Various Positions (30 page)

Cohen returned to Hydra to shore up the ruins of his relationship with Suzanne. But things got worse, their bitterness became more pronounced. She wanted both “
passion and possession.” Yet by September, the family was back in Montreal and Cohen was again a father, this time
of a daughter, Lorca. They were living in the small cottage Cohen had bought on St-Dominique Street. But family life was still resistant to happiness as a journal entry confirms:

A letter from Suzanne recounted her bitterness. She “
says I took away her life and now I owe her something enormous. She wants it in a box of blood and family jewels.” Cohen, however, could not “
make peace with the language of love.”

Despite the animosities between him and Suzanne, Cohen no longer felt that he had earned the right to sing his songs of heartache. He believed he had not suffered, not lost anyone, not experienced enough pain to justify his lyrics. A journal entry summarized his state: “
It’s no good if it ain’t the woman that you love. Write songs but your heart will never sing.” Tormenting him was an unanswerable question: “
What unfreezes a man?”

    W
ITH ITS EMPHASIS
on suffering, Zen remained a constant attraction for Cohen. Concentrating on meditation and rejecting materialism, Zen complemented the austerity he had pursued in Greece. “
I needed so much / To have nothing to touch / I’ve always been greedy that way,” he sings in “The Night Comes On.” He also valued Zen’s focus on the individual as the key to salvation: “
If you want to see God, you must realize the basis of your self,” Roshi had proclaimed.

Cohen sought Roshi’s counsel in all things, including his music. He invited his Zen master to a recording session of
New Skin for the Old Ceremony
. The next day at breakfast Roshi told Cohen, “
You should sing sadder.” Cohen felt that he lacked the courage or the ability to explore his malaise. “
I need to go deeper, always deeper,” he said in 1991. One
of his attractions to Zen was that it forced him to go deeper and discover new truths about himself. It also allowed him to write with greater simplicity and purity. Although Cohen doubted the strength of his material, he did believe that from the mid-seventies through the early eighties at least his voice was true. Zen, he thought, would make his work accessible to himself.

On his earliest visits to Mt. Baldy, Cohen found the regime too difficult. But if the discipline was too much, the ideas were seductive and he perservered. During the mid-seventies Cohen made regular visits to the Zen retreat, where he immersed himself in the rigors of Zen practice. From the 3:00 a.m. rising to the hours of sitting,
zazen
, and then
sanzen
, and personal interviews with Roshi, Cohen gained the spiritual vocabulary he sought. He learned how to get rid of the baggage that prevented him from deepening his work. “
When I go there,” he reported in 1980, “it’s like scraping off the rust.”

While Zen was helping him with his work, he was still struggling with love, as a passage in
Death of A Lady’s Man
outlines. In a sunlit suite of the Château Marmont on Sunset Boulevard, Cohen describes himself in the arms of a beautiful American woman, agitated and staring at the clock. His desires are fulfilled, but he is also at “
the end of [his] life in art.” At forty-one, love has brought death, not life, to his creativity: “
Six-fifty [a.m.]. Ruined in Los Angeles … I want to die in her arms and leave her.” The desire for women no longer satisfies him; the reality of their being possessed tarnishes his idolatry of them. “
I swim in your love but I drown in loneliness.” As he would later sing, “
I came so far for beauty / I left so much behind / My patience and my family / My masterpiece unsigned.”

A contradiction remained at the center of his life expressed by the idea of “Tibetan Desire.” The phrase, appearing in
Beautiful Losers
, represents the unholy union between renunciation and longing and the difficulty in divorcing one from the other. For Cohen, they do not cancel but complement each other. Intensifying the need for denial is the determination to possess by pleasure what cannot be attained by sacrifice. The two forces interact rather than collide, creating a desperate synergy that drives his work. The spiritual feeds the physical; the physical nourishes the spiritual. Zen and passion are the twin points of this condition in which there are no victors.

Throughout the summer of 1974, Cohen attempted to resolve these issues in a new work, conceived as a novel but experimental in form. It included prose, poetry, memoir, and journals. A remarkable, unpublished document, it contained three separate divisions: “The Dictation,” “Among Yellow Daisies, Summer 1975,” and “Random Evidence and Subtle Visitors, 1972–1975.” The sections dealt with his visit to Israel, with Hydra, and with Montreal.

He began the text in the stone basement of his Hydra home during a four-day fast and with only oil lamps to light the page. “
I am growing sick in the monastery of marriage. This book is the mind of marriage,” he declares at the outset. Despite Cohen’s anger with both the marriage and Suzanne, it was she who helped Cohen arrange the materials of the first draft.

The text is constantly self-referential and critical of Suzanne:

Cohen’s anger in the work grows into a rage: “
Goodnight once again, you fucking plagiarists. All your stolen girlfriends don’t make up for my songs’ disgust under your headline names. Trees and photographs. The last night of a real poet.” Cohen saw himself as trapped, while Suzanne had what she needed:

In the book, Cohen revisits themes in his life, their significance and their passing. Of hypnosis, he writes, “
I lost that when I was fourteen. I had it for two years. I had music for about the same time. I should turn
my back on it.” He thinks of falling in love again with Suzanne, “
It’s the least painful thing.” But it doesn’t happen. A letter from Roshi suggests he give up performing and touring and come to the desert to write for two years and Cohen is tempted. But his work gets progressively bleaker:

Cohen was again returning to the inescapable theme of life versus art. One of the attractions of art was that it is equated with sex. Marriage is death.

