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The Fiction of Leonard Cohen
By T.F. Rigelhof
 "That's everyone's dilemma: at the times we think we're coolest, what everyone else sees is a guy with his mouth full of banana...."
"I'm just a famous nobody."- Leonard Cohen
Whenever Leonard Cohen is mentioned, I think "fabulous novelist, ferociously funny, too soon finished." I always think this but say it less and less because I feel helplessly skewed, hopelessly eccentric in my response: few people seem to know what I'm talking about, fewer seem to care. Is it simply my neighbourhood? I think maybe yes, maybe no. I live within
five city blocks of the Westmount street where Leonard Cohen grew up, a six buck cab ride from the house on The Plateau he has owned in Montréal through the better years of his career. Is it different where you are?
As a novelist, Leonard Cohen is better known as a poet. As a poet, he's better known as a song writer. As a song writer, he's better known as a performer. As a performer, he's best known for a public persona which isn't usually construed as comic. As the personification of world-weary, urbane, chic suffering, he's a pop icon, so instantly recognizable that the
book designers at Random House have used a black and white image of his face in left profile, eyes closed, on a black background as the front and back covers on Ira B. Nadel's recent biography, Various Positions. Cohen's face is encased with a clear plastic dust jacket upon which titles have been printed in Buddhist saffron. Remove the dust jacket and Cohen meets the reader unadorned, sideways on but only left-sided. At first sight, I thought, ah, an error --
no right profile. Then I thought, no, Random House is cutting costs by using one photographic plate twice. Then the joke hit me, Cohen is insisting we see less than the full picture. In his lifelong game of outsmarting everyone who wants to appropriate him for themselves, he's won again. With Ira B. Nadel, it wasn't much of a contest. As a biographer, Nadel makes the fundamental mistake of allowing Cohen to disarm him completely and beguile him into showing Cohen precisely as Cohen wishes to be seen -- two dimensionally and disappearing within himself.
Jacket copy identifies Nadel as the author of studies in biography and James Joyce. It says he teaches at the University of British Columbia where he's a Professor of English. This suggests that Various Positions is a scholarly and critical work. It isn't. Professor Nadel is scholarly only in the earnestness and humourlessness of his prose: as a critic, he's just another
fan offering homage. Instead of developing critical distance, he shuffles his way through a pack of index cards and selects careful comments from Cohen's friends that just add more layers to the enigma wrapped within a mystery that the singer has become. Cohen can "contain and survive elements of pain in the dark. He [i]s in touch with matters of the soul and heart," says his old and dear friend Nancy Bacal, pointing to the light he casts in the dark. The end product is a shrunk-to-fit-the-celebrity biography that suits a novelist as inventive and comic and outré as Leonard Cohen as badly as a tweed jacket and polka-dot bow tie. Like any other straight off the peg to the pen of a hack biography, Various Positions offers a warning to the hoi polloi of the extraordinary high prices even a quite ordinary superstar has to pay for fame and success. And then it glories in the triumph of its subject's will to surmount a life in pop culture
despite the costs and to become happily abnormal. Which is fine as far as it goes, I suppose, for those who need to find a threadbare moral in every pret-a-porter story but it doesn't get near the naked skin of this hard core troubadour. Even though his songs, as Ann Diamond says, "became
a weathervane of neo-conservatism about fifteen years ago" and his image has become his most important fiction, Cohen remains a subversive and dangerous novelist. But Nadel plays it safe, expends less than 5% of his book on the novels and considers them as autobiographical facts, not art.
