Hamburg, 1970. Gunter Zint / Getty
“WAR BETWEEN A MAN AND A WOMAN”
MM: You’re preparing to go on tour now “for very professional reasons,” you said in the shed. How do you feel about going on the road for these “very professional reasons”?
LC: I’m looking forward to it. Something may happen.
MM: Like what?
LC: Just anything to interrupt monotonous flow of days. [A baby is crying in the background]
The baby crying, the missus is ill, the bills, the whole dreary escapade.
The ship of poetry has wrecked against the rocks of daily life.
MM: What about the monotony of touring?
LC: The monotony of touring – will be interrupted by the adventure of daily life.
MM: [Laughs] One of the things that I find difficult about going on tour is repeating the same songs for two or three weeks, even longer, without singing them sort of on automatic pilot. But in my case, I go on tour with few musicians, so I can switch song spontaneously, whereas you, when you work with many musicians and backup singers, it’s more of a challenge, no?
LC: I think that this is something that everybody experiences, but I think if you repeat yourself for a short period of time, it can become tedious, but when you know that you’re going to be repeating yourself over and over and over, maybe for thirty or forty or fifty nights in a row, then the repetition takes on another quality and it becomes interesting, and you start devoting yourself to the repetition and seeing it as empty, seeing it as pure form, and seeing it as a challenge each time.
So you don’t say to yourself, “Oh Christ, I’ve got to sing ‘Suzanne’ again”. You say, “Ah, here it comes again, now it’s empty. I’ve got to pour something into it. I’ve got to recreate it.” And if the ordeal has really become intense and really become accentuated, then you can devote yourself to the ordeal and meet it in a certain way that makes it interesting.
MM: What about the showbiz part of touring… the sort of idolatry, let me have a piece of your suit, a lock of your hair, things like that? And the glamour?
LC: Well, that’s very enjoyable. Certainly it’s something that has a pleasant taste to it and a sweet taste to it. There are parts of it that have a bitter taste to it. There are times when you feel that it’s not doing your character any good. And, again, like a song that has to be repeated over and over again, when you find very receptive audiences over and over again, after a while you stop thinking that it has anything to do with you particularly, that it has anything to do with your virtue, or that in any way validates some aspect of excellence that you think you possess, and it just becomes something to deal with. And it becomes a test of character as to how you are going to deal with it. Are you going to sell out to it? Are you going to believe it? Or, are you going to meet it dispassionately? There are lots of possibilities and alternatives in how you’re going to greet this phenomenon.
MM: What is it like for you to perform on the stage, if you indeed consider it performing?
LC: What do you mean by that? [Laughs] “If indeed I consider it performing.” What do you think I consider it? [Laughs louder]
MM: I think many, if not most, of the audience in your concerts would consider it an experience.
LC: An experience?
MM: Yes.
LC: You know, you’re always asking me questions about the past and the future. I’ve noticed that about you. What did I mean when I said something and what will I mean when I do something. [Laughing]
MM: Does it bother you when I ask you about the past and the future?
LC: Not as long as you keep your head on my waist? Are you comfortable?
MM: Oh I’m sorry, this recording machine can take only one mic. Would you hold the mic? So that I won’t have to hold it and sit so close. Am I sitting too close to you?
LC: Not at all.
MM: Since my reference to the past seemed to annoy you, let me ask you something about the present. You’re awaiting, now, the birth of your second child…
LC: That’s right. But I don’t like to speak about these things in public.
MM: What things? You don’t know what I’m about to ask.
LC: Well, you’ve already said too much. I consider it extremely indiscreet that you mention the fact that I have children.
MM: But you mentioned that you have children.
LC: When did I say that? In our previous discussions?
MM: Yes, you mentioned it a few times: “the baby’s crying…” And also in your poetry and songs… “I live here with a woman and a child/ The situation makes me kind of nervous/ Yes, I rise up from her arms, she says,/ ‘I guess you call this love’, I call it service.” I’m quoting from your song ‘There Is A War’.
LC: Ahhh, yes. But we have no reason to assume that everything in my poems and songs reflects accurate events. I mean that actually happened in this world. I don’t like to bring my family into the public realm at all. I like to keep it a sanctuary.
MM: Okay. I respect that.
