Photograph of Mauthausen
Concentration Camp
by Alan Jacobs
Cybrary of the Holocaust

The following article
appeared in The Ubyssey,
Page Friday column,
February 3, 1967.

After the Wipe-Out, A Renewal

by Sandra Diwa

Ecstacy is the solution - the room sometimes turns to gold. Leonard Cohen, Montreal poet, novelist, singer and now painter (he's planning an exhibition of paintings later on in the summer) has written five books: Let Us Compare Mythologies, 1956, The Spice-Box of Earth, 1961, The Favorite Game, 1963, Beautiful Losers, 1966 and Parasites of Heaven, 1966. He was brought to UBC under auspices of the Festival of Contemporary Arts.

Sandra Diwa, a grad student in English, interviews him for Page Friday.

page friday: At one point, when reading Spice-Box, seeing all the poems that you simply call "song" and later, when you started singing on the TV show "Sunday", I thought of you in connection with that word ngin, I think it means singer of the people.

Cohen: Ngin, yes. That's close to the tradition. I mean, we have all somehow lost our minds in the last 10 or 15 years. Whatever we have been told about anything, although we remember it, and sometimes operate in those patterns, we have no deep abiding faith in anything we have been told, even in the hippest things, the newest things. Everybody has a sense that they are in their own capsule and the one that I have always been in, for want of a better word, is that of cantor - a priest of a catacomb religion that is underground, just beginning, and I am one of the many singers, one of the many, many priests, not by any means a high priest, but one of the creators of the liturgy that will create the church.

pf: Is that one of the reasons why the dominant personalities in most of your books are poet priests? Even in Beautiful Losers the narrator-historian is a priest by election.

C: Yes, and since this is the vocabulary we are using for this discussion, I would say that Beautiful Losers is a redemptive novel, an exercise to redeem the soul.

pf: I also thought it was a pop-apocalypse.

C: Yeah, sure, that's good.

pf: But how do the two go together? That's what I don't understand.

C: When there's a complete wipe-out, there's a renewal. In that book I tried to wrestle with all the deities that are extant now - the idea of saintliness, purity, pop, McLuhanism, evil, the irrational - all the gods we set up for ourselves.

pf: But isn't there a kind of artistic dishonesty in setting up ideas to wrestle with and then trying to pin the structure of a book on it? It doesn't always work.

C: If you could see the man who wrote that book. I have always said that my strength is that I have no ideas. I feel empty. I have never dazzled myself with thought, particularly my own thought - it is one of the processes that my heart doesn't leap out to. When you said a singer, that's it. A singer is one who embodies in his person the idea. I have never felt myself to be a man of letters. I've always felt that whatever there was, was me, and there was never any distance between myself and the reader. I've never had the feeling of writing a book but of going up and seizing somebody's lapel or hem. I've always wanted to be created just like the priest creates the prayer for the mass for the congregation. It's not the idea of imposing a prayer but that he creates the finest part of themselves. It's that job more than anything else that I'm interested in.

pf: There seems to be a certain pattern in your work, that of creation, moving between aspiration and disintegration. It seems to me that your myth of art has two women figures, that of the beloved, the aspiring figure, and that of the mad-woman, the destructive. The whole structure seems to be that of the Orpheus myth.

C: Absolutely. I've always honored both the wrathful deities and the blessed deities and I'm in this completely. There are no functions that I have in my daily life that give me any distance from what I do and I systematically cut all the things that might. I've burnt all my bridges. What you say is true and I acknowledge it as we sit here. As it comes out I just feel that I'm a child. There's a poem about this. I just wrote it yesterday and can't quote it exactly: "I have come to this green mountain / I am 33 / a child of the double trinity". You know one is dark and one light and the third that comes from it like a braid that takes its color from both, like a salamander. That seems to represent me to myself. That's the way it's always been and I don't think I have control over it myself. I can tell you honestly, I've tried a lot of disciplines - yoga, Hebraic discipline - in an effort to control my mind but I find that I have no control. It's not that a man chooses the gods that he worships - it's the gods who choose him. And it's only when we come closest to the gods that we engage in creation. But I feel that these parts are unreachable parts of myself. There are times when I feel that I'll never do another thing. Creating a work is a lot of pain and that's all I'm trying to get across. And because of the pain you haven't got the opportunity to see the whole arena. I'm not trying to dramatize or anything, but I vomit a lot of ideas. It's not that I put things in, it's just that certain things obsess me and I get nauseous. There are things I have to do. Of course you've got to watch yourself to see that you don't get addicted to pain and remember that there is another deity and that ecstasy is the other side. The one is the way to the other.

pf: Let's talk about Leonard Cohen, the folk-singing personality.