Leonard Cohen re-invented himself as a singer-songwriter at the age of thirty-two because he couldn't make a living as a poet and novelist in Canada without either (a) turning into a hip Adrienne Clarkson impersonator at the CBC or (b) finding himself a niche somewhere in the academic hierarchy and becoming an Ur-Ondaatje. Instead, he borrowed money and headed off
to Nashville with his guitar. He got as far as New York's Chelsea Hotel. In retrospect, the make over of Leonard Cohen the writer into Leonard Cohen the singer seems inevitable. At the time, it was anything but a sure bet. He had a singing voice even Bob Dylan fans disliked, he was an indifferent guitar player with a five chord repertoire, he was a decade older than anyone else who
was hip and too bourgeois to be beatnik, he'd never played with professional musicians and was so heavily into tranquillizers that he'd picked up the nickname Captain Mandrax. In 1969, Songs of Leonard Cohen sounded so wasted and wounded, so used-up, nobody I knew could listen to the album straight through. Those of us who cared enough about Cohen's writing to
worry about the writer figured he'd never make it back from the wired high where he was mainlining melancholia. That's when I started thinking of Leonard Cohen as "fabulous novelist, ferociously funny, too soon finished."
In 1969, I knew both novels -- The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers -- and all his poetry. In this regard, I was uncommonly well-read even among Cohen fanatics. The Favourite Game was published in England in October 1963 and in New York in September 1964. It was available in Canada only as an import until McClelland & Stewart published a paperback off-print of the British edition in 1970. In 1968, it was a rarity loaned to me by a friend on condition that I read it in the McMaster Graduate Students' Lounge in one sitting while he perched on the next sofa and could keep an eye on it. David was that kind of friend and The Favourite Game is
that kind of book: if you're young and you love it, you can't let it out of your sight. Mind you, neither of us were aware what a rarity I held in my hands that day. If Nadel has done his sums right, somewhere around a thousand copies were sold in the U.K. and the U.S.A. combined. Nowadays, The Favourite Game is as common as muck and about as attractively packaged as a bag of potting soil in a $6.95 New Canadian Library reprint that features three severely mismatched type fonts and a tiny reproduction of a large Graham Coughtry oil painting in six shades of shit on the cover, together with an afterword by Paul Quarrington. What point is being made here? Paul Quarrington is the first comic writer I'd recommend as a guide for a weekend
of fishing on a northern lake for anyone who drinks beer and smokes cigars and talks hockey while listening to old Beach Boy records. Is The New Canadian Library trying to attract first year Engineering students to Cohen? Quarrington trolls for new Canadian readers with a foreign lure "The Favourite Game... like David Copperfield, falls into a subset of the
bildungsroman, the knstlerroman, a novel which portrays the maturation of an artist (in German, ein Knstler)."
If you can swallow bildungsroman and the egregious comparison to Dickens without up-chucking on the sick stink of word-intoxicated pseudo-Euro abstraction, you ought not to read The Favourite Game. It isn't David Copperfield nor is it Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man let alone Mann's Doktor Faustus. When I first read it, it simply devoured my own words. The Favourite Game is a young man's book full of precisely articulated un-Teutonic follies that are so outrageously naive, so blissfully unsophisticated, so innocently unthinking that
this novel just doesn't square with any hole a Northrop Frye-gean pigeon like Quarrington wants to nest it in. "To be a writer is to use all the brains you've got" says Stephen Vizinczey in Truth and Lies in Literature and you don't have to look any further than Cohen's friendship with Vizinczey during the years in which The Favourite Game took shape to grasp its own peculiar braininess, its revel in the ability of a young man to live entirely in a middle world between sensory and intellectual realities, in the non-literal, non-rational realm of poetic imaginings. This is what makes The Favourite Game as poignant, hilarious and erotically-charged as Vizinczey's own In Praise of Older Women. Both novels were too brave and unbridled for Jack McClelland -- Vizinczey published his own book and sold it door-to-door, Cohen sought publication in London and New York. And one good thing you can say about Nadel's biography is that it does provide a very clear picture of Cohen's dealings with Jack McClelland.
In April 1959, when he was twenty-four, Leonard Cohen was awarded a Canada Council grant of $2000. He used the money to live cheaply in London and even more cheaply on Hydra while drafting the novel he called Beauty At Close Quarters. He returned to Canada in November 1960 and secured another Canada Council grant and a rejection slip from McClelland & Stewart. Jack McClelland objected to Cohen writing prose in the first place, found his novel
tedious, egotistical, disgusting and morbid in its sex, worried about its autobiographical content and suggested radical revisions without guaranteeing publication. Cohen signed contracts with Secker & Warburg for Commonwealth rights and with Viking for the States. Both publishers wanted a shorter book: Cohen began to revise with some ambivalence. He knew he'd created
something important, "a book without alibis; not the alibis of the open road or narcotics or engaging crime." He'd "wanted to tell about a certain society and a certain man and reveal insights into the bastard Art of Poetry. I think I know what I'm talking about. Autobiography? Lawrence Breavman isn't me but we did a lot of the same things. But we reacted differently to them and so we became different men." Cohen cut the book in half. It wasn't self-mutilation. He wrote Irving Layton, "anyone with an ear will know I've torn apart orchestras to arrive at my straight, melodic line... I walk lighter and carry a big scalpel... I don't know anything about
people -- that's why I have this terrible and irresistible temptation to be a novelist."
We're lucky he didn't resist the temptation. It seems to me astonishingly negligent that the uncut Beauty At Close Quarters has never been published and the two published novels are available in Canada only in the shoddy New Canadian Library edition. If M&S celebrated our literature rather than flogged it to death, they'd do as Random House does with Michael
Ondaatje and offer us Cohen cut and uncut in quality trade paperbacks in a uniform edition with Beautiful Losers -- all to Cohen's own designs. (Cohen has always had wonderful ideas about how his books should look. Nowadays, he's an accomplished computer artist.) The Favourite Game is not only highly readable, it remains very saleable. And not only in Montréal even though it does have special attractions for readers who co-habit its terrain:
He began his tour through the heart streets of Montréal. The streets were changing. The Victorian gingerbread was going down everywhere, and on every second corner was the half-covered skeleton of a new, flat office building. The city seemed fierce to go modern, as though it had suddenly been converted to some new theory of hygiene and had learned with horror that it was impossible to scrape the dirt out of gargoyle crevices and carved grape vines, and therefore was determined to cauterize the whole
landscape....
He turned and looked at the city below him.
The heart of the city wasn't down there among the new buildings and widened streets. It was right over there at the Allan, which, with drugs and electricity, was keeping the businessmen sane and their wives from suicide and their children free from hatred. The hospital was the true heart, pumping stability and erections and orgasms and sleep into all the withering commercial limbs. His mother was sleeping in one of the towers. With windows that didn't quite open. |
That's near the end. This is from the opening pages:
The Breavmans founded and presided over most of the institutions which make the Montréal Jewish community one of the most powerful in the world today.
The joke around the city is: The Jews are the conscience of the world and the Breavmans are the conscience of the Jew. "And I am the conscience of the Breavmans," adds Lawrence Breavman....
The feeling today, if anyone troubles himself to articulate it, is that the Breavmans are in a decline. "Be careful," Lawrence Breavman warns his executive cousins, "or your children will speak with accents."
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Front to back, The Favourite Game is dead certain about its society and a certain Lawrence Breavman who relates his history as a poet within it. It's Jewish to the core, so steeped in biblical consciousness that Cohen has no need to draw direct analogies between his brave and bereaved protagonist and the psalmists. Breavman is simultaneously a priest exiled in Babylon mourning the loss of King Solomon's glories and King David reveling carnally in
the delights of a multitude of women that includes a particularly beguiling foreigner. The book opens with the line
| Breavman knows a girl named Shell whose ears were pierced so she could wear the long filigree earrings. |
Like Suzanne in the later song, Shell has touched his body with her mind but she wants to stake a greater claim to more than his republic of flesh. Shell is a daughter of a Daughter of the American Revolution and Breavman is creating a song of songs to her glory and a lament over his inability to renounce his Jewish soul to her Gentile body. Breavman may be somber but the book isn't. It's too full of delightful incongruities, weirdly twisted harmonies. If it's ever made into a movie updated to our time, it ought to have Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris doing their Nashville hillbilly version of the Jamaican reggae classic "Rivers of Babylon" somewhere on the soundtrack:
Carry us away captivity require from us a song
How can we sing King Alfa's song in a strange land |
Cohen finds the trick of subverting the conventional to comic effect by having Breavman study himself as a narrator imagining himself as a character within his own autobiography. Breavman strives for distance from himself but can't help constantly imploding. He sends himself up serio-comically as both a self-mocked hero and a self-inflated villain in a story that has multiple orgasms but no climax. The effect is highly visual, dominantly cinematic.
