9
THE TITLE of Cohen’s third album, Songs of Love and Hate, reflected the double-edged nature of Cohen’s life following his tour. As Zen was becoming more important to him, his relationship with Suzanne was becoming strained. They had a son, Adam, in 1972, and two years later their daughter Lorca was born. He adored his children but continued to leave to further his art as he had always done. Between 1971 and 1977 he released five albums, but only two books appeared. But his productivity did not bring popularity, and Cohen felt marginalized; his alienation and doubts increased. He thought that his voice wasn’t appropriate for the material. He was depressed, and doing drugs, and there were rumors that he was about to retire. He continued to work, but his audiences dwindled and his support from the recording companies waned.
Recorded in March 1971 in Nashville, Songs of Love and Hate was again produced by Bob Johnston, although overdubs were added in London. Many of the songs were from earlier periods and had been reworked for the album. “Joan of Arc” had been written at the Chelsea in New York; “Avalanche” and “Dress Rehearsal Rag” dated from earlier years. Another song, “Love Calls You by Your Name,” was a minor rewrite of an unpublished 1967 song, “Love Tries to Call You by Your Name.” This practice of reshaping old material marked Cohen’s musical career and continues with his recent albums.
“Joan of Arc” was something of an experiment for Cohen, in that he both sings and speaks the lyrics on overlapping tracks. This technique was Cohen’s idea, drawn from the literary form of the palimpsest: “I had, as the model, manuscripts that you’d see with lines written over lines. I just thought it was appropriate at that moment. It’s like the line of a Larry Rivers painting, you see the variations.” “Famous Blue Raincoat” also appears on the album, a retelling of a romantic triangle. Originally titled “The Letter,” the song outlines the dismal loss of love with no hope of recovery. Cohen based the song on a Burberry raincoat he purchased in London in 1959, later stolen from Marianne’s loft in New York. Elizabeth, his London friend, “thought I looked like a spider in it … it hung more heroically when I took out the lining, and achieved glory when the grayed sleeves were repaired with a little leather.”
His melancholic tone persisted, reflecting his unhappy situation and increasing depression. “Last Year’s Man” had taken Cohen five years to finish but its theme of paralysis and decay was timely:
But the skylight is like skin
For a drum I’ll never mend
And all the rain falls down amen
On the works of last year’s man.
Cohen was not entirely pleased with Songs of Love and Hate and later commented that “with each [of my first three] records I became progressively discouraged, although I was improving as a performer.”
Franz Schubert had once noted that whenever he sought to write songs of love, he wrote songs of pain, and whenever he wrote songs of pain he wrote songs of love. Cohen found himself facing the same problem. Few people responded to the relentless despair of his songs. He had been celebrated for his melancholy, but he had crossed some commercial line into depression. Cohen’s critique of the album was, “the same old droning work, an inch or two forward.” He also thought his voice was “inauthentic,” full of anxiety and conflict, and labeled his work the “European blues.”
Critics warned listeners that it was impossible to listen to a Cohen album in the sunshine. In his unpublished novel Perennial Orgasm, Don Lowe details the adventures of a woman named Oressia who arrives on Hydra looking for Cohen but falls into the hands of an Irish poet. His attempted seduction is thwarted by the droning of a Leonard Cohen album in the background which deflates the desire of both parties. And although his first two albums went gold in Canada with sales over one hundred thousand, his third did not. Publication of the arrangements in a songbook of the same name also failed to generate new sales.
Over the next several months, Cohen continued to perform and improve his sound as he prepared to go on tour, and he received new publicity with the release of Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller. In August 1971, Cohen formed a publishing company in London with the pop music magnate Tony Stratton-Smith, head of Charisma Records. The first book they planned, under the new Charisma Books imprint, was a selection of Irving Layton’s poetry, although the book, printed from the McClelland & Stewart plates of Selected Poems, didn’t appear until 1977. Earlier in 1971, Cohen had set up Spice-Box Books, Ltd. in England but had found that he needed a British connection to produce books effectively.
In March 1972, Cohen was back in Nashville rehearsing for a twenty-three city European tour. Two days before the band was to leave for Dublin, two singers, Donna Washburn and Jennifer Warnes, auditioned for Cohen in Studio A of Columbia Records. Warnes lived in Los Angeles but was in Nashville taping a TV show. She had heard through a secretary that Cohen was looking for backup singers. Both of their voices—especially Warnes’s alto—constrasted beautifully with Cohen’s. He explained to them that “the reason I need girls to sing with me is that my voice depresses me. I need your voices to sweeten mine.” They were both hired.
Cohen grappled with the logistics of the upcoming tour while trying to deal with his personal problems. “I’m just reeling. Sometimes in the midst of the thing, I don’t know how I do it, you know. Like I manage to get my daily life together to get this [1972] tour together. But most of the time I’m staggering under the blows. It’s no doubt that I contrive these blows for myself. I think everyone is responsible for their own condition.”
Cohen took a shotgun approach to his malaise; he fasted, exercised, and practiced yoga and meditation. In an effort to re-establish his Montreal roots, Cohen bought a cottage on St-Dominique Street and a duplex beside it in the winter of 1972. This marked his return to Montreal, although he periodically went to Nashville to record, despite giving up his lease on the farm.
One floor of the duplex became a sculpting studio for Mort Rosengarten, another became a music studio for Cohen. Cohen made the cottage his home with Suzanne and, by September, his son Adam. He enjoyed the ethnically diverse neighborhood and three years later bought three more properties.
Bob Johnston had suggested making a film of the upcoming tour and Tony Palmer, who had made a movie about Tom Jones, was hired to direct. Cohen’s lawyer Marty Machat produced. Titled Bird on the Wire, it premiered in London at the Rainbow Theatre in 1974 and shows Cohen performing, clowning with his musicians, and trying to pick up women. Cohen was initially unhappy with the arty look of the film and wanted a stronger, documentary texture. He spent nearly six months editing the work, shifting its focus away from visual clichés to the deeper realities of his music. Control was crucial for him, as it was in the production of his first book of poems and his first album. What Cohen wanted was a film that showed the live context of his music and his rapport with his audiences. Bird on the Wire did that but it also showed Cohen emotionally wasted. He felt exposed in the film and thought that his vulnerability was inappropriate for public viewing.
Touring remained an adventure. In Vienna their instruments had been held up at the German border and weren’t available for the concert. When Cohen was told of this (in the bath), he said, “Oh boy, we get to do the concert a cappella.” At the theater the band asked the audience to go home and bring their instruments; after a delay, the concert began. In Copenhagen, a poor sound system upset the crowd and money had to be refunded, with Cohen himself handing out cash and dealing with disgruntled and angry fans. In Germany, where he gave six concerts, he greeted an unruly crowd at the Berlin Sportpalast with Goebbel’s own fateful words, spoken on the very same spot: “Wollt Ihr den totalen Krieg?” (“Do you want total war?”)
In Frankfurt, where he thought he played poorly, he told the following story:
Once I was walking along in a snowstorm in New York and I came up very quickly behind a man who had a sign stuck to the back of his coat. The sign said
Please don’t pass me by
I’ve been blinded totally,
But you have eyes and you can see,
Please don’t pass me by.
But when I looked at the man’s face I saw that he wasn’t really blind, at least not physically, and so I caught up with him at the next corner and asked him why he had that sign. He said to me, “Man, do you think I’m talking about my eyes?” so I wrote this song.
In London he again played at the Royal Albert Hall. “One got the feeling,” a critic wrote, that “although the place was full to the brim, everybody sat next to an empty seat … you could have heard an unused tissue drop, such was the silence that followed. It was a silence, a concentration that in many ways was awful with its intensity. It was a sin to cough.” Cohen left the stage, returning for the encore to thunderous applause. Surprisingly, though, he grabbed the mike and said, “I have no more songs left in me.” The concerts usually concluded with Cohen silently walking off stage, leaving his guitar and books behind.
