11
IN MARCH 1976, Cohen submitted the manuscript for what would become Death of a Lady’s Man, originally titled “My Life in Art.” He chose the singular rather than plural form of “lady’s” to emphasize his focus on an individual woman; for his album, with its similar title, he wanted to stress a multitude of women that may have caused his demise. After reading the work, one editor at McClelland & Stewart wrote, “I must say that it is truly-to-God the most depressing thing I have read in a very long time.” But the editor did add that it was publishable and in many ways “superb.” Another editor, Lily Miller, began her report by saying that “Leonard Cohen was one of the reasons why I came to Canada.” She thought that the manuscript marked a new phase in his work, since each significant sequence ends with an expression of inadequacy, replacing the “constant bragging” of his earlier work. There was a new depth of thought and self-criticism. “I suggest,” she wrote, “that long discussions will be necessary to either justify or eliminate this turn of a new leaf.” Miller thought that “the earlier arrogance, the more recent sense of doom and impotence, seem here to have given way to something more mellow: an acceptance of human limitations, foibles, failures—and a love which can rise out of these very weaknesses.” She wanted to publish it.
The manuscript went back to Cohen for revision, and six months later he returned it, retitled “The Final Revision of My Life in Art.” Plans had been made for a fall publication, and announcements and advance press galleys began to circulate. Initially, there were delays with the printers. Cooper & Beatty turned down the job “because of language in the manuscript.” A second printer said that it could not meet the McClelland & Stewart schedule. A third printer, Accutext, finally set galleys for a September publication. But Jack McClelland was becoming frantic because he could not contact Cohen to finalize last-minute changes. Cohen had originally drawn illustrations for the back cover and the endpapers, but Miller had now rejected the use of Cohen’s illustrations and criticized the photo intended for the front cover. She wanted a strong front cover, possibly a drawing, and a photo of Cohen on the back: “His drawings will only diminish the power of the book,” she wrote in a June 1977 memo. A subsequent memo said that without Cohen’s illustrations, they would be left with four blank pages. She suggested they get more poems from Cohen and, because of layout problems, four more lines for “The House.” The manuscript was again revised and resubmitted in November 1976 with a new title: Death of a Lady’s Man.
On August 10, 1977, Cohen notified Lily Miller that he was again delaying the book. In reworking it, he had written as much new material as they presently had. “He feels very excited about the new work,” Miller wrote in a memo, “He feels it would add a whole new dimension to the book. However, it could not be available for another month’s time …” Written on the bottom of the note in Jack McClelland’s handwriting is the following: “This is a grim development. I am most reluctant to postpone. He called and left number. Naturally, no answer when I called back. Will do my best.”
The following week a new problem emerged with the title: a prospective co-publisher objected to Cohen using the same title for his book and record album. Cohen was also “pulled apart and uptight,” requiring a further delay. While McClelland told Cohen he would slow production for a while, he vented his frustration in an internal memo: Cohen “says he is re-writing the God-damn book which is nice news at this stage…. I should tell you this is typical Cohen, [but] we’ll have to live with it. The book will be late but I don’t think there is any point putting the pressure on him now.”
On August 11, McClelland reported that he had spoken to Cohen in California where he said that he hoped to finish the manuscript in less than a month. “He says he is writing a 90-page commentary on the book itself. What ever the hell that means. I fear the worst.” Promotion plans remained incomplete, since a fall publication was now impossible. On August 18, a telegram arrived from Mt. Baldy, announcing, “I DOUBT THAT I CAN FINISH BOOK IN 2 WEEKS OR EVEN 4 WEEKS. THERE HAS BEEN A FICTITIOUS URGENCY CONNECTED WITH THIS PROJECT FROM THE BEGINNING.” Cohen told McClelland that he would simply have to wait for the finished book. McClelland replied the next day:
LEONARD THERE IS NO SWEAT ABOUT IT. MY REAL PROBLEM IS THAT WE REALLY BELIEVE YOU HAD A FINE BOOK COMPLETED AND THAT YOU ARE PROBABLY SECOND GUESSING YOURSELF UNNECESSARILY. IN ANY CASE WE WILL WAIT. BEST AS ALWAYS. JACK
By October, McClelland was becoming less patient. In a long and detailed letter, he told Cohen that he had been forced to make an announcement to the book trade that the volume had been postponed again. The reason for the notice was that Saturday Night was about to do an article on Cohen and the delay of the book. McClelland pleaded with Cohen to tell him “where we are heading so we can deal with the story.” The problem is that “the whole goddamn situation is in the public arena and we have to have some answers.”
The November 1977 article by Sandra Martin reviewed the situation, beginning with a November 1976 night in New York when Cohen gave McClelland the manuscript of the poems after sipping vodka and watching hockey on TV. “Christ, Leonard,” McClelland was reported as saying, “Death of a Lady’s Man! With a title like that we don’t even need a manuscript.” Twice since that evening, McClelland had advertised the book in his catalogue of forthcoming books and twice had withdrawn it. By June, Cohen had finished his second version and appeared at a McClelland & Stewart sales conference to promote the book and the new album. A day later he was at the Courtyard Cafe in Toronto, pulling out a tape recorder and playing a few of the tracks from the album for his friends. In mid-August, with the second manuscript typeset, and at least three magazines ready with advance reviews from galleys, Cohen called and then cabled McClelland with the request to delay. M&S stopped its promotion of the book and put aside nearly ten thousand orders for the title. McClelland defended his position by saying, “If Leonard were a normal author, I would be phoning once a week. But he always has been and always will be special.”