Breavman never quite knows what movie he's in but he always knows that there's a camera on him. Several dozen scenes are pure photographs. Here's one:
| He was heading towards Cote des Neiges. The night had been devised by a purist of Montréal autumns. A light rain made the black iron fences shine. Leaves lay precisely etched on the wet pavement, flat as if they'd fallen from diaries. A wind blurred the leaves of the young acacia on MacGregor Street. He was walking an old route of fences and mansions he knew by heart.... He ran to the Mount Royal Hotel. A cleaning lady on her knees thanked him for the mud. |
And another -- the passage that gives the book its title:
| The juke-box wailed. He believed he understood the longing of the cheap tunes better than anyone there. The Wurlitzer was a great beast, blinking in pain... It was the kind of pet people wanted. An eternal bear for baiting, with electric blood.... On a napkin he scribbled: Jesus! I just remembered what Lisa's favourite game was. After a heavy snow we would go into a back yard with a few of our friends. The expanse of snow would be white and unbroken. Bertha was the spinner. You held her hands while she turned on her heels, you circled her until your feet left the ground. Then she let go and you flew over the snow. You remained still in whatever position you landed. When everyone had been flung in this fashion into the fresh snow, the beautiful part of the
game began. You stood up carefully, taking great pains not to disturb the impression you made. Now the comparisons. Of course you would have done your best to land in some crazy position, arms and legs sticking out. Then we walked away, leaving a lovely white field of blossom-like shapes with footprint stems. |
To put this book on screen you'd have to find a self-mocking Swede with the allusiveness of Ingmar Bergman and the irony of Preston Sturges to direct it. The New Canadian Library jacket copy blurb says it's "a shrewd appraisal of the human comedy, where 'the favourite game' is love." No, anybody who thinks that after reading this novel probably thinks Breavman is Leonard Cohen. It's little wonder Cohen looked so gloomy in the seventies: as Breavman says, "[I]n this country writers are interviewed on T.V. for one reason only: to give the rest of the nation a good laugh."
Cohen's gloom had more than one cause. Jack McClelland did take his next poetry book but gave the poet a lot of grief. McClelland insisted on changing the title from Opium and Hitler to Flowers for Hitler, dropping its dedication to "The Dachau Generation", proposing a cover which featured a drawing of a nude female with Cohen's face for tits before
grudgingly accepting a compromise cover featuring elements from six different ones Cohen had designed. Then McClelland published it with a back cover blurb (taken from a letter) that was used against Cohen's express wish. When Cohen remonstrated that "It was very important that a Jew's book about Hitler be free from arrogant personal promotion...", McClelland responded that the blurb didn't hurt sales. Cohen continued to play McClelland's games: he didn't have many alternatives. He interrupted work on his new novel and went
along on a M&S cross-country poetry tour which paid his expenses but made him no money. Cohen complained to McClelland, "Yankel, Yankel, why did you lie to us?" It took years but he got his revenge. When success as a songwriter allowed him to behave exactly as he liked, he toyed mercilessly with M&S over the production of Death of a Lady's Man. Paul
Quarrington considers that book "a novel, and a very good one." It isn't. To use Cohen's own phrase, it's "a curious book."