Despite Cohen’s ongoing and serious doubts, an inner confidence or artistic vanity still surfaced. “
It will become clear that I am the stylist of my era and the only honest man in town. I did not quarrel with my voices.”

While he was working on his memoir, his album
New Skin for the Old Ceremony
was released, his first collection of new material since
Songs of Love and Hate
in 1971. Recorded in New York, the album reflects the military experience of Israel and his constant flirtation with personal and political disaster. He reworked an early song, “The Bells,” recording it as “Take This Longing.” The quest for lost love pervades the album. “
You got old and wrinkled / I stayed seventeen,” he sings in “Is This What you Wanted?” “There Is A War” summarized Cohen’s own condition rather than Israel’s, one where love itself has been devalued: “
I rise up from her arms, / She says, ‘I guess you call this love, / I call it Room Service.’” He admits that in the past he had been easily defeated, but now he understands that to survive as an artist, he must fight.

In “A Singer Must Die” and “Chelsea Hotel #2,” Cohen illustrated the links between his life and his art. These goals coincided with his renewed commitment to Zen, and the quest for purity. When his art deceived this purity, it wasn’t art. What he must obtain is purity, clarity, purpose: the condition of zero.

New Skin for the Old Ceremony
was enhanced by a new sound, the result of John Lissauer’s production. Although Cohen lists himself as co-producer, it was Lissauer who made the difference. Cohen had first heard him in a Montreal club, playing with Lewis Furey, a Montreal friend and musician with whom Cohen would later write an opera. On the album Furey plays viola. Cohen and Lissauer talked, and then Cohen played him a number of his half-finished songs. Lissauer, he says, “
has the deepest understanding of my music,” and by early 1976, he and Lissauer were collaborating on new songs, something Cohen had never expected to do with anyone. On
New Skin
, individual strings, horns, and woodwinds extended but didn’t overwhelm Cohen’s voice. The album art created a minor controversy, however. It originally consisted of a symbolic representation of the
coniunctio spirituum
, or the spiritual union of the male and female principle from a sixteenth-century alchemical text entitled
Rosararium philosophorum
. But the arcane information on the engraving did not defuse its overt sexual imagery. In the U.S., Columbia Records thought the image was too explicit and replaced it with a photograph of Cohen on some copies, although Cohen wasn’t informed of the change. In England they adjusted the wing to cover the genital area because the record company thought naked angels might offend a church-going public. Regardless of the cover, the album was not well received, failing to break into the charts in the United States and doing only moderately well in the United Kingdom, despite a promotional tour to support it. In Europe, however, it sold two hundred and fifty thousand copies in its first six weeks.

After the record appeared, Cohen and Lissauer began work on another album. Tentatively called “Songs for Rebecca,” six or seven songs were recorded, but Cohen chose to kill the project, and it was never released. Only one song was salvaged, “Came so Far for Beauty,” which later appeared on
Recent Songs
(1979).

In the fall of 1974 Cohen began his third and longest European tour:
thirty-three concerts in fifty days, opening in Brussels and ending in Paris. He played two concerts in Barcelona and dedicated one of the concerts to Lorca. Because Cohen was so popular in Spain, his work was almost immediately translated into Spanish. In London he concluded his concert by saying, “
Thank you for remembering the songs which I wrote, all those years ago, in a room.” Part of Cohen’s great stage appeal was the humility he projected.

In late November 1974, Cohen began a small North American tour, performing to sold-out crowds at the Bottom Line in the Village. He was interviewed by Danny Fields who asked him why he was so popular in Europe. Cohen replied, “
Maybe it’s because they can’t understand my lyrics.” He outlined the link between his private and performing life. “
When I stand on a stage, I feel I bring my private life with me there and that that’s what’s interesting or amusing. That’s what’s entertaining about me.” In December he played the Troubadour in Los Angeles for three nights, and received “
one of the strongest standing ovations one has ever witnessed at the club.” Four encores were necessary to close out the show and, after the performance, Dylan came by.

Cohen was now spending part of his time with a woman named Lauren, a woman he called “
the first lover in my new life … we are the beginning of an army. To whom can we offer our victory. I do bow down and kiss your nipples. Or was that the girl I saw last night [?]” He continued to tour, taking the show to Canada. He played at a psychiatric hospital in London, Ontario, and at Toronto’s Massey Hall, before returning to Avery Fisher Hall in New York. The
New York Times
opened its review with: “
There is a lot one could dislike about Leonard Cohen.” However, the review was largely a celebration of Cohen’s uniqueness: his language was imaginative and his tunes hypnotic, their repetitiveness recalling medieval music and ancient folk tunes. “If Mr. Cohen’s voice is limited in its range, it is quite evocative in color.”

The tour was interrupted in late 1974 to attend a recording session in Nashville for the Earl Scruggs Anniversary Special, where “Passing Thru” was recorded with Billy Joel, Joan Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, the Pointer Sisters, and Cohen.

In April he returned to Montreal to give his first concert there in four years. It was only partially successful. He performed in the small
Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, which held just over a thousand people, and projected a sense of weariness as he began the first of his two concerts with a tired smile and “Bird on the Wire.” One critic wrote, “
he looks like an overworked boutique owner” and complained that there was “a mechanical manner to his movements, the manner of a hospitalized hyper-depressive.” He sang a second version of “Bird on the Wire” in French and did six encores.

After his tour, in the spring of 1975, Cohen returned to Hydra, newly troubled and despondent. His success and his family brought him no comfort. Writing in the cool darkness of his basement room or on the terrace, he dissected the present and recalled the past: