Beautiful Losers: Lives of the Saints
BACK IN 2010 OR SO I WROTE:
For the third time in my life as an ageing child of the sixties, I am reading Beautiful Losers.
The pyrotechnics of this much-acclaimed, maniacally experimental novel obscure the shocking truths it is woven around.
Genocide
Pedophilia
A hidden holocaust
MKULTRA mind control
Nazi experiments on human beings, in particular children
Cohen peppers the novel with references to this tragic story, but uses these horrors as comic triggers. The reader zigzags between heaven and hell, as the amphetamine-gulping narrator gropes for a missing moral centre in a world that has exploded.
When we read it in the sixties, we were shocked, thrilled and titillated. But, as Bob Dylan says, “Things have changed.”
Read in the light of what we know now about the classified goings-on at McGill during the years preceding the writing of this bizarre roman-a-clef, it tends to seem tragic.
Maybe there was even comedy at Auschwitz. I wouldn’t be surprised there were clowns in the barracks, loved for their ability to get a laugh out of the dying and soon-to-be-dead.
Human soap turns up several times in Beautiful Losers, as well. It’s one of those standards of holocaust humour, I guess.
Human soap is really the lighter side of Mengele’s experiments. Almost a euphemism for crimes so unspeakable they are never discussed. Thus the truth slips into the yawning abyss of amnesia, and a whole new generation of mind-controlled patriots are preparing to follow their leaders into Armageddon.
Still — in the light of the documents sitting in Washington, and all that has appeared on the internet and elsewhere over the last few years, as child victims recover their memories and voices and begin to publish their accounts of CIA torture, funded by our governments — Beautiful Losers seems strangely relevant today.
Part of it is set in a Montreal mental hospital, after all, during the days when MKULTRA was running amok in that city.
Other parts are set in the past, when Jesuit missionaries ran equally amok among the Hurons and Montagnais in Quebec. The absent heroine of Beautiful Losers is Katherine Tekakwitha, a Mohawk saint, who survived the smallpox that killed off most of her tribe, and ended up dying as a result of her conversion to Catholicism.
There are references to the orphanage where the narrator, and his mentor F., were raised, and introduced to various forms of rampant abuse.
Leonard was barely thirty when he penned this epic, fuelled by amphetamines and perhaps just a trace of rage, which he disguises behind comedy.
Reading it now, it’s fairly obvious that Leonard knew quite a lot about Ewen Cameron and MKULTRA and the secret experiments on children, including First Nations children, at McGill. He also knew what happened to people who talked too openly about what they knew.
But how much did he know? Perhaps Beautiful Losers was written from bits and pieces of information Cohen heard, and cobbled together into a novel. Perhaps he did not directly witness these horrors, which he recounts in a hallucinatory stream of consciousness manner — after all, it was 1966, he had done LSD, and read The Lamp of Albion Moonlight,by Kenneth Patchen, a novel some say inspired this one
But hallucinations alone — even very well-informed hallucinations — don’t account for the parallels between the events described in Beautiful Losers, and the real, secret goings-on in behavioural labs at the Allan Memorial Institute, hub of secret CIA experiments on various hapless mental patients, and children.
The Nazi connection, which Cohen flirts with but does not develop, is plain to anyone, and now backed up by thousands of pages of declassified CIA documents. Not that those documents mention children, of course. If they did, my generation would have grown up a lot more quickly. We would have stopped believing in fairy tales a long time ago.
There are no documents that survived past 1973, when CIA director Stansfield Turner ordered his staff to shred every piece of evidence relating to one of the ugliest research programs ever to grace the halls of learning.
But Leonard Cohen mentions them in BEAUTIFUL LOSERS. Oh, not too directly, of course, but he alludes to orphans and pedophile scientists and priests, and paints a picture of a world that, back in those days, seemed like the fantasy product of a mind wasted by drugs.
Cohen, the whistleblower, twanging his Jews’ harp in the ruins of what used to be called The Free World.
Cohen the sly operative, shrewdly estimating the limits of what he could say in print. He knew if he told the simple truth, it would not be believed.
And he was right. Not ONE critic ever got the message. No one connected the obvious dots, or followed the trail of breadcrumbs that Leonard dropped for us in the woods. If they had, the trail would have led to the witch’s door, and straight to the oven.
It’s 40 years since Beautiful Losers was first published in 1996. And it’s time for us to reread it, with a copy of John Marks’ The Making of the Manchurian Candidate by our bedside, and our browsers poised to search for real, true stories of the orphans, children, First Nations children, pedophile priests, cynical politicians, and Nazi doctors… all of whom populate the pages of Beautiful Losers.