In Jerusalem, at the Yad Eliahu Sports Palace, there was pandemonium when Cohen stopped mid-performance and left the stage, agitated and in tears, saying that he could not go on and that the money should be refunded to the audience. Drugs and the pressure of performing the final concert of the tour in the holy city of Jerusalem had contributed to his state. In the dressing room, a distraught Cohen rejected the pleas of his musicians and manager to return to the stage. Several Israeli promoters, overhearing the conversation, walked out to the crowd and conveyed the news: Cohen would not be performing and they would receive their money back. The young audience responded by singing the Hebrew song, “Zim Shalom” (“We Bring You Peace”). Backstage, Cohen suddenly decided he needed a shave; rummaging in his guitar case for his razor, he spied an envelope with some acid from years ago. He turned to his band and inquired: “Should we not try some?” “Why not?” they answered. And “like the Eucharist,” Cohen has said, “I ripped open the envelope and handed out small portions to each band member.” A quick shave, a cigarette, and then out to the stage to receive a tumultuous welcome. The LSD took effect as he started to play and he saw the crowd unite into the grand image of “the Ancient of Days” from Daniel’s dream in the Old Testament. This image, “the Ancient of Days” who had witnessed all history, asked him, “Is this All, this performing on the stage?” Deliver or go home was the admonition. At that moment, Cohen had been singing “So Long, Marianne” intensely and a vision of Marianne appeared to him. He began to cry and, to hide his tears, turned to the band—only to discover that they, too, were in tears.
The high emotions soon brought the concert to an end but before they boarded the bus, Cohen and Ron Cornelius, his guitar player, walked to a wooded hillside nearby. When they turned back to look at the concert hall, a visionary light from the night sky illuminated its roof. When Cohen had first gone out to perform, he told the audience, “There are nights when one is raised from the ground, and other nights when [one] cannot raise oneself.…This night we can’t get off the floor … This night my masculine and feminine parts refuse to meet each other.” But in the end he triumphed; the concert was a success.
Cohen had always been petrified of touring, feeling that the risks of humiliation were too great. By the end of the tour, the tedium of travel, hotels, sound checks, rehearsals, press conferences, fans, and performances had exhausted him. To a British journalist who asked during the tour what he had been doing since 1970, Cohen replied, “Trying to maintain a balance between standing up and falling down.” Cohen was never so vulnerable as he was on this tour, Jennifer Warnes recalled, opening himself up to his songs and his audiences. Working with Cohen Warnes realized that “life was art and God was music.” His presence and his manner could, and often did, make the audiences weep. One of the most remarkable elements was the on-stage spontaneity of Cohen and the musicians, who would frequently improvise new songs and melodies. Warnes thought she sang badly on the tour and remembers Bob Johnston yelling at her to listen more carefully to the notes and to attend more sharply to the nuance of the material. During the tour she also recalled Cohen writing constantly, drafting an early version of “Chelsea Hotel.”
One day while traveling through northern France, Warnes had showed Cohen a series of letters she had written about herself. When she was born, she was named Bernadette, but her mother later changed her name to Jennifer. Now she was writing to this earlier self, engaged in a search for her essential being. Cohen immediately thought there was a song there and began to compose; he wrote the lyrics and Warnes wrote the melody to “Song of Bernadette,” which she would later record on Famous Blue Raincoat.
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DURING the spring and summer of 1972, Cohen’s life with Suzanne became more difficult and his love for her was clearly faltering. He turned, once more, to drugs and mystic teachings and “to squeezing memory and vocabulary for descriptions of some ritual appetite many nights ago.” He wrote, “I left you for a song above my name … [but] I want to stand up straighter than a promise and face the sins that make me suffer, to give up what is holding me in this painful crouch, or do anything you say.” He realized that Suzanne did not love his “pious moods; you disdain my formal meditation,” yet when he came home “after loving another” and then went off to write, she quietly joined him at the bar of the Rainbow on Stanley Street, “only pulling back a little as I write this down.”
During this turbulent period he kept a journal in which he described, in a revealing paragraph, his process of writing:
You ask me how I write. This is how I write. I get rid of the lizard. I eschew the philosopher’s stone. I bury my girl friend. I remove my personality from the line so that I am permitted to use the word I as many times as I want without offending my appetite for modesty. Then I resign. I do errands for my mother, or someone like her. I eat too much. I blame those closest to me for ruining my talent. Then you come to me. The joyous news is mine.