During his return to Canada in 1963-64, Cohen found himself torn by the conflicts arising from the Quiet Revolution in Quebec. He internalized the contradictions between Indian, French and English senses of nationhood and his own Jewishness and out popped Beautiful Losers in two eight month periods of intense writing and revision back on Hydra. It's a bloody marvel that in 1996 a Western Canadian like Nadel can gloss the politics of
Beautiful Losers lightly, see them as sources for a couple of scenes and leave it at that because if this book is about anything, it's about the willing of new systems to replace old:
| What is most original in a man's nature is often that which is most desperate. Thus new systems are forced on the world by men who simply cannot bear the pain of living with what is. Creators care nothing for their systems except that they be unique. If Hitler had been born in Nazi Germany he wouldn't have been content to enjoy the atmosphere. If an unpublished poet discovers one of his own images in the work of another writer it gives him no comfort, for his allegiance is not to the image or its progress in the public domain, his allegiance is to the notion that he is not bound to the world as given, that
he can escape from the painful arrangement of things as they are. |
The words are those of the unnamed Jewish narrator but the ideas are those of F., his mentor, a Québécois MP who has been committed to a prison for the criminally insane because of his anarchist activities on behalf of the Separatist Cause. The book can be read allegorically as a political fable wrapped inside a sexually transfigured religious fantasy. Hugh MacLennan's
"two solitudes" are replaced by two solitary madmen who keep jerking each other around and off until the beautiful woman meant to unite them is utterly lost through too much history on one side and too much transcendence on the other. As a fable, it's absolutely brutal satire that offers a clearer view of the peculiarities of Canadian repressiveness than anything else written
in English in that period: the English are unresponsive to the French but the French are merciless to the Iroquois and the Jews don't do themselves any good.
Before general interest started to wane in the mid-seventies, Beautiful Losers was read many ways, not least by Cohen himself. Part of his own list was adopted for the jacket of the first edition:
| Driven by loneliness and despair, a contemporary Montréaler 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. |
Reading this as a put-on by an extraordinary con-man, some people found the novel easy to put down and cast aside as pretentious pornography. Until it was "liberated" from my bookshelves by a former student, I had a signed copy of the first edition. Easy come - easy go. I'd picked it up out of a box of garbage on a sidewalk in Hamilton. Picking up the latest New
Canadian Library edition with an Afterword by Stan Dragland, I bemoan my loss even though the cover isn't as shitty as The Favourite Game. The first edition sold for $6.50, nearly the same price now as this cheap paperback. In 1966, Jack McClelland priced the first edition a couple of bucks above the market because he didn't want anybody to think M&S was peddling
pornography. The loser was Cohen who was forced to settle for a miserly $600 advance. McClelland threw a lavish pre-publication party for 300 and Cohen didn't attend. Sales were poorer than anticipated - not surprising since everyone at M&S seemed more embarrassed than delighted by it. Years later, Cohen hired McClelland as his agent to jerk M&S's tight collars
until Stranger Music was exactly what he wanted it to be -- definitely not a Douglas Gibson book. M&S bound Beautiful Losers from Viking's sheets and Viking gave it the quality it needs because Cohen employs a number of typographical oddities that need space to exhale -- comic book captions, an advertisement for Charles Axis, a radio transcription of Gavin Gate
and the Goddesses, a Greek-English phrase book. These aren't the best things in the book but they're fun.
The best thing about Dragland's Afterword which is no fun at all -- it opens with the assertion that this is "perhaps the first post-modernist Canadian novel" and then parades all the usual suspect terms of that rhetoric -- is that it sent me in search of Michael Ondaatje's 1970 pamphlet Leonard Cohen. Ondaatje's essay remains very much worth reading for what he
says about Cohen's novels and not just as a key to the evolution of his own. Ondaatje asserts that this is a book that has to be given the benefit of second thoughts. He's right. The first time through, Beautiful Losers is simply too sensational, savage, raw, manic. Thanks to Nadel, we now know details of the fasts from food and the sunstrokes, breakdowns, esoteric
enterprises, Tantric sex practices, amphetamine overdoses, obsessions with the songs of Ray Charles and other excesses that fed its composition. The amphetamines were diagnosed long ago: this book roars along at chemical-additive freaked-out speed, twists, turns, spins around
until you can't miss the point that F. is literally correct when he says, "Hysteria is my classroom." This book is simply too exhausting to be grasped without subsequent reflection. The question is "When do you stop?" I'd say Ondaatje brakes at the right point when he says
that Beautiful Losers was the funniest novel to appear in a long time, that it takes the notion of sex as religious liberation to as extreme a position as it can go and reduces it to a level of absurdity from which it should never have recovered. Exactly.
