I'm Your Man (15 page)

Leonard went on to say that, in the process of writing
Beautiful Losers,
“I'd thought of myself as a loser. I was wiped out; I didn't like my life. I vowed I would just fill the pages with black or kill myself.” He also said, “When you get wiped out . . . that's the moment, the REAL moment”—the true, ecstatic moment he had spoken of earlier, perhaps, which he said writers who hadn't been high or tasted madness could never know. Whether Leonard was high or mad during this period is debatable. He was unquestionably in an altered mental state while writing
Beautiful Losers,
smoking hash and taking acid and, above all, speed. A man can do a lot on amphetamine, and Leonard had given himself a great deal to do in his follow-up to
The Favorite Game
, with more mythologies to compare and another quest to undertake—or perhaps the same quest undertaken by another of his six or seven thousand selves.

Beautiful Losers
is a prayer—at times a hysterically funny, filthy prayer—for the unity of the self, and a hymn to the loss of self through sainthood and transfiguration. Jesus might have nodded with fellow feeling; God might have finished it in six days instead of the nine months it took Leonard. It was “written in blood,” Leonard said.
22
He was writing, at various points, ten, fifteen, twenty hours a day. He wrote on his terrace, in his basement room and “behind his house on a table set among the rocks, weeds and daisies.”
23
He wrote with the Ray Charles album
The Genius Sings the Blues
for company, until the LP warped in the sun and then he turned on the radio, tuning it to the American Forces station, which mostly played country music. “It was a blazing hot summer. I never covered my head. What you have in your hands is more of a sunstroke than a book.”
24
In a letter to Jack McClelland he talked his book up as “The Bhagavad-Gita of 1965”
25
; decades later, he talked it down in his foreword to the 2000 Chinese-language edition as an “odd collection of jazz-riffs, pop-art jokes, religious kitsch and muffled prayer.” He told the press, “I think it's the best thing I've ever done.”
26
It was all of the above.

When he finished typing the seven last words—“forever in your trip to the end”—Leonard went on a ten-day fast. He says, “I flipped out completely. It was my wildest trip. I hallucinated for a week. They took me to a hospital in Hydra.” He was put on a protein drip. After they sent him home, he spent weeks in bed, hallucinating, he said, while Marianne took care of him. “I would like to say that it made me saintly,” he said.
27

It is tempting to suggest that Leonard was suffering manic-depression, a disorder thought to peak in men at the same age Leonard gave for poets committing suicide and whose indications include bouts of intense creative activity followed by paralysis, and a “messianic complex,” a deep conviction of having something great or world-saving to do. On the other hand a similar effect might be achieved from taking large amounts of amphetamine, topped up with LSD, for long periods, working without a break and concluding all this with a ten-day fast. “Without a detailed set of observations by a witness on which to base a diagnosis,” says Dr. Showalter, “I think the most one can claim would be that it is possible that Leonard Cohen's underlying diagnosis was bipolar disorder rather than major depressive disorder. But those symptoms could also result from a number of other disorders, including agitated psychotic state, intoxication, and various depressive and psychotic syndromes confounded by alcohol or drug abuse.”

As Leonard told the story, one afternoon he looked up at the sky over Hydra and saw that it was “black with storks.” The birds “alighted on all the churches and left in the morning.” Leonard took this for a sign that he was better. “Then I decided to go to Nashville and become a songwriter.”
28
Although he did not act on this decision immediately, music was certainly near the front of his consciousness during the writing of
Beautiful Losers.
One draft was subtitled
A Pop Novel
. Another included a section in which the narrative was set to guitar chords. In the published version, Leonard chose as an epigraph “Somebody lift that bale,” from the Kern-Hammerstein song “Ol' Man River,” in which a man tired of life and scared of death chooses laughter over tears.

Leonard could not leave for Nashville at once because he was still in time-limbo. He was coming down off speed and trying to adjust to a place where time had already slowed down to a crawling pace, a place where if you wanted to wash your face you might have to wait for the water to come uphill on the back of a donkey. “Coming down is very bad,” Leonard said. “It took me ten years to fully recover. I had memory lapses. It was as if my insides were fried. I couldn't get up anymore; I was in bed like a vegetable, incapable of doing whatever for a long time.”
29
He was exhausted. But he found the wherewithal to send off copies of his manuscript to Viking in New York and McClelland in Canada; the original was sold to the Toronto University library that held his archive. He wrote a précis of the book in which he spoke of a modern-day Montrealer “driven by loneliness and despair” who “tries to heal himself by invoking the name of Catherine Tekakwitha, an Iroquois girl whom the Jesuits converted in the 17th century, and the first Indian maiden to take an oath of Virginity.”