By November 25, 1977, McClelland told editor Anna Porter that according to Irving Layton, Cohen was still working on the manuscript. There was a distinct possibility that they might not want to publish it when they saw it. The title had to be dropped from the spring list. In late January 1978, Cohen was back in Montreal. He sent a note to McClelland, telling him that he had added sixty pages to the book and had another forty to go. He expected it to be finished by the end of March. Cohen suggested a billboard campaign for the book using the sixteenth-century engraving from the cover—the same engraving used on the cover of New Skin for the Old Ceremony—with the words “Leonard Cohen” above and “DEATH OF A LADY’S MAN, A CURIOUS BOOK” below.
Cohen added commentaries to his work, written as though another person were viewing or judging it. Lily Miller believed that this addition added new insight and originality. A different typeface would set the commentaries apart, and they would appear on the facing pages. Since the sequence of poetry and prose remained mostly unchanged, McClelland & Stewart was able to salvage about eighty percent of the original typesetting.
Thoughts of completion, however, were premature. Throughout the summer, matters of cost, production, typeface, and paper plagued both Cohen and his publisher, with the poet frequently altering the publisher’s decision. He was uneasy with the plan to issue the book in hardcover only, for a price of $10.00. His instinct suggested a $6.95 paperback. He worried about paper and rejected the sample the U.S. printer sent. If it were published in hardcover, he underlined, it should have “bulk and elegance.” Concerning publicity, he wanted “a dignified treatment and a certain formality. He’d like it to be sedate.” He rejected the idea of a billboard with his photo, his signature, and a few excerpts. He did not want to flaunt the personal aspect, he said. He preferred the billboard of the engraving plus the title and the statement that it was “A Curious Book.” McClelland rejected the idea.
Mixed reviews greeted Death of a Lady’s Man when it was finally published in the fall of 1978. Books in Canada said the work was “astonishing” in how it used the theme of poetic failure to move Cohen to “dignity and gravity.” Other reviews cited a lack of talent. It was suggested that the book was simply a hangover from the poor reception the Spector album had received. In Canada, Cohen remembers, the book was “coldly received in all circles … dismissed almost uniformly,” although he himself thought of the work as a “very leisurely and delightful kind of performance.” In the United States Death of a Lady’s Man was not even reviewed. One reason for its neglect may have been that among the literati Cohen had been largely forgotten; he had been identified as a singer and songwriter rather than a poet for too long.
During the publication delays, Cohen was also contending with his mother’s illness in Montreal, his relationship with Suzanne, and his explosive dealings with Phil Spector. This meant constantly traveling back and forth between Los Angeles and Montreal. In late 1977, after the album had been completed, he moved the family back to Montreal to be closer to his mother. She died of leukemia in February 1978. Death of A Lady’s Man is dedicated to her.
In Montreal he spent time with Adam and Lorca, feeling that children embodied an individual’s resurrection. Family life, he told an interviewer, was now an important aspect of his existence. There was a period of mourning in Montreal and Cohen addressed family matters, and dealt with the estate, deciding to keep his mother’s semidetached home on Belmont Avenue. But the Montreal hiatus was shortlived. Cohen decided he had to return to Los Angeles with his family to start a new recording. This time they settled in a larger house on Woodrow Wilson Avenue, high in the Hollywood Hills. In this spare, secluded home, with unobstructed views of Los Angeles from its various terraces, Cohen sought to recreate something of his environment on Hydra. He renewed his daily attendance at the Cimarron Zen Center, worked out at the Hollywood YMCA and began again to write.
In the spring of 1978 Suzanne suddenly left for France with the children, who were now six and four. Cohen was shocked. No single event had precipitated the move; it was simply the growing division between the two of them and a desire on her part to relocate and start a new life. At first Cohen felt a strange sense of elation and later commented that he was too weak for the institution of marriage. “Marriage is a monastery,” he once wrote, implying that marriage enforced abstinence from other relationships on the partners, often disguised as intimacy. Marriage has become “the hottest furnace of the spirit today. Much more difficult than solitude, much more challenging for people who want to work on themselves. It’s a situation in which there are no alibis, excruciating most of the time.”
Immediately after Suzanne’s departure, Cohen’s tension and bitterness disappeared. He enjoyed the quiet and solitude and turned to old friends like Nancy Bacal, who joined him in his Zen practice and in swimming and working out regularly. He also participated in a promotional tour of his book Death of A Lady’s Man, traveling across Canada in 1978.
In Los Angeles Cohen began to work with Henry Lewy on another album, tentatively titled The Smokey Life. Cohen first conceived of the album as representing the kind of life which had “the quality of smoke: fragile, and not attached to anything, but still the only one we’ve got. And we’re leading it, without landmarks and without forms.” Lewy, formerly an engineer, had been Joni Mitchell’s producer for several years and had also produced Stephen Bishop, Minnie Riperton, and others. Mitchell had introduced them and suggested they work together.
One rainy afternoon, Cohen invited Lewy to listen to a rough tape of the song “The Smokey Life.” Excited about the material, Lewy suggested they record it at once. He called the members of Passenger, who had been working with Joni Mitchell, and they arranged to meet at the United-Western Recording studio that evening. Roscoe Beck, Bill Guinn, and Steve Meador appeared and recorded the song with Cohen.