Writing about a model of sainthood that isn't his own sex practice and doesn't represent his own religious position, Cohen transfigures the vulgar images of Montréal's "solid bloody landscape" into a wild and peculiar tract. Ondaatje says Cohen lets his imagination ride through the landscape "like an escaped ski, keeping an incredible balance." He's right about the balance but wrong about the carriage: Cohen is riding two runaway horses in what looks to me like a reconditioned Egyptian war chariot dedicated to Isis. And he doesn't know how to rein his horses in when they roar out of the west into the spring of Montréal.
| Spring comes into Montréal like an American movie of Riviera Romance, and everyone has to sleep with a foreigner, and suddenly the house lights flare and it's summer.... Spring is an exotic import, like rubber love equipment from Hong Kong, we only want it for a special afternoon.... Spring comes to Montréal so briefly you can name the day and plan nothing for it. |
The book doesn't end on that unplanned day, it just evaporates into a fog of Busby Berkeley transcendentalism unworthy of both horses and rider.
| he greedily reassembled himself into - into a movie of Ray Charles. Then he enlarged the screen, degree by degree, like a documentary on the Industry. The moon occupied one lens of his sunglasses, and he laid out his piano keys across a shelf of the sky, and he leaned over him as though they were truly the row of giant fishes to feed a hungry multitude. A fleet of jet planes dragged his voice over us who were holding hands. |
-Just sit back and enjoy it, I guess.
-Thank God it's only a movie.
-Hey! Cried a New Jew, laboring on the lever of the broken Strength Test.
Hey. Somebody's making it. |
Because the book fails to find its own true ending even by "renting" the last page to the Jesuits, I don't think it's as "incomparably beautiful" as Cohen asserts. To be this, order has to be restored or chaos must triumph. Since we're left neither the gold of Jerusalem nor the
babble of Babel but only some bits of Assyrian astrology propped up on a Hollywood stage, Beautiful Losers isn't Cohen's masterpiece as a novelist. That remains unwritten.
In the Winter 1999 of The New Quarterly, Douglas Glover takes up the question of why Cohen stopped writing fiction. His essay "Beautiful Losers" begins:
| It's always a mystery why a writer ceases to write, infinitely more mysterious than why a writer begins to write, though perhaps they are related.
I think of Arthur Rimbaud writing The Drunken Boat and going off to become a trader in the African colonies, of Nikolai Gogol burning the pages of his sequel to Dead Souls, and of the late great French-Canadian novelist Hubert Aquin shooting himself to death after penning the opening pages of a new novel.
I also think of the poet, singer and song-writer Leonard Cohen who wrote two
novels -- The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers -- in the early 1960s and then stopped. The latter book, Beautiful Losers, is arguably a great novel, an exuberant eccentric: difficult, idiosyncratic, obscene -- also gorgeous, prophetic, comic and deeply holy. |
After providing an admirably succinct and complete summary of Beautiful Losers, Glover analyses Cohen's book as a dramatization of "the failure of the modern project, the faith or trust in progress, in the improveability of mankind by rational means." As such, he sees it as
standing in the alternative tradition of novel-making that emerged "through the satires of Juvenal, Lucian and Menippus, through the curious social upturnings of medieval Carnival, to Rabelais and Cervantes and on forward." Such novels, he writes, are:
comic, parodic, in dialogue with some conventional authoritative form (discourse or language) -- this dialogue taking the form of humorous subversion -- it is often earthy, bawdy, sexually explicit, if not obscene, blasphemous and revolutionary. It is the voice of the underclass, the marginal and the loser -- all thumbing their noses at the toffs in their dinner jackets and fancy dress gowns.
Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers is a novel in this latter sense, in this alternative tradition. The loser is the winner, the hero is both the villain and a victim of his own heroism.... The reason for these twists, parodies and inversions of conventional form is two-fold. First, Cohen, in the anti-tradition tradition, is drawing the reader's attention to the fact that the assumptions of the conventional novel are simply that -- assumptions driven by the bourgeois ideology of down-home realism and common sense. But, second, he wishes to point the mind elsewhere.... Sainthood somehow gets identified with being completely incapable of managing even a toehold on the structure of the modern world. The modern saint, inverting every contemporary value, is muddled, unsure of who he or she is, self-defeating, contradictory, sick and
ignorant (and fetishizes his ignorance).
Failure is a double sign. It is a sign of an inability to function in and manipulate the machinery of modernity, but also intimates a different sort of knowledge. The most spectacular version of this is the narrator who cannot narrate, the paradox of a storyteller who cannot tell a story -- which some people find a little tiresome but which becomes somewhat more understandable if we conceive it as essentially a religious concept, as paradoxical as the idea of a saint or of God on the cross. The failed poet/storyteller points outside the system to that which cannot be described. He's a limiting concept expressed at the edge of language. |
Then, after showing how Cohen uses "a small anthology of devices" to enliven the novel and subvert modern expectations, Glover concludes:
| But from within the system of modernity, a saint and a failure might end up looking the same -- sick, dirt, starved and mad -- in any event, a complete flop at standardized tests, job interviews, middle management positions and finding a publisher. And what might a true Nabokovian anti-novel look like? The line goes dead. It is possible that, having written Beautiful Losers, having in this black romantic and comic tour de force approached the edge, upped the ante and issued a challenge, Cohen realized that there were only two alternatives: repetition or silence. And only one was honourable. |
Glover's solution to the "mystery" of Cohen's silence as a novelist is certainly a "possible" one but not entirely convincing. What I like about what he has to say of Beautiful Losers is that far from being "post-modern", it stands within an alternative tradition of great
antiquity and considerable force. What I don't like about it (beyond all the talk of an indescribable something at the edge of language) is the assertion that there are "only two alternatives" here or anywhere else in literature or life. That seems to me utterly wrong-headed in itself and false to Cohen's own artistry which is all about taking third ways and following middle paths. Put another way, it seems to me lacking in respect for both the Jewish and Buddhist elements in Cohen's code of "holiness." That's a larger issue than I want to engage here. Jack McClelland was not a devil but he did give Leonard Cohen as novelist a wickedly bad time: if he hadn't, it's every bit as "possible" that Cohen would have persisted in writing fiction and ultimately created a work of greater genius and perhaps less ingenuity than Beautiful Losers.
In 1976 when Cohen's literary reputation was as high as it ever got, Michael
Gnarowski edited Leonard Cohen: The Artist and His Critics. Even though he's far grumpier about the novels than I think is just, the best article in it is an essay by George Woodcock, "The Song of the Sirens: Reflections on Leonard Cohen." Woodcock's response to the novels is humourless and constricted by his belief that poets ought to stick to poetry. He assumes The Favourite Game is autobiographical in ways that it isn't and is so concerned with the aesthetics of Beautiful Losers that he overlooks the political allegory. But he can't be faulted in his grasp of the poems, the songs or the sexual politics. Woodcock says Cohen is a good minor poet
whose work will last because of his "sense of the magic of sound in poetry, and .... Yeatsian sense of poetic propriety." The "voice for which he will be longest remembered" is the one that records permutations of desire, examines the ambiguities in human response to the universe and sniffs out the sacred in sexual encounters. It's the voice of "Suzanne Takes You Down."
