Various Positions (26 page)

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IN APRIL
1969, Cohen received the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for his
Selected Poems, 1956–1968
. Over two hundred thousand copies were sold in the United States. It was his first book of poetry to be published in the U.S., but his second album had just appeared and he was becoming well known as a singer. A full-page ad for the album reads in part, “
What makes Leonard Cohen a very different poet is that he turns his poetry into songs … now there’s actually a demand up front for Leonard Cohen.”

Selected Poems
also sold well in Canada, although the numbers did not equal those in the United States. Including selections from his first four books and twenty new poems, the collection presented a timely overview of Cohen’s work. It was published in England in 1969 and in the following four years in Germany, Israel, Sweden, France, and Spain. When Cohen learned that he had received the award, he sent a telegram from Europe: “
May I respectfully request that my name be withdrawn from the list of recipients of the Governor General’s Award for 1968.I do sincerely thank all those concerned for their generous intention. Much in me strives for this honor but the poems themselves forbid it absolutely.” No one in English Canada had ever before turned down Canada’s most prestigious literary award (and the accompanying twenty-five-hundred-dollar prize money), although the previous month Quebecois writer Hubert Aquin had rejected the award because accepting it “
would not conform to [his] political beliefs.” As a separatist and member of the
Rassemblement pour l’independance nationale
, Aquin felt he had to reject it. After the embarrassment caused by two recipients declining the award, winners in subsequent years have been asked whether or not they would accept the award before the public is informed.

Unexpectedly, Cohen turned up with Quebec novelist Diane Giguere at the party Jack McClelland gave for the Governor General winners at the Chateau Laurier the night of the Ottawa ceremony. Upon seeing him, an angry Mordecai Richler motioned him into the bathroom
with the words “C’mere.
I want to talk to you,” closed the door, and then pointedly asked him why he had turned down the award. “I don’t know” was Cohen’s halting protest. “Any other answer and I would have punched you in the nose,” Richler heatedly replied. Cohen believed that it wasn’t necessary to “
get behind Canada then.” In 1969 the country did not seem, as it does today, an entity that needed such support, he later explained. And he felt that receiving an award from the federal government at a time when the separatists were crying for recognition was, for someone from Quebec, not quite timely. He had friends in the separatist movement, and he couldn’t divorce himself from it so easily. “
I have no idea why he came to the party,” McClelland remarked.

Most of the material in
Selected Poems
was first chosen by Marianne. The collection reflected the changing focus of Cohen’s writing, from his early concentration on religion and identity to a lyrical celebration of love and then the pain of history and loss. One of the best known of the new poems in the collection was a comic plea entitled “
Marita.” It reads:

Cohen had scrawled it on a wall behind one of the outdoor tables of a famous Montreal cafe/bar on Mountain Street, Le Bistro chez Lou Lou les Bacchantes, located under the old Crêpe Bretonne. The bistro was open from 1962 to 1982, and was a gathering place for journalists, writers, artists, politicians, and riff-raff. Pierre Trudeau, René Lévesque, Jack Kerouac, Genevieve Bujold, and Harry Belafonte were likely to turn up around the famous zinc bar or at the marble-topped tables set outside. The Marita in the poem is Marita La Fleche, a petite, attractive brunette from Manitoba who managed three Montreal women’s dress shops. After leaving her shop on Mountain Street, she would go to “Le Bar Zinc,” as it came to be called. Cohen was a regular himself and tried unsuccessfully to pick Marita up one evening. She patted the young poet on the head, and said, “
Go on your way, young man and come back when you’re thirty.” Cohen’s poem was his response, although he recently admitted to no recollection of Marita in the flesh.

Critical praise for the book was strong in both Canada and the United States, although the love poetry rather than the spiritual searchings received the greatest attention. An ad for the book in the
New York Times
included “
a modern housewife’s lament,” plucked from the
New York
magazine: “It’s so difficult, you know, wearing miniskirts and keeping up with Leonard Cohen, and not going insane when the diaper service doesn’t come!” In an interview in the
Times
from April 13, 1969, Cohen explained that there was no difference between his poems and songs. “
Some were songs first and some were poems first and some were situations. All of my writing has guitars behind it, even the novels.” He was fond of citing Ezra Pound’s dictum: “
When poetry strays too far from music, it atrophies. When music strays too far from the dance, it atrophies.”