LC: You know, it’s bad enough that people know that my name is Leonard Cohen and that I’m forty years old and I’ve done this and done that. But if the entire family and friends are summoned, then I think it really does impede my strength.
MM: Duly noted and respected.
LC: See, I’m not even sure whether the voice of the woman I live with should be heard. It’s not a matter of what she says or doesn’t say. It’s the fact that a certain intimate connection of mine is publicised.
MM: Well, in that case, I won’t use my interview with Suzanne, I’m sorry, I didn’t think it would be an issue when I recorded it.
LC: I’ve got to think about it. Now that I think about it, I think it’s not a good idea. I think that it is a weakening force rather than a strengthening force, and you’re not interested in weakening me.
MM: No.
LC: Right.
MM: The reason that I interviewed Suzanne is… In my interview with Pablo Casals, I talked with Marta Casals and I found that it strengthened him.
LC: In that case, you’re already dealing with a man who had made himself strong and at the end of his life, it’s very different. I’m not at the same… It’s like going from the sublime to the ridiculous. I’m not at the same point. I probably never will be. But Casals is… It’s a different kind of life, and he’s also dealing with another kind of material. And in that case you’re strengthening him because you’re talking to a young woman who has devoted herself to an older man and there’s an implication of his energy and his strength and his vitality. In my case, it would only be a revelation of intimacy, which is not necessarily salutary.
MM: Okay, I respect it, of course, even though I don’t agree with you.
LC: Very well said, too.
MM: Can I leave this part on?
LC: Put the explanation on. That’s very good.
MM: But, you know, I wonder if you are putting a lid on voices of female family members to keep an aura of mystique about you.
LC: No, I haven’t paid too much attention to that, otherwise it would be a much better myth and a much better aura. If that had really been my intention, to create a very compelling mystery or aura about myself, you know, I wouldn’t have used my own name, and I wouldn’t have been giving the statistics of my life so freely to anyone who asks.
MM: Since you mentioned your name… You have one of the most aristocratic names in the Jewish culture. Cohen – a high priest. However, troubadours on this continent especially tend to change their names. And in one of your songs you say, “Father change my name”. Were you tempted to do it in “real life”?
LC: No. I was never tempted to change my name. Now sometimes I wish I had, because, in a way, one would like to be just a voice out of nowhere. I understand the power of that kind of lack of information.
MM: You mean it in the context of Castaneda’s claim that it is best not to have a personal history?
LC: Oh, I think there is a lot of strength that is gained from that. Also, just in terms of one’s own work, when the history of the individual, the writer is known, it often comes between the listener or between the reader and the work. One is continually interpreting the work through the history of the author, which often gives it a slant that detracts and is quite irrelevant.
MM: You mean, people compare and contrast the “truth” of your life and how it is manifested in your work?
LC: When someone hears a name associated with a kind of background, with a kind of upbringing, with a kind of education, with a kind of experience – they funnel the song or the work through that information. Now, often their estimation of that background, upbringing, education and experience is totally inaccurate and, to my way of thinking, it interferes with the appreciation of the material.
MM: But you do have a personal history.
LC: Well, I’ve never bothered to create an image that would serve the material specifically. That’s just because my work happened to grow slowly from quite an early age and it never occurred to me, you know, to go to the trouble to establish anonymity. I started writing and I showed it to friends and they knew who I was and the thing grew so slowly that there was never any point or time to suddenly obscure the origins of the material.
I asked my father,
I said, “Father change my name.”
The one I’m using now it’s covered up
With fear and filth and cowardice and shame.
Yes and lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover come back to me,
Yes and lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover come back to me.
He said, “I locked you in this body,
I meant it as a kind of trial.
You can use it for a weapon,
Or to make some woman smile.”
Yes and lover, lover, lover… come back to me
“Then let me start again,” I cried,
“Please let me start again,
I want a face that’s fair this time,
I want a spirit that is calm.”
Yes and lover, lover, lover… come back to me
“I never, never turned aside,” he said,
“I never walked away.
It was you who built the temple,
It was you who covered up my face.”
Yes and lover, lover, lover… come back to me
And may the spirit of this song,
May it rise up pure and free.
May it be a shield for you,
A shield against the enemy.
Yes and lover, lover, lover… come back to me
Yes and lover, lover, lover, lover… come back to me.
