Leonard Cohen and Philosophy (22 page)

12

Politics in
Beautiful Losers

S
TEVEN
B
URNS

A
few years ago I was on a bus. I was re-reading
Beautiful Losers
. A stranger got on, and took the seat beside me. I looked down at my page, flipped to another page, and then found myself closing the cover. I didn’t want the stranger to see that I was reading so much “fuck” and “shit.” There’s no doubt that the book could be charged with obscenity. One critic wrote, “I have just finished reading
Beautiful Losers
, and I’ve had to wash my mind.” People who just saw the book as obscene wanted it banned from libraries and bookstores. That is one way of reading Cohen’s novel, but it is not a very good reading. I’ll call it the Obscenity Reading.

When I first read the book in the 1960s, its obscenity did not bother me at all. I was excited to learn what one of my favorite poets was thinking about Canadian politics. My purpose in this chapter is to recover that excitement. But first let me introduce another way of reading it. One way to move past the Obscenity Reading is to note that famous court cases in 1960 had made it legal to publish D. H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel,
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
. And many readers were finding “redeeming literary merit” in Henry Miller’s
Tropic of Cancer
. Cohen was already known as a poet, and some readers were quick to find graceful metaphors and insightful turns of phrase in
Beautiful Losers
. A saint is someone who “rides the drifts like an escaped ski” (p. 95); or “the old people
gathered at the priest’s hem shivered with a new kind of loneliness” (p. 82). It is easy to find individual moments of redeeming beauty, and thus a better way of reading the novel. I’ll call that the Poetical Reading.

But a reader should not be content with disconnected moments of delight. A good reading of a novel should explain how the various moments hold together, how they form a unity. When a reader offers an interpretation, he or she cites many details from the text and tries to show how they form a coherent story. There are many better ways of reading
Beautiful Losers
than the Obscenity Reading or the Poetical Reading. I am going to advocate a Political Reading and will claim that it can shed light on other, less satisfactory readings.

Best Readings

I have a philosophical theory that I want to put on the table right away. It is a commonplace in discussions of literature to claim that the greater a piece of writing, and the richer a work, the more interpretations it will sustain. I claim that there is a mistake in that idea. True, it is important to keep an open mind, and to try to imagine various interpretations and different ways of reading a work of literature. But some interpretations are better than others, and if that is so, then it is likely that one interpretation will be best of all. I call that the
best reading
of a work, and I think that that is what we are all looking for when we argue about how to interpret a novel. In what follows I offer some steps in the direction of the best reading of
Beautiful Losers
. (I also discuss this theory in my article, “Best Readings.”)

I don’t want that to be an arrogant claim. Here is an argument that supports it. Let’s accept that I am wrong. If there is no best reading, then a work can support more than one equally good reading. Consider the well-known duck/rabbit drawing.

It is a drawing that does sustain more than one equally good interpretation. There is no more reason to believe that the protrusions are rabbit ears than that they are a duck bill.

It can be a duck, or a rabbit, but it cannot be both at once. Either explanation is as well supported as the other. I claim, however, that the ambiguity only exists because the drawing is so oversimplified, so schematic. If we were to add feathers or fur to the drawing we would make it richer, make it a better portrayal. But at the same time we would reduce the ambiguity of its meaning. So it goes with greater art. The richer and more detailed a work, such as either of Leonard Cohen’s novels, the less likely it is to sustain ambiguity, and the more likely it is that an interpretation will prove to be the best one. That conclusion, of course, is just the opposite of the one we assumed when we began.

Why does a more detailed work reduce ambiguity? Because there’s more evidence, more detail about plot and character, for instance, that will support one interpretation over the others. I shall attempt with my Political Reading of
Beautiful Losers
to give the best explanation of the greatest number of details in the novel. I’ll start with the question, “Who are the losers, anyway?”

Who Are the Losers?

Almost everyone mentioned in the novel is a loser. This includes the defeated tribe called “A——s” whom the Historian is studying (p. 4), it includes the New Jews of Montréal (p. 160), it includes the male prostitutes and drug addicts on Blvd. St. Laurent (p. 189), and it includes Mary Voolnd, who nurses F. and is mutilated by police dogs (p. 226). In fact I think that all Canadians are being called losers. But there are four main losers. The novel starts and ends with Kateri (Catherine) Tekakwitha. Here are the opening words:

Catherine Tekakwitha, who are you? Are you (1656–1680)? Is that enough? Are you the Iroquois Virgin? Are you the Lily of the Shores of the Mohawk River? Can I love you in my own way? I am an old scholar. . . . I fell in love with a religious picture of you. You were standing among birch trees, my favorite trees. God knows how far up your moccasins were laced. . . . Do I have any right to come after you with my dusty mind full of the junk of maybe five thousand books? I hardly even get out to the country very often. . . .

Catherine Tekakwitha, I have come to rescue you from the Jesuits. (pp. 3–5)

We learn some things in this passage about the first two losers. One is Catherine, who died in 1680. The second I shall call the Historian. He is first of all an old scholar who is writing “The History of Them All.” That’s what Book One of
Beautiful Losers
is called. He is also a dirty old man—he is thinking of what is under Catherine’s skirt as well as of her fame and her sainthood. Moreover, we learn something from this opening passage about the style of the novel itself. It has constant comic turns and one-line jokes: as if getting out of the city were a qualification for befriending a 300-year-old Aboriginal woman.

On the second page the Historian tells us about “my friend F.” who “died in a padded cell, his brain rotted from too much dirty sex” (p. 4). F. is the third of the beautiful losers. The fourth is then introduced. She is the Historian’s Aboriginal wife, Edith (she is a descendant of the A——s). She has committed suicide, by crouching at the bottom of an elevator shaft in their apartment building until the descending machine crushes her beyond recognition (p. 7).

