Various Positions (39 page)

A North American tour followed. Allen Ginsberg attended the show at New York’s Paramount Theater and remarked on Cohen’s “
gritty realistic voice … and the elegant ease of irony with which he thanked overzealous screamers and demanders in the audience—the language bitter, disillusioning like a practiced (Buddhist) Yankee-Canadian,
always surprising.” At the Vancouver concert Cohen was interrupted when he sang “let’s do something crazy,” from “Waiting for the Miracle.” From the back of the Orpheum Theatre a woman’s voice cried out, “Yessss, Leonard.” After the laughter died down, he repeated the line, and the woman again responded. A third attempt brought the same response, even more longingly shouted. Cohen strolled upstage with the mike, and looking into the darkness, said, “
There is nothing like an idea whose force does not diminish with repetition.”

He was listed second among the top ten live performances in Boston in 1993, after Peter Gabriel. The
Boston Globe
wrote that “
Leonard Cohen wrapped the most exquisite, sad poetry around exquisite chamber rock at the Berklee Performance Center.” After the tour and the hype and the publicity, Cohen had had enough. He canceled a proposed tour of Eastern Europe in favor of some rest and spiritual renewal, beginning his most intense and sustained involvement with Roshi.

In September 1993, an hour-long special on his work, “The Gospel According to Leonard Cohen,” was aired on
CBC
Radio with a long interview recorded in Montreal. Then, on October 5, 1993, it was announced that Cohen had won a Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for his contribution to Canadian music. Presentation of the ten-thousand-dollar award was made in Ottawa on November 26 by the Governor General of Canada with a gala tribute to Cohen and the other winners the following evening at the National Arts Center. One of the highlights of the gala was dinner with the acclaimed Quebec singer Gilles Vigneault, also a winner, and a third guest, Pierre Trudeau, whom Cohen had long admired for his leadership during difficult times. That fall, Cohen and Trudeau both had books on the bestseller lists.

The attention and tributes created a curious blend of melancholy and satisfaction for Cohen. “
I feel like a soldier,” he said just hours before receiving his award. “You may get decorated for a successful campaign or a particular action that appears heroic but probably is just in the line of duty. You can’t let these honors deeply alter the way you fight. If you do, I think you are really going to get creamed in the next battle. And I do feel like I am on the frontline of my own life.” When asked what these honors meant to him, Cohen laughingly answered, “
The implication
is—
this is it!”
But he welcomed the tributes in his own country: “It is agreeable to have this recognition.”

Coinciding with the Governor General’s award was the release on November 13, 1993, of his long-awaited collection of poems and songs,
Stranger Music
. It was a book that had been in the works since the mid-eighties. Jack McClelland had long urged Cohen to assemble a collection of his best work. In a 1989 video that Adrienne Clarkson made for
CBC
television, Cohen is shown at his kitchen table selecting works with her and joking that it should be called “Everything I’m Not Embarrassed By.” At other times, it was to be titled “New Selected Poems” and, later, “If the Moon Has a Sister, It’s Got to be You, Selected Poems and Songs.”
Stranger Music
, its final title, is a many-sided pun. It ironically refers to the nature of his writing and music and also alludes to the music publishing company he started up in the late sixties after “The Stranger Song” on his first album.

The original cover for the book was to be a “
primitivist, protuberant purple
derrière
,” set against a tomato-red background. Instead, his publisher chose a moody but evocative black and white photograph of Cohen. He had trouble determining the content of the book; in addition to poems, he wanted it to contain his songs, or at least a good part of them. By 1990, he had done all the work and “
came up with three books: a short book, a middle-sized book, and a long book. I established this index, and the long book was prepared. It’s done, it’s finished, but at a certain point I lost interest in the project. I thought it should have a preface. I thought it should have something else besides the poems and the songs, and then I became distracted with other matters.”

