ON THE RE-RELEASE OF THE CLASSIC 1972 DOC, AND THE CULMINATION OF HIS LATEST WORLD TOUR BIRD ON A WIRE, MARNI JACKSON CONFESSES TO OUR SECRET LIVES WITH LEONARD.
Leonard Cohen was in Hamilton at the beginning of his two-yearlong sold-out world tour, when my phone rang close to midnight.
“I’ll be late getting home,” my husband said on the phone. “I’m backstage with Leonard and the band.”
Damn. That was supposed to be me.
My husband, Brian Johnson, is a writer for Maclean’s and, over the years, he has interviewed Leonard a number of times, through good years and bad. He is full of respect for Leonard as a poet, a musician, a sort of father figure and a 76-year-old man who still looks good in a fedora. Although his relationship to Leonard is professional, it also feels intimate and singular.
One time, when he was down in L.A. doing an interview with one or another celebrity, he ended up having dinner out, with Leonard and the actress Sandra Oh (another serial interviewee). She had just finished acting in the movie Sideways and “felt like ordering some interesting wines,” Brian said on the phone, with a happy lilt in his voice. “That’s sounds like fun,” I said gamely. Sandra Oh, Leonard Cohen … stiff competition! I hung up and jogged over to the cinder track of a nearby park, where I walked round and round with my headphones on, listening to Ten New Songs (The ponies ride … the girls are young …), renewing my private, exclusive, un-media-sullied relationship to Leonard (as I call him).
I realize I’m not alone. All over the world, there are fans who maintain shy but meaningful contact with the singer (who has always tended his website with care, like a bonsai gardener). The impression that each one of us enjoys, of having a privileged, personal connection to him, is one of Leonard’s most creative and generous gifts. Readers who connect with his poetry or fans who make a little nest for themselves inside his songs come to believe that Leonard has somehow gained access to the details of their secret lives. He outs us. We listen to “A Thousand Kisses Deep” or “Alexandra Leaving” as if standing in a spotlight before a mirror.
How did he know about my polka-dot blouse, my forward deck, my brush and comb?
His songs and writing make us feel more fully known, more clearly seen; of course, that’s what art is supposed to do — to offer up confessions that unlock your own. To risk the full human encounter.
My relationship with Leonard began in high school, in 1963, when I was 17 and read his first novel, The Favourite Game. The hero, Laurence Breavman, is a Montreal university student who spends one summer working at a summer camp, having sex and falling in and out of love with women. He is living at a certain anguished distance from his life. He’s horny, confused and unhappy — it’s really the perfect novel to read when you’re 17. The voice in it is comic and lyrical by turns, as if Holden Caulfield had migrated north from Manhattan to become a Jewish camp counsellor in the Laurentians.
Leonard the Great Connector is already in evidence in The Favourite Game. “His guitar was always handy,” he writes of Breavman. “The cedar wood was cool against his stomach. The inside of the guitar smelled like the cigar boxes his father used to have. The tone was excellent in the middle of the night. In those late hours, the purity of the music always surprised him and almost convinced him that he was creating a sacramental relationship with the girl, the outside city, and himself.” And, with me, I might add. Leonard prefaced the novel with a poem of his, that begins:
As the mist leaves no scar
On the dark green hill,
So my body leaves no scar
On you, nor ever will
What romantic 17-year-old girl wouldn’t memorize such a poem? Although Leonard’s early poetry was troubadourish, with little of the dark humour of his later writing (and none of the semen-on-the-windshield joie de vivre of his experimental novel Beautiful Losers), it wasn’t sentimental. The writing had precision and edge, and he trusted his reader to meet him halfway.
As a teenager longing for life and art to begin, I read his poetry as a dialogue between us on the page. That’s when you know a poem is pulling its weight: when it speaks to your secret life. (And poets assume we all have one.) By Grade 13, I was on a first-name basis with all he had written and felt it was time for us to be formally introduced. Leonard was living in New York at the Chelsea Hotel at the time, where writers, musicians and junkies rented rooms, to pursue dereliction and their craft. Where Bob Dylan wrote “Sad- Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” I remember you well, in the Chelsea Hotel, Leonard wrote in one song.
Sitting at my Selectric typewriter in Burlington, Ont., typing with the speed and skill of someone groomed for secretarial glory, I composed a short note to L. Cohen. His poems, I wrote, were like a telephone connecting everyone who read them. It was a terrible, ungainly simile, but I needed to thank him for breaking into my frozen Burlington heart and for speaking so unpatronizingly to me. For allowing all things, on the page.