For the album, Cohen gave Lewy the songs and he set to work locating musicians, while Jeremy Lubbock worked on the arrangements. Paul Ostermeyer (sax), Steve Meador (drums), Roscoe Beck (bass), John Lissauer (piano), Raffi Hakopian (violin), and John Bilezikjian (oud, an eleven-string Middle Eastern instrument traditionally played with an eagle’s feather) were among the outstanding studio musicians, several of whom—Ostermeyer and Meador, in particular—would continue to play and tour with Cohen over the next fourteen years. Jennifer Warnes contributed background vocals. Joni Mitchell and other musicians dropped by as well.
The 1978 recording sessions took place at A&M Records, once the studio for Charlie Chaplin. In contrast to the paranoia and frenzy of Phil Spector, a strong sense of musicianship pervaded the sessions with Lewy. Because he wanted to showcase Cohen’s voice amid the striking orchestrations, Lewy had him sit in a separation booth, a small glass-walled room adjacent to the musicians where he would hear only his own voice and guitar. Cohen’s voice was the dominating sound on the tracks, in contrast to the muffled voice heard on Death of A Ladies’ Man. At the studio, Cohen was often accompanied by an attractive Mexican woman, his companion of the moment.
The album had a confident and largely acoustic style, reminiscent of Songs from a Room. In songs like the jazzy, “torch” quality of “Came so Far for Beauty,” or the cool, sly rhythms of “The Smokey Life,” Cohen was able to “wrap his voice around the words,” always his goal in a song. On “The Guests” and “Ballad of the Absent Mare,” however, the use of a Mexican mariachi band contradicted the near Eastern sound supplied by John Bilezikjian and his oud.
The album became an anchor for Cohen during a troubling time. It was dedicated to “Irving Layton, incomparable master of the Inner language.” He also thanked the late Robert Hershorn and Nancy Bacal but his most significant acknowledgment was to his Zen master: “I owe my thanks to Joshu Sasaki upon whose exposition of an early Chinese text I based ‘Ballad of The Absent Mare.’” The reference to Roshi indicated how Cohen was incorporating Zen material into his work. The early Chinese text he referred to was the “Ten Ox-Herding Pictures,” also called “The Ten Bulls.” At one time Cohen and Roshi worked on a translation of these texts, originally a twelfth-century set of pictures and commentary by Kakuan, a Chinese master. Traditionally, the ten bulls are ten images that represent the ten steps in the spiritual unfolding of the self. Both the song and the story emphasize a search in “the pasture of this world” for the reunification of the true self expressed through the capturing and taming of the bull. In the last two verses of “The Absent Mare,” the singer unites with the horse, unconsciously joining the narrator of the “Ten Ox-Herding Pictures” to realize that there can be no separation between object and subject. He suddenly recognizes the “forms of integration and disintegration” as one, and simultaneously sees “that which is creating and that which is destroying.”
The title of the album was a problem. Nancy Bacal remembers the difficulty it gave Cohen. The two of them spent an entire day working on possibilities at Cohen’s home in the Hollywood Hills. When she finally did get home, there was a message from Cohen on her answering machine saying that he was unhappy with what they’d decided on and was starting all over. Recent Songs was finally settled on as the right title for the new album.
It was a modest success. Many thought he had returned to his old form. The New York Times said that Recent Songs provided “an ideal musical idiom for his idiosyncrasies,” although the mood of the album was “strangely, even magically, uncluttered.” The Timeslisted the album among its top ten records of 1979, and Larry Sloman, historian of Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Review, predicted that the album would go silver, if not gold.
Before going on tour to support the album, Cohen spent several weeks on Hydra. There he celebrated his forty-fifth birthday in the company of a Romanian woman named Michelle. Cohen’s love of women, one friend candidly suggested, has been the quest for a single, encompassing woman he has sought his entire life. Along the way, different women have represented different anatomical parts.
When Cohen became interested in a woman, little could stop him. Once, while in Montreal, he tried to place a long-distance call. When he announced his name to the operator, she was stunned. Before she could recover, he asked her out on a date. Lucky once, he tried again with another. He kept on with the game until one night he found himself alone in his room, dialing operator after operator, waiting for a breathless response. It did not come.
The September release of Recent Songs occasioned a tour which began on October 7, again accompanied by a camera crew. Rehearsals took place in London at Shepperton Studios and then the tour started in Scandinavia, moved on to France, Germany and Switzerland, before ending in Brighton, England. The tour had its difficulties, however; Cohen told an English interviewer that:
everybody on tour has had a tiny nervous breakdown at one point or other. I don’t know if it’s the weather, or the tour’s intensity, or the music, or the combination of the people. But everyone has had to go through a radical reevaluation of their condition on the road. We’re enjoying it now because we’ve surrendered to it. They just carry our bodies from hotel room to airport bus, and the music manifests itself each night!
At the Berlin Sportpalast, where the group played on November 5, 1979, the strain was beginning to show. When the sound system failed, the crowd became unruly. Cohen shouted to them to be orderly and they reacted with increased hostility. Only the restored sound equipment and beginning of the music averted an ugly confrontation. In England for the last two weeks of the tour, Cohen addressed the depressing nature of his songs, telling a reporter that “the confusion of seriousness with gloominess is an inaccurate understanding. We have an appetite for seriousness and we can be destroyed as easily by mindless frivolity as we can by obsessive depression.”
