualification for befriending a 300-year-old Aboriginal woman.

  On the second page the Historian tells us about “my friend F.” who “died in a padded cell, his brain rotted from too much dirty sex” (p. 4). F. is the third of the beautiful losers. The fourth is then introduced. She is the Historian’s Aboriginal wife, Edith (she is a descendant of the A——s). She has committed suicide, by crouching at the bottom of an elevator shaft in their apartment building until the descending machine crushes her beyond recognition (p. 7).

  So the Historian is going to tell us a story about himself and three others. Those are the four main losers. Three are already dead. The Historian is writing their history. The second part of the book is called “A Long Letter from F.” (p. 143). Writing from his death-bed, F. gives another view of the same characters and their story. Finally there is a short section called “Beautiful Losers: An Epilogue in the Third Person,” which concludes the story about the four losers.

  A Psychological Reading

  The 1960s in particular were a period of revived nationalism in Canada. The reading of Canadian literature from the 1960s naturally requires some acquaintance with how the country was at that time conceived and conceived itself. Not to see that the book is deeply embedded in Canadian politics is to miss something essential. This has to be at least part of a good reading of the novel. I hope to get you to agree with me about that, but let me first introduce a very fine reader who does not agree with me.

  When Beautiful Losers appeared in 1966 it was immediately reviewed all over Canada, but especially by distinguished poets. One of the most impressive of those poet reviewers was Michael Ondaatje, now best known as the author of The English Patient. He published a short monograph, Leonard Cohen, in 1970.

  Beautiful Losers, writes Ondaatje, “is a gorgeous novel, and is the most vivid, fascinating, and brave modern novel I have read.” On first reading he was struck by some powerful scenes, but thought that “nothing linked them together,” and that it was “simply too sensational.” That suggests that his first reaction was a Poetical Reading. A second reading revealed to him “superb writing, structure, and themes that are very basic to Cohen” (p. 45). That last phrase is important, for Ondaatje sees the characters, at least the Historian—whom he calls the Narrator—and F., as “a powerful extension of several of the traits of Leonard Cohen” that are also to be seen in his early poetry. So he writes:

  What makes the style and technique of the book so valid and effective is the way Cohen uses it to characterize and juxtapose F. and the Narrator. The Narrator is always being defeated by Art, History, Language; F. uses language like a sword, illogically, excessively, and unrealistically—his speech is riddled with invalid and brilliant
images. . . .

  The Narrator’s “book,” is therefore the most tortured piece of writing imaginable. . . . Book Two, “A Long Letter from F.,” shows a remarkable change of style, a calm that is gracious after the diatribes and uncertainties of the Narrator. . . .

  We therefore find the essential drama of the novel in the styles Cohen uses, for F. is trying to break down the restrictive laws and values that limit the Narrator, to become the Narrator’s Mephistopheles and lead him through madness and total freedom into sainthood. (pp. 46–47)

  I call this the Psychological Reading, because it claims that the book is mainly an account of the author’s personality and that the two main “authors,” the Historian and F., are warring aspects of Cohen himself. There is much that is right about this, and another fine critic, Stephen Scobie, develops the idea further. But I do not agree with the main assumption—that the novel is best seen as portraying aspects of Cohen’s psyche

  Ondaatje reinforces his claim by comparing Beautiful Losers to Cohen’s 1963 novel, The Favourite Game. The earlier novel clearly was autobiographical—the story of a young, talented Montréal Jewish boy, with his sidekick friend and his girlfriend, making their way into adulthood. So Ondaatje says “as Breavman (the hero of the early novel) separated himself into lover and artist,” in Beautiful Losers “the role of the lover is played by F. The Narrator struggles along after them, watching, discovering . . .” (p. 50). Cohen, that is, has separated himself into Historian and F., and the drama of the novel is the struggle of one part of him to liberate the other part of him from his hang-ups, his mental constipation. But this does not fit Beautiful Losers all that well.

  The Psychological Reading misses some very important things. First of all it treats the Indian women, Catherine Tekakwitha and the Historian’s wife, Edith, as secondary characters. But Catherine’s importance cannot be reduced to an example of the Historian’s incompetent interest in history, and an example of sainthood for F. to emulate. Nor is Edith just a dead Indian. She is loving, ambitious, experimental, and tries until the end to make a living husband of the hopeless Historian. Even her suicide is presented as a desperate attempt to save their love by teaching him that the living are more important than the dead. In my reading the women are as central as the male characters. They are important in their own right, and not just because they might patch together the broken men (a recurrent theme in Cohen’s poems and songs).

  Second, Ondaatje’s reading does not explain the fact that F. is French. Leonard Cohen is not French. But F. is undoubtedly French. Why, then, should F. be one of the two sides of Cohen’s personality? One of the stories that F. tells in his long letter is the story of his losing a thumb while blowing up a statue of Queen Elizabeth, monarch of England and of Canada. The famous statue, on Sherbrooke St., was in fact a target of separatists, Québec nationalists, on the occasion of the Queen’s visit to Canada in 1964. I think that Québec separatists were part of the Canadian landscape that Cohen was portraying, rather than a part of his own personal psyche.

