Various Positions (20 page)
Authors: Ira B. Nadel
————
IN
Beautiful Losers
F., a young Montreal poet, asserts that “the texts had got to me.” This was true of Cohen himself, who based his novel on several core readings: P. Edouard Lecompte’s
Une vierge iroquoise: Catherine Tekakwitha, le lis de bords de la Mohawk et du St. Laurent (1656–1680)
(1927);
Kateri of the Mohawks
by Marie Cecilia Buehrle; a volume entitled
Jesuits in North America;
an American comic book from 1943,
Blue Beetle;
a farmer’s almanac; a passage from Nietzsche’s
Twilight of the Idols;
and Longfellow’s
Song of Hiawatha
.
Cohen had become very interested in the life and history of Catherine Tekakwitha, the Mohawk who may become the first Native Canadian saint. He found her fascinating because she “
embodied in her own life, in her own choices, many of the complex things that face us always. She spoke to me. She still speaks to me,” he said in 1990. He most likely learned
of her through her picture in the apartment of his friend Alanis Obamsawin, an Abenaquis Native, though Kahntineta Horne, a First Nations woman who later became a politician, may have told him about her. A statue of the saint sits on the stove of his Montreal house, and prints of her hang in his Los Angeles home and office. When he was in New York he would put flowers on her bronze statue in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
He also drew from Swedenborg:
Arcana Caelestia
or
Heavenly Arcana
, volumes 1 and 2, the
Divine Providence
, and
Divine Love and Wisdom
. He studied these volumes in January-February 1966 and each is heavily annotated and marked. He refers to the
I Ching
in his work, echoing his poem, “How We Used to Approach the Book of Changes: 1966,” published in
The Energy of Slaves
.
At this time, Steve Sanfield, Axel Jensen, George Lialios, and Cohen regularly met on Hydra to discuss such texts as the Book of Revelation, the
I Ching
, or
Book of Changes, The Secret of the Golden Flower
, and
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
. Jensen provided the key texts, which also included
Tibetan Yoga and the Secret Doctrine
and the translations of Evan-Wentz. Cohen introduced Hasidic thought into this mix, notably the work of Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem, as well as the Jewish prayer book.
In an unpublished essay from 1965, Cohen summarizes the importance of his education on Hydra in “esoteric enterprise”:
We have among us adepts of telepathy, telekinesis, levitation,
apporte
, teleplasty, dematerialization, telesthesy, psychometry, kryptoscopy, and other minor ocular skills which at best assume the importance of parlour games in relation to our ultimate goals, and which at worst may be viewed as a dangerous distraction from those high purposes. I, for one, am rather disposed to the more pessimistic interpretation of these phenomena, but the charity we all practice in regard to another’s discipline forbids me to treat the subject with any further aggression. We also have among us students of tantric sexual systems, and I regret to say, misplaced as my regret may be, that these students have often found themselves in adulterous predicaments.
In March 1965 Cohen told Jack McClelland that
Beautiful Losers
would be finished in a month “
and if it gets by censors it could make
money. I need cash—so would you decide how much you’d like to pay me.” Three weeks later Cohen reported that he had “
written the Bhagavad Gita of 1965” and that “what happens to this book doesn’t matter because I have discovered a way to write a novel in three weeks and will turn out four in 1965. That is serious.” He then proposed new titles:
SHOW IT HAPPENING
or
SHOW IT HAPPENING EVERY DAY
is the novel’s new title, or maybe
THE HISTORY OF THEM ALL
, or maybe
THE
BEAUTIFUL LOSERS
, or just
BEAUTIFUL LOSERS
. Just these titles are worth a fortune to Ideal Hollywood.
So you’ll get the mss. in April.
One of us is cracking up.
Two separate draft title pages of the novel read “
BEAUTIFUL LOSERS /
A Pop Novel” and, correspondingly,
PLASTIC BIRCHBARK /
A Treatment of the World.” Note sheets contain other variant titles:
IT WAS A LOVELY DAY IN CANADA, INDIAN ROCKETS, INDIANS
. One experimental section has the prose set to guitar chords.