In mythic form, of course.
Is it surprising that I’ve tunnelled through libraries for news about victims?
Fictional victims! all the victims we ourselves do not murder of imprison…” p. 7
Still a brilliant literary diversion, this tour de force of style and showmanship is built on the bodies of the “fictional” victims whose graves Leonard graces with a book-length epitaph.
“I’ve poisoned the air, I’ve lost my erection.
Is it because I’ve stumbled on the truth about Canada?
City Fathers, kill me, for I have talked too much.” p. 37
Recently in an interview, Cohen called Beautiful Losers a long “prayer.” Strange, how religion tends to blur distinctions and wipe out memory: much like those drugs MKULTRA was giving out to all and sundry.
I hope you’ll go out and find an old copy, or buy the new edition, and decide for yourself.
UPDATED, December 2018
Yes. Unbelievably, I'm reading Beautiful Losers for the fourth time since I first read it sometime in the late sixties or early seventies.
"More of a sunstroke than a novel" is how Leonard described it ...
I've never loved it although I used to defend it on grounds that it was about something important that had happened in Montreal, my home town which back in the eighties needed defending. What exactly those events were - other than the more or less well known history of the Jesuits and the original peoples, and in particularly the Mohawks who gave the Church its first Amerindian saint, Keteri Tekatwitha. A story well worth telling, that I had never learned about in the English Protestant schools I attended, and on the face of it this is what Beautiful Losers is about. Except that it's not. It's actually more about the relationship between the nameless narrator, whom critics have named "I." and his talkative, domineering, sociopathic friend F. Although it begins with a coda in praise of Catherine Tekatwitha, giving the impression it really might have something to do with her, and eventually gets around to recounting details and scenes from her biography, C T never really comes to life as anything more than the tiny votive statue that to this day stands barely visible in a display case in the church of Notre Dame du Havre, where Leonard probably first saw her. Miracles have been ascribed to her, but the "I." of Beautiful Losers is no believer - more of a masturbator - a failed scholar in love with his love for the martyred Iroquois saint - and probably more in love with F. - a mysterious mentor-like monster who contracts syphilis and ends his days in a mental hospital from which he pens an interminable letter to "I." in the next to final chapter.
I hope I've got all that right. Despite the fact that this is my fourth time reading this 'novel' - to be honest I've never been able to overcome my boredom with the narrator and his never ending struggle to be funny. The fourth time around, this is even more obvious, especially in the long passages of sophomoric dialogue which even in 1966 must have seemed forced and silly to many readers. The truth is, I never liked Beautiful Losers but that doesnt stop me from thinking about it and rereading it, over the decades. I'm not the only one. It seems hundreds of critics have attempted to decode this novel. I've read very few of these critics but I know Stephen Scobie edited an entire volume of essays devoted to it - back in the 1980s - and I once skimmed it, but I'm just not interested in what critics have to say about it. The last one I came across explored the text in terms of its relationship to post-humanism and the modern technological era first described in depth by McLuhan in Understanding Media.
For my own part, I keep rereading Beautiful Losers to find something that is not there: a story, a true confession. Against all evidence, I seem to think I can penetrate the text with my X-ray vision and find the core that Cohen threw away when he wrote it, back in 1964 I think it was, on Hydra, on speed, with Marianne putting flowers on his writing table in the morning and making him little snacks to keep him going. Generally speaking, it was a lot of work and hot air for very little reward. He once told me he no longer had the strength to write another novel - the process is just too strenuous and exhausting and having written two or three myself, I agree with him -
People still read Beautiful Losers and since his death it has come out in a new edition which appears to be selling more than ever. And I notice, just as before, people are baffled and confused by it, and either hate it or love it - I'm much too old to be in the camp of the lovers and haters. But after all these years I do have a few things to say about it. They will no doubt fail to impress the professional critics who, unlike me, have been through the text with a fine tooth comb numerous times extracting every single flea, every clue, every imagistic pattern and motif, and whose thoughts are so profound I wont waste my time and theirs attempting to decipher their long-winded arguments. You can do that for yourself sometime when you have a few spare weeks or months to throw into that black hole.
But I will tell you what Beautiful Losers is not about: it's not about the truth. That's why it fully deserves to be called an elaborate fiction. But neither is it pure fiction as it uses facts as a springboard for the narrator's long monologue. It is a long evasive digression that I believe is intended to lead us into an unspeakable truth.
