Transcription
That Leonard Cohen has been trying to heal pain with his songs since he first began to write them at the age of 16. And by songs, I mean all those volumes of delicate lyrical poetry and the two rowdy, frenzied novels, as well as the haunting music which has made him renowned throughout the world. Leonard Cohen rarely consents to television interviews, but this week and next on Authors, he speaks both about the pain and the healing. Now, some of the language you may find offensive; some of the ideas difficult and unorthodox. But the passage of Leonard Cohen through the highs and the hells of relationships and personal knowledge makes him a writer whose qualities transcend those of the work alone.
Can I assume that when you're making a poem, that you are finding out where you are in the process of doing it? That it's not something you've thought about and you say, "All right, now I know I'll write it down," but rather that as you as you construct it, you learn?
Yeah, I think that's what you're seeing; that's one of the aspects of it. So in *Death of a Ladies Man*, as I think I trace a growing yearning for certain kinds of stability and uh, repose and unity of human relationships and unity of perception, am I right in assuming that you found your way into that as you were doing this book, or the or the work that led up to it?
I think the longing exists on a conscious level, but the uh, yeah, just the deployment of the energies is somehow illuminated through the work. I know that I want to be in one place; I know that I don't really feel like moving around too much anymore. But I think that's because I want to try something big, and I need the kind of uh, stable surroundings to be able to really take flight.
See, when I read the dedication to Masha Khan, "To the memory of my mother," and then came right through to the end, to the lines which end the book saying, "I am satisfied and I give in. Long live the marriage of men and women. Long live the one heart," I've I wondered if then Masha Cohen, wherever she is now, is saying, "Leonard's on his way home."
I like that; I like that description. What was she saying, either tacitly or explicitly, to you in the period of the roaming, reaching, very hungry Leonard Cohen? I mean, hungry for experience; wanting the man it seemed to me in a lot of your early work who wanted to know and have and test everything. Was she reacting to that in you?
I think her her reaction was two-fold. I think uh, she was critical of my life and uh, the details of it; she examined with not too much pleasure at certain points. But I always did feel that underneath it all there was a great support and uh, somehow an affirmation of what I was doing.
Mm-hmm. Thinking about you and her and the movement through *Death of the Ladies Man*, I remembered the story about Jack Kerouac and some young enthusiast for his work coming to find him, and there he was, 40, wearing a woolen knitted cardigan and living with his mom, and they were a little bit dismayed and turned away because he wasn't the Kerouac of *On the Road*. What happens to you now as you travel, meet the meet the fans, go on the road, meet the interviewers, and they're still looking for the Leonard of "Suzanne" or the earlier work, or are they still looking for that?
Well, I think what are they asking you to be now? I find people very sympathetic and uh, kind of yeah, sensitive to uh, to where you are. I mean, I have no idea where I am or where they are, but I think both of us are willing to make those uh, minut uh, adjustments moment to moment to uh, to ourselves. I was really impressed with the people I met across the country and the kind of questions and just the kind of presence of people. You didn't feel you were being eaten then?
Not at all. That's great. There's um, I'd like you to do a little reading if you will. Okay. While we talk. And there was one that I found myself laughing out loud at yesterday, partly because of uh, of an image that came into my mind as I read it, and I said, "You know what this is? D is this is T.S.L." Yep. Writing a script for *All in the Family*. And uh, okay, do you know what I'm talking about?
