The Reactionary Leonard Cohen
Also: Tobias Wolff on learning to write, Hemingway’s Michigan, Seamus Heaney’s letters, an 82-foot lizard fish, and more.
In The Walrus, Simon Lewsen reviews Matti Friedman’s Leonard Cohen biography, Who by Fire, which “tells the mostly unknown story of Cohen’s post-’60s funk and the series of events that brought him out of it”:
In 1973, Friedman explains, Cohen was living with his on-again-off-again girlfriend Suzanne Elrod and their son, Adam, on Hydra, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea. He spent his days in a fog of self-loathing. He hated the hippie scene. He hated poetry. He hated folk music. (“I just feel like I want to shut up,” he told a journalist from Melody Maker.) It wasn’t his first or last depressive episode, but it was surely one of the deepest.
Salvation, Friedman explains, came in an unlikely form. On October 6, 1973, 1,500 kilometres southeast of where Cohen was living, Egyptian troops began streaming eastward across the Sinai Desert, toward Israel, moving in tandem with Syrian forces, which invaded from the Golan Heights in the north. The attack was a surprise timed to coincide with Yom Kippur, the end of the Jewish new year—a day of fasting, prayer, and atonement. The Egyptian and Syrian armies were looking to recapture territory that Israel had annexed in 1967. But unlike that previous war, which the Jewish state won within six days, this one left Israeli troops inundated and fearful of defeat. On Hydra, Cohen caught the news from the Levant while toggling between radio stations. “I wanted to go fight and die,” he wrote. Then he boarded a plane to Tel Aviv.
Friedman devotes the rest of his book to the month that followed. Cohen found his way to the front lines of the war, where he served as an entertainer for the troops. The experience restored him. His previous visit to Israel, in 1972, had culminated in a near-disastrous concert in Jerusalem. He’d taken the stage, high on LSD, feeling jittery and unworthy. Who was he, he wondered—an effete Jew who’d abandoned religious orthodoxy for a hedonistic celebrity lifestyle—to perform in the Biblical city itself? What right did he even have to be there? He’d walked off stage halfway through the show. (The cheers from the crowd eventually brought him back on.)
But a year later, Cohen’s war experiences quickly put his earlier doubts to rest. He wasn’t a soldier, but he lived like one, sleeping on the ground and subsisting on combat rations. He played at airbases, field hospitals, and encampments—locations that were targets for enemy fire. He sang the same ballads he’d sung in Jerusalem a year earlier, but when he performed them now—in a moment of crisis, in the shadow of death—they took on a new urgency. Cohen, at last, seemed worthy of their power. Who could question his Jewishness now? Or his bravery? Or his masculinity? Who could deny that his songs had meaning? “I came to raise their spirits,” Cohen reportedly said of the soldiers, “and they raised mine.” After the war, he returned to Hydra reinvigorated, eager to have another child and record a new album.
Lewsen writes that Friedman’s Cohen is something of a reactionary: “The story, ultimately, is that of a liberal bohemian whose comfortable life in the West brings him to the brink of self-annihilation until (fortuitously) a war comes along, enabling him to heal his ailing psyche and restore his manly vigour. Cohen is brought low by fame, drugs, and Western decadence. The forces that revive him? Mortar fire, gallantry, martial struggles in a Biblical locale.” But Cohen has always been something of a reactionary. “Once you become aware of the reactionary side to Cohen,” he writes, “you start seeing it everywhere, certainly in the spate of recent books about him—a corpus that hasn’t stopped growing since Cohen’s death eight years ago.”
Speaking of Jewish artists, Maxim D. Shrayer surveyed 120 Jewish poets and translators in February on the state of Jewish poetry in America. About 90 responded, both formally and informally. Only a third felt publishers were receptive to Jewish poets and poetry.
Hemingway’s Michigan: “When Ernest Hemingway drove to northern Michigan in 1947, he had not seen his boyhood haunts for more than a generation—not since leaving them behind in 1921 and moving on to Paris and fame. He also never saw them again.”
Faith and Russian literature: “Among the words we get from Russian are populism and intelligentsia, which in Russia meant not intellectuals as a class but adherents of a specific revolutionary ideology. That ideology varied, but it always included some form of anarchism or socialism. Above all, an intelligent (member of the intelligentsia) had to be an atheist and an uncompromising materialist. As Dostoevsky observed, Russians do not become atheists; they believe fervently in atheism.”