Behind the curtain of the text there stands the Wizard at the typewriter sweating on the terrace of his house on Hydra and likely stinking of amphetamines that he takes to fuel his writing. He doesnt want to be telling this story - he would like to be writing something closer to the truth. But he cant. The dedication hints at this: Steve Smith... and his dates. Who was Steve Smith? I have heard he was a poet. Why did he die age 21? Was it suicide? Or some other kind of death?
What drove the typewriter Wizard to Greece and before that England in 1959? What made him decide to sit down and weave this not very convincing hallucinatory prose poem and pass it off as a novel? Barrie Wexler claims BL was based on Kenneth Patchen's The Lamp of Albion Moonlight. The Beats were writing similar kinds of novels -- Kerouac's On the Road... Brion Gysin's The Process ...
So much for the style -- but there has to be more, a deeply buried theme, an overarching motif, driven by a burning desire to make sense of oneself ... or atone for something.
I think Cohen was atoning -- he was an atoner from Day One. Born on the Day of Atonement or close to it. A natural at it.
And personally i think he was atoning for his first novel, Ballet of Lepers. Which shares the same first letters as Beautiful Losers. Is there something to that? I think I read that Ballet of Lepers was the precursor to The Favourite Game. But I'd take a wild leap and say although it directly preceded TFG, Ballet of Lepers has more in common with Beautiful Losers -
The only way to read Ballet of Lepers is in manuscript form, at the Fischer Library. It's stored in a couple of folders in Box 2 (I think) of Cohen's archives. I spent an hour or so reading through it in the spring of 2017, and I have a fairly strong recollection of at least parts of it. I would call it enhanced autobiography written when Cohen was in his early 20s. Real people from his early life appear: his mother, grandfather, and the wife of a McGill professor whom he calls "Marian". Is this Marian Dale Scott, wife of poet and law professor F.R. Scott? And as an undergraduate did Cohen have an affair with her, with her husband's full knowledge and approval? And were the couple involved in, and did they induct young Leonard into a bizarre Crowley-ian cult (possibly linked to The Process Church) that met in Westmount mansions and held torchlight rituals on Mount Royal? And why are three pages missing from what appears to be an important scene in the middle of the novel?
Given all these questions, and the fact that I would probably not be the only one to recognize the characters and wonder what was going on at McGill when Leonard was a student -- I doubt Ballet of Lepers will ever be available in published form.
If it were, I think readers would make the same connections I am making between "Marian" and Marian Scott, and her eminent law professor husband, who in Ballet of Lepers is the leader of a bizarre pagan cult operating secretly at McGill -- and draw paralles between the situation of the married couple in Ballet of Lepers and the love triangle in Beautiful Losers involving 'I' Edith and F. And then they might hypothesize that this is one and the same triangle, and the same characters, viewed from the perspective of ten years later, with some new twists added e.g. it is F, who sleeps with the narrator's wife Edith - instead of the young Leonard-character who has an affair with the professor's wife. Not a difficult switch to pull, fictionally, and a way to throw the reader off the autobiographical trail.
People have tried to guess the identity of F. over the years. F. may well be a composite -- but he bears a strong resemblance to Leonard's mentor Frank Scott, commonly known by his initials F.R.
A mystery solved and a can of worms opened...
If F. is Frank Scott - and there are many reasons to think he is - then Beautiful Losers is less a confession than an accusation, although it is both. And it's a crime scene, not a comedy.
Retreating to Hydra to write his novel, Cohen took copious amounts of speed and did his best to write an experimental novel that would be stylistically innovative, shocking in content, and harbour a continous thread of documentary evidence of MKULTRA
It's not hard to imagine a young novelist taking on such an explosive project
especially if he had lived through the era described by MKULTRA survivors
of which he was one of the "success stories"
It's also not hard to imagine the reaction -- given that Canadian literature has been, in many ways, a creature of military intelligence
(PROVE -- give examples)
BL was attacked and praised
Not unlike the work of Arthur Lipsett, whose "obscure" films are a collage of details which are much more readable when considered in the light of experiments he must have known about, and possibly was part of (given his own history of schizophrenia, LSD)
BL is widely thought to be an avant garde work of imagination
Cohen's earlier novel, The Favourite Game, is a fairly autobiographical and only mildly unconventional coming of age story
If BL was a work of imagination, and if imagination were the motivating force behind Cohen's writing, we might expect him to have written a third and a fourth
After BL, Cohen wrote no more novels
Was he disappointed by the mixed response (and mediocre commercial success) generated by BL
Or by the public's inability to read through the surface and grasp the subtext: a Darwinian world populated by insane psychiatrists, a pedophile protagonist who is also bisexual and masochistic
In my opinion, LC's work was never driven by imagination
He has a healthy fascination with the mundane, current events, politics, and religion
Critics assume he invented the world of BL and some of his farther-out poems
I think this is part of the cultic mystery and fascination that surrounded him since the beginning of his career
In his poetry, Nazi doctors walk the halls of Montreal hospitals -- giving rise to the belief that he is a surrealist, a gifted fabulator, a master of black humour
He was all of these things of course, and many more
Monk, millionaire, man of action
What Cohen actually did was record a slice of subterranean life in Montreal
- not just his own, but a collective experience at the time which was carefully hidden
He then brought it out into the public and rode out the reaction.
