The Night Before Leonard Cohen Died

I rushed up to Innis College on the evening of Wednesday November 9^th but thought that I was nonetheless going to be a little late for George’s lecture, but when I got there, a tall young guy in a tie and who was standing at a podium in the hallway told me that the George Elliot Clarke lecture was just about to let people in over at the other atrium. A woman at a desk told me that I was in the right place and she pointed to the line-up. I went to stand at the end of the line, but a couple of women in front of me were looking at me funny and I also suddenly realized that if they were facing me that I might be at the wrong end of the line. I asked whether this was the front or the back. They said emphatically that it was the front, and so I walked to the other end, which logic suggested was probably the back of the line.

            I noticed that most of the people in line had white hair and more than half of them were ladies, though it looked like there were a lot of older couples there as well. The youngest people in the crowd were a few women of East Asian descent, which struck me as curious. Were they Cohen fans already or some of George’s students from another course?

            The line built up behind me and ran back around past me all the way to the entrance. It took at least twenty minutes for the line to start moving, and when I finally got to the table I suddenly saw that there was actually a guest list. Someone approached me to run a line through my name, so I just said I wasn’t there. He said he’d just write my name in at the bottom, which made me think that meant I had to go to the back of the line, but he wrote my name and told me I could go in.  I think there was a reception afterwards, with refreshments, so maybe that’s what the list was for. But then again, there would have been no reason in that case to write my name down, so I really don’t know what purpose the list served or how anyone got their names onto it.

            I sat in the front next to a seat that had a sign saying, “Reserved for photographer”. They were playing a selection of Leonard Cohen songs. At first some of them sounded fuzzy over the system. I don’t know if it was the recordings or a glitch in their equipment but it seemed to clear up later. The song I heard as I walked in was “The Smokey Life” – “ … Set your restless heart at ease, take lesson from these autumn leave, they waste no time waiting for the snow … It’s light enough to let it go …”

            Above the back of the stage was a large sign that read, “Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, 50 Years On” with the subtitle: “Blasphemy as Treason – Passion as Revolution”

            I saw George sitting with Giovanna Riccio. He didn’t seem to see me when he was looking in my direction and I said “Hi!”

            Honey Novick was there and came up to say “Hi” before going back to her seat.

            An extremely cute and attractive young woman of East Asian descent came and sat down to my left, saying, “Hiya!”  as if she knew me as she did so. I don’t think she knew me. I said, “hi” back. She turned out to be the photographer. She took lots of pictures, but never left her seat. It seemed to me there would have been better angles. Maybe they didn’t want her wandering around and distracting George or the audience.

            Charlie Keil, the principal of Innis College stepped up to the podium. He told us that this lecture series has been in abeyance, but the Harold Innis Foundation has helped to bring it back. He joked that U of T protocol dictates that there mush always be three speakers at the podium before any event. I did not catch the name of the second speaker, other than to hear that he was the principal’s rep. He said that they need to build on Harold Innis’s legacy and announced that they have already signed up journalist and broadcaster, Andrew Coyne, for next year’s lecture. He introduced Graham Coulter, who I think is an Innis College student.

            Graham said that George Elliot Clarke was the fourth poet laureate of Toronto and is the seventh of Canada. He said that George is one of the greatest poets writing in Canada and that he teaches African Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto. Graham left out that George also teaches Canadian Poetry, which I am currently studying with him.

            George Elliot Clarke’s poem, “The Wisdom of Shelley” was read – “You come down after five winters, X, bristling with roses … brazen as brass … Roses got thorns and words do lie …”

            George finally went to the podium.

            He started off on a riff about Harold Innis and his contributions to the Staples Theory, which showed that Canada developed differently from other countries because different staples were exploited, such as fish in the east, wheat in the prairies and forestry out west. Innis is a great example, along with Pierre Elliot Trudeau of the tradition of critical thinking in Canada. He added that because Canada has this tradition of critical thinking it would have been much “harder for us to make the same decision that the United States made yesterday”. We all laughed.

