Toronto Star on Leonard Cohen

[jarkko]

This came from Dick Straub.

Leonard Cohen hits 70


PHILIP MARCHAND

MARITA
PLEASE FIND ME
I AM ALMOST 30
- Leonard Cohen

The poet no longer remembers what Marita looked like. He is almost 70 now.
(Tuesday will be his 70th birthday.) He does remember scrawling the poem on
the wall of a Montreal bistro, after unsuccessfully trying to pick up one
Marita La Fleche, an older woman who patted him on the head and said, "Go on
your way, young man, and come back when you're 30."

In 1965, the National Film Board of Canada released a short documentary
titled Ladies And Gentlemen ... Mr. Leonard Cohen, which advertised Cohen as
the best young poet in Canada, a romantic with dark, liquid eyes, and a
bohemian of impenetrable cool. The cameras showed him getting out of bed in
his underwear, in a seedy hotel room, and looking out of a window on the
bleak, wintry cityscape of Montreal.

"You always have a feeling in a hotel room that you're on the lam and this
is one of the safe moments in the escape," Cohen's voice proclaimed on the
sound track. He bent over a sink and scrubbed his face with PhisoHex and
then rubbed it with a towel. "You know that you have found a little place in
the grass, and the hounds are going to go by for three more hours. You're
going to have a drink, light a cigarette and take a long time shaving."

Cohen's biographer, Ira B. Nadel, reports in his 1996 book, Various
Positions: A Life Of Leonard Cohen, that the poet still finds hotels
fascinating. In 1984 he released a video titled I Am A Hotel.

The 1965 documentary also showed Cohen being made-up for a television
appearance on a talk show hosted by Pierre Berton. "There, now, don't you
look beautiful," the make-up woman said to him. "I look better than when I
started," he told her, with the sweetest smile you ever saw.

Many of Cohen's albums show him with a piercing frown, befitting his
reputation as a gloomy bard, a sad romantic. He is a manic-depressive, to be
sure. But you can tell from this one scene that Cohen smiled his way into
the beds of many women.

On the television show, Cohen told Berton that he has no "concerns." Berton
sputtered in disbelief and outrage. "Well, come on now, what do you care
about, really?" he demanded. "Don't you care about anything? How can you be
a good poet and not care about something?"

"No, I do the poetry, you do the commentary," Cohen replied.

"No, but I ... let's get that straight. Are you saying that there's nothing
that worries you, that there's nothing that bothers you? How can you write
poetry if you're not bothered by something?"

Cohen thought for a moment. "My battle, when I get up in the morning, my
real concern is to discover whether or not I'm in a state of grace."

Later in the film we hear some lines Cohen has written to a beloved:
"Beneath my hands, your small breasts are the up-turned bellies of
breathing, fallen sparrows." This is a reminder of the lush lyricism that
marked the early poetry of Leonard Cohen, in such collections as the 1956
Let Us Compare Mythologies (containing poems Cohen wrote between the ages of
15 and 20) and the 1961 Spice Box Of Earth.

Biographer Nadel tells us that Cohen was born in Montreal to Nathan Cohen, a
successful manufacturer of mid-priced men's clothing, and his wife, Masha,
from whom Cohen seems to have inherited his tendency to depression. His
father died when Leonard was 9.

When Leonard was 15, he bought his first guitar for $12 from a pawn shop.
"There was no guitar culture going on at the time, and it was generally
thought that only Communists played the instrument," Nadel writes. Cohen did
pore over The People's Songbook, a collection of folk songs and protest
songs of the kind performed by such left-wing icons of the time as Woody
Guthrie, Josh White and Pete Seeger.

Although not known for expressing political views, Cohen has probably been
most deeply influenced by the folk music he learned in the early 1950s.

Cohen began writing his own songs in that period. His most famous tune,
"Suzanne," was written in 1965 and was inspired by a dancer named Suzanne
Verdal, who took Cohen to her loft, fed him tea and oranges, and spent hours
talking with him by candlelight. The pair never became lovers, however.

I first met Leonard Cohen in 1974, when I did a profile of him for a
magazine then known as Miss Chatelaine. At the time, having just released an
album titled New Skin For The Old Ceremony, Cohen was touring university
campuses in southern Ontario. When I met him, he was wearing a black shirt
and a gray suit, which he told me was handmade for him by a tailor in Addis
Ababa. His hair was slicked back in the Sicilian style that Al Pacino
sported in The Godfather.

We talked for a while, and then he granted an interview to a student
reporter, and when it became apparent that the student reporter had asked
all his questions, Cohen started interviewing him on his attitude to
journalism. "Do you have a cynical attitude or a genuine interest?"

The student reporter was flustered because he wasn't sure if Cohen was
putting him on. "Well, uh, I'm genuinely interested in interviewing someone
whom I admire, but I, uh, refuse to interview someone whom I have negative
feelings toward."

"Don't you think that this might limit your career?" Cohen asked, with the
sense of irony that had by then replaced his lush lyricism.

"Well, I wouldn't interview, say, a general that wanted to start a war."

"Do you think Trudeau is a belligerent character?"