C: I wouldn't call myself a folk-singing personality. I think this nation has a great case of schizophrenia. There's no contact, in a sense, between the people who watch me on TV and the other half. I really don't care what they call me. I'm not a particularly good painter but I'm doing a little painting now, putting together a collection. I have this feeling that if you liberate yourself, anything you lay your hand on can sparkle. Professionalism is the enemy of creativity and invention. There's a possibility for men to live in a way of continually changing their environment. It's a matter of whether or not you believe a man can change his environment. I believe he can. My painting and my singing are the same thing. I don't care what people call me, whether you call it folk-singing or some people call it a priestly function or some people see it as a revolutionary activity or acid heads see it as psychodelic revolution or poets see it as the popularization of poetry. I stand in with all these people. These are all the people who say we can change, get out of pain. That's why I'm interested in pop. In a way this is the first time that people have ever said, "This is our age and we exalt in it and we delight in it, it is ours". It's an assault on history and it's an assault on all these authoritarian voices who have always told us what was beautiful. I like to be created by pop because it's an ally in my own time. My time says it's beautiful and it's part of me and I want to be created by it.

pf: Is that why you chose an excerpt from a Ray Charles' record "Somebody said 'Lift that bale'." as an epigraph for Beautiful Losers?

C: Yes, I think that's the real news on the streets today. You know, somebody said, somebody saying, it can be better, I don't know, maybe it can't but somehow we can get closer to our center. Somebody saying whatever there is around that we don't like, can be changed - the monolith has begun to dissolve.

pf: Are you suggesting the disintegration of personality when you quote from Primo Levi at the beginning of Flowers for Hitler?

C: That quotation is, "Take care not to let it happen in your own homes". He's saying, what point is there to a political solution if in the homes these tortures and mutilations continue? That's what Flowers for Hitler is all about. It's taking the mythology of the concentration camps and bringing it into the living room and saying, "This is what we do to each other". We outlaw genocide and concentration camps and gas and that, but if a man leaves his wife or they are cruel to each other, then that cruelty is going to find a manifestation if he has a political capacity; and he has. There's no point in refusing to acknowledge the wrathful deities. That's like putting pants on the legs of pianos like the Victorians did. The fact is that we all succumb to lustful thoughts, to evil thoughts, to thoughts of torture.

pf: In this admission you're suggesting that you're working in the same structure as are the contemporary writers - maybe it starts with Celine - Burroughs, Selbe, Gunter Grass, and for that matter, Sartre in Nausea.

C: The only thing that differs in those writers and myself is that I hold out the idea of ecstasy as the solution. If only people get high, they can face the evil part. If a man feels in his heart it's only going to be a mundane confrontation with feelings, and he has to recite to himself Norman Vincent Peale slogans, "Be better, be good", he hasn't had a taste of that madness. He's never soared, he's never let go of the silver thread and he doesn't know what it feels to be like a god. For him, all the stories about holiness and the temple of the body are meaningless.

pf: When Sartre talks about the salauds, the cowards who are us all, they're the ones who refuse the experience of nausea. There's some point at which you allow yourself to go or you don't. Lawrence talks about this too.

C: The thing about Sartre is that he's never lost his mind. He represents a wonderful Talmudic sense of human possibility, but I know he's never going to say "and then the room turned to gold". He'll say "the room turned to shit". But the room sometimes does turn to gold and unless you mention that, your philosophy is incomplete. Like Bertrand Russell, he hasn't flipped out. Anybody who has flipped and survived, who hasn't been broken by conformity or pure madness like an incapacity to operate, knows the ecstasy and the hallucination and the whole idea of the planets and of the music of the spheres and of endless force and life and god - enough to blow your head off. And Sartre never had his head blown off. The thing that people are interested in doing now is blowing their heads off and that's why the writing of schizophrenics like myself will be important.