In both technique and sentiment, Cohen is deeply conservative as a poet: Woodcock gives chapter and verse and finds the songs even more exaggerated. Cohen's songs, he says, are nothing more than "the popularization of a conventionally romantic type of verse" that lacks intrinsic feeling. They're essentially empty until life and meaning are simulated by the
singer's voice. I can't argue with that: Cohen cheerfully admits that "Almost all my songs can be sung any way. They can be sung as torch songs or as gentle songs or as contemplative songs or as courting songs." That's why I prefer tribute albums to Cohen's own recordings. But having said that, I must backtrack: I can't leave it at that. Why? Between writing some of
this essay for Paragraph magazine and extending it for this book there have been at least a half dozen times when I've found myself inadvertently thrust into a Leonard Cohen song with the compliments of the sound systems in some record shop or bistro: he remains a voice of Montréal. And listening to him by chance, I've found it impossible at least a couple of times
not to attend to what he's singing. There are some songs of his -- "Tower of Song" for one -- that he so owns and that so own him that a kind of magic happens that doesn't often happen in popular song. It comes from a kind of weariness and seems to succeed all the more for coming out of a damaged instrument. Like some of the cuts that you can find on recordings of Chet
Baker and Billie Holiday when they were well past their prime, it has the feel of your own blood and it's utterly devastating.
The success of his songs as escapist vehicles within popular culture has made Cohen far more reactionary than most of his younger fans realize. I haven't tracked his singing career closely enough to determine at what point he unconditionally surrendered to the patriarchal world view that the best of his early work seems to be struggling to overturn. Or when the original irony of calling his back-up band "The Army" utterly failed him. But by the early eighties, not only his haircuts and suits but something deeper in him implied a takeover by Ronald Reagan. George Woodcock suggests this was inevitable from the beginning: I have my doubts and my doubts are sustained by the novels. But I have no doubt that Woodcock got to the bottom of Cohen's sexual politics a lot faster than some of Cohen's female friends. Nearly
thirty years ago, Woodcock understood that Cohen's loneliness and pain are passive conditions, attributes of a love that gains ultimate fulfillment only in its loss. In Cohen's world, love can be felt but not thought: women are to be looked at, not listened to. As individual intellectual beings, women don't exist and cannot be imagined: they are mere ikons, sacred objects to be used in sexual ceremonies for poetic purposes. For some women who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they really seem to like. It flatters narcissists. It pleases sadists and masochists. What it doesn't do is age gracefully. In the final chapters of Various Positions, Nadel drools so heavily over Cohen's overage Don Juanish triumphs over girls living the lives of women and women living the lives of girls that he dodders off without
mentioning anywhere that he wrote a previous book about Leonard Cohen. It's called Leonard Cohen: A Life in Art and it's smaller but smarter than Various Positions. This is what Nadel writes at the end of its penultimate paragraph:
| In the first phase of his career, life and its ritual symbols formed his art, providing the substance for, and shape of, his writing; in the second, art, as symbolic and religious expression, has fashioned his life. |
Criticism is more implied than stated but there's at least some critical element here, some sense that Cohen has ended up as his own best fiction.
Whenever I think about the great novel Cohen's first two portend, I think of a novel as cunning and original as Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival. I think of a work of genius - not ingenuity. But having read Nadel's account of Leonard Cohen's obsessions over the past two decades, I fear it won't ever be written. Cohen has reinvented himself too often to conclude that all he has left in him is the silence implied by "Jikan" (Silent One), the name he took when he was ordained a Zen monk on August 9th, 1996, a position he now seems to have abandoned. But if the only thing left in him is silence punctuated by occasional moments of poetry, it ought to be remembered that before he surrendered so much of his talent to transcendentalism, involvements with women and fictionalizing his own life that he has ended
up "the Bliss Carmen of our generation" as John Newlove once described him, he's still a novelist to be reckoned much higher than a footnote appended to Michael Ondaatje's career.
So whenever Leonard Cohen is mentioned, I think "fabulous novelist, ferociously funny, too soon finished" and remember this - from Bliss Carman's "Envoi" -
Success is in the silences
Though fame is in the song
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