Cohen later admitted that another cause for delay was that he “
could never get around to confronting the various dismalities that were presented [to] me, just the meagreness of the whole thing [the book project].” He turned to his friend Nancy Bacal to assist him, admitting that he didn’t know where to begin. For months the two worked daily to select, revise, cut, and restore texts. His goal, according to Bacal, was to “
select the pieces that express the place he finally got to rather than the road taken there.” He wanted to eliminate the poems of searching or what he called “the messy ones.” He also wanted works of simple but refined language. Then Rebecca De Mornay became involved, often
arguing for inclusion of the so-called “messy” works, which demonstrated not the finished precision of his best writing but items that spilled over with emotion and feeling.

Late night sessions, debates, and numerous faxes went back and forth among Cohen, Bacal, and De Mornay until the manuscript was finished. In his words, he wanted

The final text of the book provides a chronological selection of his work, incorporating poetry, prose, and song. Noticeably absent, however, are any passages from
The Favorite Game
, his most autobiographical novel, perhaps an indication of his self-protective nature, even at this stage of his career. He also de-emphasizes the Montreal aspect of the collection, leaving out most of the poems about the city in favor of those dealing with foreign locales. The original selection from
Beautiful Losers
avoided sex, but then he realized it had to be there, since it was an essential component of the novel. The most widely cited text is
Death of A Lady’s Man
, reworked and in some cases re-ordered from the original book, with new headings for some sections. Cohen himself has said that he is happiest with this version of the work, for he at last made the book “
coherent,” ridding it of a great deal that could not be penetrated in the original text.

Albums are only partially represented—“Dress Rehearsal Rag” from
Songs of Love and Hate
, “Heart with No Companion” from
Various Positions
, “Jazz Police,” from
I’m Your Man
, and “Be for Real” from
The Future
all missing. Some notable poetic works one would expect to see are also not present—for example, “Go by Brooks,” “Out of the Land of Heaven,” and “The Bus.” There are also some curious textual changes: the original version of “The Escape” was untitled in
The Energy of Slaves
and featured the line “
I’m glad we ran off together.” In
Stranger Music
he elaborates this to read “
I’m glad we got over the wall / of that loathsome Zen monastery.” The poetic forms of three songs—“Suzanne,” “Avalanche,” and “Master Song”—are replaced by their recorded versions. There is a section entitled “Uncollected Poems,” with eleven works ranging from 1978 to 1987 and written in Paris, Mt. Baldy, Hydra, and Montreal. This section caused some disagreement among the three editors, and two works were excluded from the finished manuscript, one dealing with Robert Hershorn.

Jack McClelland was now acting as Cohen’s agent and he had to convince Doug Gibson, now publisher of McClelland & Stewart, that Cohen preferred informal agreements. In lieu of a contract, a letter of agreement was drawn up and Gibson accepted it, although he stipulated that the volume was to be a “
major new book by Leonard Cohen with a heavily autobiographical slant, i.e., a lengthy introduction and a central text that contained his finest poems.” By January 1990, however, Cohen had lost interest in the project and his son’s accident in September of that year further delayed the book.

The matter of an introduction remained contentious. Cohen wanted a short statement and Gibson was pushing for an autobiographical essay. Disagreements slowed progress, while song lyrics were added. Everyone was becoming impatient. By August 1991, a proposed twenty-thousand-word introduction was dropped, although Gibson thought it would be the key selling point of the book. He suggested a less formal piece, perhaps “
reflections on his career, reflections on his life … think of this as a riff; introductory by virtue of its placement in the book.” Cohen still refused, choosing to keep the book clean, free from any introductory declaration.

Nevertheless,
Stranger Music
provides the most comprehensive single-volume collection of poems and lyrics now in print. It is important because most of his poetry has been out of print for years. For a younger generation of fans, his activity as a writer was a surprise; they were startled to learn that he wrote anything but songs. The volume reaffirms the union between poet and songwriter, which Cohen never separated. Cohen himself thought of the book as a sort of poetic autobiography: “
I tried to eliminate poems that suffered from those youthful obscurities
and rambling intoxications of language, poems that really didn’t stand up. I wanted my better poems to be around. What is here are the poems that survived my scrutiny. In any case, it’s selected poems, not collected poems.”