            George began his talk about Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers by referring to the Indian love-cure for an old man’s illness that Cohen presents in one part of the book, and which features the chant, “I change, I am the same, I change, I am the same, I change, I am the same  …” It’s like the saying, “The more things change, the more things stay the same.”

            George told us that Leonard Cohen has always been a presence in his mind. Both of his parents were big fans and Cohen’s records were played often in their home while he was growing up. He confessed that the picture on the back of Songs from a Room of Marianne Ihlen sitting at the typewriter wearing a towel and no underwear “was quite devastating to my personage”.

            George said that Beautiful Losers is dissatisfying in expectations of closure but fresh as the incorruptible corpse of a beatified saint. Afterward, the book is bewildering, but as the character “F” advises, “Connect nothing”. Mystery is life and play is the creative process. The narrative is diabolically slippery. “Moral crusades … I’m still thinking of the Republicans.”

            If even Cohen’s inclusion of Adolph Hitler as a participant of a ménage a trios can be accommodated, his references to the Holocaust certainly can.

            The novel’s three main critiques are: the dissolution of Native Quebec; the exploration of sexuality and the Bohemian denunciation of the rat race.

            Cohen is postmodern in rejecting overarching theological notions. Beautiful Losers was informed by the Decadence Movement, with Charles Baudlaire at the forefront. Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allen Poe extolled aesthetics but preferred walks on the wild side.

            George spoke to a technician above and behind us that was minding a projector and asked him to show us the first visual aids, which were a couple paintings that depicted Saint Catherine Tekakwitha.

            The narrator of Beautiful Losers has a comedic, political and sexual obsession with Catherine.

            The next projected image was of the black-cloaked figure of Leonard Cohen.

            Of the proliferation of the adjective, “dirty”, Cohen says in the Donald Britain documentary, “Ladies and Gentlemen: Mr. Leonard Cohen”, “There are no dirty words.” Two more images are presented. One from the aforementioned film shows Cohen being cozy with a Black woman and another shows him typically dressed all in black.

            Cohen has an allegiance to Decadence. George quoted from Baudelaire’s “Le Lethe” – “ … Lavish without shame, caresses on your body …” The poem is from “Flowers of Evil”. Cohen was later to write “Flowers for Hitler”. There is a repugnant moment in the novel, with Hitler in the bath. This is a way of saying that evil is normal.

            I took notes while George was lecturing. The photographer seemed to look at me a lot when she wasn’t taking photos. I may be wrong, but she also seemed to squirm a bit at the subject matter of the talk, which got pretty explicit sometimes.

            The book depicts a sardonic version of the Christian doctrine. From Baudelaire again, “Frantic lover, implore the whip …” Baudelaire’s pleasure in necrophilia and his divine black sorceress. Blackness over whiteness are tropes that Cohen uses as well.

            Our next image was of Cohen celebrating his 45^th birthday on the island of Hydra with a voluptuous dark skinned, naked woman from Romania on his bed. This image was followed by one of Charles Baudelaire and another of Baudelaire’s Caribbean mistress, Jeanne Duval.

            A clip was played of Ray Charles singing “Ol’ Man River” an African American protest song written by the Jewish composer, Jerome Kern. Sartre speaks of the secret blackness of white. Ray Charles is rendered secretly white. George quoted Norman Mailer’s statement that “jazz is the music of the American Negro, criminal proletariat”. Blacks were more improvisatory. Jazz produced an ethos. Jazz music is fuck music, but a particular kind of fucking. The cool element wears dark glasses like Cohen’s character, “F”. Norman mailer wrote of the “White Negro”. Sartre said, “The Black man remains the great male of the Earth, the world’s sperm”.

            In Beautiful Losers, everyone is a loser, including the Jews and the nurse, Mary Voolnd.