In a spring 1972 interview, Cohen refers to a work he has just completed, The Energy of Slaves, a work that records his pain and indicates the depressive state that characterized his work for several years. Originally titled “Songs of Disobedience,” which he had previously submitted and then withdrawn from his publisher, he retitled and reworked the manuscript as The Energy of Slaves. He explains that in the book he doesn’t explicitly describe his pain because it can’t be stated: “It took me eighty poems to represent the situation of where I am right now. That to me totally acquits me of any responsibility I have of keeping a record public. I put it in the book.” Unhappy with the generally limited range of his material, he nonetheless felt that it represented his state of mind. He was interested in the book’s reception, more so than any other book he wrote, “because I have the feeling that by making it public I may be making a mistake.”
One early and sympathetic reader of the book was Irving Layton. In a December 4, 1972, note, Layton defended Cohen’s position. He wrote “what alone matters are the memorable words you leave behind. For power in these one must have the strength to be weak—for this and many others to follow. One must somehow—for talent, for immortality—name the strength (courage?) to be weak in one’s own way … God sometimes reveals his wisdom through a poet’s weakness.” This creed justifies much of Cohen’s confessional poetry and state of longing.
In September 1972 Cohen was in London anticipating the birth of his son in Montreal when he received unexpected news: his close friend and confrere Robert Hershorn had mysteriously died in Hong Kong. The news was devastating and only partly mitigated by the call telling Cohen that his son Adam had been born. He departed immediately to welcome a son and bury a friend. Painfully, Cohen shoveled in part of the dirt on the coffin in the Shaar Hashomayim cemetery, a Jewish custom of the living honoring the dead once they are lowered into the ground. “Partner in Spirit, Laziness and love, Hershorn is now gone,” Cohen lamented, adding in a notebook, “O Hershorn, first-born, first tired, first dead of anyone I knew, these ignorant papers are for you.” An unpublished draft dedication to Death of A Lady’s Man, written some four years after the death of Hershorn, enlarges his importance for Cohen, who refers to him as
the Lion of our Youth, the Eagle of Experience, the Grizzly Bear of our Forest and the highest leaping Deer of our Imagination …My Pupil in Music, my Teacher in War, Addict of God, Original as an Explosion … Companion, Companion, Companion murdered by Mid-wives in Hong Kong, buried in Montreal snow weeks later, black and bloated, under Hasid supervision.
In 1979, Cohen remembered Hershorn in the dedication of his album Recent Songs with these words: “To the late Robert Hershorn, who many years ago put into my hands the books of the old Persian poets, Attar and Rumi, whose imagery influenced several songs, especially ‘The Guests’ and ‘The Window.’” In 1994, Cohen published a prose poem entitled “Robert Appears Again,” in which Cohen, stimulated by a tab of speed, holds an imaginary conversation with his friend in a Paris cafe. Admitting to him that “I can’t seem to bring anything to completion and I’m in real trouble,” he comically ends the meeting by castigating Hershorn for not excusing himself before “disappearing again for who knows how long.”
After the birth of his son, Cohen’s relationship with Suzanne became problematic. “It was a tricky time,” he remembered. For help, he left Montreal and went to California to visit the Zen master Roshi at Mount Baldy. “It began,” he explained, with “a need for self-reform.” He had phoned Steve Sanfield, who was now living north of Nevada City, California, and asked if he could be introduced to his teacher: “I can’t get this cat out of my head. Take me to see him,” Cohen said. Sanfield took him to the Cimarron Zen Center where they had tea with Roshi. The conversation was sparse but Roshi said, “Bring friend to Baldy!” Baldy was an abandoned boy scout camp in the San Gabriel Mountains that had been recently acquired by the Rinzai movement. It became the Mt. Baldy Zen Center in the spring of 1971. Cohen and Sanfield drove to the center, and then Sanfield left Cohen there. His only advice was about the Lotus position: “It’s going to hurt like hell; don’t move. It will just hurt worse.”