Reaction to
Stranger Music
was positive, although there were quibbles over the failure to print every song and every poem (the only volume to come close to a full publication of his lyrics is the dual language,
Leonard Cohen, Canzoni da una stanza
, edited by Massimo Cotto [Milan, 1993]). The book quickly went to number four on
The Globe and Mail
national bestseller list and a second hardcover printing was necessary.

The book was also published in a limited edition: one hundred and twenty-five signed and numbered copies, specially bound and elaborately presented in a clamshell box which contained three signed, limited-edition prints drawn by Cohen. Even priced at three hundred and fifty dollars each, the books quickly sold out. The sudden reappearance of his earlier works in paperback prompted him to comment that
“it’s very agreeable at fifty-eight to see these books you wrote at twenty-five, twenty-eight. I’m delighted. You do have that sense of vindication of people who were really misunderstood in their time and then re-discovered.” His reputation as a professional depressive, he felt, wasn’t entirely warranted. “
I’m really not all that morose. But you get nailed with something and every time they call your name up on the computer it reads ‘depressed and suicidal.’ I’m probably one of the few people that actually have jokes and a few light moments in their songs and poems.”

Following the necessary publicity for
Stranger Music
, Cohen largely withdrew from public life to spend time with Roshi and act again as his principal secretary. This meant a grueling schedule, not only in the daily activities at Mt. Baldy but in the visits Roshi made to various Rinzai Zen centers in New Mexico, Puerto Rico, Vienna, and upstate New York.

In July 1994, Cohen came to New York to spend a day shooting the video of “Dance Me to the End of Love” from his new release
Cohen Live
. In between takes and re-takes, he visited his sister Esther and her husband Victor, who was suffering from a deteriorating illness. He extended his stay to be with them; within a month Victor had died.

Cohen Live
featured performances from his 1988 and 1993 tours, mixing new versions of old songs. Cohen felt that this album represented
“
the final pages of a chapter” that began with
Various Positions
and continued with
I’m Your Man
and
The Future
. “These are old songs refashioned,” he said. “
The voice has deepened after fifty-thousand cigarettes.” The critical reception was mixed.
Time
magazine wrote, “
This glum, melancholy collection should be dispensed only with large doses of Prozac.”

After the promotional tour for the live album, Cohen concentrated on Zen and his writing, admitting that the quiet of the monastary was only occasionally disrupted by the sound of his composing on his electric keyboard. And occasionally a glass: “
I only drink professionally,” he told one interviewer in late 1993, “I don’t practice meditation anymore. I practice drinking. My Zen master gave up trying to instruct me in spiritual matters but he saw that I had a natural aptitude for drinking.”

Cohen narrated
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
for the National Film Board of Canada, lending his authoritative voice to the project. Barrie McLean, co-producer and director of the
NFB
film, first asked Cohen to revise the original narration, which had been prepared for the Japanese version. Cohen declined, recommending Douglas Penick, a Buddhist expert, who rewrote it. Cohen then recorded the narration for the two-part film, the first entitled “A Way of Life;” the second, “The Great Liberation.” A co-production between
NHK
Japan, Mistral Film, France, and the National Film Board of Canada, the film was a remarkable portrait of life in the Himalayas and the rituals of Buddhist practice. In the film, monks read the
Bardo thodol
, or
Tibetan Book of the Dead
, to the dying and then reread it during the forty-nine days after physical death to assist the consciousness in choosing the right path. Roshi believed the book to be “
a Tibetan fairy tale” and Cohen partially shared his view. “
I respect the book and I respect the tradition,” he said, “but it’s not the one I’m studying in. But fairy tales have within them deep truths, even if they are expressed as paradoxes…. the major advice [in the work] is to view all things that happen to you as projects of your self. Not to run from them but to embrace them, and that is always valuable.” When asked himself if he was afraid of death, Cohen answered that it’s not the event that is worrying, it’s the preliminaries: “
the event itself seems perfectly natural.”