The narrative of
Beautiful Losers
encompasses history, politics, and sex. As F. outlines it to the narrator, “
You have been baptized with fire, shit, history, love, and loss.” The novel uses a multiplicity of narrative forms and languages, incorporating journals, letters, grammar books, historical narratives, advertisements, catalogues, footnotes, poetry, and drama. Encyclopedic, all-encompassing, and energetic, the text almost bursts its form, and at times the narrator must interject to remind the reader that “
a man is writing this … A man like you.” Writing
Beautiful Losers
taught Cohen “
how to treat big themes with a fast, personal technique,” although his work still went through many transformations.
Cohen assessed the novel in a letter to Cork Smith:
As far as the prologue goes, I can’t think of anything to put in a prologue, and I think it would interfere somehow with the way the whole book is launched, its continual
forward
motion. A prologue would seem to say to the reader: you see, it was all really make-believe, and here am I, your faithful author, standing with a pipe in my library, just another book in my career. But I swear it wasn’t like
that at all. I have written some things, even parts of
The Favorite Game
, that came out of my sense of a career, but every word of the new book is antagonistic to the very idea of career. Your colleague hit on something very true, I think, in his concern for the reader mistaking the book for non-fiction. It
is
non-fiction, although it would serve none of us to let this get around, in fact the notion must be rigorously suppressed. I believe this will be a problem of the presentation of the book on the market. It is non-fiction in the sense that there is more of the unscreened author on every page than usually appears in a work of the imagination, and this is because the book is really a long confessional prayer attempting to establish itself on the theme of the life of a saint, meditation on a tight rope, slipping off to circus screams, catching it again in the crotch, and all the men in the audience blink—they know what it feels like. To get pretentious, more than anything the book resembles the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, in the way that he requires the student to Visualize the stages of the life of Jesus, to actually see Nazareth, the real landscape, never to leap into glory, but to move from the
fact
into mystery, mystery is always grounded in the ordinary fact, mystery has a narrow entrance. It is fiction because I use a fictional construction, characters, scene setting, parodies of pornographic suspense—because all of the apparata of religious perception have withered, in me and in you, and we are offended by any accounts of Mystery which are not presented in fictional or anthropological terms. Because I could not write or believe in a book called Cohen’s Meditations, I had to make a story out of prayer. I believe I had enough craft to be able to pull it off, and a lot of the joy in the book comes directly from pride in craft, ordinary fictional craft. Again and again, I had to reassure myself and the reader that it was only fiction, and when we believed it and relaxed, then I could really dive into the prayer which itself (I think) is composed, at the bottom, of real facts, buttons, doubts, garbage, pie-throwing, and you have to move through all the shit before you can use the pure vocative. Anyhow, this is all postmortem. If the book is one of those rare books that is still read three years after it is published, or maybe even five years, it will have become less and less fictional.
During the writing of
Beautiful Losers
, Cohen had continued his practice of fasting. He felt that it helped focus the mind on creation and also produced a physical manifestation of the holiness of his calling. The absence of food, the denial of pleasure, revivified the importance of his task, following the Judaic tradition of sanctifying the self through exerting control over the appetites. The sanctity was somewhat compromised by the aid of amphetamines, however, which kept him awake and killed his appetite. “
My fast has been following me and I have been following my fast,” Cohen writes. His spiritual sustenance diminishes his physical hunger, he explains, and he rejoices in the emptiness of his body.
After he completed the novel, he broke down. With the text finally finished, he decided to take a break and go to another island. He hadn’t prepared himself, however, for the hot afternoon sun when he returned by boat. He nearly passed out when he got home and had to drag himself to bed. He didn’t eat for more than ten days. He hallucinated and lost weight, going down to 116 pounds. Too many amphetamines coupled with sunstroke had caused his breakdown. But the day the storks came to Hydra was the day he recovered. Every year the storks stop over on their way to Africa and nest for one night on the highest buildings, usually churches, and then leave the next morning. When the storks left, Cohen had regained his strength.
