The New Yorker Radio Hour - Leonard Cohen: A Final Interview

Episode Date: December 26, 2017

Leonard Cohen was one of the world’s greatest songwriters, and a figure of almost cult-like devotion for generations of fans, including Bob Dylan. David Remnick sat down with Cohen in the summer of 2016, at the musician’s home in Los Angeles to discuss Cohen’s career, his spiritual influences, his triumphant final tours, and what he was doing to prepare for his end. “I am ready to die,” Cohen said. He was already suffering from a number of health problems at the time and died in November 2016. “At a certain point, if you still have your marbles and are not faced with serious financial challenges, you have a chance to put your house in order. It’s a cliché, but it’s underestimated as an analgesic on all levels. Putting your house in order, if you can do it, is one of the most comforting activities, and the benefits of it are incalculable.” Plus, a 1952 poem by E.B. White brings Christmas greetings to misfits and oddballs the world over. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Last year, I spent a few days with the songwriter, Leonard Cohen. Cohen had been avoiding interviews for the past four or five, six years, but once he agreed to talk, we talk for days and covered the length and breadth of his career. and I'm grateful that I had the chance to visit when I did because not long after, Leonard Cohen died at the age of 82. Cohen once wrote a song called The Tower of Song,

in which he compared himself really unfavorably to Hank Williams. But along with the other masters, Bob Dylan certainly, Joni Mitchell, Kanye West, everybody's got their own list. Leonard Cohen is way up there in the ranks of songwriters. When I visited him in Los Angeles, he was suffering from a number of very serious illnesses although he was keeping that very, very private. He was in deep pain, especially from compression fractures in his spine,

and he had to sit in a big blue medical chair. He was very thin, maybe 110 pounds at the most. But I have to say that he was in an abluent mood somehow for a man who knew where life was taking him, and it was going to take him there in a hurry. He was the most gracious host, this side of my mother. Would you like a few slices of cheese and olives? No, I'm good, thank you.

You're cool. Cohen had just finished up a new album called You Want a Darker. He'd recorded almost all of it sitting in that medical chair right there in the living room, a really modest space with just a couple of guitars, some recording equipment, and a keyboard. And even as our talk, like the album itself, never really strayed far from the end of things, his sense of humor, his vicious self-mockery was always present. Sorry, darling. Could you bring my hearing aid?

I can't hear a fuck all. Cohen grew up in Montreal in a prominent Jewish family, a well-to-do established family there. His family ran a clothing concern, and it was almost as an homage to his family business that Cohen, even in the 60s, always wore beautiful well-cut suits, including a tailored, dark blue number that he had on when I saw him. When Leonard was nine years old, his father died, and that event became a kind of origin story for his career as a writer. and as someone who believed in writing as an almost sacramental act. My father's funeral was held in our house.

We came down the stairs, the coffin was in the living room, and it was open. It was winter, you know. And I was thinking, like, it must be hard to dig. I went to the plot. I saw my father buried, and then I came back to the house and I went to his closet and I found a

bow tie I cut one of the wings of the bowtie off and I wrote something on it I think it was some kind of to my father I don't remember what I wrote

and I buried it in the backyard it was just some attraction to a ritual response to an impossible event. Out of the game, if I ever loved you all, no, no.

It's a cry and shame. You want it darker, the last album is saturated with thoughts of the end of death. But Cohen's subjects were always there from the first. The big things, death, love, sex, God, and always undercut by that razory wit. And as a young man, Kahn wanted to be a writer above all, a poet. And he was following less in the path of Hank Williams or Bob Dylan in those days than he was

in the path of Alan Ginsberg or Frank O'Hara. His blood on my arm is warm as a bird. His heart in my hand is heavy as lead. His eyes through my eyes shine brighter than love. Oh, send out the raven ahead of the dove. That's Cohen reading at the 92nd Street-Wye in New York 50 years ago. But around that time, it came clear that he'd never make a real living as a writer. And surrounded in New York by talents and early friends like Lou Reed and Judy Collins and Patty Smith,

he wrote the songs for his first record, which came out in 1967. takes you down to her place near the river. Like the best poets, he was writing directly from his inner life and from the life all around him. If you grew up with him in Montreal, you also knew the places and the people in songs like Suzanne. And no one else seemed to have quite the same precision, the same irony. And she feeds your tea and oranges that come all the way from China.