(Before Prozac, there was poetry.)
Not long afterward, a letter arrived. My address on the envelope was written in purple fountain-pen ink. Inside was a sheet of semi-transparent (of course!) onion skin stationery.
Dear Marni, the message went, Thank you for your most perfect letter. Leonard.
That got me into my 20s.
But in university, our relationship grew moody. With “Suzanne” and his new career as a folk singer, Leonard became popular — too popular for my taste. I knew that his accolytes would only crush him; he needed my loving distance, my complicit silence. After all, Leonard had touched my perfect body with his mind — we didn’t need anything as coarse as an encounter in time and space.
So we continued to meet whenever we could, in my bed under the lamp, on a chair with a dead magazine or in the darkness of an audience as his imperfect voice released the dove of a new song
While waiting for Leonard to carry my groceries home, I met a man, a writer, who had published a small volume of poems.He had embarked on a crazy novel that I liked. We fell in with each other. He was a journalist who sometimes interviews stars and artists. Over the years, he has interviewed Leonard often and hung out with him at times.
One summer day, he interviewed Leonard in his Montreal apartment and, when the conversation was over and small talk resumed, Brian said, “I have to buy some fish on the way home.”
“I know where to go. It’s not far,” said Leonard. “I’ll walk you there.”
Later, up north at our cabin, I cooked the Cohen-consecrated fish. Delicious. Life is strange; somehow, despite being one of his original Founding Fans, I had become a journalist-in-law to Leonard.
Two years ago, partly to recoup his lost investments, Leonard Cohen embarked on a world tour that became one protracted love-in after another with his global audiences. How wonderful to command such a warm following in your eighth decade!
Early in the tour, he played several concerts in Toronto. With the interviews over, my husband and I joined the audience one night — a ménage, as it were. At 74, Leonard was in better shape than ever — sober, calm and in good voice.
The concert was masterful, a dance of light and dark that lasted three hours. He doffed his grey fedora repeatedly, paying his respects to everyone in the band. In the past, Leonard used to sing onstage with his eyes closed, primed by several bottles of red wine before getting up on stage. Now, his eyes are open, he has moves, he skips, he plays all the songs you want him to and even re-animates that durable old chestnut, “Suzanne.” He sings the words with care, in his old, tender timbre; you see the river in Montreal, you glimpse the garbage and the flowers. He brings “Marianne” and “Sisters of Mercy” to life again.
But the evening was not an exercise in nostalgia; it was a new window opening onto a beloved old view. As an encore, Leonard sang “Closing Time” with the band and then, as a joke, he came back onstage, almost sprinting, for yet another encore (there were seven). If L-dog (as my son affectionately calls him) can be this on top of things at 74, then there’s hope for us all. Maybe we don’t have to accept diminishment and decline as we age. Instead, we can become more ex-pansive, more generous, cannier at delivering what we have to offer. Ringing the bells that still can ring.
One encore included the hymn-song “If It Be Your Will,” a song about relinquishing control. Leonard’s art partly lies in erasing the marks of his own authorship and making the audience feel in possession of, almost the co-creator, of the music. We’re summoned to become more ourselves, in the presence of this smallish, smiling figure on stage. He’s there for us. He’s our man.
My son will make fun of L-dog whenever we get too reverential. He respects the guy, even though his own musical tastes run in different directions. But it turns out that he’s had a private connection with Leonard, too.
When he was 17 and living at home, the only computer with a printer was in my office. My son would use it to print out his high school assignments and other documents. Years later, I decided it was time to finally houseclean my computer, and as I was trashing files, I came across an old folder of Casey’s stuff. I opened it to make sure I wasn’t erasing school records or something of that sort. I found some photos and old resumes, along with a university essay on Lucille Bogan, Iggy Pop and “raising social issues through social deviance in popular music.” And there was also a “Letter to Leonard” that he had written sometime in his teens. I opened it.
Dear Leonard Cohen,
I am writing you to say how much I enjoyed your book, The Favourite Game. I know how much work is involved in creating a novel compared to the recognition it gets. I found it to be a very honest collections of moments.
The note went on for two more paragraphs, and closed with “Thanks for the story.” The book had offered him some timely solace, apparently.
I don’t know if the letter ever got mailed. But I’m sure Leonard got the message.
Zoomermag.com – Oct. 2010