It was winter and there was snow in the mountains. After three days Cohen was convinced it was “the revenge of World War II.” With a Japanese teacher and German head monk named Geshin, “they had a bunch of these American kids walking around in the snow at 3:00 a.m. in sandals.” The snow blew over their food in the dining hall. Cohen lasted a few weeks and then went over the wall: the regime, the mountain cold, and the discipline were too difficult; he headed for the heat of Mexico. In retrospect, he thought Roshi was a nice old rabbinical figure, but he didn’t quite get what he was saying. He felt he didn’t need it anyway. He ate a lot of ginseng and drove to Tijuana, then drove back to Los Angeles and called Suzanne. The two of them went to Acapulco, and their experience appears in the poem that begins “O darling (as we used to say)” in The Energy of Slaves:
Even as we lie here in Acapulco
not quite in each others’ arms
several young monks walk single-file
through the snow on Mount Baldy
shivering and farting in the moonlight:
there are passages in their meditation
that treat our love and wish us well
In Acapulco, a photo of Cohen with his Buddhist haircut, taken in a hotel bathroom, shows him glaring at the viewer, one hand holding a cigar, the other looped in a belt. The picture first appeared as an uncaptioned, rear jacket photo on The Energy of Slaves(1972) and was later used as the cover for his 1973 album, Live Songs. A second photo taken in Acapulco shows him sitting on the edge of a bathtub, looking slightly less menacing and more relaxed.
Despite his initial escape, Cohen eventually returned to Zen: “I dreamed about this, I longed for something like this. I didn’t know it existed; the formality of the system, the spiritual technology was there; it was no bullshit. You could do it if you wanted, if you developed your will.” He started to practice with some regularity, and for a time in the early seventies he became Roshi’s secretary and accompanied Roshi to various Trappist monasteries where Cohen would occasionally lead the sesshins for the monks. Roshi’s koan for the monks consisted of one question: “How do you realize Jesus Christ when you make the sign of the cross?”
In The Energy of Slaves he addressed the ambiguous problem of art no longer being able to remove him from his personal responsibilities. He was upset at the absence of creativity:
Where are the poems
that led me away
from everything I loved.
The Energy of Slaves was a difficult and troubling book that dramatically shifted from the mythology of Let Us Compare Mythologies, the romanticism of The Spice-Box of Earth, and the historical focus of Flowers for Hitler to a personal self-loathing and even a loathing of sex. “In many ways, I like that book the best of anything I’ve ever done,” Cohen said in a 1993 interview, because it is one “of the strongest pieces that I’ve ever done.” A poem summarizing his life concludes with:
Welcome to this book of slaves
which I wrote during your exile
you lucky son-of-a-bitch
while I had to contend
with all the flabby liars
of the Aquarian Age
There is some humor in the book, usually in the form of satire: “Come down to my room / I was thinking about you / and I made a pass at myself.” He is candid about sex, describing his four months with the twenty-year-old Valentia or his time with Terez at the Chelsea or his desire for a woman he sees: “Why don’t you come over to my table / with no pants on / I’m sick of surprising you.” With his belated fame he can at last have “the 15-year-old girls,” he could never acquire in his youth:
I have them now
it is very pleasant
it is never too late
I advise you all
to become rich and famous
As Cohen comically admits to himself, “I am no longer at my best practising / the craft of verse / I do better / in the cloakroom with Sara.” His goal is to “write with compassion about the deceit in the human heart.”
In The Energy of Slaves Cohen introduced a theme that his later poetry, especially Death of A Lady’s Man, extended: the failure of imagination and inspiration when love and beauty are attained. He expressed this in the ironically but aptly titled “The Progress of My Style,” in which he shows why his art fails. “Each man / has a way to betray / the revolution / This is mine,” he searingly admits, as he acknowledges the betrayals of his past, his love, and his art. Both poetry and love deceive him as his very identity shifts: “I have no talent left / I can’t write a poem anymore / You can call me Len or Lennie now.” In a 1975 interview he said of The Energy of Slaves, “It was like dipping all the parts into tetrachloride to clean them—I wanted to get back into my own baroque from a clean position.” Introducing each poem in the book was the silhouette of a razor blade.
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LIFE in 1973 was troubling on every front, as a candid unpublished autobiographical account from that summer indicates:
I’m thirty-eight years of age, five feet eight inches tall, a hundred and thirty-five pounds, brown hair, hazel eyes. I live in Montreal. It is the summer of 1973. Right now I have the solemn violins of the radio to accompany me. I’ve had [the] usual jobs. I was a popular singer for a while with my own band. I had a chance to meet a lot of girls on the road. I was very girl-crazy, after a while just cunt-crazy.
I don’t give a shit about your idea about human dignity because none of them ever include me. I don’t care who you are and what noble form of torture you represent. You can shut this book.
Don’t come to me when you are sweet and cold. Come when you are nasty and warm if you want to hear a story. This is a fascinating story. It’s about the fat, dead world.