On his way to Australia to extend his tour, Cohen stopped in Toronto at the end of February 1980 to attend the launch of a livre d’artiste by the Italian Gigino Falconi, a portfolio of seven lithographs based on Cohen’s poems. “He has the same kind of appreciation of women I use in my work,” Cohen commented at a press conference. The questions turned to Cohen’s work, particularly his recent record. “I think it’s a beautiful, great thing,” Cohen said. He felt he was more popular in Europe than in North America because “the market is more acceptable there. I find I get more support from the record companies in Europe. Here, the emphasis is on the quick hit. They’re not concerned about an artist’s past work.” He referred to Death of A Ladies’ Man as “a classic, a grotesque masterpiece,” and reiterated that he worked slowly, that the process of writing never got easier. “I can’t force myself, no matter how badly the company wants another record. I’m naturally protected by the slowness with which I work.”
The Australian tour began on March 6 in Melbourne with four performances, continued to Adelaide, and ended in Sydney on the 14th with two shows. It was his first visit there, and he was well received. A critic said that Cohen was “destined to be the cult-figure extraordinaire of the eighties.” Another paper described him as “the most enduring and emotionally honest poet … on the fringes of rock and roll.” Cohen emphasized in various interviews that his work dealt not with world movements or cataclysmic change but with the self: “I never got out of my personal life,” he admitted. Columbia issued a set of four of his albums as a memento of the tour and Recent Songs went gold in Australia, although in Canada “it didn’t seem to make much of an echo.” Cohen returned to Montreal to spend the spring of 1980 in the company of his children, who were visiting.
The Canadian documentary filmmaker Harry Rasky traveled with the group and used footage from the European tour for what would become a CBC film, “The Song of Leonard Cohen.” Rasky showed Cohen performing in Europe and interviewed him in his Montreal home where he philosophized about his career and his attraction to music. In the film, Cohen explained his “rejection” of life on Hydra as the result of his inescapable marriage to music: “The song seized me and an appetite for reaching many people seized me. [But] when I began to make money, the quality of my life deteriorated swiftly, and even when I could afford a decent hotel room in a dark city, it compared unfavorably with a beautiful sunlit room on a Greek island.” He said he now felt more rooted, less restless. He was prepared to settle in Montreal after a decade of wandering.
Much of the film was shot in Montreal and at his home across from Parc Portugal. The use of extensive family photographs deepened the feeling of an exile’s return. There was, he told Rasky, “a new spirit in my work. Songs I will write will not have that elegiac quality any longer…. A song, or a poem, or a piece of work or even where a man is in the world—it withers if it isn’t based on what is authentic and what is true.”
The appearance of Irving Layton in the film confirmed the ongoing mutual admiration between the two writers. “Genius,” Layton pronounced, “is seeing things exactly as they are.” And Cohen, he said, was able to do that in his work. Layton linked this condition of sadness and song to that of fourteenth-century balladeers and to being Jewish, defined by him as “the gift of anxiety, of pain, of alienation, of solitude.”
In the Rasky film Cohen looked healthy and fit. His performances from the 1979 tour show a polished entertainer, with more rhythm and energy in his songs. Jennifer Warnes and Sharon Robinson harmonized perfectly with Cohen’s sometimes raspy voice. The tour seemed to release much of the anger and stress he had experienced over the breakup with Suzanne and the removal of his children to France.
Back in Los Angeles, Cohen taped a series of unreleased poetry readings with Henry Lewy, including one that conveyed his unhappiness at being separated from Suzanne and his children:
I wandered away from you
I bought a little electric piano.
Miles from where you live
I composed a song of farewell.
Everyone loved it.
My cup was filled to the brim.
A young Communist
Payed homage to me
with a poem entitled
Ode to the Intellectual Worker.
I made my way to Paris.
O, Paris, I said
Every little messiah
Thanks you for his loneliness.
On another occasion, I said
Paris, be strong, be nuclear
and talk, talk,
Never stop talking
about how to live without God.
It was very soon after this
that I retired to the countryside.
I installed my piano in a corner
and I cried, speak to me, speak to me,
Angel of Beauty
Speak to me
O thou comfort of the world.
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WITH HIS CHILDREN gone and his album finished, Cohen gave up the house in Los Angeles and began to spend more time in Europe, Montreal, and New York. Paris became a frequent stop on his way to Roussillon, with its ochre cliffs, and then to Bonnieux in the heart of the Luberon mountain area, where Suzanne later moved with the children. Cohen’s access to the children was limited, even though he rented the house for them in Roussillon and purchased the home in Bonnieux; at one point he lived in a trailer parked outside the country house where the children stayed. Cohen and Suzanne wrangled over custody of the children and the terms of a settlement from 1978 to 1984. “On Seeing Kabir’s Poems,” written in 1981 at Roussillon and printed in Stranger Music, recalls this period.
Cohen began to study the Talmud at this time, always traveling with a copy of the text. It became a source of spiritual sustenance, always with him when he visited his children. His new circumstances meant a renewal of the now tedious vagabond life, traveling from hotel to hotel, with frequent stops at the Royalton in New York and the Cluny in Paris.
In 1979, Cohen, along with Richard Cohen and Eric Lerner, also students of Roshi, bought a house in South Central Los Angeles at a foreclosure sale. It was cheap and near the Cimarron Zen Center. Although he rarely lived there over the next five or six years, Cohen eventually made it his Los Angeles home. He didn’t bother to furnish his part of the two-story house. Steve Sanfield recalls that at this time Cohen led the life of “a wandering monk,” with very few possessions, and that his home was strikingly bare and simple. The kitchen was the only place to sit down, since there were no chairs in any other part of the house, only tables or cushions.
