Black Romanticism

SELECTED POEMS 1956-1968 by Leonard Cohen. 245 pages. Viking. $5 hardback, $1.95 paperback.

Montreal's Leonard Cohen appears to be drifting toward the vortex of popular success. His 1966 novel, Beautiful Losers, a hallucinogenic potion of Iroquois history and art-as-psychosis, has a sizable readership among college students and literate dropouts. Cohen has been documented on an educational television film and interviewed on CBS. His recent move into folk-rock composing and singing has not gone unnoticed either. His song Suzanne, a sweetly eerie and rather self-conscious effort to be both sublimely sacred and sublimely profane, has been recorded by a number of modern minnesingers. His dark brand of sentimentality has enough youth appeal so that the Smothers Brothers have booked him for a fall appearance on their TV show.

All this has helped to sell his poetry. Selected Poems 1956-1968, published months ago, has sold more than 20,000 copies. Sales for the average collection rarely hit one-tenth that figure.

Beautiful Rules. In these poems, Cohen is the troubled free spirit, worrying the burdens of the past and uncomfortable in the mechanized present. He prowls through the blasted stumps of tradition looking for signs of regeneration but not really expecting to find them. His nostalgia and vain hope find expression in Lines from My Grandfather's Journal:

There were beautiful rules: a way to hear thunder, praise a wise man, watch a rainbow, learn of tragedy.

All my family were priests, from Aaron to my father. It was my honour to close the eyes of my famous teacher.

Prayer makes speech a ceremony. To observe this ritual in the absence of arks, altars, a listening sky; this is a rich discipline.

But it is not a discipline that can be practiced by someone who has fled the old priesthood and has yet to found his own. The question that arises from many of Cohen's poems is: Where can a radically enlightened individual invest his passion and get a steady and satisfying return? Revolutionary politics has its possibilities but, as Cohen notes in his poem Kerensky, the vision of revolution is all too brief. Cohen's own experiences in this area include a disappointing 1961 adventure in Cuba as a would-be volunteer for Castro just before the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Women also seem to have their limitations. In lines that read like the postcoital blues, Cohen says:

I want your warm body to disappear politely and leave me alone in the bath

because I want to consider my destiny.

When it comes to love, Cohen can be both a romantic and a realist. At times he glorifies women as succoring goddesses. In Suzanne, published in the book as a poem, a half-mad woman in rags and feathers is melded with the Christ figure to express the perfect union of body and mind.

Menacing Blades. At other times, Cohen sees women as dangerous creatures capable of destroying his freedom and dignity. He can be wry about it, although in The Cuckold's Song his double-edged view of love leads to an exercise in self-mockery that could be described as black romanticism. Addressing the women who have injured his pride, he concludes:

The fact is I'm turning to gold, turning to gold.

It's a long process, they say,

It happens in stages.

This is to inform you that I've already turned to clay.

Although Selected Poems contains seductive lyrics and passionate lines praising "the eternal moment," Cohen finds his most authentic voice in anxiety and bitterness. To use one of the images that recur in this collection, life is full of menacing razor blades. To hear Cohen at full throat, however, one must look elsewhere than Selected Poems. Beautiful Losers is his best attempt to fan his dark obsessions into a revelatory flame of pure personal style. If the book has a message at all, it is that the state of grace lies beyond the boundaries of sanity. The extent of Cohen's youthful readership suggests that it would not be too difficult to recruit an invasion force--or at least enough spectators to make the effort worthwhile.

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