Driving that souped-up Buick to the end of love can tear a poor singer in two: revisiting Leonard Cohen's Death of a Lady's Man 30 years on

I’ve long dreamed of writing an essay that would focus solely on a subject of some personal obsession: the great divorce albums made in the broadly defined rock idiom. The list would be necessarily short, as my criteria are severe. Obviously, Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks sets the mould. Nick Cave’s The Boatman’s Call makes every cut, as does Lee Hazelwood’s Requiem for an Almost Lady and Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear. But whenever I get to thinking about Leonard Cohen, the question isn’t whether he’s got a record that qualifies but which one to choose. Romantic relationships have about as much chance of surviving a Cohen record as a hot turkey sandwich at a teamster’s meeting. Further reflection illuminated the dilemma: Cohen’s one great work of relentless lament for broken love isn’t a record at all, but a book.

Not to be confused with his much maligned but actually quite inventive, weirdly moving and brazenly snappy Death of a Ladies’ Man, the 1977 record produced by Phil Spector, who, more or less insane, apparently homicidal, usually drunk and frequently wielding various weaponry, almost resulted in Cohen’s actual death, Death of a Lady’s Man—a very similar title with a very different meaning—is the volume of poetry Cohen released the following year—yet another entry into this summer’s ongoing theme of under-loved books by famous writers from 1978.

Like all Cohen’s work, it dares to go “to the end of love” and crawl toward some modest redemption. It’s full of humour and eloquence, raw sex and verbal play. Like some of Cohen’s work, it arrives at these elements through endearing feats of irony, bouts of deadpan hysteria and an ongoing sliding between grandiose pomposity and self-flagellation. I would argue it’s some kind of masterpiece, inspired, audacious and gutting, a meta-volume of multiple reflections and sly digressions that arrive at truth through covert means, like bank robbers tunneling in from the basement of the lingerie store down the block.

‘I Knelt Beside a Stream’ opens the collection with mock-heroic language and disquieting allusions to the author’s passive participation in his doomed plunge into love—which, with Cohen, always spells a deadly threat to meditation, mental health and artistic creation. The speaker kneels beside a stream manifesting on a wooden floor in Upper Manhattan, where a feathered shield is placed on his arm, a feathered helmet on his head. “This made me feel so good,” he explains, “I climbed up on Alexandra’s double bed and wept in a general way for the fate of men.” Somewhere in here he finds himself submitting to Alexandra’s suggestion to worship her, which he does for ten years. “Thus began the obscene silence of my career as a lady’s man.”

What immediately follows this poem is of equal importance as the poem itself. Shit, maybe more. Like the vast majority of poems here, ‘Stream’ is supplemented with a commentary written so that it seems the author’s either a separate person from the poet, at least as separate as the incompatible selves at work in Cohen’s double life as artist/ascetic and lady’s man. These commentaries function as a notebook archeology, exposing excerpts from other unpublished writings—especially something called Final Revision of My Life in Art—that deepen or at least perversely twist our reading. Just as often they decry what’s false, preposterous or embarrassing about the poems.

The commentary for ‘The Café,’ where the poet’s taken “a drug that makes me want to talk,” expands on the six-lines of verse with an explanation as to what happened to the titular locale: “Upon inquiry, I discovered that it had been demolished and the marble tabletops thrown into the harbour.” The evidence of Cohen’s actions cagily described in the poem has been lost to time. Implied is some willful amnesia, a way of escaping feelings too complicated to sort out in the reasonable, detached approach of the commentator, the poet’s adversary, the aggressive apologist for this book which had already been sent to Cohen’s publisher and pulled from publication several times before.

With its vague resemblance to Nabokov’s Pale Fire, the doubling structure offers resolution found only through cold self-analysis and a balm for the reader upset by the author’s surges of violent resentment and reeling marital anxiety, ie: “You fucking whore, I thought you were really interested in music.” Gradually, however, we realize the commentator is as susceptible to emotional torrents as the poet. He too becomes illucid, digressive, overwhelmed by his project. The disparate personae of these two Cohens slowly collapses, the commentator finally tossing out fragmentary statements as enigmatic as the book’s briefest poems: “They should cast your cunt in chrome for the radiator cap of a Buick.” (Why a Buick? I’ve always wondered this. Perhaps you’d have to be a motorist in 1978 to get that.)

There is a narrative poem about carrying luggage and waiting for a boat with one’s wife that never fails to sweep me up. There’s a poem where the flow of Montreal traffic is narrated as an unsuccessful attempt at forgetting a woman. There’s one that gives the finest advice on performing poetry since Hamlet, and one ostensibly authored by Cohen’s spiritual mentor that is the best piece of verse ever written about a cricket’s girlfriend. And there is a lovely pair of poems quite near the end that steps back from emotional clamour to take note of a nine-year-old girl’s face that appears in the window and stares. Though typically spare, the shape of Death of a Lady’s Man is unruly, suitably so, fraught with alienating effects, yet few chronicles of disastrous love pierce the heart so brutishly. Cohen’s time as a lady’s man didn’t actually kill him, or his art. But something always dies in such melees, just as something of the other always burrows within us afterwards. I’m grateful that he took this fatalist metaphor to such sumptuous extremes. He really took off the kid gloves with this one.