The unorthodox nature of the novel made for some difficulties. Viking required eight readings of
Beautiful Losers
before deciding finally to publish it. Even then, they were not sure of what they had approved. One reader referred to the book as “
Canada with the Maple Leaf snatched off—it is a serious put-on, rich and raunchy, terrifying and funny. It is a truly experimental novel, in which, I admit, I don’t always know where he’s going, but I like the way he travels.” Brendan Gill of
The New Yorker
, Norman Holmes Pearson of Yale, and Leslie Fiedler of Buffalo all offered praise, Fiedler writing that it was an “
honest-to-God pop art novel, with an R.C. Pocahontas and all.” McClelland also went to outside readers to confirm his judgment that it was a brilliant book. “
It astounds and baffles me and I don’t really know what to say about it. It’s wild and incredible and marvellously well written, and at the same time, appalling, shocking, revolting, disgusting, sick, and just maybe it’s a great novel. I’m damned if I know.”
Cohen’s response to McClelland’s letter of acceptance was a six-page statement beginning with a parodic dialogue between offended Canadian critics and a defensive Cohen. It opens with Cohen telling these critics that he was the author only “
for a brief period. Soon it will be the book that
you
have written, and you will treasure it.” The letter continues in the tradition of the trial scene of Leopold Bloom in the “Circe” episode of
Ulysses:
— Fiend of the Kaballa
! Explain yourself! We happen to know that even Milton Wilson hates your book.
— The authorship of the book is already among you. I have already lost it. I am the one man who has not written it.
— The associates of Jack McClelland are easily certain that you are a sick phony and they have conveyed this opinion to their associate, Jack McClelland, who resists it with that true and baffled courage with which a man who longs to be a pagan resists the voice of his conscience.
— Sirs, do not apply for pity.
— Eeeek! Jew Cohen, you’ve condescended too far this time. You have written a disgusting book and we intend to punish you with the G[overnor] G[eneral’s] award, so that you will be hidden forever from the Americans.
The dialogue continues with charges of the novel’s filth, fetishism, and fantasy. Cohen responded by declaring “
the book I hold is absolutely empty, it contains not a trace of anyone, especially me.” He also outlined his terms for publication to McClelland, including control over the cover and jacket copy. He was still smarting at the poor job with
Flowers for Hitler:
the “
exhibitionism I argued off the front cover turned up on the back. We’ve got to avoid all hints of this sort of thing with Beautiful Losers.” He also didn’t want quotes from critics on the back cover. Of “
Canadian critical opinion, I say this in all truthfulness, there is not a single mind in the whole dreary heap that I can take seriously, whether they turn their attentions to me in attitudes of censure or praise.” As always there was the matter of money: “
if you can get that $500 [the advance] to me quickly you would be contributing to my
mental health. So let’s say, to put it in writing, that I accept your publishing offer in general, and that we will work out details in our usual unofficial gentlemanly way.”
McClelland agreed to Cohen’s supplying biographical copy and approving jacket copy for the novel. Part of Cohen’s own description of the book was adopted for the jacket, which reads:
Driven by loneliness and despair, a contemporary Montrealer tries to heal himself by invoking the name and life 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. Obsessed by the memory of his wife Edith, who committed suicide in an elevator shaft, his mind tyrannized by the presence of F., a powerful and mysterious personage who boasted of occult skills and who was Edith’s lover, he embarks on a wild and alarming journey through the landscape of the soul. It is a journey which is impossible to describe and impossible to forget …
Beautiful Losers
is 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, a Jesuitical tract, an Orange sneer, a scatological Lutheran extravagance, in short a disagreeable religious epic of incomparable beauty.
The categories are there, Cohen is saying; take your pick.
But even the manuscript, it seemed, would not cooperate: after the book had been accepted, Cohen wrote, “
I lost my only carbon of the original when a sudden wind sent pages scattering to the sea during an outdoor reading in Hydra. Only because my NY agent could get another copy could I proceed with revisions.” But advance sales were promising; pre-publication orders reached a surprising 3100 copies. It was also being read by a number of movie producers: Otto Preminger, the
MCA
group, Ulu Grosbard, and Alexander Cohen, for a possible movie option.