I’ve asked Hank Williams, how lonely does it get
For those interested, I am going to bring into the discussion now new elements that I think will widen our perspective on psalm I.9 and on the whole book. This post will require some work, but I hope you will find it worth it. You should set aside some quiet time for yourself to go through it and espacially to read the essay entitled Interior
Landscapes and the Public Realm: Contingent Mediations in a Speech and a Song by Leonard Cohen, by Winfried Siemerling. Some of you may have read it already. You will find the link to that essay further down below. It revolves around many things that we have approached so far in this thread: zen, judism, God, prayer, exile, loneliness, Martin Buber, and also A. M. Klein. This essay also refers to a speech LC gave, I think in 1964, entitled
Loneliness and History. The original of that speech is in box # 9 at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto.
But first Abraham Moses Klein.
Klein was one of LC’s mentors in Montreal and at McGill. Poet, essayist, brilliant orator, LC admired him very much and may have been influenced by him considerably. For example, Klein had published a collection of poetry entitled
The Hitleriad which may later have found an echo in
Flowers for Hitler. Klein also published in 1944 a series of psalms entitled
The Psalter Of Avram Haktani. It consisted of 36 psalms. Klein was 33 at the time. There may have been other psalms too, I am not sure. Klein’s psalms were more in the form of traditional poetry and were in rhyme, unlike those of LC. Each psalm was titled, unliked LC’s. So maybe BoM can also be seen as an homage to A. M. Klein and the dedication at the beginning of BoM,
"for my teacher", may in fact be addressed to A. M. Klein. It is important to remember, as it was stressed before that LC was in a low period when he wrote BoM and that he felt silenced. Klein toward the end of his life suffered from severe depression and was also silenced. Maybe LC in that particular moment of his life feared he might share the same predicament as his mentor, and
"your name, which is beyond all consolations that are uttered on this earth", may also involve mourning over Klein.
Here is one exemple of Klein’s psalms. It is the psalm that will be refered to in the article below and also in the essay by Winfried Siemerling:
PSALM XXII
A prayer of Abraham, against madness:
Lord, for the days alloted me,
Preserve me whole, preserve me hale!
Spare me the scourge of surgery.
Let not my blood nor members fail.
But if Thy will is otherwise,
And I am chosen such an one
For maiming and for maladies
So be it; and Thy will be done.
Palsy the keepers of the house;
And of the strongmen take Thy toll.
Break down the twigs; break down the boughs
But touch not, Lord, the golden bowl!
O, I have seen these touched ones—
Their fallow looks, their barren eyes—
For whom have perished all the suns
And vanished all fertilities;
Who, docile, sit within their cells
Like weeds, within a stagnant pool.
Now, to put things into context, here is another extract from the 1986
Matrix interview that was quoted a couple of times before in the first pages of the thread (so I wont give the source again here).
MB -- When did you meet A. M. Klein for the first time?
LC -- It must have been ’53-’54.
MB -- He was already in his decline?
LC -- It had to be between 1950 and 1955, around ’53 or ’54. I think he had been sick, and – this is very inaccurate – I don’t want to flavour it with any of my own speculations, but he was making some kind of attempt to return to a public life in some small degree. He gave a reading at McGill, and I met him then. After the reading I went up and said: “You wrote this review some years ago,” and he said, “Oh yes”, and he remembered him (this essay was of a book by Cohen’s maternal grandfather, Rabbi Solomon Klonitzki-Kline) and asked after my grandfather. I think my grandfather had died by that point, and then I visited Klein with Irving Layton several times at his house. He was in the hospital and then at his house… So that was the curious connection I had with Klein.
MB -- Did his poetry fascinate you?
LC -- Everything touched me. I lived the world of Montreal poetry. That’s mostly what I tought about, and that was my univers. There was a line – there were different lines which I thought I inherited: there was a Jewish line; there was Montreal; there was that kind of consecrated expression called poetry; there were a number of lines which I though I had inherited, and they crossed all over the city; and also there was the priestly hierarchy, which I took quite seriously. In some part of my young soul I took that very seriously.
MB -- I think I notice a great deal of punning on “priest” an “Cohen” in your work, am I correct?
LC -- Probably, yes I don’t know if its punning, but there are references. I took it seriously, probably still do. But that was the world I lived as a young man in Montreal. So that confluence involved quite a few of those genealogies – the Jewish one, the Montreal Jewish one, the one that connected A. M. Klein to my grandfather and my own family, McGill University, and this consecrated expression of poetry. In A. M. Klein there were a lot of those lines that converged, so he was a very important figure to me, beyond the actual poem on the page. I was never interested in mastering a man’s entire work -- I’m talking about everybody from Homer to A. M. Klein, and I’d see the work in probably a very superficial way, but with a certain kind of hungry eye, and I would seize on things that became very important: a line, two lines, a poem, a phrase, a reflection, and that’s what my reading was about, and that’s what my education involved. I never asked for more than three or four things in a guy’s work to speak to me and that was enough for me to fall in love with him. I had no appetite to master his oeuvre, none whatsoever. I still don’t. So in A. M. Klein there were a number of poems that really spoke to me.
M.B. – Which ones for example?
LC – Well, one thing was the Hitleriad, just as the gesture. The other thing was one or two of the psalms, especially the one involving madness – “Touch not the golden dome.” There’s a poem where he prays to be exempt from madness. He prays not to be mad. He prays -- he makes his willingness known to God to accept any kind of affliction -- but he prays that it won’t be a mental affliction. It’s a very moving poem especially in the light of his predicament. That poem touched me very much, and I had read The second Scroll, and I was moved by the book. Also all the poems in The Rocking Chair -- the poem that ends up with something of race, about Camillien Houde -- I remember that as being an uncharacteristic line of his, to come at the end of a poem, and it really hits you. So there were real connections.
…
MB -- Klein was interested in Caughnawaga. Did that trigger off anything in you?
LC – No. I had many perceptions of A. M. Klein. His fate was very important to me – what happened to and what would happen to a Jewish writer in Montreal who was writing in English, who was not totally writing from a Jewish position. I’ve never been so interested in people who write from a position, although I really recognize the excellence of many writers who write about Glengarry County, Cork County, you know, the people who write specifically -- local writers. I love many of them, but I always was more interested in exile, somebody who can’t claim the entire landscape as his own; and I saw Klein as one of those figures, as a guy who came out of the Jewish community of Montreal, but who had a perspective on it and on the country, and on the province. He made a step outside the community. He was no longer protected by it, much less protected than Richler, for instance. I mean Richler speaks squarely from a Jewish community, and his people go out of the Jewish community. The rhythms are Montreal Jewish rhythms. It really comes out of the neighbourhood, whereas Klein is very much less associated with a locale, you know, with the corner store, with the neighbourhood. His stance is Hebraic, rather than Yiddish. It’s not a shtetl that he’s talking about; it’s not the shtetl sensibility. It’s Hebraic; it’s Biblical.
MB -- That’s what appeals to you is it?
LC -- Well that made his position more risky, more dangerous.
MB -- That’s what Layton does. He talks about his brotherhood with the prophets. He goes back to the Old Testament.
LC -- Definitely. Layton was influenced by Klein’s predicament. There was a period in his life when he was very close to Klein. Layton and I have talked about Klein for hours and hours.
So now that the table is set, I invite you to take the time to read Winfried Siemerling’s essay at the following link. You’ll see, many things seem to fall into place:
Winfried Siemerling's essay>>>
As a closing line for this rather long post, Klein was not without a sense of humour. This is from one of his notebooks;
“God invented Adam and has lived since on the royalties”
It’s late, I’m signing off.