Someone revealing carefully guarded secrets is in a precarious position and can expect various responses:
1 rejection
2 ridicule
3 threats
4 offers
Witness Julian Assange.
Whistleblowers can be blackmailed, or become blackmailers
Other details of Cohen's biography are highly ambiguous: in particular the Cuban adventure. But also his appearance as a ready-made media star ca. 1966 when the NFB presented him to the world (narrated by Don Britten) --
The MKULTRA program is into the third generation and appears to have been a more widespread phenomenon than we thought
It is clearly high on the list of Canadian taboos, but the internet is changing that.
Because it really happened, it deserves our urgent attention
We will be learning more about it in the days and years to come
Someone's post about the banality of evil reminded me of a classic Leonard Cohen poem:
ALL THERE IS TO KNOW ABOUT ADOLPH EICHMANN
EYES:…………………………………………..Medium
HAIR:…………………………………………..Medium
WEIGHT:………………………………………Medium
HEIGHT:……………………………………….Medium
DISTINGUISHING FEATURES:………………None
NUMBER OF FINGERS:………………………….Ten
NUMBER OF TOES:………………………………Ten
INTELLIGENCE:………………………………Medium
What did you expect?
Talons?
Oversize incisors?
Green saliva?
Madness?
from Flowers for Hitler (1964)
BACK IN 2010 OR SO I WROTE:
For the third time in my life as an ageing child of the sixties, I am reading Beautiful Losers.
The pyrotechnics of this much-acclaimed, maniacally experimental novel obscure the shocking truths it is woven around.
Genocide
Pedophilia
A hidden holocaust
MKULTRA mind control
Nazi experiments on human beings, in particular children
Cohen peppers the novel with references to this tragic story, but uses these horrors as comic triggers. The reader zigzags between heaven and hell, as the amphetamine-gulping narrator gropes for a missing moral centre in a world that has exploded.
When we read it in the sixties, we were shocked, thrilled and titillated. But, as Bob Dylan says, “Things have changed.”
Read in the light of what we know now about the classified goings-on at McGill during the years preceding the writing of this bizarre roman-a-clef, it tends to seem tragic.
Maybe there was even comedy at Auschwitz. I wouldn’t be surprised there were clowns in the barracks, loved for their ability to get a laugh out of the dying and soon-to-be-dead.
Human soap turns up several times in Beautiful Losers, as well. It’s one of those standards of holocaust humour, I guess.
Human soap is really the lighter side of Mengele’s experiments. Almost a euphemism for crimes so unspeakable they are never discussed. Thus the truth slips into the yawning abyss of amnesia, and a whole new generation of mind-controlled patriots are preparing to follow their leaders into Armageddon.
Still — in the light of the documents sitting in Washington, and all that has appeared on the internet and elsewhere over the last few years, as child victims recover their memories and voices and begin to publish their accounts of CIA torture, funded by our governments — Beautiful Losers seems strangely relevant today.
Part of it is set in a Montreal mental hospital, after all, during the days when MKULTRA was running amok in that city.
Other parts are set in the past, when Jesuit missionaries ran equally amok among the Hurons and Montagnais in Quebec. The absent heroine of Beautiful Losers is Katherine Tekakwitha, a Mohawk saint, who survived the smallpox that killed off most of her tribe, and ended up dying as a result of her conversion to Catholicism.
There are references to the orphanage where the narrator, and his mentor F., were raised, and introduced to various forms of rampant abuse.
Leonard was barely thirty when he penned this epic, fuelled by amphetamines and perhaps just a trace of rage, which he disguises behind comedy.
Reading it now, it’s fairly obvious that Leonard knew quite a lot about Ewen Cameron and MKULTRA and the secret experiments on children, including First Nations children, at McGill. He also knew what happened to people who talked too openly about what they knew.