‘Lover Lover Lover’
MM: You say, “Please let me start again, I want a face that’s fair this time, I want a spirit that is calm”. What else would you want if you could start again? What would you change?
LC: You mean if I had the power to change things?
MM: Yes.
LC: Well, I don’t. I don’t… [Laughs quietly] It’s impossible to speak of these things because the change you want, the change you wish, is based on experience. The experiences come about through your… Let me put it this way. Any changes that I would want would be based on my experience. And without that experience, I wouldn’t have the information to establish what kind of changes I wanted or not, so that the notion of changing is futile. The change is based on experience and the experience is what has made you anyhow. I can’t really describe what I mean. Do you know what I mean?
MM: Do you mean you are the sum-total of your experience?
LC: Yes, and anything that you have within that context is based on what you are anyhow, so… It’s just a continuing soap opera.
MM: Well, in “real life”, you have a new experience. You are a father and you have the responsibility of being a parent. Does it change your outlook on life?
LC: It does… Oh yes. It does change.
MM: In what way?
LC: It makes you dull and slow-witted and tired and fed up, among other things. It certainly does do those things. You see, the next generation has already been created and, except to provide a roof and food, the male in this situation is really quite superfluous.
MM: Personally, my father was certainly not superfluous in my life. He provided not only a roof and food but inspired me to sing, read and write… What about instilling values, spiritual guidance – even just the meaning of the family name that you’re passing on to them?
LC: I suppose I could pass on a few things, but there are many male models around that could do as good a job as I could. As for duplicating myself or reproducing myself, I have no interest in creating someone just like me.
MM: So why the children then?
LC: Well, the children in my case were generally the woman’s idea, but this is nobody’s business but my own, you know. I have myself no urgency and no strong desire to participate in the creation of the next generation. I never felt that. But Suzanne, although rationally she doesn’t know why she is in the position she’s in, was seized by an overwhelming need for children.
Your father’s gone a-hunting
And he’s lost his lucky charm
And he’s lost the guardian heart
That keeps the hunter from the harm
Your father’s gone a-hunting
He asked me to say goodbye
And he warned me not to stop him
I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t even try
‘Hunter’s Lullaby’
MM: In your song ‘There Is A War’ you express a sort of a war between man and woman. For real? Or/and metaphorically?
LC: That song starts: “There is a war between the rich and the poor, a war between a man and a woman, there is a war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones who say that there isn’t”. But you see, I’m not a politician and I don’t have to be bound by any aspect of any particular thing that I have treated. I’ve described the war between men and women. It’s a fact that everybody recognises. It’s not something that I have to justify. Any man over thirty knows that there is a war between men and women. I mean even before women became vocal, and their own interpretation of the war.
But that isn’t the only aspect between men and women. It’s just one of the aspects that I’ve treated in my work, and in my life – I mean sometimes I’m in a state of war with a woman and sometimes there’s a truce. Sometimes it feels that there never was a war. And sometimes there never was a truce. We are not always in the aspect of warriors.
MM: But surely you don’t mean a war for real?
LC: Fight to the death.
MM: [Laughs] Your lips are curling – ironically, it seems.
LC: You know what war is.
MM: Yes, unfortunately, I do know what a real war is.
LC: Well, that’s what it is. I mean, we have to assume with each other in a conversation that, in the conversation we both know what we are talking about. And I think you have to assume that the people listening know what we’re talking about, and I think we can agree that there is a war between men and women. That is, that often there is a fight to the death, that is a fight to the psychic death between men and women, a struggle for supremacy, and a ruthless and vicious contest of wills.
Now this is only one aspect. This is by no means a total description of all activities between men and women.
I mean a marriage or a long association between a man and a woman is such a subtle and complex and mysterious event that writers, singers and poets will be engaged from now on, and all the time up to now, in trying to illuminate this awesome mystery.
MM: Do you think that’s more pronounced now because “women became vocal”, as you put it?
LC: No, I don’t think there is any more or less. I think this is an aspect of struggle. And I have no idea what it means in the long run. I would say that women’s lib, in a sense, gives away the position, and makes the female position somewhat weaker than it was when these activities… when this war was somewhat more camouflaged.
This only applies to the luxury class. You know, when it comes down to opportunities for employment and equal wages and that sort of thing, I don’t think that any reasonable person will have any quarrels with the position that liberated women take on this.