Well, I like *All in the Family*. This one? Oh, yeah. Can you read? Because the movement through the whole page is terrific. Uh, this is called "This Marriage." I said, "Because it is so horrible between us, I will go and stop Egypt's bullet trumpets and a curtain of razor blades. Organ music." She said, "That's beautiful. Then I can commit suicide and the child falls into strangers' hands." The radio said, "He helped a lot of people, but the good they do die young." I just looked around and he was gone. I said--she said, "The monstrosities of Lilith attack her young young." She said, "What you did to me." I said, "The lonely." We said, "The knights of hands on ourselves. Your unkindness." We said, "Your greed, your unkindness, your bitter tongue. Give me time. You never learn. Your ancestors, my ancestors [ __ ] you." I said, "You [ __ ] Stop screaming. I can't stand it." You can't stand anything. Nobody can live like this in front of the child. Let them learn. This is no good." You're [ __ ] right. It's no good. This kitchen was once beautiful. Oil lamps. Order. The set table. Sabbath observed. That's what I want. You don't want it. You don't know what I want. You don't know anything about me. You never did. Not in the beginning. Not now. In the realms where this marriage was sealed, where the wedding feast goes on and on, where Adam and Eve face one another, the foundations are faultless and secure. Your beast's hair flares like black fire upwards and your breasts, now in maidenhood, now in motherhood, draw down my face. Our hunger blessed by sun and moon. A ring of dancers round the house where within the room is hid, where within the bed is undone, whereupon the hungers joined, where within the one speaks himself, expressions yet unknown.
You said a while ago you don't know where you are and you don't know where they are, but when I when I read that, when I read that for the first time yesterday, um, I put the book down with a very strong sense of having of having just run my fingers over a jewel. It was very wonderfully crafted. Do you ever feel that when you go back over some of the better work? Do you are you ever able to say to yourself, "Good, okay, that's that's pretty damn good"?
Sometimes I do that, but I I don't really reflect on the work from that point of view too often. But sometimes, you know, you hear a song on the radio and it sounds okay, or someone draws your attention to something; it seems all right.
Yeah. Was there a time when it was a really vital importance for you to go on the road with the bands, sing to people, hear the reaction back, and has that changed at all as as your focus has gone towards a singular place in singular relationships?
Well, that process changed. I'm still interested in doing it, and if I do finish another record, I would like to tour behind it. But at the beginning, it was a rock and roll in that life and the range of possibilities, unlimited range of possibilities that was offered you on the on the road as well.
What kind of possibilities? Women, companionship, excitement, drugs, appetites, all that?
Yeah. And greed for everything. The life of the appetite.
Yeah, yeah. After a while, after the second and third tour, you begin to get very interested in the music and the performance, in the test of character that the performance involved involves. And I think you you get a more athlete's vision of the whole process; you just want to keep in the right kind of shape so you can deliver that that concert every night, and the whole day focuses toward those three hours that you're in front of people.
What role does instant response play? The difference between the time lag that's entailed when you labor over a book of poems for a year or two years, and then it comes out, and then you wait, and then you may get a review and you may get an interview, and it slowly trickles back on the one side, and then on the road, hit record, wham, everybody yelling and cheering on the other? Levels of importance and those two kinds of response for you?
Not really, because I mean that instant response is gratifying, of course, but also you have the risk of the other thing going all the time, which is instant humiliation. But you know, in some way I've tried to design the work so that it can last beyond that immediate perception of it. So you know, the poems are designed to last, at least, you know, till the next season, and the songs too. So it's really time that I'm most interested in when it comes to a real evaluation of the work.
How much time? Well, I'm not greedy; I mean, I don't I don't think of, you know, a thousand years or anything like that, but just, you know, if a song lasts for a few years, or if a book keeps on turning up, people are still interested in it, or if I myself can pick it up and not be totally embarrassed by it. So there is an important kind of satisfaction in that. I mean, I what I thought I heard you saying um, a moment ago when I talked about feeling the craft of "This Marriage" in *Death of a Ladies Man*, I may have misunderstood. I thought you I thought you were saying to me, "Well, that's that's not important to me uh, that expression of the craft," and I guess I interpreted that the durability. I thought I heard you saying, "I've done it; it's gone. Enough. It brings some pleasure, fine, but it doesn't matter to me." But it does matter.
Well, it matters when you're in in that role of uh, evaluating your work, but I myself take that role rarely. I don't think it's a real role that one should dwell in. But I mean, I am there from time to time. It's not very often that I assume that viewpoint uh, because then you just be looking back all the time, and you'd be examining your career from a kind of stock market uh, point of view. I don't I mean, I do do that from time to time, but that isn't really where I dwell. Anyways, events rush in too quickly to allow you the luxury of that kind of reflection. *Death of a Ladies Man*, though, has appears to be exactly that.