But how much did he know? Perhaps Beautiful Losers was written from bits and pieces of information Cohen heard, and cobbled together into a novel. Perhaps he did not directly witness these horrors, which he recounts in a hallucinatory stream of consciousness manner — after all, it was 1966, he had done LSD, and read The Lamp of Albion Moonlight,by Kenneth Patchen, a novel some say inspired this one
But hallucinations alone — even very well-informed hallucinations — don’t account for the parallels between the events described in Beautiful Losers, and the real, secret goings-on in behavioural labs at the Allan Memorial Institute, hub of secret CIA experiments on various hapless mental patients, and children.
The Nazi connection, which Cohen flirts with but does not develop, is plain to anyone, and now backed up by thousands of pages of declassified CIA documents. Not that those documents mention children, of course. If they did, my generation would have grown up a lot more quickly. We would have stopped believing in fairy tales a long time ago.
There are no documents that survived past 1973, when CIA director Stansfield Turner ordered his staff to shred every piece of evidence relating to one of the ugliest research programs ever to grace the halls of learning.
But Leonard Cohen mentions them in BEAUTIFUL LOSERS. Oh, not too directly, of course, but he alludes to orphans and pedophile scientists and priests, and paints a picture of a world that, back in those days, seemed like the fantasy product of a mind wasted by drugs.
Cohen, the whistleblower, twanging his Jews’ harp in the ruins of what used to be called The Free World.
Cohen the sly operative, shrewdly estimating the limits of what he could say in print. He knew if he told the simple truth, it would not be believed.
And he was right. Not ONE critic ever got the message. No one connected the obvious dots, or followed the trail of breadcrumbs that Leonard dropped for us in the woods. If they had, the trail would have led to the witch’s door, and straight to the oven.
It’s 40 years since Beautiful Losers was first published in 1996. And it’s time for us to reread it, with a copy of John Marks’ The Making of the Manchurian Candidate by our bedside, and our browsers poised to search for real, true stories of the orphans, children, First Nations children, pedophile priests, cynical politicians, and Nazi doctors… all of whom populate the pages of Beautiful Losers.
In mythic form, of course.
Is it surprising that I’ve tunnelled through libraries for news about victims?
Fictional victims! all the victims we ourselves do not murder of imprison…” p. 7
Still a brilliant literary diversion, this tour de force of style and showmanship is built on the bodies of the “fictional” victims whose graves Leonard graces with a book-length epitaph.
“I’ve poisoned the air, I’ve lost my erection.
Is it because I’ve stumbled on the truth about Canada?
City Fathers, kill me, for I have talked too much.” p. 37
Recently in an interview, Cohen called Beautiful Losers a long “prayer.” Strange, how religion tends to blur distinctions and wipe out memory: much like those drugs MKULTRA was giving out to all and sundry.
I hope you’ll go out and find an old copy, or buy the new edition, and decide for yourself.
UPDATED, December 2018
Yes. Unbelievably, I'm reading Beautiful Losers for the fourth time since I first read it sometime in the late sixties or early seventies.
"More of a sunstroke than a novel" is how Leonard described it ...
I've never loved it although I used to defend it on grounds that it was about something important that had happened in Montreal, my home town which back in the eighties needed defending. What exactly those events were - other than the more or less well known history of the Jesuits and the original peoples, and in particularly the Mohawks who gave the Church its first Amerindian saint, Keteri Tekatwitha. A story well worth telling, that I had never learned about in the English Protestant schools I attended, and on the face of it this is what Beautiful Losers is about. Except that it's not. It's actually more about the relationship between the nameless narrator, whom critics have named "I." and his talkative, domineering, sociopathic friend F. Although it begins with a coda in praise of Catherine Tekatwitha, giving the impression it really might have something to do with her, and eventually gets around to recounting details and scenes from her biography, C T never really comes to life as anything more than the tiny votive statue that to this day stands barely visible in a display case in the church of Notre Dame du Havre, where Leonard probably first saw her. Miracles have been ascribed to her, but the "I." of Beautiful Losers is no believer - more of a masturbator - a failed scholar in love with his love for the martyred Iroquois saint - and probably more in love with F. - a mysterious mentor-like monster who contracts syphilis and ends his days in a mental hospital from which he pens an interminable letter to "I." in the next to final chapter.