            Sartre’s existential Negro and Mailer’s white Negro hipster accept the risk of defeat. The wrong kinds of defeats: the muting of the self and the defiance of rage, totalitarian issues of society. George reminded us that Cohen wrote “The Energy of Slaves”. According to Mailer, to be Jewish or Negro is to act out the psychotic. In Pierre Vallières’s “White Niggers of America” the existentialist protest of French Canadians is given a Black soul. In Beautiful Losers, the face of the character “F” turns black after too much dirty sex. The soul has been presented in essence as being lily white ever since Plato, but the soul is black. “Black is beautiful” redefines the province of decadence in the hidden blackness of “F”. This identification is problematic and is a heavy psychic burden for Blacks to bear.

            In Beautiful Losers, Catherine Tekakwitha experiences an ethnic cleansing, as she is transformed to a Caucasian. He skin becomes white as a transubstantiation of cultural genocide.

            George said that Canadian scientists researched diets on natives and deliberately induced malnutrition in London, Ontario. “Why London, for cryin out loud? Why not Kensington?”

            In Beautiful Losers, Cohen describes the presentation over a radio station of a song by a Soul group called Gavin Gates and the Goddesses. The four female backup singers, George said, are an allusion to the women that were killed in the bombing by the KKK of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963.

            “F” may be guilty of statutory rape. The scene in the book that depicts the rape of the narrator’s native wife, Edith, when she was young, reminds George of the abduction, beating and murder of Helen Betty Osborn in The Pas, Manitoba in 1971.

            The crowd scene in Beautiful Losers, in which the narrator is masturbated from behind by an unseen woman is reminiscent of the scene from Anais Nin’s “The Woman on the Dunes”, except that it portrays a woman in a crowd, watching a hanging. She is overwhelmed because she has never seen a man die before. While she is in this state a strange and unseen man presses against her from behind, and as she does not resist, he opens her skirt and penetrates her from behind.

            The scene in the book of the Quebec separatist rally draws upon the Beat oeuvre of Allen Ginsberg. Beat movement – Ginsberg – liberty. Cohen and Ginsberg are Jewish Buddhists who question everything. The rhetoric of Beautiful Losers owes much to Howl.  Ginsberg’s poem, “A Supermarket In California” interrogates certain famous poets about their activities in a supermarket: “Garcia Lorca, what are you doing down by the watermelons?” Cohen’s narrator asks similar questions of Catherine Tekakwitha.

            Beat went hand in hand with the sexual revolution, genitals and manuscripts. Ginsberg: “Who sweetened the snatches of a million girls …” Free your mind, your ass will follow. Kerouac also denounced repression. Ginsberg howls against Moloch. As a symbol of repression. Cohen accuses the church in a similar rant.

            An excerpt was played from Ginsberg’s Howl. Ginsberg’s “America” has a list of first person declarations that are similar to those of Cohen’s narrator in Beautiful Losers. The socialism of mini-skirts. In Ginsberg’s footnote to Howl he declares that everything is holy. The meaning of Beautiful Losers is reflected in the “God is alive” segment. Then George plays Buffy Sainte Marie’s attempt to turn the words into a song from her album Illuminations. Personally, though I’m a big fan of Buffy Sainte Marie, I’ve never liked her version of God Is Alive. I’ve actually written a much better melody to accompany the words.

            According to Mailer, the Negro still does not know if he is part of mankind. Ginsberg refers to “the Negro streets”. Destroying public sculptures. A small Nazi party. The scene is prophetic. Flowers to the police. Trying to levitate the Pentagon. George says that Beautiful Losers is a relatively late Beat novel. As it was published, Trudeaumania was waiting in the wings.

            That marked the end of George’s talk.

