Authors: Ira B. Nadel
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
Times
listed 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.