A Review of Let Us Compare Mythologies

By Allan Donaldson

This is at once the first book of poems by Leonard Cohen and the first in a poetry series produced by McGill University in order to bring to the public the work of young McGill writers of outstanding ability. As the dust jacket points out, the venture is the first of its kind in Canada, and McGill and Mr. Louis Dudek, the editor of the series, are to be congratulated for embarking upon it. It is one of the more ridiculous features of the university mentality that whereas hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent annually to retain even the most abysmal nincompoops to be students of literature, it is seldom that anyone thinks it worth while to spend some money on literature itself.

Mr. Cohen, the author of the present volume, is Jewish and a Montrealer, and these two facts strongly influence his poetry, which is concerned for the most part with the relationship between Jew and Gentile and with the inhumanity of modern urban society and its indifference to the fundamental human need for freedom and love. Mr. Cohen's greatest weakness is an overuse of images of sex and violence, so that at its worst his work becomes a sort of poetic reductio ad absurdam of the Folies Bergeres and of Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors. "How you murdered your family," he writes, "meaning nothing to me as your mouth moves across my body." It was, I believe, Mr. Harry Truman who remarked of the Folies Bergeres that there was nothing duller than the protracted spectacle of a large number of bare breasts, and it is a critical truism that images of violence shock only when used in moderation. These faults, however, are the faults, not so much of Mr. Cohen, as of certain of his influences, and this is true also of his tendency to identify poetry with an absence of grammar. His virtues are his own, and they are considerable. His handling of the character and problems of his people strikes one particularly for its imaginativeness and honesty, and at his best he expresses himself, sometimes whimsically, sometimes passionately, in speech which it is beyond the capacity of mere formula to produce.

Turning New Leaves

by Milton Wilson

For the last hundred and fifty years or so, poets have spent a good deal of their time looking for a tale worth telling and for a landscape of meaningful objects to set it in. The poems they wrote were often about the search itself. The bag of good tales was no longer open before them, as it had been in Chaucer's or Shakespeare's time; and, although the unweeded garden, the perilous seas, the dark oak forest and the enchanted cave might still display their store of tempting images, these images had lost their credentials and new ones had to be acquired from associationism, neo-Platonism, anthropology, psychology or poetic tradition.

But there's a tree, of many, one,
A single field that I have looked upon.
Both of them speak of something that is gone.

But the archetypal poetic myth still awaits explication, and one wonders if the best we can hope to find is an archetypal alphabet, out of which languages are born and die, subject as much to the whims of history as to poetic necessity. Perhaps Prometheus, Endymion and the Wandering Jew, the tree, the stone and the rose, aren't "necessarily" so. The key to all the mythologies may lead to nothing but comparative mythology. But this is at least something, and, as McCaslin says in Faulkner's The Bear, the poet has to talk "about something."

Leonard Cohen quotes this passage to introduce his first book of poems, Let Us Compare Mythologies. Whether he regards his title as a comprehensive index to the book as a whole, I don't know. It applies obviously to a couple of poems near the beginning, where what the dust-jacket calls "the relation of Gentile and Jew" is treated explicitly. But the comparative mythology does not stop there. A poem like Rites suggests mythologies within mythology, the rites of youth against the rites of age, and in Rededication (which follows it) the cyclic myth of nature prevails with difficulty and the rededicated soul hopes that his "disturbing spring" will lead to "no October." In the next poem, Pioneers, a man returns to a familiar landscape after "one furious year," hoping

to cheer the landscape
and startle old streams.
But someone's bulldozers
had heaved the river aside
and fish screamed against fossils
in the drying sand.

The missing year now seems "a treacherous dead year"; new trails must be blazed on new wood; and the new rites must let new blood:

But nourish the tired saplings
with your marking axe,
and if your swing draws blood,
dig deeper,
and the autumn path
will not seem so intricate.

More impressive than any of these is The Sparrows, in which two children ("I" and "you") see the same images (the migration of the brilliant scarlet and gold birds and the presence of the dull brown sparrows who remain "for spring negotiations"), but absorb them into different patterns, which neither can make real to the other:

and you, an innocent scientist,
question me on these brown sparrows:
whether we should plant
our yards with breadcrumbs
or mark them with the black, persistent crows
whom we hate and stone.
But what shall I tell you of migrations
when in this empty sky
the precise ghost of departed summer birds
still trace old signs...

Mr. Cohen's book is full of "precise ghosts" tracing their "old signs," and these ghosts are often a good deal more sinister than "departed summer birds." Demon mistresses and sacrificial pyres loom up in tenements and on street-corners. But the point is not that the dying myths are really alive, but that they are only just alive. The book is a swan-song, and it begins with an elegy. Satan in Westmount is a pretty feeble Satan. The lover (in Song of Patience), his throat marked by his demon mistress (who uses a needle and thread instead of her teeth), doesn't really need to carry a stake in his pocket. A little patience will finally dispose of her and her handiwork. Yet the lover thinks of her decay with mixed feeling. He is sad to see one of "history's beacons" dissolve into the sea; but he will also rip the embroidery from his throat with some relief:

And I do not gladly wait the years
for the ocean to discover and rust your face
as it has all of history's beacons
that have turned their gold and stone to water's onslaught,
for then your letters too rot with ocean's logic
and my fingernails are long enough
to tear the stitches from my throat.

Nevertheless, swan-song though it may be, as Let Us Compare Mythologies draws to a close, visions and prophecies fill the air. There is a long Exodus and then, in the last poem, the promised land suddenly turns up in everybody's myth at once.

Well, finally it has happened,
Imagines someone in another house,
Staring one more minute out the window
Before waking up his wife.

Mr. Cohen knows how to turn a phrase, his poems at their best have a clean, uncluttered line, and he writes "about something." Not that he always evades the dangers of his own methods and materials. He can fall into the contemporary mythologizer's chief pitfall: that of taking the alphabet for the language, of attributing more power to his images than the context he provides can justify; instead of working for them, he may let them work for him. When sun and gold, blood and stone, flower and bird are thus tapped for an automatic flow of unearned power, they sometimes refuse to cooperate (See Song, or the ending of Had We Nothing to Prove, which weakens a fine poem [quoted at the top of this page]). Although at certain moments Love may seem the key to all the mythologies, Mr. Cohen has not given it a convincing image or an articulate voice. Perhaps the comparative mythology of his modern Egypt is not yet adequate for his Exodus, much less his Promised Land. Like some other Canadian poets, he is engaged in the struggle to turn what is given to modern man into a myth that is not just academic nostalgia or archetypal primitivism. He is unlikely to give up or turn to neo-classicism, and if he ever really writes his Exodus it should be a tale worth reading.

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