A hiatus in his writing followed
Selected Poems; The Energy of Slaves
did not appear until 1972,
Death of a Lady’s Man
was published in 1977, and
Book of Mercy
came out in 1984. His singing took precedence, and he recorded seven new albums between 1971 and 1985. His personal life underwent dramatic changes; he became a father, committed himself to Zen, and renegotiated his life with Suzanne. A number of friends and critics felt that he had compromised his artistry by moving into music, but it was music that gained him his audience.

In June 1969,
Saturday Night
magazine devoted ten pages “in celebration of Leonard Cohen.” Cohen was on the cover, staring out at the reader with his large dark eyes. Type running down the left side of the cover declared, “
Leonard Cohen: the poet as hero.” The headline across the top read “Mordecai Richler on the Frightened
WASPS
of Westmount.” Jack Batten, the new associate editor of the magazine, discussed Cohen’s popularity as a singer among the young, and the significance of his poetry and lyrics in capturing the times. One eighteen-year-old told of a visit to Cohen’s motel room, after which she remarked that, “
he acts taller than he really is. I’ve heard other women say the same thing.”

Cohen was included in a series of writers featured on thirty billboards displayed in Toronto subway stations. The brainstorm of Max Layton, son of Irving, it was an original way of promoting Canadian writing and culture. Entitled “Poetry Underground,” the Cohen billboard featured a large portrait of him taken by Canadian photographer Sam Tata and the romantic lyric of “Go by Brooks,” from
Selected Poems
.

During 1969 Cohen was criticized for continuing to live in Greece, following the April 1967 coup by the Greek colonels who then initiated a repressive rule. He defended himself by saying that he did not see it as “
a betrayal of mankind to vacation in a country ruled by fascists … I had a house there, friends; I didn’t consider my presence there a collaboration. It was the contrary.” Two poems, both entitled “I threw open the shutters” in
The Energy of Slaves
, confront the cost to others who were there, however, and the torture they underwent. The second version ends with these lines:

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THE SUCCESS
of Songs from a Room in
1969 led to Cohen’s decision to go on his first tour. It was exclusively in Europe, as were his 1972 and 1974 tours. Cohen didn’t tour North America until November 1974, beginning in New York at the Bottom Line and ending in Phoenix at the Celebrity Theater in March 1975. He would not play in New York again for ten years.

Bob Johnston put together the band, which consisted of Charlie Daniels, Ron Cornelius, Bubba Fowler, and Johnston himself (he wanted to stay at home because he did not consider himself a keyboard player, but Cohen insisted), plus Corlynn Hanney and Sue Mussmano as vocalists. They began in Hamburg on May 4, 1970, and played six cities. At the opening concert in Hamburg, Cohen exhibited an odd showmanship by greeting the stomping German audience with a raised arm and the cry, “Seig Heil
!” In Paris, he invited the ardent crowd to join him on the stage. They did, and the management called the police, although Cohen was able to control the crowd. He began the concert with “Bird on the Wire,” reciting rather than singing. In Copenhagen, he led the audience out into the street and back to his hotel. In London he played
before ten thousand fans at the Royal Albert Hall. A critic said that Cohen exhibited a “
captivating self abasement leaving deep impressions of a sad and tortured wasteland.” Cohen’s peculiar melancholy earned him a loyal British audience. “
Word gets around that Cohen is coming and it’s a sellout, just like that,” a London paper reported. “He sneaks onto the stage whilst you’re still discussing how uncomfortable the seats are …To be alone, he tells us, is not necessarily to be lonely.” Cohen had “a unique gift for juxtaposing natural speech with formal metaphor.”

On July 25 the band played a festival at Forest Hills, New York, memorable for the rainy weather and poor sound, although one reviewer remarked that the “cut of his voice” was more impressive than his poetry: “
Mr. Cohen sings in a dry manner, flat like a wall but textured like stucco.” Another critic found that the effect wore off after a while. Dylan, unrecognized and stopped by security, came backstage to congratulate Cohen and his band on their performance. In August the group returned to Europe to play a festival in Aix-en-Provence and the Isle of Wight.

In Provence they encountered a massive traffic jam en route to the concert. Bob Johnston told Billy Daniels, the road manager, to get some horses, since most of the musicians were from Tennessee or Texas. There were horses at the stable attached to the country inn where they were staying, so they mounted up and with a guide headed through the countryside to their destination. To their astonishment, along the way they found a French steakhouse done up as a “Texas Bar.” Ten cowboys and one Montreal Jew who had learned to ride at summer camp pulled in and roped their horses to the only hitching post in southern France. They marched in wearing their western garb, surprising the few patrons and fulfilling the fantasies of the owners. After several bottles of wine, they remounted and headed off to the concert. They decided the best entry would be to ride their horses onto the stage, and they did, despite Charlie Daniels’ fear that that the wobbly stage would collapse. Cohen attempted a gala entrance on his white horse, which needed to be coaxed up a steep ramp; at the appropriate moment, it reared back as he saluted the crowd.

A group of Maoists in the crowd objected to paying because it reeked of capitalist domination and shouted that Cohen was a fascist. Bottles were thrown and the band thought someone had taken a shot at them,
knocking out a stagelight. Cohen took the microphone and challenged the people to come on stage if they were unhappy, intimating that the singers were also armed, an expression of western bravado from a group of horse-riding musicians from the gun-totin’ south. “
If you don’t like what you hear, come take the microphone. Until then we’ll keep singing,” Cohen said. The concert went on, although with difficulty. That night his backup band was named The Army.

The Isle of Wight concert on August 31, 1970, wasn’t any easier. They came on at 4: 00 a.m., following Jimi Hendrix, who had just set the stage on fire. The audience of three hundred thousand was exhausted. Someone had also set fire to the concession stands just before Cohen was to perform. The promoters woke up a sleeping Cohen, who first appeared in a raincoat and pyjamas, taking twenty minutes to tune up. After changing into safari jacket and jeans, he began the performance. The group played seventeen songs, mostly in 1
/4
or slow time, partly the result of Mandrax. Cohen also recited three poems, slowly.

Then Cohen did a fourteen-minute encore, and Kris Kristofferson recalls that Cohen “
did the damndest thing you ever saw: he Charmed the Beast. A lone sorrowful voice did what some of the best rockers in the world had tried to do for three days and failed.” Kristofferson told Zal Yanofsky, his fellow musician, that that was the type of background he wanted for his own songs. “‘Boss,’ Zal said, ‘Leonard is an angst poet. You’re an alcoholic.’”

Melody Maker
, the British paper, was less enthusiastic. “
Leonard Cohen is an old bore who should just return to Canada which he never should have left to begin with!” Ricki Farr, a concert official at the Isle of Wight was upset about the fee Cohen had negotiated and said, “
Cohen lays on this trippy thing about love and peace and all that crap. I think Leonard Cohen’s a boring old crone and he’s overpaid. I think he should go back to Canada.”

Despite some negative feedback, the tour was a success. Part of this had to do with Cohen’s realization that after years of separating himself from the world, he could join it. “
I decided I couldn’t live as a coward. I had to sing or I was nothing. I also started to accept guidance and to allow people to love me … I knew all about solitude and nothing about cohesion and unity.” The
I Ching
was instrumental in this transformation. He
had been studying the book of changes on Hydra, focusing on the phases of arrangement, the splitting apart and decay that occur in the world and what may affect a given moment. “
The book has been a sort of teacher for me,” he remarked to a journalist, and he thought that it was “time now for me and others to get together. I feel there’s a great getting together in the world again … I want to lead the world to a new sensibility.” The response of the Paris audience to his pleas for order in the midst of chaos was a sign to him that communication and unity were possible. And if suffering was responsible for leading him to where he was artistically, singing relieved him from its pain.