Well, that kind of reflection is appropriate to the to the desk and to the meditations that go into the work, but I think outside of that uh, they're somehow inappropriate. I think that's the proper time to evaluate your life and and the events in your life is when you're sitting in front of the table. Otherwise, you know, you become a bore to others and a bore to yourself if every time you meet someone you say, "How am I doing?" Well, just really to embrace that regime of uh, of a novel or a long prose work or a symphony or whatever it is, you know, it's I just love that regime, getting up in the morning and having your coffee and playing guitar for half an hour, so then going to the typewriter and uh, doing a quote every day. Just it just locates your whole day.
Are you doing that now, by the way, or no, or will you shortly?
I hope so. Does that depend on having sorted out the personal masses to the point where you can get a physical space and a and uh, a daily routine of bread, butter, and--
Yeah, I'm not so sure it involves sorting it out. I think you have to bite through, maybe just uh, establish yourself and begin the work, and then let the mess gather around it and in whatever way it does. I think that's what stops a lot of people from writing, you know, the uh, waiting to sort it out.
Yeah, waiting to sort it out. I don't think anything gets done.
If only I had the time, I would. Yeah. Have you found that that you can write well according to your own canons when you're in turmoil and driven and feeling a lot of pain?
Well, I think there's a degree uh, beyond which it becomes uh, impossible to work.
Oh, sure. When the noise level goes up. Yeah, I think you know uh, it's just a matter of what you know what grade of hair shirt you you wear. I think uh, some discomfort is necessary. I know that that lots of people through the history of of poetry, through history of literature, and then it's to a very small extent on my own experience, have resolved, or at least found some illumination of the dark places they're in through the process of just writing about it.
Well, I think you um, you do a lot to um, affirm your worthiness by writing. Uh, I remember a prose poem by Baudelaire in which he says, you know, "Today I betrayed three friends. I refuse to give a recommendation to someone who deserves it. I gave one to someone who doesn't. I lied six or seven times. And now that I'm in my room and I lock my door, let me do one thing that will justify myself to myself." I think that that's a very accurate um, picture of the process, you know, of this particular racket.
Leonard, during the the hungry period, or what I'm sort of arbitrarily calling the hungry period, the appetite of time um, when you were reaching out into everything, the uh, the mythology of a lot of our more or less contemporaries and younger people about drugs was that they would really take you into a new space where a lot of the horrors and the weight of the immediate physical world would vanish. Did you look for that through acid and other drugs, and did you find it at all?
Not quite sure what the motivation was uh, I did try those drugs. I think you know, the drugs are so different, and their effects are so different, it's hard to generalize about the experience, although I suppose you can in some way. I think you know, I don't feel evangelical one way or the other. I think it's a dangerous process. I think it does break down a lot of the structures, for better or for worse. I think you know, in many individuals it's an unfortunate thing to have these landmarks dissolved, but there is something beyond that, and I think it's it's appropriate for a certain period of experimentation, but it's certainly nothing to embrace as a as a lifelong enterprise.
Can you point to anything in your work and say, "Well, there's something there's a door I stepped through that I might not have even seen the outlines of had it not been for some of that experience"?
[Music] It's very hard to say what drugs do. LSD or acid is a very, very powerful drug which certainly does dissolve the foundations of of your ordinary life and does afford a point of view that is usually not related to anything that is that is going on. But on the other hand, it binds you to a certain vision; it isn't really liberation; it really is another kind of bondage. But as a stage, and in a very rigid society, perhaps if a young person comes from a very rigid kind of background, it does blow the thing to pieces, so there's a chance of a fresh start if if you can't fight it through another technique. As I say, it's a it's a dangerous um, that's a dangerous process because many people are not really equipped to make fresh starts. Sometimes uh, it's just a paralysis; you don't make a fresh start at all; you just stop what you're doing and don't do anything else. I mean, there are a lot of people burned out by acid.