Cohen became involved with a journal Roshi wanted to start entitled Zero. Mixing Roshi’s philosophy with contributions by creative writers, the journal appeared for several years. The title of the journal expressed Roshi’s philosophy: “Zero is activity that is complete and full of good will…. In the state of zero there are no questions.” By the third volume, the journal listed Eric Lerner as editor, Richard Cohen as associate editor, and Steve Sanfield and Leonard Cohen as contributing editors. That issue included an interview with John Cage, a collage of haiku by Allen Ginsberg, poetry by John Ashbery, an interview with Joni Mitchell, and the lyrics of several songs from Recent Songs by Leonard Cohen.
For Roshi, zero was the central Zen tenet, a detachment from the distractions of the self, or the absence of the self. It was the condition of positive emptiness. Only by dissolving the fixed self is one’s true nature made manifest, Roshi argued. For Zen to begin, the ego self must die: “As long as we see things dualistically, we shall never see the truth.” In an essay entitled “On The Nature of Zero,” originally a 1979 talk at Mt. Baldy, Roshi summarized his understanding of the concept of zero: it is manifested in the practice of Zen mastery over impermanence “through realizing oneself as a sphere alternately expanding and contracting.” The ultimate goal is the state of absolute tranquility where “everything is oneself.” Enlightenment, Roshi said, “is the possession of two kinds of wisdom: one which looks, in a personal way, upon everything as yourself and another which looks in an impersonal way upon yourself as Zero.”
Cohen spent whatever time he could with Roshi at Mt. Baldy and occasionally accompanied him to other Zen centers. Together they visited the Gethsemane Monastery in Kentucky, the former monastery of Thomas Merton. At the headquarters of the Trappist Movement in Spenser, Massachusetts, they talked with the abbot and attended Mass, observing another form of spiritual commitment. While they were there a monk confided to Cohen that every day he questioned why he was there and thought about going over the wall. Roshi believed that his monks should be a part of the world, telling them, “After you realize the mountain, go back to the world. Don’t stay here too long.” Roshi encouraged Cohen to play tennis and to join a nearby tennis club in Claremont. He did, but admitted that regular play did not improve his game much. As Cohen reports, “Roshi saw that I knew how to work; what I didn’t know how to do was play.”
Cohen’s attachment to Rinzai Buddhism remained unswerving. He admired Roshi’s willingness to get up at 3: 00 a.m. and to meet four times a day with his students in sanzen, his commitment to the rigors of the sesshins, and his determination to teach at the various Zen centers in Vienna, Ithaca, or Puerto Rico. Roshi adapted to American ways, offering his teishos (lecture/sermons) in Japanese but giving sanzen in English. His Zen practice was considered the most vigorous in America.
Cohen’s commitment to Zen, however, was never at the sacrifice of his Judaism. He told an Australian journalist that “I am not a Buddhist, but a Jew.” Despite more than a twenty-five-year involvement with Zen, a religion he once described to Nancy Bacal as “for the truly lost,” he has constantly affirmed his Jewishness. Cohen may criticize the lack of a meditational dimension in Judaism and devote himself physically, as well as financially, to Zen, but he has never renounced his identity as a Jew. In a 1993 letter to a Hollywood trade paper he wrote:
My father and mother, of blessed memory, would have been disturbed by the Reporter’s description of me as a buddhist. I am a jew.
For some time now I have been intrigued by the indecipherable ramblings of an old zen monk. Not long ago he said to me, ‘Cohen, I have known you for 23 years and I never tried to give you my religion. I just poured you sake.’ Saying that, he filled my cup with sake. I bowed my head and raised my cup to him crying out, ‘Rabbi, you are surely the Light of the Generation.’
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IN OCTOBER 1980 Cohen began his sixth European tour, using the same musicians as the 1979 tour, although Jennifer Warnes did not join them. They started in France, where he again played to sold-out houses. In Berlin he created a controversy when he asked his fans at the packed stadium to remove the chairs. “If you see this terrible plastic, you see the dark side of our lives,” he told them, an allusion to the Nazi past. Unlike the 1979 tour, which mainly featured material from Recent Songs, the current tour provided more of a survey of his best-known songs.
In Frankfurt, after his concert, Cohen was woken in the middle of the night by a loud knocking at his door. He opened the door to find a six-foot-two-inch blonde woman dressed only in boots and aluminum foil. Cohen nobly refused her wish to enter but she persisted and so Cohen gave in. By morning he was determined to take her with him for the rest of the tour. She declined and prepared to leave, despite his pleas and declarations of her beauty. Smiling, she said to Cohen, “One more star in my constellation,” and left. The tour ended in Tel Aviv and Cohen was once more at loose ends.
A December 11 entry in a journal describes him in Room 700 of the Algonquin Hotel in New York with a chassidic prayer book, his grandfather’s tefillin and woolen tallit, a box of Barton’s Hanukkah candy, and a set of Hanukkah candles, all in preparation for celebrating the festival with his children. Four days later in the same journal the first draft of “If It Be Your Will” appears.