In terms of the upper classes, and the luxury-loving people (such as we are), then the disclosure of women that they are, you know, at war, kind of gives their position away.
Like, I never thought they were at war until they convinced me of it. I just thought I was taking these bruises accidentally. But now I know there is a full-fledged war, both sides have stated their intentions.
MM: Women are stronger than men, you mentioned before.
LC: They seem to be very much stronger today. I think that anyone who observes men and women in the same room carefully understands that women make most of the major decisions in any room at any time. They are making the sexual choices, certainly, in most situations nowadays. They seem to be determining the psychic quality in any room that they are in these days.
MM: So are you giving up?
LC: I quit!
MM: [Laughs]
There is a war between the rich and poor
War between the man and the woman
There is a war between the ones who say there is a war
And the ones who say there isn’t
Why don’t you come on back to the war?
Why don’t you come on back to the war?
You cannot stand what I’ve become
You much prefer the gentleman I was before
I was so easy to defeat, I was so easy to control
I didn’t even know there was a war
‘There Is A War’
MM: In ‘So Long, Marianne’ and in many of your songs and your poems, your lovers are forever parting.
LC: That’s true. I don’t remember any of the songs right now… I don’t remember the songs I wrote a long time ago. Let’s see… They are all saying goodbye to each other?
MM: Well, you love them and leave them.
Hello, my love,
And my love,
Goodbye.
‘Here It Is’
Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving.
Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost.
‘Alexandra Leaving’
I loved you in the morning,
Our kisses deep and warm,
Your hair upon the pillow
Like a sleepy golden storm,
Yes many loved before us,
I know that we are not new,
In city and in forest
They smiled like me and you,
But let’s not talk of love or chains
And things we can’t untie,
Your eyes are soft with sorrow,
Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye.
‘Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye’
So long, Marianne, it’s time that we began
To laugh and cry and cry
And laugh about it all again.
‘So Long, Marianne’
LC: Well, I have a few here on my new record in which they are condemned to each other for eternity. For instance, I have that song, it goes like this:
I tried to leave you,
I don’t deny
I closed the book on us
At least a hundred times
I wake up every morning by your side
The years go by,
You lose your pride
The baby is crying so you do not go outside
And all your work is right before your eyes
Goodnight, my darling
I hope you’re satisfied
The bed is kind of narrow,
But my arms are opened wide
And here’s a man working for your smile.
‘I Tried To Leave You’
This is a monogamous song.
MM: Still, you use the word “condemn” to describe monogamy.
LC: Lovers condemn. They’re like mated beasts – the same cage and the long embrace and fighting over scraps of freedom. There is a version of the thing which is very unattractive. I think anyone who has lived with anyone else knows what I mean.
MM: Much of your work is expressed in terms of relationship between man and woman. Be it allegorically or metaphorically, it’s man and woman…
LC: I suppose all subjects are just an allegory or metaphor for human activity. I think I was very badly educated and never taught how to work with things; if I had really learned a skill and another relationship with the world in which the emphasis on the social activities were not so strong, I might have been able to treat other subjects. I don’t know… That was my experience. I didn’t really have significant experience with the world, the forests, the rivers or with machines and ideas. I had very simple and limited relationships. One was with my own mind, that is writing, and the other was with the people that I lived with, which were women.
MM: Judging by your poetry and songs, you draw your inspiration from real life relationships with people… With women in particular.
LC: Yes, I certainly think in the past that’s true. I don’t feel that so much anymore.
MM: Did you ever get any feedback from persons who had inspired certain experiences or events or emotions you’ve used publicly, in your writing?
LC: I’ve never been accused of betraying anything that should be left unsaid. No, I don’t think that I’ve exploited it on that level. If you can make something that is beautiful out of something you’ve experienced, I think that everybody concerned is happy about it.
MM: Well, I’m thinking of Zelda Fitzgerald. She seemed to resent that her husband had used their experiences in his work.
LC: Yes, well, I guess she had ambitions as a writer herself. But I don’t know – I don’t think I’ve taken anything that anybody could have used in any other way.
I’ve been listening
To all the dissention
I’ve been listening
To all the pain
And I feel that no matter
What I do for you
It’s going to come back again
But I think that I can heal it
But I think that I can heal it
I’m a fool, but I think I can heal it
With this song
‘Minute Prologue’