By now, Cohen had an infant son and an impressive body of work but little peace of mind. He had stopped writing songs and stopped loving Suzanne. “While she suffers, I have a chance to breathe the free air and look under the flab for my body,” he wrote in March. Two days later, he added, “Listening to gypsy violins, my jeep rusting in Tennessee, married as usual to the wrong woman.” His relationship had deteriorated to no more than “fighting over scraps of freedom, getting even.”
Live Songs came out in April 1973 to little notice. For more than a decade, it was the last of Cohen’s albums to even make the U.S. charts. The album contained a range of concert songs drawn from the 1970 and 1972 tours and was uneven but spontaneous. The mood was somber, the songs full of darkness, and the cover photo haunting. The unusual liner notes by the little-known (and often institutionalized) artist and poet Daphne Richardson read in part that a transformation occurred because of “the mad mystic hammering of your body upon my body [and] your soul entered mine then and some union took place that almost killed me with its INTENSITY.” She had begun communicating with Cohen while trying to publish a book of collage poems using pieces by Cohen, Dylan, and herself. Cohen found her letters engaging and often wrote to her, excusing her excesses as part of her illness.
Cohen found the intensity of her imagination attractive and her work as an illustrator appealing; he wanted her to illustrate The Energy of Slaves. He met her in London during his 1972 tour. A month later, he called his London agent requesting her to tell Daphne that her illustrations for his poetry book would be needed, only to learn that she had committed suicide three days earlier by jumping off Bush House in London. Cohen was mentioned in her suicide note.
The music on Live Songs continued the themes of Songs of Love and Hate. Bob Johnston again produced the album, essentially a mixing of live tapes from the two previous tours. It opens with “Minute Prologue,” from London (1972), a recitation on the dissension and pain in the world that won’t disappear, although music can heal any damage it causes. One of the most important songs on the album, “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy,” continues the focus on death and despair and, as the liner notes explain, is about a suicidal woman from Montreal whom Cohen knew in 1961. The daughter of a judge, she had had a reckless life, sleeping with everyone and eventually giving birth to a child, who was then taken away from her. She shot herself in her bathroom. As he wrote, “In the House of Honesty / Her father was on trial / In the House of Mystery / There was no one at all.”
Reaction to the album was negative. A rumor began to circulate that Cohen was going to retire from music, a rumor that upset his lawyer and record company. There was also the suggestion of suicide. In a March 1973 interview, he smoked the interviewer’s cigarettes almost continuously and appeared withdrawn. He answered questions vaguely and lapsed into long, uninterrupted silences. The threat of suicide had always accompanied his morose persona and funereal songs but he later admitted, “I’m too old to commit suicide. It would be unbecoming.”
The Toronto Star unknowingly promoted the retirement controversy, picking up an English story reporting that Cohen had quit the music business. Thinking that he was speaking in confidence following receipt of a Gold Album award from Melody Maker for two hundred and fifty thousand sales of his first LP, Cohen told reporter Roy Hollingworth, “I just cannot stand to remain part of the [music] business. I’ve reached a state when I’m just not writing anything.” A week later, he enlarged on the theme of disillusionment and his decision “no longer … to be tangled up in the mechanisms” of the industry. The industry viewed his comments as an attack. He said that his decision had been made ten months earlier when he entered a Buddhist monastery in California. He planned to continue to write songs only “if I feel they are good.”
In a later interview in the Toronto Star, Cohen explained the confusion about his remarks on retirement, declaring, “I never did retire. I didn’t announce that. It was a completely mischievous adventure on the part of a journalist in England.” The two had been discussing the state of the music business and its depressing character. “And I said, ‘But I don’t want to see a headline: Leonard Cohen quits music business and goes into monastery. And the next week I pick up the paper and it’s been reprinted all around the world.” No one was more surprised than his lawyer Marty Machat, who spent days phoning music publishers and record company executives to tell them Cohen was very much in the business. But what’s to quit, Cohen added: “I mean how can I quit? I’ve never been in it. Nobody’s making me do anything. I’ve done three tours, only a record every two or three years—that’s not much for a singer. I’ve always been able to play it as I wanted. What is there to quit?”