On Hydra in 1982, he met a woman who became important in his life: Dominique Issermann, a fashion photographer from Paris. Carole Laure, the Quebecois actor, and her husband Lewis Furey, had established careers in Paris, and they introduced Cohen to Issermann when she came to visit Laure on Hydra. Cohen and Issermann began a long-term relationship, characterized by maturity and a mutual devotion to work. Issermann took publicity stills of Cohen and directed two of his videos: “Dance Me to the End of Love,” and “First We Take Manhattan.” Cohen frequently stayed with her in her Paris apartment, writing songs and visiting his children.
Issermann stimulated a new intensity and vigor in Cohen’s songwriting, marked by his strenuous efforts with Various Positions, his 1984 album. Her work habits influenced Cohen, who relied more on effort than inspiration. His career was faltering and Issermann became a graceful working companion who understood his anguish and commitment to his task. In his words, Issermann helped him “dig in.” A period of “diligent application to this whole affair” began.
But the same pattern began to emerge. Cohen, uncomfortable in a stable relationship, found it necessary to wander as his creativity appeared to become restricted. So he spent time in New York at the Royalton, in California with Roshi, and in Montreal at his home. Dominique visited when possible and Cohen stayed in Paris when he could. He became unwilling to make space for her and her career in his life, either in Los Angeles or Montreal, and after a period of reassessment, they chose to separate. They remain close friends, however, and Issermann’s photographs of him are frequently reprinted in his songbooks, in his concert programs, and on French postcards. She anchored his life in the eighties and became an important creative force. An inscription on his album I’m Your Man reads, “All these songs are for you, D.I.” Issermann was a crucial, if little recognized, figure in Cohen’s recovery from depression, the redirection of his musical career, and the renewal of his spiritual life.
On Hydra in the winter of 1981–1982, Cohen began to work on the libretto of an opera for which Lewis Furey would do the music. Variously titled “Merry-Go Man, “The Hall,” “Angel Eyes,” and finally Night Magic, Cohen actually thought of it as a ballet. The title derived from the name of a popular nightclub in Old Montreal named Nuit Magique. It was run by a friend of Cohen’s named Bob Di Salvio, who had first heard the phrase in Van Morrison’s song “Moondance.” A back room at the club was named Les Beaux Ratés, “the beautiful losers.” Cohen described Night Magic as a cabaret opera about a broken-down Montreal singer who has his wishes granted, “a combination of Brecht and Disney.” The plot involved a music hall star named Michael who was preparing a show that would revive a run-down theater named the System, the same theater used by Cohen in Beautiful Losers and the name of an actual Montreal movie house. In the course of one night, three female guardian angels visit him, and one falls in love with him. A series of songs on the clash between art and life result.
The work was a musical pastiche that reflected Cohen’s renewed interest in regulated form. He wrote the entire opera in Spenserian stanzas. This Renaissance verse structure, first used in the epic The Faerie Queen, consists of nine lines, eight five-foot iambic lines, with the ninth, an iambic line of six feet. Cohen felt he needed to locate himself in a literary tradition in order to give his work resonance.
The opera was filmed and starred Nick Mancuso, Carole Laure, and Frank Augustyn. Furey directed, composed the music (Cohen wrote the lyrics), and supplied the voice for the songs which were lip-synced by Mancuso, a gifted dramatic actor but not a musical star. Carol Laure played the enamored angel. Robert Lantos and James T. Kaufman produced.
The film opened at Cannes on May 17, 1985. Variety complained that the music and lyrics were “reminiscent of the sixties era … [but] as tuneful as the score is, it lacks the necessary power to grip the listener.” The choreography, said Variety, was in the style of TV extravaganzas. Coordinated with the film release was a double-album soundtrack recording distributed by the French division of RCA with a slightly different cast from that of the film. Cohen and Furey won a Juno for best music score in 1985 for the music to the “rock opera.”
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COHEN had an idea for a short film, initially based on the experiences of a hotel and his song “The Guests.” Produced by Barrie Wexler, “I Am a Hotel” was intended for the Canadian pay-TV network, C-Channel, but when the network collapsed and Cohen twice threatened to pull out, Moses Znaimer and City-TV stepped in to complete the production (he is listed as executive producer) with CBC-TV and the Canadian Film Development Corporation assisting with funding.
No one involved really had any experience with rock videos, though. Wexler and Cohen watched various examples at City-TV, settled on a budget of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and started to plan. Several months later Cohen returned to Toronto and told Barrie Wexler that he wanted out of the planned video production, explaining that he couldn’t write a music video in his present state of mind (he was working on a book of psalms). That was a Saturday night, Wexler remembered, and he had promised to deliver a script for the video by Monday morning. He persuaded Cohen not to give up, and they worked all night. With the help of the Toronto writer Mark Shekter, they put together a thirteen-page treatment. In the interim, singer David Blue had died in New York (Cohen gave the eulogy at the funeral) and Cohen named the production company “Blue Memorial Video” in his honor since Blue had portrayed Cohen onstage in Montreal at the Centaur Theatre production of “The Leonard Cohen Show.”
Wexler and Znaimer lined up the King Edward Hotel for the shooting, set to begin in April 1983. In the meantime, Cohen had gone to Roshi’s New Mexico Zen center, where he could make only one fifteen-minute telephone call a week. The day Wexler was to sign the deal with C-Channel, Cohen telexed to say he had changed his mind, that he would refund the money, and that the project had to be postponed or canceled. Znaimer told Wexler to find Cohen and make him change his mind. Unable to contact him, Wexler went to C-Channel and signed, despite the telex from Cohen in his pocket. He couldn’t speak to Cohen for four days and when he could, he was able, during their fifteen-minute conversation, to convince him to participate, although Cohen wanted to be written out of much of the video.