I am aware of a kind of preoccupation with a multitude of depressing aspects in the world, really quite hideous, burdening, weighing aspects of the world that you have been grappling with one way or another um, like what?
Oh, the ones that get us all uh, messed up uh, human relationships, death, uh, personal incapacity, inability to make it work um, the uh, all of the both serious and joking things around failure that we've through *Death of the Ladies Man*. Failure. So I guess one of the depressing things, but I don't there may be some much more intricate things that you find depressing, and I'd like to know about that. I'd like to know also if you're now at this point finding ways to get your head into, in your heart into a way of seeing the world that isn't depressing.
Well, I don't look at it that bleakly all the time. I don't I don't think it's bleak at all uh, I feel totally responsible for my own condition and uh, lots of good moments. I really don't know what to say about that, you know. I'd like to tell you I've embarked on a program of transcendental meditation; I feel a lot better, but uh, I I don't uh--
What do you mean you'd like to tell me that? Have you and I--
No, no. I mean I haven't, and I and I uh, I mean to say that there's no program that I've embraced. I think I have had some programs in the past that I've uh uh, grasped, that you know, I get two or three of them a day, but I don't I just think that you know, trying to get through is is uh, is my program. But that in itself, when you say it that way, "Trying to get through is my program," sounds a little bit as if you're holding out with your fingernails, and there's a great risk that you may not--
Well, I don't feel, you know, it's hard right now, you know, with your hospitality and the wine, and I really don't feel endangered at this particular moment.
Leonard Cohen once told an interviewer that he was thinking of changing his name to September. Leonard September. The incredulous interviewer asked, "No, September Cohen?" Leonard said, with a twinkle submerged beneath the doleful songs and the mystical poems, "There is a mischievous, impish inside to Leonard Cohen. It sometimes surfaces in his poetry and the novels, but it's most apparent when he turns an absurdist eye towards the public side of his life: the fame, the reputation, the image, the excesses of the road, to her work, and I suppose most of all, the sadly beautiful vanity of man." Last week on the Authors program, Leonard Cohen and I talked at length about the public side, and he read from his new book, *Death of a Ladies Man*, a funny, bittersweet passage which had seemed to me like a script for *All in the Family*, as if it had been written by T.S. Eliot. But it was also a poem about the failure of a marriage. And while Cohen doesn't look at life bleakly all the time, I sensed in his wonderfully crafted words a deep yearning for stability and repose, in unity. It seems to be a time for reflection in Leonard Cohen's life, for an evaluation of its sometimes extreme events. Well, this week our conversation turns away from the public aspects towards the more personal considerations of art, relationships, in the self. I asked him to begin with a reading of a poem entitled "The Rest is Dross."
We meet at a hotel with many quarters for the radio, surprised that we've survived as lovers, not each others', but lovers still, with outrageous hope and habits in the craft which embarrass us slightly as we let them be known: the special caress, the perfect inflammatory word, the starvation we do not tell about. We do what only lovers can: make a gift out of necessity. Looking at our clothes folded over the chair, I see we no longer follow fashion, and we own our own skins. God, I'm happy. We've forgotten nothing and can love each other for years in the world.
I haven't read that for a long time. How is it?
There's a number of flaws in it, but I think it comes out of something authentic.
What are the flaws?
I think the last three lines, where I tried a device of throwing the poem away, really meaning to say to the reader, "I'm not throwing the poem away." I think I really did throw the poem away.
Do you find yourself analyzing as your work in terms of devices, flaws, "Let's see how can I get this on to the next stage"? Is there a a pro process of technical craft analysis, like a like a diamond cutter looking at the lines of cleavage and saying, "This is the way I'll do it"?
It's just the way I'm doing. Well, I think there is a technology, and maybe to put less charitably, a series of tricks, as Leighton says, that every poet learns sooner or later. But beyond that, there's something you can't fake, and I don't think that that one's entirely successful. It's not bad, right up to the last part. Maybe it's okay.