I hope I've got all that right. Despite the fact that this is my fourth time reading this 'novel' - to be honest I've never been able to overcome my boredom with the narrator and his never ending struggle to be funny. The fourth time around, this is even more obvious, especially in the long passages of sophomoric dialogue which even in 1966 must have seemed forced and silly to many readers. The truth is, I never liked Beautiful Losers but that doesnt stop me from thinking about it and rereading it, over the decades. I'm not the only one. It seems hundreds of critics have attempted to decode this novel. I've read very few of these critics but I know Stephen Scobie edited an entire volume of essays devoted to it - back in the 1980s - and I once skimmed it, but I'm just not interested in what critics have to say about it. The last one I came across explored the text in terms of its relationship to post-humanism and the modern technological era first described in depth by McLuhan in Understanding Media.
For my own part, I keep rereading Beautiful Losers to find something that is not there: a story, a true confession. Against all evidence, I seem to think I can penetrate the text with my X-ray vision and find the core that Cohen threw away when he wrote it, back in 1964 I think it was, on Hydra, on speed, with Marianne putting flowers on his writing table in the morning and making him little snacks to keep him going. Generally speaking, it was a lot of work and hot air for very little reward. He once told me he no longer had the strength to write another novel - the process is just too strenuous and exhausting and having written two or three myself, I agree with him -
People still read Beautiful Losers and since his death it has come out in a new edition which appears to be selling more than ever. And I notice, just as before, people are baffled and confused by it, and either hate it or love it - I'm much too old to be in the camp of the lovers and haters. But after all these years I do have a few things to say about it. They will no doubt fail to impress the professional critics who, unlike me, have been through the text with a fine tooth comb numerous times extracting every single flea, every clue, every imagistic pattern and motif, and whose thoughts are so profound I wont waste my time and theirs attempting to decipher their long-winded arguments. You can do that for yourself sometime when you have a few spare weeks or months to throw into that black hole.
But I will tell you what Beautiful Losers is not about: it's not about the truth. That's why it fully deserves to be called an elaborate fiction. But neither is it pure fiction as it uses facts as a springboard for the narrator's long monologue. It is a long evasive digression that I believe is intended to lead us into an unspeakable truth.
Behind the curtain of the text there stands the Wizard at the typewriter sweating on the terrace of his house on Hydra and likely stinking of amphetamines that he takes to fuel his writing. He doesnt want to be telling this story - he would like to be writing something closer to the truth. But he cant. The dedication hints at this: Steve Smith... and his dates. Who was Steve Smith? I have heard he was a poet. Why did he die age 21? Was it suicide? Or some other kind of death?
What drove the typewriter Wizard to Greece and before that England in 1959? What made him decide to sit down and weave this not very convincing hallucinatory prose poem and pass it off as a novel? Barrie Wexler claims BL was based on Kenneth Patchen's The Lamp of Albion Moonlight. The Beats were writing similar kinds of novels -- Kerouac's On the Road... Brion Gysin's The Process ...
So much for the style -- but there has to be more, a deeply buried theme, an overarching motif, driven by a burning desire to make sense of oneself ... or atone for something.
I think Cohen was atoning -- he was an atoner from Day One. Born on the Day of Atonement or close to it. A natural at it.
And personally i think he was atoning for his first novel, Ballet of Lepers. Which shares the same first letters as Beautiful Losers. Is there something to that? I think I read that Ballet of Lepers was the precursor to The Favourite Game. But I'd take a wild leap and say although it directly preceded TFG, Ballet of Lepers has more in common with Beautiful Losers -
The only way to read Ballet of Lepers is in manuscript form, at the Fischer Library. It's stored in a couple of folders in Box 2 (I think) of Cohen's archives. I spent an hour or so reading through it in the spring of 2017, and I have a fairly strong recollection of at least parts of it. I would call it enhanced autobiography written when Cohen was in his early 20s. Real people from his early life appear: his mother, grandfather, and the wife of a McGill professor whom he calls "Marian". Is this Marian Dale Scott, wife of poet and law professor F.R. Scott? And as an undergraduate did Cohen have an affair with her, with her husband's full knowledge and approval? And were the couple involved in, and did they induct young Leonard into a bizarre Crowley-ian cult (possibly linked to The Process Church) that met in Westmount mansions and held torchlight rituals on Mount Royal? And why are three pages missing from what appears to be an important scene in the middle of the novel?
Given all these questions, and the fact that I would probably not be the only one to recognize the characters and wonder what was going on at McGill when Leonard was a student -- I doubt Ballet of Lepers will ever be available in published form.
If it were, I think readers would make the same connections I am making between "Marian" and Marian Scott, and her eminent law professor husband, who in Ballet of Lepers is the leader of a bizarre pagan cult operating secretly at McGill -- and draw paralles between the situation of the married couple in Ballet of Lepers and the love triangle in Beautiful Losers involving 'I' Edith and F. And then they might hypothesize that this is one and the same triangle, and the same characters, viewed from the perspective of ten years later, with some new twists added e.g. it is F, who sleeps with the narrator's wife Edith - instead of the young Leonard-character who has an affair with the professor's wife. Not a difficult switch to pull, fictionally, and a way to throw the reader off the autobiographical trail.