So the Historian is going to tell us a story about himself and three others. Those are the four main losers. Three are already dead. The Historian is writing their history. The second part of the book is called “A Long Letter from F.” (p. 143). Writing from his death-bed, F. gives another view of the same characters and their story. Finally there is a short section called “Beautiful Losers: An Epilogue in the Third Person,” which concludes the story about the four losers.

A Psychological Reading

The 1960s in particular were a period of revived nationalism in Canada. The reading of Canadian literature from the 1960s naturally requires some acquaintance with how the country was at that time conceived and conceived itself. Not to see that the book is deeply embedded in Canadian politics is to miss something essential. This has to be at least part of a good reading of the novel. I hope to get you to agree with me about that, but let me first introduce a very fine reader who does not agree with me.

When
Beautiful Losers
appeared in 1966 it was immediately reviewed all over Canada, but especially by distinguished poets. One of the most impressive of those poet reviewers was Michael Ondaatje, now best known as the author of
The English Patient
. He published a short monograph,
Leonard Cohen
, in 1970.

Beautiful Losers
, writes Ondaatje, “is a gorgeous novel, and is the most vivid, fascinating, and brave modern novel I have read.” On first reading he was struck by some powerful scenes, but thought that “nothing linked them together,” and that it was “simply too sensational.” That suggests that his first reaction was a Poetical Reading. A second reading revealed to him “superb writing, structure, and themes that are very basic to Cohen” (p. 45). That last phrase is important, for Ondaatje sees the characters, at least the Historian—whom he calls the Narrator—and F., as “a powerful extension of several of the traits of Leonard Cohen” that are also to be seen in his early poetry. So he writes:

What makes the style and technique of the book so valid and effective is the way Cohen uses it to characterize and juxtapose F. and the Narrator. The Narrator is always being defeated by Art, History, Language; F. uses language like a sword, illogically, excessively, and unrealistically—his speech is riddled with invalid and brilliant images. . . .

The Narrator’s “book,” is therefore the most tortured piece of writing imaginable. . . . Book Two, “A Long Letter from F.,” shows a
remarkable change of style, a calm that is gracious after the diatribes and uncertainties of the Narrator. . . .

We therefore find the essential drama of the novel in the styles Cohen uses, for F. is trying to break down the restrictive laws and values that limit the Narrator, to become the Narrator’s Mephistopheles and lead him through madness and total freedom into sainthood. (pp. 46–47)

I call this the Psychological Reading, because it claims that the book is mainly an account of the author’s personality and that the two main “authors,” the Historian and F., are warring aspects of Cohen himself. There is much that is right about this, and another fine critic, Stephen Scobie, develops the idea further. But I do not agree with the main assumption—that the novel is best seen as portraying aspects of Cohen’s psyche

Ondaatje reinforces his claim by comparing
Beautiful Losers
to Cohen’s 1963 novel,
The Favourite Game
. The earlier novel clearly was autobiographical—the story of a young, talented Montréal Jewish boy, with his sidekick friend and his girlfriend, making their way into adulthood. So Ondaatje says “as Breavman (the hero of the early novel) separated himself into lover and artist,” in
Beautiful Losers
“the role of the lover is played by F. The Narrator struggles along after them, watching, discovering . . .” (p. 50). Cohen, that is, has separated himself into Historian and F., and the drama of the novel is the struggle of one part of him to liberate the other part of him from his hang-ups, his mental constipation. But this does not fit
Beautiful Losers
all that well.

The Psychological Reading misses some very important things. First of all it treats the Indian women, Catherine Tekakwitha and the Historian’s wife, Edith, as secondary characters. But Catherine’s importance cannot be reduced to an example of the Historian’s incompetent interest in history, and an example of sainthood for F. to emulate. Nor is Edith just a dead Indian. She is loving, ambitious, experimental, and tries until the end to make a living husband of the hopeless Historian. Even her suicide is presented as a
desperate attempt to save their love by teaching him that the living are more important than the dead. In my reading the women are as central as the male characters. They are important in their own right, and not just because they might patch together the broken men (a recurrent theme in Cohen’s poems and songs).

Second, Ondaatje’s reading does not explain the fact that F. is French. Leonard Cohen is not French. But F. is undoubtedly French. Why, then, should F. be one of the two sides of Cohen’s personality? One of the stories that F. tells in his long letter is the story of his losing a thumb while blowing up a statue of Queen Elizabeth, monarch of England and of Canada. The famous statue, on Sherbrooke St., was in fact a target of separatists, Québec nationalists, on the occasion of the Queen’s visit to Canada in 1964. I think that Québec separatists were part of the Canadian landscape that Cohen was portraying, rather than a part of his own personal psyche.

Perhaps I exaggerate this aspect of F.? He is introduced as “my friend, F.,” so F. could stand for Friend. Stephen Scobie thinks it could stand for Frankenstein (
Leonard Cohen
, p. 99). It could also stand for phallus; think of the Historian as a desperate, once-rational mind being led about by his penis. But F. says: “It is not merely because I am French that I long for an independent Québec.” In the course of the ensuing political manifesto, he makes a telling political remark: “The English did to us what we did to the Indians, and the Americans did to the English what the English did to us. I demanded revenge for everyone” (pp. 186–87). The Indians, the French, and the English are all losers. Canadians are all losers. That, I think, is a strand in the narrative of
Beautiful Losers
that reaches from the first page to the last. It is also, I am sure, a significant fact that in those two passages, and in various places elsewhere in the novel, Cohen makes use of the official Canadian practice (developed in the 1960s) of proceeding in two languages, alternating French and English. Finally, F.’s long letter ends with “Signé F.” (p. 226).