“
Beautiful Losers,
” he wrote, was “a love story, a psalm, a Black Mass, a monument, a satire, a prayer, a shriek, a road map through the wilderness, a joke, a tasteless affront, an hallucination, a bore, an irrelevant display of diseased virtuosity. In short,” he concluded, it was “a disagreeable religious epic of incomparable beauty.”
30

Eight

A Long Time Shaving

W
hile Leonard was on Hydra, wasted and unglued, Marianne nursing him as Masha had nursed his father, in Canada two men were making a film that painted an entirely different picture. Its opening scene, shot in October 1964, showed a self-possessed young man who looked nothing like a speed freak, more like a well-bred, young Dustin Hoffman who still had a touch of baby fat. Standing onstage, entertaining a college audience with a story about visiting a friend in a Montreal mental hospital and being mistaken for an inmate, Leonard was droll, dry, self-deprecating and mannered, with the delivery and timing of a stand-up comic.

Ladies and Gentlemen . . . Mr. Leonard Cohen,
which appeared in 1965, is a forty-four-minute, black-and-white documentary made up of footage shot by Don Owen on the previous year's four-poet university tour and new material shot by the National Film Board documentarian Donald Brittain. The latter depicts Leonard doing an assortment of cool-looking things in various cool-looking Montreal locations to a soundtrack of cool jazz. A voice-over describes him as “a singular talent with four books under his belt.” (
Beautiful Losers
was finished but not yet published.) As affirmation of Leonard's celebrity in Canadian literature, this was several rungs up from the literary prizes and the
Six Montreal Poets
album.

It is a curious film, somewhere between a Leonard Cohen infomercial and a fly-on-the-wall study of Leonard at work and play. We observe him in Le Bistro and walking down the streets he used to roam as an adolescent, stopping to admire old movie posters outside a beautifully run-down cinema. We see him read a poem to a rapt audience of young women with teased hair and sixties makeup, then read the same poem to friends—Mort, Layton, Hershorn, May—only this time accompanying himself on guitar. We watch as he handles journalists and academics. We catch him unawares in his underpants in a cheap hotel room, which costs three dollars a night, we're told. We spy on him as he shaves, bathes, sleeps, expounds, ponders and sits writing at the small desk in his room, cigarette in one hand, pen in the other, while the streetlamp illuminates an overspilling ashtray and the lumps in the cheap wood-chip wallpaper.

Old home-movie footage underlines how much this contrasts with the life Leonard gave up for poetry: here's a cherubic little boy, standing by a car with the family's black chauffeur; here are his uncles, formally dressed in smart suits with boutonnieres; here are the grand houses of Westmount, whose residents, Leonard says, dream “of Jewish sex and bank careers.” The path he chose, Leonard says, was “infinitely wide and without direction.” His first concern when he wakes in the morning is “to discover if I am in a state of grace,” which he defines as “the balance with which you ride the chaos around you.” The film is full of the grand, ironic, playful and deflecting statements of the kind Leonard would come to employ in interviews throughout his career. Irving Layton was correct when he said on camera that Leonard's main concern really was “to preserve the self.” Despite the appearance of vérité, much of the film is pure theater, as inscrutably and entertainingly fictionalized an account of Leonard's life as is
The Favorite Game
.

Being shown living in a run-down hotel in Montreal was better for the
poète maudit
image than the duplex Leonard rented near McGill, and it also guarded his privacy. Yet he was being truthful when he talked in the film about hotels being a “kind of a temple of refuge, a sanctuary of a temporary kind, so all the more delicious.” Leonard would often seek out refuges and sanctuaries—spiritual, terrestrial and sexual—and show no inclination to want to linger too long in any. The hotel life might have been made for him. It was uncomplicated. The cheaper the hotel, the more uncomplicated it was: just the basics, no one bothering you, you're left alone to do what you want. And in a hotel, whatever you might do, the next morning your room will be cleaned, your sin expunged, leaving you free to start over or move on.