And just when you mean to take. Tell her that you have no love to give her, then she gets you on her wavelength, and she lets the river answer that you've always been her lover. Want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind. She will trust you, for you've touched her perfect bond. What Leonard Cohen found really difficult was performance, the stage, there was something about getting up on stage that he found almost false. He said that he felt like a chained parrot up there sometimes, and the stage fright could be paralyzing.

I'm scared enough as it is up here, and I think something's wrong every time you begin to applaud. On one tour, he says he went through three bottles of wine a night before going on stage. Chateau-Lour, in fact. It went so well with the music, he said. Still, the booze and the drugs didn't always really help with the anxiety. I hope you bear with me. These songs are kind of, they become meditations for me,

and sometimes they just don't get high on it. And I feel that I'm cheating you, so I'll try it again, okay? And if it doesn't work, I'll stop in the middle. In Israel in 1972, he left the stage when he felt like the show just wasn't going well. He went back to the dressing room, and he dropped some acid. And then he heard the audience singing to him. It was really singing to him. The audience had sense that I was disappointed.

I mean, how sweet? How sweet can an audience possibly be? It was singing back to you. They started singing of Amu Shalom Alecam. You know, and I'm hearing this in the dressing room. They're singing it to me, and they mean to be singing it to me. So I go out, and I start singing so long Marianne. That's one of his most famous songs about an ex-girlfriend.

Meanwhile, the asset starts to kick in. He's hallucinating. I see Marianne. This is right in front of me. And I start crying. I turn around and the band is crying too. And it turned into something to And it turned into something quite quite

The entire audience turned into something quite entire audience turned into one Jew. Which is enough for anyone. And this Jew was saying, what else can you show me, kid? I've seen a lot of things, and this don't move the dial. The entire, you know,

the skeptical side of our tradition, manifested as an actual gigantic being, judging me, you know, hardly begins to describe the operation. I mean, the sense of invalidation and irrelevance that I felt was authentic because those feelings, not unique in this respect, but those feelings I've always circulated around my psyche, you know, which is, where do you get to stand up and speak for what and who and, you know, how deep is your experience, how significant is that a thing you have to say to anybody? I think it really invited me to deepen my practice. Like, dig in deeper, whatever it was.

You know, like take this thing a little bit more seriously, you know. Cohen released 14 studio albums in his long career, along with another dozen-odd books of poetry and two novels. My conversation with him continues in a moment. I'm David Remnick, and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Welcome back to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Today, my conversation with the great songwriter, Leonard Cohen. We spoke in the summer of 2016 at his home in Los Angeles. Cohen was already very ill, but he was somehow bearing up with amazing determination, and he was really eager to be able.

talk. He died a couple of months later at the age of 82. Bob Dylan once said that Cohen's songs were like prayers, and many of them do lean heavily on scripture, on the Psalms in particular, and his most famous song by far is called Hallelujah. Plenty of Cohen's fans have come to see him as a kind of quasi-religious figure, but when I spoke to him, Cohen was reluctant to overanalyze that religious aspect of his music. He didn't like the suggestion that he tried to give his work a spiritual uplift or heft. Because I don't like to be identified with Jewish thought. In my own mind, you know, I know that I'm deeply conditioned by these.

One of the great themes of Kabbalistic thought is the idea that the thrust of Jewish activity is the repair of God. God in creating the world dispersed itself. that creation is a catastrophe, there are pieces of him or her or it that are everywhere. And that the specific task of the Jew is to repair the face of God.