I thought it was okay. I liked it a lot. Remember when Bob Dylan said, when he was still Zimmerman, I guess isn't his real name, that uh, within three years or five years or whatever time period he set himself, he was going to be a star or the greatest, some formulation of that kind? Did you ever um, approach your craft as a public performer with that kind of intention?
I don't think I really did. I always felt that my work was more eccentric, and that if it touched the mainstream from time to time, I would be lucky. But I never I never saw it as as dominating a field as Dylan did. And he was justifiable in feeling that way because he really did have his his hand on all the kinds of music that really did lead to the mainstream; he made a synthesis of them. But if you set out to do that, can you, as he did, can you be anything more ultimately than a kind of uh, extremely sensitive reactor, as differentiated from an initiator, initiator, an inventor?
Well, I think in the case of a really good artist, you're doing both both functions at the same time, and it's an immediate, instantaneous reaction to the stimuli.
So you're saying you've got to be to some extent in tune with the currents, whether or not you're swimming in the principle?
I think it's more than in tune; I think you really you represent them. I think you have to be so open to the life around you that it isn't even a matter of translation or interpretation; that you are manifesting the the feelings and deepest feelings of people. I don't think it's anything you can plot; you either are one of those kind of individuals or you aren't. There's there's nothing to be said for being one because it uh, it means a very tricky kind of existence.
What's the what's the source material now for the work that lies ahead of you? I had a feeling 10 or 15 years ago that a lot of the source material was a population of girls that you'd known and your projection of yourself into them, you're looking for some kinds of mystery and healing in them, but to a large extent, projection of Leonard's persona on those girls. Is that right? And how how is that changing as you move on?
Well, I think women did play a great part um, I mean, we are meant to be here with each other, and it's appropriate to to treat that subject. But I think I I had a quotation in, I don't know if it was in my first book, I had a quotation from uh, William Faulkner, *The Bear*. Uh, it goes like this: "Alrighty," said, "Listen and read again, but only one stanza this time," and closed the book and laid it on the table. "She cannot fade though thou hast not thy bliss," McCaslin said, "Forever wilt thou love and she be fair." He's talking about a girl. He said, "Well, he had to talk about something," McCaslin said, "I mean, you have to talk about something, otherwise you're writing theology, or you're doing abstract mathematics." And I think we do have an appetite to worship, and I think it's appropriate that we find each other, the mystery, men and women, and that some sacramental uh, relationship has to be discovered between us. Something like that.
Was there a greater uh, projection of yourself on the persons you encountered when you were younger that is disappearing now? There seems to me to be a motif of self-effacement certainly in *Death of a Ladies Man*. I don't know whether you're playing with us there or whether that's your genuine investigation, but I'd like to know if there's been a movement from the real preoccupation with stating, "I am, I am finding myself out there," to a withdrawal of the self into some other kind of investigation.
Yeah, I think that that the whole process of subject, object, and seeing the world from that particular point of view, I feel I've exhausted I've exhausted it for a little while. I think
The death of Ladies Man is, you know, the closing statement on a certain chapter. I do have the feeling that I would like to write a book, or even live a life, where the eye is not so prevalent, and the capital I, yeah, not the side, yeah. I think that’s the only way out of suffering is to somewhat dissolve or attack the particular point of view.
Do you think you would have come to that kind of perception with the normal maturing of a middle-class Jewish Montrealer, or has it had a lot to do with the travel, with the exposure to Eastern thinking, with uh—
Well, I am a middle-class Jewish Montrealer. I—I think that uh—yeah, but you’re not a normal one. You’re not—you haven’t sort of followed the patterns of your—of your family.
Well, I think that every man, uh—uh, yes, growing up, uh, goes through these processes. I don’t think it’s—I think this is one of the things that we’re getting into bad shape about regarding what an artist is. I think that every man who’s—the—we—the—the Western—all of us—and even the artists themselves—that our life has a very—is special.
You don’t think it is?