“Whenever I come into a hotel room,” Leonard told the camera, “there is a moment after the door is shut and the lights you haven't turned on illumine a very comfortable, anonymous, subtly hostile environment, and you know that you've found the little place in the grass and the hounds are going to go by for three more hours and you're going to drink, light a cigarette and take a long time shaving.” A good solution, as his mother advised him, when things got tough. Released on the cusp of Leonard's move into a music career,
Ladies and Gentlemen . . . Mr. Leonard Cohen
appears in retrospect less a portrait of a serious literary figure than of a pop/rock celebrity in training.

F
ind a little saint and fuck her over and over in some pleasant part of heaven, get right into her plastic altar, dwell in her silver medal, fuck her until she tinkles like a souvenir music box . . . find one of these quaint impossible cunts and fuck her for your life, coming all over the sky, fuck her on the moon with a steel hourglass up your hole.”

Beautiful Losers
was published in the spring of 1966. There had been no book in Canada like it—nothing by Leonard Cohen like it either, even if some of its motifs (love, loneliness, friendship, God, ecstasy, the atrocities of modern life) might have had a familiar feel. The protagonist, whom we know only as “I,” is an anthropologist, “an old scholar, wild with unspecific grief,” who has fallen in love with a dead, young seventeenth-century Indian whose picture he happened upon while studying a near-extinct Native Canadian tribe. Catherine Tekakwitha, or “Kateri,” is a martyr and a saint, the first Iroquois to take an oath of virginity, and an outsider, unable to live in the world she inhabited. “I” is an outsider too, and lonely, so lonely; despite its frenzied humor and bombast, this is one of the loneliest of Leonard's books.

I's wife, Edith, had committed suicide by sitting at the bottom of an elevator shaft, waiting quietly to be crushed. “F.,” the protagonist's best friend, guru, masturbation buddy and sometimes lover (and Edith's lover too), is a madman, savant, Canadian separatist politician and, possibly, saint, who is in the hospital dying from syphilis, a martyr to Montreal but even more so to his cock. However, it's possible that F. is I, that all the characters might be the same person. There's a peyote quality to the book, its characters shape-shifting and dissolving. Sometimes they appear to be gods, but there's a comic earthiness too.
Beautiful Losers
is a prayer for both union and emptiness, and a quest for sexual and spiritual fulfillment. It's a satire on life in the sixties. It's also a treatise on the history of Canada: before the Jesuits came to the country, Catherine would have frolicked happily in the long grass with the boys of her tribe, at one with nature, the gods and man. Canada too had fallen from grace, with the vacuity of urban life and the “two solitudes,” the schism between its English and French populations. Maybe it would set things right if he could go back in time and fuck this young saint, or if he could fuck like his old, sainted friend/teacher, or if he himself could be a modern saint, a celluloid Buddha.

Beautiful Losers
is “a redemptive novel, an exercise to redeem the soul,” Leonard said in a 1967 interview. “In that book I tried to wrestle with all the deities that are extant now—the idea of saintliness, purity, pop, McLuhanism, evil, the irrational—all the gods we set up for ourselves.”
1
In a CBC television interview he said, “I was writing a liturgy, but using all the techniques of the modern novel. So there's this huge prayer using the conventional techniques of pornographic suspense, of humor, of plot, of character development and conventional intrigue.”
2
He said he “was not interested in guarding anything,” and he didn't.
Beautiful Losers
is excessive, manic, free—not tidied up into perfectly edited scenes like
The Favorite Game
. It mixes high and low art, poetry and Hollywood, lyrical beauty and the language of comic books.
The Favorite Game
had been considered a groundbreaking book;
Beautiful Losers
was truly groundbreaking. The
Globe and Mail
described it as “verbal masturbation”; the
Toronto Daily Star
called it “the most revolting book ever written in Canada,” but also the “Canadian book of the year.”

