Beautiful Losers Read online

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  Beautiful Losers

  “Fuses sexuality with spirituality … mystical and profane, poetic and obscene … an invitation to play Russian roulette with a phallic pistol.”

  – Kirkus Reviews

  “Cohen is a writer of terrific energy and colour, a Rabelaisian comic and a visualizer of memorable scenes.”

  – London Observer (U.K.)

  “Brilliant, explosive, a fountain of talent.… James Joyce is not dead … he lives under the name of Cohen … writing from the point of view of Henry Miller.”

  – Boston Herald

  “A fantasied eroticism which is wildly funny.… An exciting book.”

  – Sunday Times (U.K.)

  “The literary counterpart of Hair on the stage and Easy Rider on the screen.”

  – Daily Telegraph (U.K.)

  “Leaves one gasping for breath as well as suitable words.… Cohen is a powerful, poetic writer.”

  – Dallas Times Herald

  BY LEONARD COHEN

  FICTION

  The Favourite Game (1963)

  Beautiful Losers (1966)

  POETRY

  Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956)

  The Spice-Box of Earth (1961)

  Flowers for Hitler (1964)

  Parasites of Heaven (1966)

  Selected Poems, 1956-1968 (1968)

  The Energy of Slaves (1972)

  Death of a Lady’s Man (1978)

  Book of Mercy (1984)

  Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs (1993)

  ALBUMS

  Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967)

  Songs From a Room (1969)

  Songs of Love and Hate (1971)

  Live Songs (1972)

  New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1973)

  The Best of Leonard Cohen (1975)

  Death of a Ladies’ Man (1977)

  Recent Songs (1979)

  Various Positions (1984)

  I’m Your Man (1988)

  The Future (1992)

  Cohen Live (1994)

  More Best of (1997)

  Field Commander Cohen (2001)

  Ten New Songs (2001)

  The Essential Leonard Cohen (2002)

  Dear Heather (2004)

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, November 1993

  Copyright © 1966 by Leonard Cohen

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover by The Viking Press, Inc., New York, and McClelland and Stewart Limited, Toronto, in 1966.

  Lyrics quoted on this page–this page are from “It Hurt Me Too” by Merald Knight, Marvin Gaye, and William Stevens. Copyright © 1962 by Jobete Music Co., Inc./Stone Agate Music. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cohen, Leonard, 1934–2016

  Beautiful losers / by Leonard Cohen.—1st Vintage Books ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Men—Canada—Fiction. 2. Death—Fiction. 3. Grief—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PR9199.3.C57B4 1993

  813′.54—dc20 93-10916

  CIP

  Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-679-74825-0

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-77857-4

  Cover design by Susan Mitchell

  Cover photograph by Lee Friedman

  v3.1_r1

  for Steve Smith (1943-1964)

  Somebody said lift that bale.

  – RAY CHARLES singing “Ol’ Man River”

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Leonard Cohen

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Book I The History of Them All

  Book II A Long Letter from F.

  Book III Beautiful Losers

  An Epilogue in the Third Person

  About the Author

  1

  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, better-looking now than when I was young. That’s what sitting on your ass does to your face. I’ve come after you, Catherine Tekakwitha. I want to know what goes on under that rosy blanket. Do I have any right? 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. There was a river behind you, no doubt the Mohawk River. Two birds in the left foreground would be delighted if you tickled their white throats or even if you used them as an example of something or other in a parable. 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. Could you teach me about leaves? Do you know anything about narcotic mushrooms? Lady Marilyn just died a few years ago. May I say that some old scholar four hundred years from now, maybe of my own blood, will come after her in the way I come after you? But right now you must know more about heaven. Does it look like one of these little plastic altars that glow in the dark? I swear I won’t mind if it does. Are the stars tiny, after all? Can an old scholar find love at last and stop having to pull himself off every night so he can get to sleep? I don’t even hate books any more. I’ve forgotten most of what I’ve read and, frankly, it never seemed very important to me or to the world. My friend F. used to say in his hopped-up fashion: We’ve got to learn to stop bravely at the surface. We’ve got to learn to love appearances. F. died in a padded cell, his brain rotted from too much dirty sex. His face turned black, this I saw with my own eyes, and they say there wasn’t much left of his prick. A nurse told me it looked like the inside of a worm. Salut F., old and loud friend! I wonder if your memory will persist. And you, Catherine Tekakwitha, if you must know, I am so human as to suffer from constipation, the rewards of a sedentary life. Is it any wonder I have sent my heart out into the birch trees? Is it any wonder that an old scholar who never made much money wants to climb into your Technicolor postcard?

  2

  I am a well-known folklorist, an authority on the A——s, a tribe I have no intention of disgracing by my interest. There are, perhaps, ten full-blooded A——s left, four of them teen-age girls. I will add that F. took fall advantage of my anthropological status to fuck all four of them. Old friend, you paid your dues. The A——s seem to have made their appearance in the fifteenth century, or rather, a sizable remnant of the tribe. Their brief history is characterized by incessant defeat. The very name of the tribe, A————, is the word for corpse in the language of all the neighboring tribes. There is no record that this unfortunate people ever won a single battle, while the songs and legends of its enemies are virtually nothing but a sustained howl of triumph. My interest in this pack of failures betrays my character. Borrowing money from me, F. often said: Thanks, you old A———! Catherine Tekakwitha, do you listen?

