In Love We Disappear

Don’t go home with your hard on
It will only drive you insane
You can’t shake it or break it with your Motown
You can’t melt it down in the rain

These ungallant words were sung, shamelessly, by Leonard Norman Cohen. Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan were in the background, and Phil Spector was, when not shoving a semiautomatic pistol in Cohen’s mouth, producing. Death of a Ladies’ Man (1977) was not an environment for tenderness or introspection. It was not even released with Cohen’s permission; Spector stole the tapes, and that was the least of it. If the muse is summoned at gunpoint, and then the goods are hijacked, you don’t always get reliable information. It’s no secret that Leonard was a very naughty boy, but while coitus was half of his grand theme—the other half was pursuit of the unreliable narrator known as God, or G-d—it was not usually in the spirit of “Don’t go home with your hard on.” It was about the thing that haunts you when you don’t meditate, or ponder the abyss, or seduce, or fail to seduce, or still feel the hunger when the body inevitably fails.

Fucking is officially about reproduction, but it’s really about the force of life itself, making love when it’s love, what Leonard called the only engine of survival. There is a poem in your past, your projection, your dirty secrets and your sweetest self; you are inspired, you have expired, you seek succor when the desire is exhausted. Your relationships are plagiarisms of previous relationships, and the more they proliferate, the less you know what you are doing. You are long past deluding yourself that you will ever get it right, but you appreciate what you have when you have it. You toast and offer a sacrament, a wild little bouquet. Leonard has commemorated all of this and more in song, and in this respect, he is the most sex besotted great Anglophone songwriter, though Marvin Gaye and Prince loomed large in this arena, too. Bob Dylan, the one who first inspired Cohen to turn his poems into songs, avoided the subject of sex almost entirely. He left that space for Leonard, who ran with it on every album. If you were to listen to Cohen’s complete oeuvre and play a drinking game, taking a shot every time sex comes up, you’d need your stomach pumped.

Exhibit A: “Suzanne.” I was fortunate enough to have dinner with Leonard in January 2015, under much more humane conditions than the Phil Spector sessions. We met at a Pizzeria Uno off Wilshire. I asked him if “Dress Rehearsal Rag” was a song about not committing suicide. He said, “Yes.” Then I asked if “Suzanne” was a song about not seducing a beautiful woman. He said, “Yes.” And there was so much seducing in that not seducing. That not seducing is Auden writing of “Eros, builder of cities.” It is Stevens writing of being “too dumbly in my being pent.” Eros is not just desire, but wanting what you don’t or can’t have. It is waiting for the miracle. It is the stirrings still near the end. Judy Collins covered it, then brought Leonard to her Town Hall show, where he panicked and ran backstage, then was coaxed back by Collins, who held his hand to get him through it, and it was deemed a triumph. It began the pattern he would follow for most of his performing life: He had to be accompanied by women, and they looked as lovely as they sang. Part of it was that he lacked confidence in his voice, which they cushioned. Part of it was the continual need for female beauty. “Wasn’t it a long way down?” he asked. On his way there, the ladies took the edge off.

Our perfect porn aristocrat
So elegant and cheap
I’m old but I’m still into that
A thousand kisses deep

I’m good at love, I’m good at hate
It’s in between I freeze
Been working out but it’s too late
It’s been too late for years

But you look good, you really do
They love you on the street
If you were here, I’d kneel for you
A thousand kisses deep

First the “perfect porn aristocrat,” then the kneeling. First the experience, then the poem. There was another Suzanne, his long-term lover and mother of his two children, but that was not the Suzanne of “Suzanne.” The Suzanne of “Suzanne” was the wife of his friend, the sculptor Armand Vaillancourt. Did the experience inspire the song or was it the other way around? Leonard’s life was a poem, a parable. Was it too on the nose that his name was a near-homophone for koan? Listen, read, take it all in. Among English-language songwriters—especially with so many lyrics that qualified as raunchy poetry—was there anyone else so preoccupied with desire, and all he could desire, while also elevating the profane to the sacred, the booty calls to high poetry? His grandfather had the Torah memorized. He learned to read so that his grandson could write. When he was recording poetry as a young man, he told the engineer that there were no dirty words. The dirty words were about experiences that could also be exalted.

There was a time you let me know
What’s really going on below
But now you never show it to me, do you?
And I remember when I moved in you
And the holy dove she was moving too
And every single breath we drew was Hallelujah

The unedited “Hallelujah” is legendary, said to be around 150 verses, maybe 180. If you were to narrow down the theme of those verses, it would be failure. But what a failure. The Hebrew Bible is there, and so are all the women, the ones he could seduce and those he could not. He failed to sleep with Nico, and he never forgave Lou Reed for succeeding at this. “I cannot sleep with Jews anymore,” she told him, but she made an exception for another landsman. Reed inducted Cohen into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and, completely out of character, waxed rhapsodic about his lyrics. From where Leonard was sitting, it seemed shambolic, and he stoically endured the ceremony. (Back in the Chelsea days, he was honored to meet the author of Beautiful Losers.) Nico died bloated and addicted in 1988, Reed left us after a failed liver transplant in 2013, and when I met Leonard in 2015, he could still not let go of it. Nico haunts Leonard’s notebooks. She was more than the one that got away. She was a muse, a trope, an everlasting no. The unfulfilled act was as inspiring as not sleeping with the first Suzanne. Except that she rejected him. She was the wound that never healed.

Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen were lovers, briefly and not exclusively, when their careers were beginning in 1967. As the years went by and a friendship with Leonard became harder to sustain—“What do you say to an old lover?” he once asked her, frostily, over dinner—she, who had called herself a “stone cold Cohenite,” became increasingly dismissive. She called him, sneeringly, a “boudoir poet” and liked to say, “He owns the phrase ‘naked body’ … it appears in every one of his songs.” I checked and he used it just once.