Leonard was most unhappy at how the book was received on publication and at how badly it sold in Canada—an understandable reaction given how intense the experience of writing the book had been. Word reached Jack McClelland that Leonard blamed his publisher, complaining about the book's price, its design, its poor distribution and lack of advertising. McClelland was angry. He felt that he had gone out on a limb to publish the book. When he had first read Leonard's manuscript in May 1965, McClelland found it “appalling, shocking, revolting, sick,” but also “wild and incredible and marvellously well written.” “I'm not going to pretend that I dig it, because I don't,” he wrote to Leonard. “I'm sure it will end up in the courts, but that might be worth trying. You are a nice chap, Leonard, and it's lovely knowing you. All I have to decide now is whether I love you enough to spend the rest of my days in jail for you.”
3
He had proven that he did, and now a year later, Leonard was “bitching because
Beautiful Losers
is not available in all stores. . . . Just what in hell did you expect? You may be naïve but you are certainly not stupid. Booksellers have a perfect right to decide what they will sell and what they will not sell. Many stores have decided that they don't want to take the risk of handling this book.” McClelland reminded Leonard that they had thrown a big promotional party for the book, whose value was “almost totally lost because you didn't think it suited your image or were unwilling to put yourself out. . . . I am beginning to think,” McClelland concluded, “that the National Film Board did you no favor.”
4
What McClelland was implying was that
Ladies and Gentlemen . . . Mr. Leonard Cohen
had gone to Leonard's head.

Beautiful Losers
did not enjoy huge sales in the U.S. either (although one copy would be bought by a young Lou Reed), despite the review in the
Boston Globe
that declared, “James Joyce is not dead. He is living in Montreal.” In 1970 the book was given its UK publication by Jonathan Cape. The publisher, Tom Maschler, was “amazed by
Beautiful Losers
.” “I thought it quite wonderful,” he says, “an original and important novel.” The
Times Literary Supplement
ran a review whose length reflected Leonard's celebrity as a recording artist by that time:
*
“
Beautiful Losers
is an abstraction of all searches for a lost innocence. . . . [It] suffers badly from uncharacterised characters, cosmic desperations, unresolved even in the throes of frantic sex, the compulsively-listed paraphernalia of the environment and the iconographic employment of all the modern communications phenomena the author can manage to drag in. It's a novel that features wanking in a moving car, a masturbation machine that goes over to its own power supply, Brigitte Bardot and (you guessed) the Rolling Stones. It's a novel that's got everything, and that is exactly its trouble: with everything for a subject it has no subject and rounds itself out with rhetoric like a bad poem trying to talk itself into shape. There is talent here, but no sense of limit.”
5

Leonard, said Irving Layton, “is one of the few writers who has voluntarily immersed himself in the destructive element, not once but many times, then walked back from the abyss with dignity to tell us what he saw, to put a frame around the wind. I see Leonard as the white mouse they put down into a submarine to see if the air is foul—he is the white mouse of civilisation who tests its foulness.”
6

T
he gospels diverge on exactly when and where Leonard decided to become a singer-songwriter. According to the journalist and socialite Barbara Amiel, it was in the summer of 1965, in Toronto, in a suite at the King Edward Hotel. Leonard was composing tunes on a harmonica and singing his poems to a female friend while elsewhere in the suite a naked couple were “getting it on.” Leonard took this as a positive response. He announced, “I think I'm going to record myself singing my poems.” His companion winced and said, “Please don't”
7
—though she was a touch too late, since Leonard had been filmed singing and playing guitar in
Ladies and Gentlemen . . . Mr. Leonard Cohen
. The song he performed was called “Chant”—he would later describe it as the first song he ever wrote.
8
It had a somewhat “Teachers”-like melody, over which Leonard chanted the words:

    
Hold me hard light, soft light hold me

    
Moonlight in your mountains fold me

    
Hold me hard light, soft light hold me

Ira B. Nadel dated it to some six months later in his Cohen biography, at a poetry event presided over by F. R. Scott and attended by Irving Layton, Louis Dudek, Ralph Gustafson, A. J. M. Smith and Al Purdy. “Leonard played his guitar, sang, and raved about Dylan,” and since no one in the room had ever heard of Dylan, Scott took off for a record shop, returning with
Bringing It All Back Home
and
Highway 61 Revisited.
He put the albums on, Nadel wrote, “to the chagrin of everyone” besides Leonard, who listened “intently, solemnly” and announced to the room “that
he
would become the Canadian Dylan.”
9
But by Leonard's own account—in 1967 in the
Village Voice
and to any number of music journalists since, this biographer included—his intention was to write country songs, not to be a folk-rock singer-songwriter. He was more comfortable with country, given his history of being in the Buckskin Boys, than he was with folk or rock, genres with which he felt out of touch. Leonard himself dated his decision to a few weeks after the completion of
Beautiful Losers,
following a ten-day fast and a period in the wilderness.