It’s special because it manifests itself in a—in a durable form. But I think every man who works and raises a family is going to be up against these things and is going to have the same kind of process of maturing. You said, or are said to have said, that having children is the only thing that really keeps you in contact with mankind. And then there’s a—an appropriate—not quoting, but trying to remember—assault on the ego.
Yeah, I do feel that, uh, in marriage and children are the only things that move you out of center stage. Otherwise, it’s just kind of dating for the junior prom and exchanging identification bracelets and getting them back when the music is wrong.
Leonard, are you surprised to find yourself viewing uh the partnership of men and women in—in this way, and talking about it in language which now sounds very traditional and very—very square, very old-fashioned?
You’re surprised?
No, no, I’m not surprised. Uh, it seems appropriate, you know, right now. On the other hand, you know, I don’t—I don’t—I don’t feel evangelical about it. I don’t feel that, you know, everyone must get married and have children. I just feel that—I don’t even know if it’s right for me. I just—it feel—I feel like the institution is under such attack, [Music] and there’s something in me that comes—comes to the aid of it somehow. I just feel that it is the foundation of human life, and you know, whether one’s marriage fails or not, or one tries again or not, is really irrelevant—that this is the sacramental relationship. It is the foundation of human society, and you know that it has to be affirmed.
A businessman, a few years older than you and me, who knows you pretty well, said to me once that you are the most saintly person that he knows. Now, I don’t know whether he was talking about the you now, or the you that he’s known over the years, because he’s known me for a long time. But obviously he was perceiving and wanting to talk about a guy who has had some experience and has demonstrated a will to reduce the ego, reduce the I, to serve other people, to make his will transparent to the intentions of other people. Does that reflect the you that you know?
That’s a nice compliment. Uh—uh, is that an important thing to say about it? By the way, that’s a compliment. I was surprised that you said that.
Well, you know, it’s hard—if someone feels that, you know, someone else is a saintly person, it means that there’s been a special kind of transmission between those two people. And you know, rather than treat it heavily, I chose to treat it lightly. I don’t know who the guy is, you know. It’s obviously someone who’s touched me and I—and whom I’ve touched. But just according—whether I am or not that thing. [Music] One never feels that way, anyways. But uh, reducing the ego is—is the prudent thing to do as—as you grow older.
Prudent has nothing in it of morality. Prudence is no strategy for getting on.
Yeah, I think so. It’s a pragmatic enterprise because you cannot hold on to the things that support the ego. Those things dissolve with time anyhow. And uh, you know, our work is small and our bodies are fragile and our relationships are—are impermanent. So that uh, to—to try to support an ego on those pillars is—is fruitless and just leads to suffering.
You said that we’re in bad shape about our view of the artist. Then you’re complaining in part about the terrific elevation of the ego within the artist community, and I guess the whole world of media hype and puff about every artist. And that’s a world that you inevitably get into when you go and make records and that kind of stuff. And the world of the performing artists is one of tremendous elevation of the ego. But you have enjoyed that. You have found that there is at least a transient satisfaction.
Well, I remember in Glasgow—
You want to do it again?
Oh yeah, I’d like to uh, go on the road again with a band.
Sorry, Glasgow?
Oh, there was a—I remember at Glasgow, at the Apollo Theatre, I think it was the night of the—of the football match that Glasgow won two years ago—the stage manager pulling down the curtains. He said, “Oh, you’ve sent a lot of happy people home tonight, Mr. Cohen.” You know, those are—those are good feelings.
If—if at the end, looking back, you were able to say, “Well, the poems were okay, but at some point I touched the life of one individual and healed or redirected or helped,” would that latter really be a greater satisfaction? That’s what I think I hear you saying.
Well, if you really could help somebody—I guess if that were possible—maybe it is—that uh—would have to weigh pretty heavily. But uh, I don’t know. There’s something about putting a song into the world and just letting it take its path that is wonderful too.
But nobody puts a song into the world except individuals.
Yeah, it is. And I—who saw that particular way of putting together some sounds and some words and some experiences. It’s not done by committees.