People have tried to guess the identity of F. over the years. F. may well be a composite -- but he bears a strong resemblance to Leonard's mentor Frank Scott, commonly known by his initials F.R.
A mystery solved and a can of worms opened...
If F. is Frank Scott - and there are many reasons to think he is - then Beautiful Losers is less a confession than an accusation, although it is both. And it's a crime scene, not a comedy.
Retreating to Hydra to write his novel, Cohen took copious amounts of speed and did his best to write an experimental novel that would be stylistically innovative, shocking in content, and harbour a continous thread of documentary evidence of MKULTRA
It's not hard to imagine a young novelist taking on such an explosive project
especially if he had lived through the era described by MKULTRA survivors
of which he was one of the "success stories"
It's also not hard to imagine the reaction -- given that Canadian literature has been, in many ways, a creature of military intelligence
(PROVE -- give examples)
BL was attacked and praised
Not unlike the work of Arthur Lipsett, whose "obscure" films are a collage of details which are much more readable when considered in the light of experiments he must have known about, and possibly was part of (given his own history of schizophrenia, LSD)
BL is widely thought to be an avant garde work of imagination
Cohen's earlier novel, The Favourite Game, is a fairly autobiographical and only mildly unconventional coming of age story
If BL was a work of imagination, and if imagination were the motivating force behind Cohen's writing, we might expect him to have written a third and a fourth
After BL, Cohen wrote no more novels
Was he disappointed by the mixed response (and mediocre commercial success) generated by BL
Or by the public's inability to read through the surface and grasp the subtext: a Darwinian world populated by insane psychiatrists, a pedophile protagonist who is also bisexual and masochistic
In my opinion, LC's work was never driven by imagination
He has a healthy fascination with the mundane, current events, politics, and religion
Critics assume he invented the world of BL and some of his farther-out poems
I think this is part of the cultic mystery and fascination that surrounded him since the beginning of his career
In his poetry, Nazi doctors walk the halls of Montreal hospitals -- giving rise to the belief that he is a surrealist, a gifted fabulator, a master of black humour
He was all of these things of course, and many more
Monk, millionaire, man of action
What Cohen actually did was record a slice of subterranean life in Montreal
- not just his own, but a collective experience at the time which was carefully hidden
He then brought it out into the public and rode out the reaction.
Someone revealing carefully guarded secrets is in a precarious position and can expect various responses:
1 rejection
2 ridicule
3 threats
4 offers
Witness Julian Assange.
Whistleblowers can be blackmailed, or become blackmailers
Other details of Cohen's biography are highly ambiguous: in particular the Cuban adventure. But also his appearance as a ready-made media star ca. 1966 when the NFB presented him to the world (narrated by Don Britten) --
The MKULTRA program is into the third generation and appears to have been a more widespread phenomenon than we thought
It is clearly high on the list of Canadian taboos, but the internet is changing that.
Because it really happened, it deserves our urgent attention
We will be learning more about it in the days and years to come
Someone's post about the banality of evil reminded me of a classic Leonard Cohen poem:
ALL THERE IS TO KNOW ABOUT ADOLPH EICHMANN
EYES:…………………………………………..Medium
HAIR:…………………………………………..Medium
WEIGHT:………………………………………Medium
HEIGHT:……………………………………….Medium
DISTINGUISHING FEATURES:………………None
NUMBER OF FINGERS:………………………….Ten
NUMBER OF TOES:………………………………Ten
INTELLIGENCE:………………………………Medium
What did you expect?
Talons?
Oversize incisors?
Green saliva?
Madness?
from Flowers for Hitler (1964)
5 comments:
"much too old to be in the camp of the lovers and haters" -- yes.
"Canadian literature has been, in many ways, a creature of military intelligence" -- because CANADA has been, in many ways, a creature of military intelligence.
"(PROVE -- give examples)" -- Buchan, for one, AKA Lord Tweedsmuir, author of the German-vilificatory 'The Thirty-Nine Steps' (1915), 'Greenmantle' (1916) & cetera, and devisor of the Governor-General's Award awarded to --and turned down by-- Cohen in 1968, for Selected Poems 1956-68. (Cohen did attend the ceremony).