Guy down in front next to the lady, he's our man in Panama: a comic chronicle of heartache, humiliation and pathology in Key West, circa 1978

I have never been to Key West, Florida. At least not, you know, in the conventional sense. But I have written about it, several times in fact, and what’s more I even wrote about Key West for the people of Key West. My pal Paul moved down there and got me a gig with a local magazine, interviewing Key Westers or, in any case, people somehow associated with the place, however incredibly tangentially. I’d talk to them and then write about our conversation in such a way that made it seem like I personally had something profound to say about Key West, even pretending it was a place I could in some way call home. The ruse was encouraged by my superiors. It was weirdly fun.

Most of what I do know about Key West I learned the same highly dubious way I learn most things: from reading fiction. Key West’s literary history is of course formidable, with its Hemingways and Tennessees and Elizabeth Bishops, though the period that really got me interested occured after their time, a period that previous to this gig I knew absolutely zilch about. Everyone I’ve ever talked to about Key West seemed to talk about what the place was like in the 70s, the time before colossal gentrification, the time of locally sanctioned madness, cheap real estate, too many guns, too many drugs, rampant corruption and literary outlaws. And I don’t know that any one figure seemed to sum up that time better than Thomas McGuane, a.k.a. Captain Berserko. Dude was so crazy he even married Margot Kidder. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t live there anymore.

The McGuane novel that everyone considers to be the his defining Key West work is Ninety-two in the Shade (1973), which he himself eventually made into an amiably off the wall movie with Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton and Kidder (enough said). But the one that strikes me as the genuine article, the one that comes closest to mapping out the particular pathology of that era/place/generation is in fact the novel McGuane took his biggest critical whipping for, largely on account of its disquieting degree of autobiographical content delivered in the treacherous wake of McGuane’s time spent courting Hollywood and seducing starlets. Literary types tend to find it distasteful when ostensibly serious writers overstep the boundaries of literary celebrity, and Panama (78), dragged McGuane’s private hysteria and public fumbles out into the open. You ask me, it’s a hell of a book, that much better—not to mention funnier—than its predecessor for laying its heart so crudely bare—though like Ninety-two, the mercurial comic prose is in high gear.

Panama’s protagonist is one Chester Pomeroy, returning to Key West to lick his wounds following some sort of debacle, or a perhaps series of them. The back cover blub explains that Chester’s a washed-up rock star, though you’d never glean that from anything described in the meat of the novel. He mentions being on tour, seems to like music, and at one point recalls having lunch with Jean-Luc Godard, but the way he conveys his past vocational adventures tends to be willfully oblique and/or surreally embellished: “I was making a tremendous living demonstrating, with the aplomb of a Fuller brush salesman, all the nightmares, all the loathsome, toppling states of mind, all the evil things that go on behind closed eyes. When I crawled out of the elephant’s ass, it was widely felt I’d gone too far; and when I puked on the mayor, that was it, I was through. I went home to Key West and voted for Carter.”

Chester’s two central concerns upon his return, the poles of some Oedipal wish-fulfillment, are: a reunion with Catherine, a woman he apparently married years ago in Panama, though neither can remember the ceremony, a woman he publicly insulted at some point in his blurry past but whom he still loves with an aching force, so much so that he stalks her in super markets and actually nails his left hand to her door while super-loaded on Bolivian cocaine; and to continue denying that his father is still alive, wealthy and boring, rather than a store detective who died of smoke inhalation in a Boston subway fire years ago. This is just one example of our hero’s selective or severely damaged recall skills. Chester’s memory issues are offered some degree of remedy when Catherine hires a private detective to follow him around so as to report back later on his actions. Yet in Chester’s first-person narration there’s never anything less than a rich sense of someone less than obsessed with coming to terms with his own identity. In an especially memorable moment, that sense of self-actualization is specifically concerned with how his relationship to place: “I didn’t know what I was, not a Southerner certainly. A Floridian. Drugs, alligators, macadam, the sea, sticky sex, laughter, and sudden death.”

In a certain sense Panama is a novel of redemption, though the shape or value of this redemption is hardly clearly defined or entirely resolved. It is a sort of staggering celebration of self-implosion and fiery bullshit, and a treatise on the limitations of willing oneself toward insanity. And it’s thick with a palpable, desperate heartache that refuses to surrender to the notion of a polite, quiet laying down of arms in romantic battle. What’s important too is that it speaks so specifically of a geography and a people as an entry point into persona and story. Whether or not the Key West of Panama really existed matters less than the fact that only Key West, that crazed, slightly suicidal Key West of the 70s, could have helped give birth to this heartfelt, daring, extraordinary goof of a novel.