Frankie Laine, he was singing “Jezebel”
I pinned an Iron Cross to my lapel
I walked up to the tallest and the blondest girl

I said, “Look, you don’t know me now but very soon you will
So, won’t you let me see?”
I said, “Won’t you let me see?”
I said, “Won’t you let me see your naked body?”

But I can see why Joni Mitchell thought that he owned the phrase and put it everywhere. It is used once the way “friend-o” is used just once in No Country for Old Men. Their singular use feels ubiquitous. Naked bodies are everywhere in Cohen’s oeuvre. There are dresses waiting to be tortured, flags to be placed on the marble arch. There is part of Cohen that is compelled to be gallant. He’s a boudoir poet, but how dirty does he talk? By sexting standards, he’s a gentleman.

It’s coming from the women and the men
O baby, we’ll be making love again
We’ll be going down so deep
The river’s going to weep
And the mountain’s going to shout Amen!

It is typical for a songwriter to write of desire, but when Bob Dylan wrote “I Want You” it stopped there—at wanting and wordplay. When John Lennon wrote a song called “I Want You” it was a hymn of praise and fear that this feeling was so strong, he compared it to drowning; the passion was deep, the lyrics were minimal. When Elvis Costello called a song “I Want You,” it was about sexual jealousy, about being tormented by the wanting. There is no Leonard Cohen song called “I Want You,” but the wanting is everywhere, and it becomes more specific. Desire is where a poem begins. A man who says that the sex will make the river weep and the mountain shout “amen” is not exactly writing from a place of modesty. But then this is a poem. Leonard told me that he enjoyed the fact that much of his association with Joni Mitchell was not deep. I was surprised.

“But the songs you wrote for each other are deep.”

“That’s what I’m saying. The songs were better than we were.”

The songs were better than we were. Even in the lyrics from “Democracy,” it’s a promise, not a report.

I sang my songs, I told my lies
To lie between your matchless thighs
And ain’t it fine, ain’t it wild
To finally end our exercise?

“Matchless thighs”: as if he had a ranking and these thighs outmatched them all. Does he say that to all the girls? Yes, he does. He said it to all of us; he put it on an album, one called New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974), which delivers what it promises.

You were K-Y Jelly
I was Vaseline
You were the father of modern medicine
I was Mr. Clean
You were the Whore and the Beast of Babylon
I was Rin Tin Tin

Before the writing happens, he told me, there is an appetite to write, and you don’t know what you’re doing. The appetite, the wanting, turns into voice—or it is taken over by voice—and suddenly Suzanne is taking you down. Sex is everywhere, even when it isn’t anywhere. Vaseline rhymes with Mr. Clean; Leonard, like Iggy Pop, wants to be your dog. It is Nico, always turning you down, it is the unconsummated Suzanne of the song and the Suzanne in real life, the one who became his gypsy wife. Leonard gets jealous? He gets everything. He’s been everywhere.

And where, where is my Gypsy wife tonight?
Too early for the rainbow, too early for the dove
These are the final days, this is the darkness, this is the flood
And there is no man or woman who can’t be touched
But you who come between them will be judged

Dear reader, Leonard and Suzanne Elrod were never married. She was a gypsy girlfriend, a common law, a partner, a plus one, an arm candy. She was also mother to Adam and Lorca. She was, in his bohemian way, a family, but in this world of swollen appetites and not going home with one’s hard on, becoming a gypsy wife was inevitable.

Sex happens to someone else; you get frustrated and write a song, say, “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong”:

I suppose that he froze when the wind took your clothes
And I guess he just never got warm
But you stand there so nice in your blizzard of ice
Oh please, let me come into the storm

Leonard Cohen would not have called himself a ladies’ man, but he did write “Death of a Ladies’ Man.” It is a quieter moment in the Spector sessions, and the song sounds less like the Wagner of the girl groups and more like Pink Floyd. But the theme was far from mellow. It brimmed with frustration, disappointment. His longtime relationship was ending, and the ancillary ones did not provide succor. He needed someone to dance him through the panic, but not yet.

So the great affair is over but whoever would have guessed
It would leave us all so vacant and so deeply unimpressed
It’s like our visit to the moon or to that other star
I guess you go for nothing if you really want to go that far.

Allen Ginsberg wrote an “Ode to Failure.” Leonard wrote many of them. If lust is a muse, that lust, in the bodies of mere mortals, is bound to disappoint. He wrote about his own failings, his own quest, his own unquenchable appetites that led him to his final destination.

2016: a year that took Bowie and Prince and elected Trump, also took Leonard. His passing was devastating, but he had suffered enough. When he was confined to the barracks of a medical chair where he recorded his final album completed with his permission—You Want It Darker—while he was using his Buddhist discipline to block out pain so excruciating, even the opiates failed. They are always broken hallelujahs. And the memories of the flesh kept haunting him. On June 24, 2016, a few months before he left us, he remembers when he thought he knew what pain was.

I should have seen it coming
You could say I wrote the chart
Just to look at her was trouble
It was trouble from the start
Sure we played a stunning couple
But I never liked the part
It ain’t pretty, it ain’t subtle
What happens to the Heart

Looking at her was trouble from the start. Why get into trouble? This is what happens to the heart. Happens to the Heart was what he wanted to call his final volume. But when you make plans, especially when one is a boudoir poet, G-d says ha. He saw it coming the whole time. He touched your perfect body with his mind. That couldn’t last forever. Wasn’t it a long way down? It was, but it was also glorious, including the failures. We’re present; we’re gone. Leonard was more present than most. He lived his life as if it were real. Yet he went the way of all flesh. What was that all about? “We are so lightly here,” he told us. “It is in love that we are made. In love we disappear.”