            There was then a question and answer period. Someone asked George to recite one of his own poems and so he chose, “Look Homeward Exile” – “ … Lavinia, her teeth decayed to black stumps, her lovemaking still in demand, spitting black phlegm – her pension after twenty towns. And Toof, suckled on anger that no Baptist church can contain, who let wrinkled Eely seed her moist womb when she was just thirteen … Blind blues – precise, ornate, rich needlepoint …”

            I went to ask the second question, but the Innis College suit to George’s left cut me off and asked one of his own. I thought that was rude. He asked about process, so George talked about Leonard Cohen’s poem, “Style”, which he thinks was a reaction to the Cuban missile crisis. We looked at that poem in Canadian Poetry class and that was when George seemed to get that idea about the meaning.

            I got to ask my question next. I commented that I’ve always associated the character “F” with Cohen’s “The Master Song” and Cohen’s tendency to split himself into two people, with one of them being the dominant half and the other serving as the observer. But I said that it had just occurred to me that “F” might be a kind of sexual Frankenstein’s monster with some of the pieces coming from the personality of Irving Layton. George answered me by my name, which was nice, but didn’t really answer my question, but he went off in another direction about the same subject, saying that F could stand for French, Frankenstein or even Fuck but he thinks that Cohen means for us to fill in the blanks the way we choose. He added that it’s the same thing with the Aboriginal tribe referred to as the A --- s. Are they Algonquins, Assholes? Again, he said they are open to interpretation.

            George again started talking briefly about the US election and claimed that the republican sweep put Obama’s legacy in danger of being destroyed. Someone in the audience called out, “Wrong!”

            Someone asked George to compare the previous Canadian government with the current one in relation to poetry. He said that as the Parliamentary poet he has to be non-partisan. But he said that it’s far better to exercise passion in seeking change than it is to be passive, though passionate activism doesn’t necessarily change anything in the end. “No pun intended.”

            In Beautiful Losers, on the first day of spring there is an orgy on the street and the teenage Nazis join the passionate mob. The novel is essentially an existentialist statement. Out of suffering you get the Blues and out of joy and activism you get jazz.

            Someone asked the difference between Cohen and Ginsberg. George said, “Context”. It’s the difference between Canadian Quebec and the United States. The milieu for Ginsberg is an immigrant family in cosmopolitan New York. The American Dream in a democratic republic. The sense of a republic is being unrestricted as an individual. Canada, being part of a monarchy is saturated with elitism. We think we are every man and woman but we are not. Their money says “e pluribus Unum” which means “one out of many”. Our money says “Dei Gratia Regina” which means “By the grace of god, the queen”. We’re saying that only one person matters. Ginsberg’s anti-clericism is republican, whereas Cohen both criticizes and kind of likes the church at the same time. A. M. Klein and Cohen witnessed a renaissance in their social setting. Cohen borrows from Ginsberg and regurgitates it.

            Someone asked, “Should we hold Cohen culpable for last night’s election?” George said Cohen recognized darkness and its beauty. The US election may be an unhappy awakening. There is no appreciation for darkness. They have signed onto a misery that they did not intend. They couldn’t see the alternative light. Cohen has always embraced darkness as an aesthetic.

            Beautiful Losers was ahead of the curve. An orgy nullifies Nazis. The novel points to the ideal of liberation and freedom, but we must understand our ability to be regressive.

            Charlie Keil returned to the podium to thank George.

            After the official question and answer period, some of us came up to where George was standing and chatted. It was mostly about the election. The guy from the audience that had told George that he was wrong when he’d said that Trump had just wiped out Obama’s legacy explained why he was wrong. He said that the fact that Obama had reopened relations with Cuba is a legacy that can’t be taken away. He said the same thing is true for Obamacare. George disagreed about Obamacare. He said that Obama made the mistake of trying to please everyone when he was in power. He had promised to bring change but didn’t put the bankers who’d instigated the financial crisis in jail. George said that that was what brought Donald Trump to power. I argued that Trump doesn’t have the hearts of all republicans but George thinks he does because they won the senate and congress and the Supreme Court. I didn’t pursue the point because things just moved on but I think the Republicans just wanted to ride Trump into power. For most things they have the power to deny him their blessings for anything insane.

            George was called away to the reception and I went home.