Authors: Ira B. Nadel
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
.
————
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.
————
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.”