One cannot say the boy was not promoted. Wiki dixit:
In 1966, the CBC called Beautiful Losers "one of the most radical and extraordinary works of fiction ever published in Canada", and quoted a critic from the Boston Globe who positively compared the work with the fiction of James Joyce.
For some reason I'm thinking of William Stephenson aka The Man Called Intrepid, who I recently learned was associated with a spy training camp in Ontario, the mysterious "Camp X" now renamed Intrepid Park. Also visited during the war by Ian Fleming who worked for MI6.
Innumerable spies and ex spies reinvent themselves as writers, as we all know.
But when I wrote this long ago I was probably thinking of various editors and Creative writing professors I had encountered over the years. I had found out every single one of them had a military background. Strange, that.
Scott told his biographer Sandra Djwa (interview, 1975 Jan 8) that he had recommended Cohen for a (the?) Canada Council grant.
Also from Djwa's book The Politics of the Imagination: A Life of F.R. Scott (1987) :
'For Cohen, visits to Clarke Avenue were 'warm and wonderful [with] a very open fluid atmosphere; lots of fun; drinking; and talk of politics and poetry.' And Marian and Frank began to visit the downtown Montreal clubs where Leonard was beginning to perform with his guitar. Cohen, in turn, was invited to North Hatley to stay with the Scotts at their summer cottage. once when Cohen arrived in some personal turmoil, he found Scott sitting quietly in his wicker chair on the long verandah. the house, built on the slope of a hill, was surrounded by trees. Scott, sensing the younger man's agitation, motioned to the autumn leaves, saying 'Just let it work on you.'' (interview with Cohen, 1983 Jan 9)
'He tried to share with Cohen this feeling of peace. And he helped the younger man to write by encouraging him to stay at his brother Elton's cabin further up the lake, a sparse wooden lean-to Scott had used as a summer retreat in earlier days. There, in 1957, Cohen began to write The Spice Box of Earth and in 1958 he stayed longer and worked on The Favourite Game. His poem 'Summer Haiku: For Frank and Marian Scott' reflects some of the peace he found at North Hatley:
Silence
and a deeper silence
when the crickets
hesitate.
Carved into a rock over many years of successive visits, this haiku was ultimately presented to the Scotts at North Hatley, where it became a doorstop for the summer house.' (interview with Doug Jones, 1983 August 9)
And this anecdote from Westmount '66, based on Djwa's interview with Dudek (1979, April 26) :
'Scott, always extraordinarily open to new people and new experiences, was introduced, by Cohen, to the new pop poetry of the late fifties and sixties -- the Bob Dylan of Blonde on Blonde and Bringing it All Back Home. This occurred early in 1966 when Scott planned a poetry party. He contrived an invitation, 'The EDGE of the PRISM,' which brought together the names of many little mags started by the proposed guests. [...] Layton, Dudek, Purdy, Gustafson, and a number of others came, including Cohen. As Dudek and Scott recalled, Cohen brought out his guitar and said:
'What are these poets doing, all writing poetry the way they used to? Do you know who the greatest poet in America is?'
'Who?'
'Bob Dylan!'
'Who's he?'
'Don't you know? He's already made a million dollars.'
'Then he can't be the greatest poet in the world.'
'Don't you know his records?'
'Where can you get them?'
'National Music Store.'
Scott dashed out with the names of four records, found they cost $6.95, and bought two. Back at Clarke Avenue he interrupted the general conversation to put on one of the records that Cohen described as 'very good music, very good poetry. it's the greatest poetry of the century'. Then, in Scott's words, 'the music began to blare such as never had been heard in these halls before.'
'At that point Al Purdy 'bounded out of the room as though booted from behind,' saying 'It's an awful bore. I can't listen to any more of this.' He went to the kitchen, probably to get more beer. Cohen's presentation of Dylan as a great poet was 'a great fiasco' because, as Dudek reflects, 'no one thought him any good.' At this point Cohen told the assembled poets that there was an audience out there waiting for him. He would be the new Bob Dylan, a claim no one believed.
'Scott's plan for the day had been 'drinks, lunch, sit around and rest, resume and then go to see two films from the National Film Board.' They saw a Klein film, 'A.M. Klein: The Poet as Landscape,' followed by 'Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Cohen,' a film Cohen declined to see. After five they came back, rested, had pre-supper drinks and finally dinner. Around ten the conversation began to flag. Scott asked, 'Would you like to hear that Bob Dylan record again?' This time everyone got up and danced -- 'the new rhythms and the beer were having their effect.' And Scott added yet another new experience to his list.'
Interesting. Including the part about "turmoil" before he began writing Spice Box. Thanks for posting!
Post a Comment