Four days before filming, Cohen arrived in Toronto, the day the newspapers were saying C-Channel was going to fold. Wexler bought a copy of every Canadian newspaper at the King Edward Hotel’s newsstand where Cohen was staying so he would not learn of the channel’s collapse. Wexler and Znaimer worked through the night to re-finance the project. Three CBC executives were dining together that night and between the first course and dessert, Wexler was able to convince one to come to City-TV’S offices to hear his pitch. That evening Wexler got a call approving the money. The Canadian Film Development Corporation also came through in record time to help finance the film.
Filming took six days. It was a thirty-minute surreal drama, a pastiche of fantasy, song, and dance woven around five sets of lovers (including Cohen) who meet at a grand hotel. Five songs narrated the drama, opening with “The Guests” and moving to “Memories,” “Gypsy Wife,” “Chelsea Hotel,” and finally “Suzanne.” The sequences were shot in both black and white and color. Skating champion Toller Cranston, dancer Ann Ditchburn and the National Ballet’s founder Celia Franca all appeared in the video. Cohen described the film as “a kind of carousel, you just see figures moving in and out, and their stories unfold, they find what they want.” There is no dialogue, only the songs and body movement. Wexler explained that what they tried to do was make the singer almost incidental to the dancing, acting, and music. During an interview after the shooting, Cohen said that hotels had always been his natural habitat, “My personal life is such that there’s nowhere else to go. Where does a guy go?”
When Cohen saw the film, he hated it. Some scenes had to be re-shot, and more money was needed. Additional sequences, especially for “Suzanne,” were added by the post-production director, Don Allen. Editing was a long and stressful process, but when Cohen saw the final product, he was thrilled. The film was broadcast on May 7, 1984, and beat out entries from thirty-two other countries to win the Golden Rose award at the 24th International Montreux Television Festival. It also received a special mention in the Critic’s Choice category. Critics praised the work and saw a transition in Cohen’s work from the erotic and experimental to the traditional, with worship and redemption as the new focus. Cohen, Wexler, and Znaimer suggested that their next video would be an adaptation of The Favorite Game, but it has never been made.
Cohen realized that one “must assume an alarming flexibility,” and that projects undertaken without structure could sometimes succeed, while those that were planned could fail. He recognized that he was an inflexible man for the most part. “I like to get up at 3 : 00 a.m. to the sound of a bell … Flexibility for me is a position I’m hounded into—and I don’t like it.” Order, structure, and discipline were his strengths.
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AS HE APPROACHED FIFTY, Cohen felt he needed to re-evaluate his direction once more. He was at last ready to “get down to a Jew’s business.” The spiritual quest came in part from an inability to do anything else. “I was silenced in all areas. I couldn’t move…. It was the only way I could penetrate through my predicament.” What he discovered was “the courage to write down my prayers. To apply to the source of mercy … I found that the act of writing was the proper form for my prayer.” His efforts resulted in a book of psalms first titled The Name, then The Shield, and finally Book of Mercy. Asked to describe it, Cohen cryptically claimed the book is either “inspired or it isn’t; it either rings true or it doesn’t. I think it does … I’m happy for being able to write it because the writing of it, in some ways, was the answer to the prayer.” But Cohen was hesistant to have the material published; he felt it was risky because it was so unlike his last book, Death of A Lady’s Man.
Book of Mercy was published by McClelland & Stewart in April. “It came from an intense desire to speak in that way,” he said of the odd form, “And you don’t speak in that way unless you feel truly cornered, unless you feel truly desperate and you feel urgency in your life…. I also wanted to affirm the traditions I had inherited.” In the book, Cohen follows the Old Testament practice of numbering rather than titling the psalms. The book contains fifty psalms, marking Cohen’s age. Like the biblical psalms, the psalms in Book of Mercy deal with longing and self-abnegation; “Broken in the unemployment of my soul, I have driven a wedge into your world, fallen on both sides of it. Count me back to your mercy with the measures of a bitter song, and do not separate me from my tears.” He also recorded several of the psalms with a string quartet in a Los Angeles studio in 1984. Henry Lewy engineered the recording, but it was never released.
Critics were unsure what to make of the book, a position similar to Cohen’s: “It’s a tricky thing to publish a book like this. I really don’t know what section of the bookstore it should be in … It’s not a quarrel, it’s not an argument, it’s not theology; it is just an asking.” Some wondered how the poet who appeared to possess such venom in Death of A Lady’s Man could now possess such spiritual love. Others felt that it added another dimension to Cohen’s work. In July 1985, he won the Canadian Authors Association Literature Prize for lyrical poetry for the book, receiving five thousand dollars, although the recognition didn’t affect his anxiety: “Everyone is in some kind of fix. Writing is my trade, and I treat my fix that way. When I’m feeling good about my work, I call it my vocation; when I’m feeling ordinary about it, I call it my trade.”
Book of Mercy was mystical, spiritual, and indulgent, displaying none of the lyricism of his early work or the anger of his later. The focus of his longing was no longer a woman, but a desire to find spiritual fulfillment. Prayer, he acknowledged, was not in. “We’re such a hip age. Nobody wants to affirm those realities. It doesn’t go with your sunglasses,” he explained to one critic.