Tobias Wolff has won Paris Review’s Hadada Award. In brief remarks on the occasion of its acceptance, he remembers how his mother and brother taught him to write: “When I was in the fourth grade, my teacher became exasperated with my mulish refusal to learn cursive. I liked to print my words, so that they looked like the ones in the books I read. Finally, Mrs. Post sent me home with a note to my mother, telling her that I would not be allowed to return to school until I learned to write in cursive. My mother did not need this complication. She was raising me alone, in a small apartment above a garage, working on her feet all day at a Dairy Queen.”
Confessions of a former fare hopper: “I don’t know when I stopped paying for the Metro. High school, I guess. My rationale at first was that I had no money, and in those days it was easy to get on the train without paying for it. You didn’t even have to jump the turnstile. All you had to do was wait until someone else paid, and then you could walk very quickly behind him before the automatic gates closed. (Or, if your legs were skinny enough, you could squeeze between the gap in the two doors without setting off the alarm.) It was not hard to get away with this trick in the suburban Virginia stations. There, most everyone paid for the Metro, leaving no shortage of people to tail.”
The forgotten genius of Carl Linnaeus: “Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon were both taxonomists, born in the same year (1707), but apart from that they had little in common and never met. Buffon was French, Linnaeus Swedish. Buffon was suave, elegant, tall and handsome (Voltaire said he had “the body of an athlete and the soul of a sage”), whereas Linnaeus was a bumptious little man (under five feet), who was widely regarded as uncouth. Buffon’s funeral was attended by 20,000 mourners but Linnaeus died almost forgotten, after suffering from a brain disease for fifteen years. Yet the Linnaean system of taxonomy has survived much better than Buffon’s, which was hardly a system at all.”
Seamus Heaney’s letters show a man disturbed by the touchiness of other people and longing for solitude: “The public celebration of his seventieth birthday, he told one of his most trusted correspondents, the historian Eamon Duffy, left him ‘feeling that I had agreed to be plundered. I don’t know if you were aware of the extent of the exposure,’ he went on, ‘but it left me oddly unconfident. Not oddly, come to think of it. Understandably and self-reproachfully.’ The exposure that went with success made him retreat to the persona he had used when publishing his earliest poems: Incertus.”
Revisiting the work of Elizabeth Cullinan: “Last Tuesday, April 9, Fordham University hosted a celebration of the life and work of the writer Elizabeth Cullinan. The event included a book launch for the reissue of Cullinan’s out-of-print short story collection, Yellow Roses, and a reading and panel discussion featuring Mary Gordon, Peter Quinn, Keri Walsh and Angela Alaimo O’Donnell. It comes a month after America published a St. Patrick’s Day essay by Tom Deignan asking ‘What is the greatest novel ever written about Irish New York?’ Among the authors whose work Deignan cited: Elizabeth Cullinan.”
How the repair and reconstruction of Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral brought France together:
Macron had declared that he also wanted to give contemporary architecture a place in the reconstruction. After that, strange designs for a modern tower began circulating. Some architects suggested a crystal spire “as a symbol of the fragility of our history.” Others wanted to place a greenhouse and beehives on the roof of Notre-Dame. Yet others wanted to illuminate the roof from below so that it would be visible from a distance At some point, France's star architect Jean Nouvel weighed in. His objection: It isn’t necessarily modern to replace something that already existed with something new.
Notre-Dame chief architect Villeneuve says he never tried to stop the discussion about all these idiotic ideas. “I knew that the crazier the designs, the greater the chances of a faithful reconstruction,” he says. In July 2020, a national expert commission voted unanimously in favor of an historic reconstruction.
An 82-foot lizard fish: “Scientists have unearthed the remains of a gigantic, 200 million-year-old sea monster that may be the largest marine reptile ever discovered. The newfound creature is a member of a group called ichthyosaurs, which were among the dominant sea predators during the Mesozoic Era (251.9 million to 66 million years ago).”
On Leonard Cohen, I remember many years ago an attack on him from a left feminist perspective in - maybe- The Village Voice- as a male chauvinist based on his portrayal of women in his songs. So I did find reading about Leonard Cohen as reactionary interesting.