The prayers are to remind God that it was once a harmonious unity. God again, heard them say, passed away. There is a... That's how the light gets in. Is your view of performance, especially in these last X years,

have a religious dimension that's self-conscious? It's not self-conscious. You know, I only know that if I write enough verses and keep discarding the slogans, even the hip ones, even the subtle ones, that something, Something will emerge that represents. I've often said that the reason my writing is so slow

is that I have to finish the verse before I discard it. But I understand it also for a lot of songs that have, say, three or four verses that are on the recording or published on the page, there are 60 or 70 or 80 verses in that. Some as many as that. but all was at least 10 or 20. Like a lot of artists of his time, Cohen was a seeker. He dabbled in everything from Scientology to dancing with the Hari Krishna's.

But he stuck with spiritual life in a way that few of his peers ever did. He was serious. It was never a hobby. In fact, he spent long stretches at a Zen Buddhist monastery in the mountains outside of Los Angeles with a teacher named Joshua Sasaki Roshi, whose students lived in the most... ascetic way possible. When I brought up Cohen's reputation as a ladies' man,

he laughed and he talked instead about the thousands of nights and days he spent on a mountain just shoveling snow, cleaning, cooking, and meditating. I was deeply associated with Roshi for over 40 years. I don't really know too much about Buddhism or what formal Buddhist training. is I only know Roshi's system, which I understand is eccentric. On a superficial level, it accomplishes what boot camp accomplishes, which is basically to get you to stop whining. It makes whining the least appropriate response to suffering. Some years ago, Cohen came back from the Zen Monastery, only to discover that his accounts had been absolutely wiped out by his manager.

He sued, but there was no getting around it. The money was gone, and there he was, well into his 60s, with nothing for his kids or for his retirement. So Colin had no choice. He had to go back to work. He published a book of new poems for the first time in 20 years, and he went out on a tour that lasted more or less for four years. And there was a different feel to Cohen's work on stage after this monastic period. He was funnier. He was more animated, more lighthearted, and maybe for the first time, seemed really happy to be on stage.

I was talking with some of the guys. Some of the guys in this band are kind of, you know, over the hill. And they were talking about the various stages that a man goes through. in relation to his allure to the opposite sex, you start off irresistible, and then you become resistible. Then you become transparent,

not exactly invisible, but as if you're seen through old plastic. And then you actually do become invisible. And then, and this is the most amazing transformation, you become repulsive. But that's not the end of the story. after repulsive, you become acute. And that's where I am.

I caught one of those concerts at Radio City Musical, and I've got to say, it was one of the best things I have ever seen in my entire life. Here was this guy, dressed in a suit and a fedora. Over and over again, he'd sink to his knees, almost in devotion to the audience and to the songs themselves. I'd always admired Cohn's songs, but I'd never been quite swept away. The studio recordings especially sometimes seemed to live.

little, I don't know, rinky dink in their rendition. Too much synthesizer, not quite worthy of the songs, but that tour was a triumph. Leonard Cohen had an astonishing band now, and his voice was as deep as the ocean. When we finally met, Cohen was suffering from these terrible health problems, cancer and excruciating back pain, and he was even allergic to most of the medicine that would alleviate the pain. All of those years spent meditating were coming in handy. in an entirely new way. I've had to white knuckle this thing.

Fortunately, I have some training in, we could call it, mind control. As a blessing, the mental activity is working just fine. I got most of my marbles maybe more than I've

added other periods. In a certain sense, this particular predicament is filled with many less distractions than in other periods of my life and actually enables me to work with a little more concentration and continuity. The only thing that mitigates against full production

is just the condition of my body because there are times I just have to lie down. I just have to lie down. Leonard, you have to say when you need a rest. No, no, I'm fine. It's you guys. Would you like something to eat? He was incredibly solicitous.

Instead of taking a break or asking us to come back another time, Leonard sent his assistant out to pick us all up some food at Fat Burger down the street. I think I got your onion, or did I get your onion? I think we all have my name. Cohen told me he was still hearing the voice of God. And it was at that moment that somebody, he started up a leafblower, some damn thing next door. But Cohen was saying that God sounded different now,

not that awful, incessant voice of judgment that he heard when he was younger. Sometimes it's just like, you're losing too much weight now, man. You're dying, but you don't have to cooperate so enthusiastically with the process. You know, like force yourself to have a sandwich or something, you know what I mean?