The reawakening of his Judaism in the eighties took another form as he transposed Hebrew prayer into his songs. “Who by Fire” is based on the Hebrew melody for the prayer “Mi Bamayim, Mi Ba Esh” sung at the Musaf or noontime service on Yom Kippur. “If It Be Your Will” was also borrowed from Jewish prayer, originating in a phrase from the Kol Nidre service on Yom Kippur eve where, just before the listing of sins, the petitioner cries, “May it therefore be Your will, Lord our God, and God of our Fathers, to forgive us all our sins, to pardon all our iniquities, to grant us atonement for all our transgressions.” The melody for Cohen’s song is derived from the synagogue song.
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Various Positions was the musical counterpoint to Book of Mercy. Cohen acknowledged that he had really started to slave over his songwriting. Until 1983, he could write more or less on the run, or at least on the tour buses, in the hotel rooms, in the airplanes, in bed. What altered his attitude from working hard to giving everything to his craft was a growing sense of mortality as he approached fifty. “I had no idea how hard the task was,” he told an interviewer in 1993,
until I found myself in my underwear crawling along the carpet in a shabby room at the Royalton Hotel unable to nail a verse. And knowing that I had a recording session and knowing that I could get by with what I had but that I’m not going to be able to do it.
He was broke, he had a lot of financial obligations, and he felt his career had more or less evaporated. But he perservered: “I bought my first synthesizer and I started working in a way that I have never worked before,” Cohen said. “I had always worked hard, but I really threw myself into this. The work was very intense, very clear.” In 1993 he explained this new intensity in a characteristically laconic, yet ironic manner: “I don’t know why, but something happened to me ten years ago. When things got really desperate, I started to cheer up.” Around 1984, the alternative rock scene began to rediscover his music when Sisters of Mercy and Nick Cave started to do cover versions of his songs. “The initial thing had passed,” Cohen said. The mainstream audience was dwindling, but the alternative culture was tuning in to his work.
On hearing Various Positions, Bob Dylan commented that Cohen’s songs were becoming more like prayers. For this album, his first in five years, Cohen also relied on extensive backup vocals. One of the reasons for the album’s success was producer John Lissauer, who had assisted on Recent Songs. He created a unique sound that reflected the spiritual feeling Cohen wanted to convey. His song “The Law,” possibly referring to the Torah, reinforced his realization of a powerful and long-lasting set of principles that must control the behavior of men and women. The law has frequently called him but he had not responded until recently: “I left everybody / But I never went straight.”
But religion didn’t dominate the record. “Coming Back to You” is something of a country and western song, narrating the determination of the lover/worker/prisoner to return to a woman, despite her transgressions. “Dance Me to the End of Love” marks his return to love from hate, from the breakup with Suzanne to the new joy with Dominique. One of the most troubling songs on the album, and perhaps the most autobiographical, is “The Night Comes On.” In five verses Cohen rewrites his life, beginning with his mother, his childhood fears, and her death. The 1973 war in Israel and the peace following is linked to his father’s death. He also alludes to his unhappy marriage with characteristic clarity:
We were locked in this kitchen
I took to religion
And I wondered how long she would stay
I needed so much
To have nothing to touch
I’ve always been greedy that way.
“If It Be Your Will,” with Jennifer Warnes singing harmony, made for a haunting conclusion to the album.
Cohen had recorded the album in New York for CBS but they decided not to release it in the U.S. It was released in Europe, where it was felt his European audience was more adaptable. But in the U.S., tolerance for Cohen’s already uncommercial style was being stretched with an album of religious themes. Various Positions made the Top Ten in Spain, Portugal, and Scandinavia, and fared modestly well in England. In the U.S. it was finally released by Passport Records, a division of JEM records, but only a few thousand copies were pressed.
Cohen told an interviewer that his audience in North America had dried up, although in Europe it had remained loyal. Europeans appreciated “people who can’t sing but whose voices are connected to the heart…. In the secret chambers of my heart, I consider myself a singer; on good days, I consider myself a stylist.”
Cohen said that he couldn’t really mount tours in North America because his record company was not behind him. During the seventies and into the eighties, the company seemed to release his records in secret. He referred to the CBS building in New York as “the Tomb of the Unknown Record.” When the interviewer asked Cohen what occupation he would list if he were filling out an application, Cohen replied, “Sinner.”
Depressed at the lackluster reception of his work, Cohen returned to touring. On May 5, 1985, he played Carnegie Hall, his first New York concert in ten years. A month later he performed at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles, where he referred to himself as “an old veteran of the rainbows, rambling on in his invisible trench.” Dressed in black and playing a black acoustic guitar, Cohen sang new compositions like “Dance Me to the End of Love,” and a rollicking “Diamonds in the Mine.” Afterwards, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Al Kooper visited him backstage to congratulate him.
The 1985 tour was his most extensive, encompassing Europe, North America, Australia, and Israel. In Poland, solidarity, the independent trade union that would shortly oust the dictatorial Polish government, asked him to perform and he discovered he was something of a hero to the movement. He declined, however, because of the band’s fear of the political tension that might suddenly surround the concert and their tour. When he arrived, he received a note from Lech Walesa, the trade unionist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 and would later become president of the country. A pirated double cassette from one performance circulated as Cohen in Warsaw, 22 March 1985 with twenty-one songs from the concert.
Between January and July Cohen performed seventy-seven concerts. Women, he said, were what kept him sane on the road. Otherwise, it was just hotel rooms, the bus, and bad food.