Snow, apparitions, death, birth, gambling, war and beestiality: these are but a few samples of What the Crow Said

In some regards, it was as though the book itself, our book, was at once magical and realistic. Maybe 15 years ago my old buddy Rich had found it in a house under construction in a Calgary subdivision while drunk. He carried it home and, in accordance with his perverse habit, quickly removed the dust jacket and chucked it—his bookshelves are lined with such appallingly denuded volumes. He then made a pot of coffee and read it all through the night. When he split with his girl the year following she took the book to Vancouver and he moved to the Yukon, yet months later he found it again nestled between catalogues in the washroom of a mutual friend who claimed to have no memory of its arrival.

In an act he’d later regret, Rich lent the book to me not long after their reunion. It went from this point to live in the trunk of my car for years, traveling with me all over this end of the country, unread and forgotten. The car is long gone, and I assumed I’d lost the book until finally, just last year, I found it again, taking refuge in my parents’ basement following a flood. So it was only during this last week that, with the coming of Canada Day and an accompanying desire to fulfill old promises I read the damned thing, weirdly spellbound, exactly 30 years after it’s publication. It starts like this:

“People, years later, blamed everything on the bees; it was the bees, they said, seducing Vera Lang, that started everything. How the town came to prosper, and then to decline, and how the road never got built, the highway that would have joined the town and the municipality to the world beyond, and how the sky itself, finally, took umbrage: it was all because one afternoon in April the swarming bees found Vera Lang asleep, there is a patch of wild flowers on the edge of the valley.”

Vera Lang’s impregnation by bees among the grasses of Big Knife, a particularly vulnerable settlement perched ambiguously on the border of Alberta and Saskatchewan, looms indeed as an omen of all that ultimately passes in Robert Kroetsch’s What the Crow Said. Summoning up the sort of only half-fathomable eroticism that is exclusive to literature, Kroetsch describes Vera’s body as “singing like a telephone wire… her belly tightening to the push and rub of her myriad unthinking lovers,” while every other inhabitant of Big Knife is suddenly seized with the sudden awareness of a catalytic event occurring in their midst, even the boys at school who collectively guess “they were confronting a mystery greater than any they were ever expected to or would ever learn.”

Kroetsch’s narrator, not unreliable but rather openly uncertain, follows Vera’s insect tryst with stories of deaths foretold, an unyielding winter, the erection of a prairie lighthouse, ghosts, countless strange killings, a child raised by wolves who becomes a meteorological prophet, a sex-crazed Frenchman convicted of murder who invents a flying machine and escapes from jail to seek out Vera’s love letter-writing little sister, still more inexplicable pregnancies, and of course the arrival and eventual departure of the cantankerous and possibly sagely talking crow of the title. Kroetsch’s characters are perpetually struggling to come to terms with the unpredictable wrath of both nature and machine, not to mention human desire. One even goes so far as to deny the existence of gravity. Their stories emerge from Kroetsch’s adoption of magic realism, an experiment, rarely fashionable among the literati, that’s likely kept What the Crow Said from being regarded with the esteem given to Kroetsch’s best-known novels, The Studhorse Man, Gone Indian and Badlands. Yet Kroetsch deserves credit for recognizing the genre’s utter suitability for conveying of tall tales told in prairie taverns and communities whose lives depend on the caprices of weather in a place where the weather makes no fucking sense at all. And Kroetsch handles the medium with ribald comic invention, making for a very entertaining, audacious and frequently poetic read.

Magical explanations seem not to be the whimsy of Big Knifeans but rather a coping mechanism for difficult lives concerned with fertility, family, land and effective negotiation with animals. These people, mostly weak, distracted men and formidable, hard-working women, suffer to hilarious extremes. For much of the novel’s mid-section the town's men become ensnared in a game of schmier from which they are unable to escape for months, like the victims of spell that would normally be dreamed up by Luis Buñuel for the bourgeoisie of France or Mexico. The game moves from locale to locale, the men rotting away in the process. “Men lay in their own vomit, gagging and crying. Husbands ignored the entreaties of their wives, fathers denied so much as a nickel or dime to the children waiting in parked cars…” The addiction represents a catastrophe built on boredom, frustration and susceptibility to games of chance that resonates with anyone whose spent any time in a some rural Chinese Canadian restaurant with a VLT machine plugged into a corner socket, occupied for hours at a time by some hypnotized old timer unable to even remove his parka.

It’s in this manner that the greater truths are found through exaggeration. Kroetsch’s use of magic realism is come by honestly because he so clearly recognizes that the fantastical elements in his story must possess an intuitive logic. Kroetsch is of course a prairie boy himself, born 81 years ago in Heisler, and by the time of What the Crow Said was well into a career that capitalized on his understanding of Albertan vastness, xenophobia, and terror. All of this was, if I recall correctly, stuff Rich was trying to tell me when he placed the book in my hands all those years ago, back when its corners were crisp and pages un-yellowed. But sometimes a book, just like the rains that end a prairie drought, just needs some extra time to get to you.