one of us cannot be wrong

"A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility … I think it has something to do with the energy of love.”

It's often easier to tear open and pick at the things you dislike most about someone you love. I had a hard time even beginning to write about Leonard Cohen's first novel, The Favorite Game, in an earlier post. I fairly tripped all over myself and still only managed to stutter "it's my favorite." Whatever it touches in me is apparently too deep to articulate. Instead, I find myself looking at its opposite, his second novel, Beautiful Losers (1966). And though even his most effectively sensual songs tread perilously close to becoming overwrought and chauvinistic (and I'll admit to loving more than a few that slip there), for me, BL is a book that reveals his sometime tendency toward vulgarity and misogyny. It's the paperback equivalent of "Death of a Ladies Man." The Favorite Game produced by Phil Spector. All you need to know are the track titles to understand. Not that I have a real issue with vulgarity, it has a place and a purpose as with many uncomfortable things. It's just that some people wear it better than others. Woody Allen comes to mind as one who should never try it on--sitting through Husbands and Wives felt like watching a movie whose script had been written by a child that had just learned saying "f*ck" would startle the guests. Don't get me wrong, the book is stunningly well-written, and a complex achievement in language and metaphor.

Where does it deviate? Well, that's its whole purpose. We are told that Beautiful Losers is the story of a Jewish scholar (who is never named, thereby removing his humanity), his wife, Edith (who is the only one of the three without a narrative voice, thereby removing her humanity), and their friend and her lover F., a Military Police Officer with anarchist tendencies (which only proves him contrary ...). The novel is in three parts, under the affected titles of "Books" one through three: the husband's story of the relationship between the three; F.’s letter and confession to his friend, and “Beautiful Losers,” a third-person epilogue. There are deceptions and affairs and death; powerlessness and power plays; desire and sexual disassociation. And then there is Catherine Tekakwitha, the first Native American saint. I'm not sure it's early enough in the evening for me to begin on all of this. As his fans know, Cohen's bothered self-image about his Jewish upbringing in hyper-Catholic Montreal, Canada have always appeared in his writing. His allusions to the bible are never far from the surface if they dare go under at all, and as ever, he steals out of it with the skill of one who has suffered under its weight. Here he mixes the spiritual with the political; in this case Catholic obsessions that infect his characters with regard to Saint Tekakwitha and the question of how to marry that with what the secular poets and philosophers taught us to see in history, how that relates to the divine that is still held onto, and the self-doubt, and worse, self-loathing it creates. It is a return to one of Cohen's favorite prophets, Isaiah, and Isaiah's study of the political and historical through poetry. Here, however, he (meaning Cohen) only finds cynicism and despair--the divine world has failed, history is a hopeless cycle of pain, and the Messiah is lost.

If it all sounds fascinating to you, well, it is. So whither the vulgarity? A reviewer in Canada's newspaper The Globe and Mail described it as "verbal masturbation," and that is apt. And I suppose, a heck of an accomplishment, too. Amidst all of this richness, is how he corrupts all of the philosophical above and how he twists his often referred to elements in relationships between characters (be it in song or text); teacher and pupil; master and disciple. Here, instead of the slow-burn sensuality he uses the biblical pain of experience that he recognizes so well, and has his characters unleash it on each other. And it's ugly. It's ugly what they do to each other, their games and psychological tortures, and it's ugly in how it's described; made more so because he uses the power of the lyrical elements that he is master of to tell it all.

On an early edition, there is a description on the jacket flap that reads, "[Beautiful Losers] is a disagreeable religious epic of incomparable beauty." It is, yes, it is that. Perhaps I would be more forgiving if it had come from another of my men. I don't know.

[Cohen photo by J. Nisbet]