And no, it’s really when the eye steps out of the way of the willing—of that willing being—and uh, you know, something from the world takes—takes root or takes form and then is given back. It’s the eye—or that sense of self-importance—that really defeats the process. I mean, a poet can’t feel important. He doesn’t get anything if he feels important. When Will Shakespeare then sits down at his desk with his dirty pen, and Burbage says, “You gotta have a play by this week Friday,” and Shakespeare says, “Watch me, boy, I can do it,” and he whips off Macbeth—
Yeah.
That’s because he’s not thinking of himself as Will Shakespeare sitting at the desk and uh, will he succeed or will he—will he not succeed. You know, he has the whole structure of craft and willingness to—to fall back on, and he just lets it flow through him. But flowing through him—I don’t mean that in any uh, light sense. I mean, it flows through him, but doctored and modified by the—the great skills that he has. But he can’t oppose himself to—to the world, which is really what importance is—self-important—self-importance.
Yeah. Is there an example in your recollection of an artist who has opposed himself to the world, or a would-be artist who has imposed himself—to oppose himself to the world—and when that kind of glorying in his selfhood screwed things up in a spectacular way? Some—
Well, Dali. You know, what—what the persona that the guy develops to protect himself in the world is another question. You know, what kind of image you really uh, go into collusion with and encourage is another thing.
From the man sitting in front of a blank canvas—what’s your inclination in that respect, by the way, to uh, at this point of 44, to pull back and forget about persona and just be a very private person, or to find some new social structures that can put you into contact with people?
Well, I uh, I don’t really have a program, you know. Events rush in too quickly for me to develop a real program about it. You know, songs come along and uh, after a couple years you have 10 or 12 of them and you start to make a record, and then you know, the—the demands of the—the technology and of the craft and of the career uh, the kind of carry—carry it along.
Is making contact with people an issue for you? A difficulty? A challenge?
Now, I like to make contact with people. Um, it’s nice to do within a form of work.
Yeah, a shared submission to the discipline.
Well, it’s just—it’s a wonderful thing. Writing a song, of course, is easy to talk about because it’s so immediate and it’s so easily uh, used. It has such a utilitarian value. Songs, you know, people do their washing up and make love and court, and a lot of the most mundane and most important parts of their lives are enacted to music. And you know, to be one of the people who score those activities is—it’s really uh, it’s very uh, gratifying.
As we finish, would you—would you find something in Death of a Ladies Man that you feel would send people out of the theater uh, feeling happy and—
Reno?
I don’t know if I can find one. We’ll do that. Oh, there’s a poem about marriage here called “Slowly I Married Her.”
Oh yeah. I don’t know if it’s going to make them happy, but it’s going to make them joyfully sad, maybe.
Slowly I married her slowly and bitterly married her love married her body in boredom and joy slowly I came to her slow and resentfully came to her bed came to her table in hunger and habit came to be fed slowly I married her sanctioned by none with nobody's blessings in nobody's name amid general warnings amid general scorn came to her fragrance my nostrils wide came to her greed with seed for a child years in the coming in years in retreat slowly I married her slowly I kneeled and now we are wounded so deep and so well that no one can hurt us except death itself and all through death's dream I move with her lips the dream is a night but eternal the kiss and slowly I come to her slowly we shed the clothes of our doubting and slowly we wed.
Yeah, I think I’ll um, strike the word sad from—when I—it had made me sad when I first read it. I’m hearing you read it—it’s made me feel warm.
That’s a good poem, didn’t it?
Yeah, I think that one’s a good one. Harry Belafonte’s wife, who had been uh, very suspicious about my presence because I—I had suggested that Harry Belafonte change his show and stop singing calypso and start singing about himself—he’s a very great singer—and we were drinking late into the night—the Four Seasons Hotel—and I got out this poem. I thought he could set it to music. And uh, I don’t know whether it was the vodka or not, but she wept a few tears. It sealed the night very nicely.
Thank you, Leonard.
You never changed your name to September Cohen?
No. You’re stuck with Leonard.
Too late now. Too late to change the name. Too late for suicide.