  Perhaps I exaggerate this aspect of F.? He is introduced as “my friend, F.,” so F. could stand for Friend. Stephen Scobie thinks it could stand for Frankenstein (Leonard Cohen, p. 99). It could also stand for phallus; think of the Historian as a desperate, once-rational mind being led about by his penis. But F. says: “It is not merely because I am French that I long for an independent Québec.” In the course of the ensuing political manifesto, he makes a telling political remark: “The English did to us what we did to the Indians, and the Americans did to the English what the English did to us. I demanded revenge for everyone” (pp. 186–87). The Indians, the French, and the English are all losers. Canadians are all losers. That, I think, is a strand in the narrative of Beautiful Losers that reaches from the first page to the last. It is also, I am sure, a significant fact that in those two passages, and in various places elsewhere in the novel, Cohen makes use of the official Canadian practice (developed in the 1960s) of proceeding in two languages, alternating French and English. Finally, F.’s long letter ends with “Signé F.” (p. 226).

  A Political Reading

  So if the Psychological Reading is too private and personal, and leaves out significant aspects of the novel, what do I think are the important ingredients in my Political Reading? In 1962 Canada had a national election. The governing Conservative party under John Diefenbaker had quickly become unpopular. The newly-elected John F. Kennedy in the USA was getting all the trendy headlines. Kennedy sent campaign help to the opposition Liberal party, led by Lester Pearson. The Liberals, whose policies were friendlier to the Americans, won the election. George Grant responded in 1965 with a book, Lament for a Nation, that turned the country on its head. He argued that John Diefenbaker was the last of the nationalist Canadian leaders, and that the recent election marked the end of an independent Canada. The Liberals had accepted what he called the continental model of development. In future, Canada would not build its own railway line from East to West, and strive to control its own economy. It would seek deeper and deeper integration with the American economy. The Canadian project of building a separate nation on the northern half of the continent was finished. Grant wrote about what Canadians were losing. I think that Canadians are also Cohen’s losers.

  My reading of Beautiful Losers must now be becoming clearer. It is not a portrayal of Cohen’s psychology as much as it is a portrayal of his city and his country. That is why Catherine’s conversion by French Jesuits is so important, that is why F. is French. Let me say more about each of the main losers, and how they represent aspects of Canada in the 1960s.

  The nation of Canada begins, of course, with its original inhabitants, and with their confrontation with Europeans. The first major confrontation was between the French and the Indians (as they were called by Europeans who thought that in sailing west they were on their way to India). Catherine Tekakwitha was a girl of the Mohawk First Nation. When she was four, she and her whole village contracted the European scourge, smallpox. Catherine’s body was weakened by the illness, she was partially blinded and her face was disfigured. She was also orphaned when the rest of her family all died of the disease.

  A Jesuit missionary, Père de Lamberville, came to her tribe when she was eighteen, and impressed her with the stories about both Jesus’s love and his suffering. She began to try to suffer as he had, and undertook acts of great self-denial, self-punishment, and self-mutilation. The missionaries warned her that she was taking these signs of penance too far, but she persisted. She vowed to remain a virgin forever. She prayed for hours in freezing temperatures. She whipped herself. She lay on a bed of thorns. She refused most food. So she died, weakened by her religious practices, at the age of twenty-four (in 1680). But she had had visions. She had wandered the forests placing small wooden crosses as reminders of prayer and penance. Others had visitations from her after her death. Miracles were performed in her name. The Roman Catholic Church had declared her venerable in 1943, but she was not made an official Saint until 2012, long after Cohen’s novel demanded her “official beatification” (p. 242).

  We see here the story of a Native North American child whose life was devastated first by the disease and then by the religion of the invading Europeans. Much of the novel’s obscenity, the blood and pain, the flesh and sex, begins in Cohen’s honesty about Catherine’s life. “I have come to rescue you from the Jesuits,” his Historian announces. But the novel ends with her still in their hands. Catherine represents Canada’s Aboriginal people, who were losers in their confrontation with European invaders.

  The Historian confesses already on the second page that he suffers from constipation. It helps to think of his constipation as his essence. He is cramped, inhibited, full of anguish and regret. I think he typifies English Canadians, inhibited by rules for being good, and rules for being rational. F. is indeed his opposite, and Catherine’s opposite, too. He is sensuous, lively, witty, and elegant. He is also successful as a businessman; at one point
he pays a million dollars for a factory. Later he becomes a Member of the national Parliament in Ottawa. Some readers thought at the time that F. was modeled on Pierre Trudeau (who became a Member of Parliament in 1965, and became Prime Minister in 1968). He even drove a Mercedes convertible like Trudeau, and like Trudeau he brought glamour and passion to the project of dragging English Canada into a new era. But the comparison fades away; F. fails in his mission, and he dies in an asylum, apparently of a sexually-transmitted disease.

  The fourth main loser is Edith, a reincarnation of Catherine. She had a hard childhood, and was raped at thirteen. We learn that life with her husband, the Historian, gets less and less interesting for her. She and F. conspire to save the Historian from himself. But if she represents contemporary Aboriginals, she too fails to save English Canada from its dismal fate. Notice too that Mary Voolnd, who becomes important as F.’s nurse in his final days, is from Nova Scotia (p. 150). I see no reason for this detail except that it helps to establish that the book is about the whole country.

  These episodes underline the central metaphor: Canadians are constipated and have trouble reaching orgasm. The Quiet Revolution Francophones have tried to show them a better way. But despite F.’s example and tireless efforts, Edith and the Historian continue to be mired in frustration. We have a standoff. None of them succeeds. All are losers.

  My point is twofold. First, the four Beautiful Losers are not just aspects of the author’s consciousness. Second, one of its obvious aspects is that the four characters include a representative of the situation when the Europeans arrived, and three contemporaries who represent the three founding peoples of the nation of Canada: Aboriginals, French, and English. Beautiful Losers is all about Canada on the eve of the 1967 centennial of its founding.