Ironically, at the time of the controversy, his work was being celebrated. In July 1973 at the Shaw Festival, Gene Lesser, a New York director, was preparing a production of “Sisters of Mercy.” Its opening led to this headline in a Canadian paper: “Bed-centered play aimed at open-minded people.” Based on Cohen’s songs and work, the play went to New York after its Canadian premiere and opened off Broadway at the Theatre de Lys. Clive Barnes of the New York Times panned it, writing that if the play was a “musical journey into the words of Leonard Cohen,” as the program stated, “it is, to be frank, a journey that I would rather not have taken.” Barnes also criticized the play’s autobiographical element: “Unfortunately, while Mr. Cohen may very well be … God’s final gift to women, he doesn’t shape up so well as either a poet or a musician. As a poet he is cute, as a musician he is familiar.” Cohen himself disliked the production.
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COHEN FELT that his life was becoming a battle for survival, and the opportunity to participate in a real war was too tempting to resist. He and his family had returned to Hydra in August 1973. But to test himself and to escape the turmoil of his personal life, Cohen flew to Israel from Athens a few days before the Yom Kippur War began in October 1973, partly out of a determination to help, partly “to recover from vanities of the singing profession,” and, as he wrote in the unpublished prose work “The Final Revision of My Life in Art,” partly “because it is so horrible between us I will go and stop Egypt’s bullet. Trumpets and a curtain of razor blades.” When he arrived, he told the press that he flew to Israel to entertain troops during the conflict and “to make my atonement.” He added that in the past he sided with the Arabs in their demands that Israel return territory taken by it in the 1967 war, but now he supported the Jewish state.
Cohen left Hydra and the difficulties with Suzanne. “What a burden for the woman being born to carry still-born blessings up the hill … I must study the hatred I have for her, and how it is transmuted into desire by solitude and distance.” He felt she restrained him and curbed his success: “I never became a sign for everything that is high and nervous … the band ran down like an unwound music-box, too slow and too sweet. A fungus became attached to the spirit of song and high pretensions infected the gift of words.” He made a pact: “I won’t fuck in the Holy Land unless she is my True Wife.”
At the airport he got the last seat on the flight to Tel Aviv and his attitude quickly changed:
Nothing can stop me. My luck has changed. The girls in uniform smile at my airport style. I hate to leave them all behind. This man’s traveling. I am thin again and loose. I suntan myself from within. We can fall in love now, we already have, it doesn’t matter, goodbye.
Sitting on the floor at the airport with his leather bag, he felt conspicuous, and after a quick visit to the airport post office, he was stopped by a plainclothes security officer, who questioned him in the men’s room about his destination. When the officer discovered that Cohen spoke some Greek and that he was flying to Israel, he was released. The unexpected expression of democratic ideals expounded by a poet in Greek convinced the police to let him go. As he waited to be searched before boarding the plane, his thoughts shifted: “I could see that certain people had recognized me. No one I wanted to fuck but some I wanted to look at naked, especially a girl whose eyes are looking at me now.”
He arrived in a tense and nervous country, admitting, “I am in my myth home but I have no proof and I cannot debate and I am in no danger of believing myself … Speaking no Hebrew I enjoy my legitimate silence.” He accepted the invitation of a married couple he had met on the flight to stay with her mother and sister in Herzliyya, a suburb of Tel Aviv. The sister immediately inflamed him, but he deflected his interest when he learned that the war was not that easily found, despite the sad news about the fighting on the radio every hour. The mother and daughter still went to the beach every day; “The war was somewhere else.”
Despite his nominal pact with himself, Cohen became involved with a series of women in Israel. A tall, red-haired woman with “long, stainless steel legs” and a body he called “a sexual construction;” a Yemenite broadcaster who had interviewed him two years earlier; and a girl who recognized him in the lobby of a movie theater. One incident, he said was symbolic:
I went immediately to the Cafe Pinoti, looking for Hanna. There was nobody on the street. I decided to quit looking for her. This event has the essential quality of my life in art.
After returning from the beach, he continued his search. “After I had showered and changed, I walked up and down the vacant blacked-out streets looking for Hanna, longing for her. Such patrols are a usual feature of my life in art.”