You know, sometimes I hear it say, ignore me. Just get on with the things you have to do. It's very compassionate at this stage. You know, I mean, more than any time in my life, I don't have that voice that says, you're fucking up. That's a tremendous blessing. Tremendous blessing, you know. Really, you know.

are ready to die. I hope it isn't uncomfortable. Spiritual things, Baruch Hashem, spiritual things have fallen into place for which I am deeply grateful.

To the very last, Leonard Cohen was working all the time, compulsively, focusing on what he could get done at home, writing, recording, collecting, finishing old poems, and to me it seemed like almost a model of how to live your last days, if you can.

I'd like to tie up the strings. It's a cliche, but it's underestimated as an analgesic on all levels. Putting your house in order is one of the most, if you can do it, one of the most comforting. activities and the benefits of it are incalculable. There's a great deal of new material that I haven't sorted out.

50 or 60, unpublished poems. There are songs halfway through that are not bad. Listen to the hummingbird whose wings you cannot see. Listen to the hummingbird. Don't listen to the hummingbird. me. Listen to the butterfly, who's days but number three. Listen to the butterfly, don't listen to me. Listen to the mind of God, which doesn't need to be. Listen to the mind of God, don't listen to me. So, it's halfway. I don't think I'll be able to finish those songs. And maybe I'll get a second way in that or no.

I became juices. They're tired and lame. The late Leonard Cohen. I talked with him in the summer of 2016. His last album is You Want a Darker. And if you want to read the profile of Leonard Cohen that I published in the magazine, you can find it at new yorkerradio.org. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick. We're going to close the show today with a holiday message from E.B. White. You probably remember E.B. White is the author of Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web, but White was also one of the New Yorkers' earliest and most important contributors. He created the voice of the magazine along with James Thurber. His essays and stories and poems were published in the magazine for nearly six decades and won him accolades including a Pulitzer Prize. This poem by E.B. White, and it doesn't have a title, was from December 1952.

We've adapted it for the radio hour, and it was performed by Keegan, Michael Key, who's currently appearing in Steve Martin's play Meteor Shower on Broadway. Enjoy. From this high Midtown Hall, undecced with bows, unfortified with mistletoe, we send forth our tinseled greetings as of old to friends, to readers, to strangers of many conditions in many places. Merry Christmas, to uncertified accountants, to tellers who have made a mistaken addition to grounded airline passengers and to all those who can't eat clams. We greet with particular warmth, people who wake and smell smoke. Merry Christmas to intellectuals and other despised minorities.

Joy to the authors of books whose titles begin with the word how, as though they knew. Greetings to growers of gourds, to shearers of sheep, and to make. makers of change in the lonely underground booths. Merry Christmas to old men asleep in libraries! Merry Christmas to people who can't stay in the same room with a cat. Merry Christmas to people who plant trees in city streets. Merry Christmas to people who save prairie chickens from extinction. Greetings of a purely mechanical sort to machines that think,

plus a sprig of artificial holly. joyous yule to Cadillac owners whose conduct is unworthy of their car. We send most particularly and most hopefully our greetings and our prayers to soldiers and guardsmen on land and sea and in the air. The young men doing the hardest things at the hardest time of life. To all such, Merry Christmas. Blessings and good luck. Merry Christmas to all who think they are in love but aren't sure. Greetings, too, to the inhabitants of other planets.

See you soon! And last, we greet all skaters on small natural ponds at the edge of woods toward the end of afternoon. Merry Christmas, skaters. Merry Christmas to all. And to all a good morrow. That's a poem from E.B. White, published in The New Yorker in 1952. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by Alex Perrin, Emily Boutin, Ave Cario, Rianne Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sarah Nix, Michael Rayfield, Mithelie Rowe, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Susan Morrison, Emma Allen, Johnny Vince Evans, Terence Bernardo, Emily Mann, and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.