Various Positions (19 page)

While in Montreal, Cohen met Suzanne Verdal, a dancer who was one of the inspirations for two poems that would appear in
Parasites of Heaven
in 1966. He first saw her dancing flamboyantly with her husband, sculptor Armand Vaillancourt, at a
boîte
in Montreal called Le Vieux Moulin. The first poem, beginning “Suzanne wears a leather coat,” celebrates her dangerous beauty. The second, better-known poem is a version of his well-known song “Suzanne,” from his first album,
Songs of Leonard Cohen
(1968). He wrote the poem in the summer of 1965, although it lacked focus until Suzanne took Cohen to her loft near the St. Lawrence river. She remembered that they would spend hours talking by candlelight. Cohen maintained that they “
were never lovers, but she gave me Constant Comment tea in a small moment of magic.”

Images in the song were drawn from a visit to the seventeenth-century La Chapelle de Bonsecours, the mariner’s church in old Montreal with the figure of the golden virgin at the top with her body turned away from the city to bless the departing mariners. Inside the sanctuary, hanging from the ceiling of the triple-steepled church, are votive lights suspended in model ships. Yafa Lerner can remember walking with Cohen in September 1965 and his excitement about the poem.

In a 1986 interview on the life of John Hammond, the Columbia Records executive who gave Cohen his first record contract, Cohen explained that the opening verse of his song was more or less
reportage:
“Suzannne takes you down / to her place near the river / you can hear the boats go by / you can spend the night beside her.” Verse two represented the religious symbols of Montreal, a city filled with religious iconography. “
And Jesus was a sailor / when he walked upon the water / and he spent a long time watching / from his lonely wooden tower … forsaken, almost human / he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.” Cohen summed up verse three as the “
compassionate attention that a man looks to receive from woman”:

Cohen recalled that he had the chord progression before the lyric and outlined his process of composition: “
Most of my songs began with the phrase of music and a phrase of the lyric.” The tunes were usually completed before the lyric. Then Cohen would begin the long process of “
uncovering the lyric and fitting it to the melody.”

In Canada, Cohen had been saddled with that unfortunate sobriquet, “The voice of his generation.” “
tv stations pay me one hundred dollars a half hour for any blasphemous nonsense I can dream up,” he wrote in a 1963 letter. He had become a literary personality, his persona better known than his work. “
I was mailing a letter yesterday and a man came up to me and said, ‘I bet there’s not a decent poem in that envelope!’”

In the same 1963 letter, Cohen announced, “
this Sunday I address the Jewish Public Library and I shall have become a Rabbi at last.” This was a controversial event described in the
Canadian Jewish Chronicle
under the headline “
Poet-Novelist Says Judaism Betrayed.” Speaking at a December 29 symposium entitled “The Future of Judaism in Canada,” Cohen gave an address he called “Loneliness and History.” He startled the audience with an indictment of the community’s neglect and indifference to its artists. The emphasis on the corporate survival of Jewish institutions, he said, was wrong; Jews must survive in their loneliness as witnesses, for if they forego that role, they abondon their purpose. Jews are the witnesses to monotheism, and that is what they must continue to declare. Jews had become afraid to be lonely. The prophet had vanished; only the priest
remained. And the last great poet who tried to be both prophet and priest, A.M. Klein, had fallen into silence; rabbis and businessmen had taken over. Replacing the loss of Jewish values was the wealth of Jewish businessmen. Klein saw this change and decided to become a priest rather than prophet. Young Jewish writers would not make this mistake; they would remain alone and seek to honor their prophetic roles, Cohen declared.

This indictment of the Montreal Jewish community confirmed their worst suspicions: Cohen had turned against them, first in print in
The Favorite Game
and now in person. The reaction at the meeting was strong, but because of the late hour the chair, Dr. Joseph Kage, curtailed discussion and suggested that the symposium be continued the following Sunday. At this second meeting, a packed hall was disappointed to learn that Cohen would not be there. The community took his absence as an insult, but in a later interview Cohen said no one had confirmed to him the date of the second meeting. In his absence, several speakers lashed out at him, launching personal attacks. They quoted from his novel and identified Cohen with anything that was critical or vulgar in the book. A few of the younger members of the audience attempted to defend Cohen, although with little success.

Cohen frequently found his Jewish identity tested. The structure of his Judaism, like his quest in music, became a plea for union with a higher being and confirmation of his priestly function. “
Draw me with a valuable sign, raise me to your height. You and I, dear Foreign God, we both are demons who must disappear in the perpetual crawling light, the fumbling sparks printing the shape of each tired form.”

The controversy initiated by his December 1963 talk did not abate when early in the new year Cohen traveled to Western Canada. He stopped in Winnipeg for a reading/performance with the Lenny Breau Trio at the Manitoba Theatre Center and a reading at the University of Manitoba, then moved on to Vancouver, where he spoke at the University of British Columbia, the Jewish Community Center, and the Vancouver Public Library, all the while promoting the image of the poet as alienated spiritual iconoclast—cool rather than beat, mysterious rather than angry. His readings were uniformly successful and sensational.

In Vancouver he spent time with Earle Birney, who had promoted his work. In a letter thanking him for his hospitality, Cohen playfully chided
him: “
Please quit soon. Layton and I will take over. Then we will quit.” At the Jewish Community Center on February 12, he again spoke on “
the distinction between the Prophet and the Priest, probably sparking a religious revival.” The library talk generated the most displeasure, however:

Many found his behavior offensive, especially his use of frank language and his invitations to the women in the audience to join him in his hotel room after his talk. Despite the furor, he wrote to a Canada Council official who sponsored the tour that “
Vancouver is a beautiful Polynesian city and I will stay there forever.”