Most of his assignations occurred in the Gad Hotel on Hayarkon Street in Tel Aviv. After checking into the Gad, Cohen heard footsteps outside his room. It was the tall and striking woman he had just met at the desk. He heard an interior voice saying, “You will only sing again if you give up lechery. Choose. This is a place where you may begin again.” Another voice countered, “But I want her … Please let me have her.” The inner voice that won advised him to, “Throw yourself upon your stiffness and take up your felt pen.” His attitude toward women remained shameless; he invited women reporters to undress for him, or at least bare their breasts during an interview.
Shortly after moving to the hotel, he went to see the singer/promoter Sholomo Semach, who was attached to the air force. Cohen wanted to volunteer, and Semach immediately lined him up with an entertainment group in the air force. Before he started, however, the Israeli singer Ilana Rovina invited him to perform one night at an air base near Tel Aviv, which he did. He then joined her group for performances in the Sinai, flying in on a Dakota aircraft. At a desert airport he stole a .45 pistol from a deserted shed, armament for the battle. Soon after his return to Tel Aviv, he had a new assignment: Cohen, Matti Caspi, and a third entertainer drove around and sang at rocket sites, tank encampments, aide stations, and army posts. They were flown by helicopter across the Suez to a former Egyptian air base, where they performed in a concrete hangar. Cohen was startled to find there a leftover Egyptian calendar and a can of mashed potatoes that had a label which read, “A Gift from the People of Canada.” A helicopter arrived with wounded men, and Cohen began to weep as he stared at the bandaged soldiers. When someone told him that the troops were Egyptian, his relief disturbed him. But when an Israeli soldier gave him some Egyptian money found on a dead soldier, he could not take it and buried it in the sand.
He then drove with others toward Ismailia and General Sharon’s encampment, where “tanks are the only architecture.”
I am introduced to a great general, “The Lion of the Desert.” Under my breath I ask him, “How dare you?” He does not repent. We drink some cognac sitting on the sand in the shade of a tank. I want his job.
Returning to the Egyptian airfield, they came under fire and were forced to take cover. Cohen fantasized: “I manage to kill an arrogant Israeli officer who has been bugging me with relentless requests to sing Suzanne. The scales are balanced. Let justice be done. I doubt if I made this up.” Lurking behind his actions was this constant question: “May I entertain the notion of Personal Purity as the condition for my Task?” It was a question that he had asked of himself in Cuba as well.
The performances were ad hoc, with soldiers shining flashlights on the singers. “It was very informal and very intense,” Cohen said. “Wherever you saw soldiers you would just stop and sing.” Occasionally there was danger, “but you get caught up in the thing. And the desert is very beautiful and you think your life is meaningful for a moment or two. And war is wonderful … It’s one of the few times people can act their best. It’s so economical in terms of gesture and motion…. Everybody is responsible for his brother.” War and earning a living are the only two activities that ever permit men to leave women, he added. He explains this in “My Life in Art”: “Feeling good in the desert. War is ok… As my friend Layton said about acid on his first ‘trip’: ‘They’ll never stamp this out.’”
Before Cohen left Israel, he decided that he had to visit Jerusalem. He believed that if he walked there from Tel Aviv he would be cleansed. He quickly got lost in the outskirts of Tel Aviv, however, and found himself wandering back to Dizengoff Street, with its numerous cafes. The next day he took a bus to the Holy City, where that night at dinner, his friend Asher confronted him: “You must decide whether you are a lecher or a priest.”
After a month or so, Cohen left Israel, which was demoralized because it had experienced heavy casualities in the war. He reported, however, that “people stop me and thank me here and there and tell me never to leave Jerusalem.” He took a military flight to Athens but flew on to Asmara, Ethiopia, where he lived in the Imperial Hotel for a while, writing songs and re-assessing his life. Ironically, this too would become a site of war some six weeks later, when a revolution occurred. At the Imperial, he finished “Chelsea Hotel #2” and began several songs incorporating his Israeli experience: “Field Commander Cohen,” for example, is about a surrealistic spy known for parachuting “acid into diplomatic cocktail parties” who returns to nothing more than “silver bullet suicides, and messianic ocean tides / And racial roller-coaster rides / And other forms of boredom advertised as poetry.”
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:
It all breaks down for the sake of peace and it all breaks down for the sake of peace … it won’t break down, the guilt, the intrigue, the thrones of waiting women, all in the service of fresh love. They say it all breaks down for the sake of peace.
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?”