This went on for a while. Later someone mentioned getting his girlfriend
pregnant, and Cohen remarked, "Everybody should rush into pregnancy. It's
the only thing that makes women happy." He paused. "It also gets them off
your back." Then he spotted me, all ears, with my little reporter's
notebook. "Don't write that down," he demanded. When I said nothing, he
shuffled back and forth like a boxer. "We have ways to get you."

The best concert on that tour took place at the London Psychiatric Hospital.
The audience was excitable and a little bit rowdy. Cohen, who lacks the
tenor voice of most rock and folk singers, has a deep voice that tends to
drone. Usually soprano backup singers relieve the droning tendency, but on
this occasion they were nowhere in sight. At one point Cohen stopped and
said, "This is the test. We're here under voluntary conditions. Nobody paid
us and nobody paid you. We can leave if we don't like it, and so can you ...
Any questions?" Somebody in the audience hollered, "How about a singalong?"
and then Cohen, drawing on his teenaged experience as a counsellor in a
B'nai B'rith summer camp, led the audience in renditions of "On Top Of Old
Smoky" and "You Are My Sunshine" and "Beautiful Brown Eyes."

Ten years ago I interviewed Cohen for the Toronto Star in his Los Angeles
offices. His hair was then cut very short, in keeping with his Buddhist
asceticism, but he still loved black and gray - he wore black jeans, a black
sweatshirt and a charcoal suit jacket. In our conversation, he denied that
his songs were particularly depressing.

"I've certainly got a bum rap on that," he insisted. "People talk about my
work being grim or sombre, but I think that I'm one of the few singers, the
few writers, who have a few jokes in their songs." He shrugged. "It doesn't
matter. Songs are meant to be sad. That's why we love them. Roshi once said
to me, `Leonard, you should sing more sad!'"

"Roshi" was a Buddhist monk who was then Cohen's spiritual teacher. "Roshi's
pretty well given up trying to teach me anything after 25 years," Cohen
confessed, however. "A couple of years ago he said, `I've never tried to
give you my religion. I just pour you sake.' So a lot of our relationship
now is as drinking buddies. I think he's given up on my education. I'm 60
and I haven't made any progress."

Whatever the state of his spiritual progress, Cohen's artistic career
remains lustrous. A writer for the British publication, the Guardian, puts
it this way: "Since his mid-50s, his stock has risen steadily. Late middle
age tends not to be easy for pop stars, if they get there at all, but it has
smiled on Cohen. There have been several tribute albums and covers by Bono,
R.E.M. and Johnny Cash. His influence has been cited by Nick Cave, Suzanne
Vega and Rufus Wainwright, who said recently, `I really believe he's the
greatest living poet on earth.'"

Happy birthday, Leonard Cohen.

Additional articles by Philip Marchand

[lizzytysh]

That's an enjoyable article, even if that paragraph about women and pregnancy makes him appear to be a raging sexist . I really like these articles, as with every one, something new seems to inevitably appear .

[Midnight]

and Cohen remarked, "Everybody should rush into pregnancy. It's
the only thing that makes women happy." He paused. "It also gets them off your back."

Well! I think Leonard let his mask drop there for a moment.

[lizzytysh]

Those babies have made Leonard blissfully happy ~ and brought the kind of meaning to his life that nothing else can .

[Midnight]

Well, since it's nearly his birthday I will not at this time say what I really think about Leonard's attitude to women in general.

Regarding children...I had a friend who fell in love and married a man who already had one child from a previous marriage. The inevitable happened...because she loved him she wanted to have a child...he did not. He made a deal with her...if she would not mention the word baby for five years...then she could have one. She was not to ever bring the subject up. His thinking was that in five years she'd be over it.
Wrong. The whole time she was devouring baby magazines in secret. So at the end of her probabtion she immediately got pregnent and they had a boy. Well, dad is now ecstatic, of course. I don't think this case is unusual...a little extreme...but not unusual. Women have a emotional and biological urge to have children when they fall in love with a man. A man doesn't seem to have this strong desire for children (I know that there are exceptions) when they fall in love with a woman. They're happy after the fact.

[jeannieb]

Leonard adores women. I am a woman, and know about such things. I'll bet a whole lot of women on this forum will let you know they feel the same way.

I believe Leonard is human, and fallible, and has at times been driven mad by women, too.

Why, I myself, nearly a saint, have been driven mad my men a time or two. And hope to be again.

[lizzytysh]

Leonard loves women. Many women who have known him love Leonard. Each have played their part in intimacy gone awry. Leonard knows his limitations in relationships, yet has had longer ones in legally-non-binding fashion than many men, perhaps even most. May s/he who has not sinned cast the first stone.

There was a song popular when I was in sixth grade, "To Know Him Is To Love Him" by The Ponytails ~ "To know, know, know him / Is to love, love, love him."

[Midnight]

It is September 21...so I will decorously wait a few days to address this modern mythology of love...which Leonard has exploited so well in poetry and song.


P.S. I thought it was Phil Specter and the Teddy Bears.

"Why can't he see, how blind can he be
Someday he'll see that he was meant for me"

Yeah, right.