By March, he told his U.S. agent, Marian McNamara, that his trip had been “
fairly triumphant…. As far as the prose goes,” he complained, “much work, many breakdowns,” adding that he would “tap Easter and Passover and all festivals of renewal.”

Cohen felt a new purpose and desire: “
Most of all what I want is to be able to seize some discipline and consecrate myself to ten years of real labor.” This consecration occurred with
Beautiful Losers
, which was written in two intense eight-month periods, the first in 1964, the second in 1965. His goal was to prepare a “
liturgy, a big confessional oration, very crazy, but using all the techniques of the modern novel … pornographic suspense, humor and conventional plotting,” as he told Eli Mandel and Phyllis Gotlieb. In February 1964 he said that he wanted to isolate himself “in the country and work on the new lunatic novel.” Seven months later, he wrote Jack McClelland that his “
new novel, PLASTIC BIRCHBARK, is deep into its asylum.”

When he started, he worked only long enough to write three pages a day, sometimes one hour, sometimes eight, typing away on the terrace of his house in Hydra with a portable record player beside him. After the book began to take shape, he would work for longer periods of time, up to twelve or fifteen hours a day, aided by amphetamines and a Ray Charles record,
The Genius Sings the Blues
. His favorite song, played over
and over, contains the line “Sometimes I sit here in this chair and I wonder.” Speed, he thought, would strengthen his mind, but at a certain point “
the whole system collapsed. It isn’t a very good drug for depressed people because coming down is very bad. It took me ten years to fully recover.”

Work on the novel was interrupted by his October visit to Canada to receive the four-thousand-dollar Prix litteraire du Québec for
The Favorite Game
. He also participated in a reading tour organized by Jack McClelland. Four poets traveled in two cars; an exuberant Irving Layton, a white-bearded Earle Birney, a nervous Phyllis Gotlieb, and the leather-jacketed Cohen. Beginning with a October 25, 1964, reading at the North York Public Library, they visited six eastern Canadian universities in five days: Waterloo, Western, Toronto, Queen’s, Carleton, and McGill, reading to audiences of up to three hundred students. Receptions, book signings, and publicity accompanied them, as well as tv and radio broadcasts. The poets, however, did not mix well with each other. According to McClelland, Birney drank and was shy; Gotlieb was withdrawn; Layton was a showman; and Cohen went along but didn’t enjoy himself. At Western,
Time
reported that “
Leonard Cohen in a black leather jacket, Caesar haircut and expertly mismatched shirt and tie looked around and asked, ‘Is this a church?’” The report unfavorably described Cohen’s book as “more shackled by despairs exclusively his own” than by history. When an undergraduate demanded to know ‘What makes a poem?’ Cohen replied, “God. It’s the same kind of operation as the creation of world.”

Although the poets made no money—five months later, after all expenses, they had only one hundred and fifty dollars to divide four ways—the venture did result in an added benefit, especially for Cohen. Donald Owen filmed the tour for the National Film Board of Canada. He dutifully traveled with the group, filming their various readings. Birney’s and Gotlieb’s were remarkably dull. This resulted in a re-edited and partially re-shot film by Donald Brittain about Cohen rather than the group.
Ladies and Gentlemen … Mr. Leonard Cohen
, released in 1965, was the first of several films about Cohen.

The tour did generate publicity, but Cohen complained to Jack McClelland in March 1965 that:
the reading-tour made me an enemy of the whole country and ruined my Canadian life. This was not due solely to my obnoxious personality. It also resulted in the minimum attention for the book it proposed to promote. And worst of all it doesn’t look like we’re going to get any money out of it. Yankel, Yankel, why did you lie to us?

————

DURING HIS VISIT
political events in Canada intruded into Cohen’s artistic world. To Marian McNamara in New York he explained he had been:

On his return to Hydra, he got down to work and began to rewrite
Beautiful Losers
, often listening to a radio tuned to the Armed Forces network broadcast from Athens, which played mostly country and western music. Cohen incorporated Canada’s political turmoil into his work. The Quiet Revolution was changing the landscape of Montreal, turning it into a secular, francophone city, quietly assaulting the ruling anglophone business class. In 1963, the Front de Libération du Québec began its campaign of violence; in May, the explosion of a time bomb in a Westmount mailbox seriously injured an explosives expert. In a October 26, 1963, interview, Cohen remarked that the exploding mailboxes were an invitation to Canada to re-enter history and that the survival of the nation depended on the response to this event. On July 12, 1963, a bomb destroyed the statue of Queen Victoria on Sherbrooke Street. The brass head of the lifesize statue hurtled fifty feet away and the statue toppled. Chalked on the monument were the words “You’re coming to your
goal,” and on the street, near the severed head, was scrawled “Here is the answer.”

Cohen refers to the bombing in
Beautiful Losers
as a proposal by F., who tells the narrator that he will commit suicide as he lays sticks of dynamite in the lap of the statue. “Queen Victoria and Me,” a poem in
Flowers for Hitler
, emphasizes the symbolic power of the figure. Cohen included the poem, with minimal musical accompaniment, on his
Live Songs
album of 1973. Cohen includes the October 1964 visit of the Queen and Prince Philip to Montreal in his novel, contrasting the new revolutionary fervor of Quebec with its decaying ties to the monarchy. The erotic mood of a separatist rally in the text is testimony to the link between politics, history, and sex.

Cohen’s own response to the movement was complex, although in a February 1964 letter from Montreal he wrote that “
in ten years Quebec may not be part of Canada and I will stay in Quebec. Our government has recently established a Ministry of Culture, the first in North America.” He told George Johnston on Hydra, “
I have made a commitment: to Art and my Destiny. All the other commitments are not commitments at all, but contracts, and I don’t like the legal world of compulsion.”