  3

  Catherine Tekakwitha, I have come to rescue you from the Jesuits. Yes, an old scholar dares to think big. I don’t know what they are saying about you these days because my Latin is almost defunct. “Que le succès couronne nos espérances, et nous verrons sur les autels, auprès des Martyrs canadiens, une Vierge iroquoise – près des roses du martyre le his de la virginité.” A note by one Ed. L., S.J., written in August 1926. But what does it matter? I don’t want to carry my old belligerent life on my journey up the Mohawk River. Pace, Company of Jesus! F. said: A strong man cannot but love the Church. Catherine Tekakwitha, what care we if they cast you in plaster? I am at present studying the plans of a birch-bark canoe. Your brethren have forgotten how to build them. And what if there is a plastic reproduction of your little body
on the dashboard of every Montréal taxi? It can’t be a bad thing. Love cannot be hoarded. Is there a part of Jesus in every stamped-out crucifix? I think there is. Desire changes the world! What makes the mountainside of maple turn red? Peace, you manufacturers of religious trinkets! You handle sacred material! Catherine Tekakwitha, do you see how I get carried away? How I want the world to be mystical and good? Are the stars tiny, after all? Who will put us to sleep? Should I save my fingernails? Is matter holy? I want the barber to bury my hair. Catherine Tekakwitha, are you at work on me already?

  4

  Marie de l’Incarnation, Marguerite Bourgeoys, Marie-Marguerite d’Youville, maybe you could arouse me if I could move out of myself. I want to get as much as I can. F. said that he’d never once heard of a female saint he wouldn’t like to have screwed. What did he mean? F., don’t tell me that at last you are becoming profound. F. once said: At sixteen I stopped fucking faces. I had occasioned the remark by expressing disgust at his latest conquest, a young hunchback he had met while touring an orphanage. F. spoke to me that day as if I were truly one of the underprivileged; or perhaps he was not speaking to me at all when he muttered: Who am I to refuse the universe?

  5

  The French gave the Iroquois their name. Naming food is one thing, naming a people is another, not that the people in question seem to care today. If they never cared, so much the worse for me: I’m far too willing to shoulder the alleged humiliations of harmless peoples, as evidenced by my life work with the A——s. Why do I feel so lousy when I wake up every morning? Wondering if I’m going to be able to shit or not. Is my body going to work? Will my bowels churn? Has the old machine turned the food brown? Is it surprising that I’ve tunneled through libraries after news about victims? Fictional victims! All the victims we ourselves do not murder or imprison are fictional victims. I live in a small apartment building. The bottom of the elevator shaft is accessible through the sub-basement. While I sat downtown preparing a paper on lemmings she crawled into the elevator shaft and sat there with her arms around her drawn-up knees (or so the police determined from the mess). I came home every night at twenty to eleven, regular as Kant. She was going to teach me a lesson, my old wife. You and your fictional victims, she used to say. Her life had become gray by imperceptible degrees, for I swear, that very night, probably at the exact moment when she was squeezing into the shaft, I looked up from the lemming research and closed my eyes, remembering her as young and bright, the sun dancing in her hair as she sucked me off in a canoe on Lake Orford. We were the only ones who lived in the sub-basement, we were the only ones who commanded the little elevator into those depths. But she taught no one a lesson, not the kind of lesson she meant. A delivery boy from the Bar-B-Q did the dirty work by misreading the numbers on a warm brown paper bag. Edith! F. spent the night with me. He confessed at 4 a.m. that he’d slept with Edith five or six times in the twenty years he’d known her. Irony! We ordered chicken from the same place and we talked about my poor squashed wife, our fingers greasy, barbecue-sauce drops on the linoleum. Five or six times, a mere friendship. Could I stand on some holy mountain of experience, a long way off, and sweetly nod my Chinese head over their little love? What harm had been done to the stars? You lousy facker, I said, how many times, five or six? Ah, F. smiled, grief makes us precise! So let it be known that the Iroquois, the brethren of Catherine Tekakwitha, were given the name Iroquois by the French. They called themselves Hodenosaunee, which means People of the Long House. They had developed a new dimension to conversation. They ended every speech with the word hiro, which means: like I said. Thus each man took full responsibility for intruding into the inarticulate murmur of the spheres. To hiro they added the word koué, a cry of joy or distress, according to whether it was sung or howled. Thus they essayed to pierce the mysterious curtain which hangs between all talking men: at the end of every utterance a man stepped back, so to speak, and attempted to interpret his words to the listener, attempted to subvert the beguiling intellect with the noise of true emotion. Catherine Tekakwitha, speak to me in Hiro-Koué. I have no right to mind what the Jesuits say to the slaves, but on that cool Laurentian night which I work toward, when we are wrapped in our birch-bark rocket, joined in the ancient enduring way, flesh to spirit, and I ask you my old question: are the stars tiny, after all, O Catherine Tekakwitha, answer me in Hiro-Koué. That other night F. and I quarreled for hours. We didn’t know when morning arrived because the only window of that miserable apartment faced into the ventilation shaft.

  – You lousy facker, how many times, five or six?

  – Ah, grief makes us precise!

  – Five or six, five or six, five or six?

  – Listen, my friend, the elevator is working again.

  – Listen, F., don’t give me any of your mystical shit.

  – Seven.

  – Seven times with Edith?

  – Correct.

  – You were trying to protect me with an optional lie?

  – Correct.

  – And seven itself might just be another option.

  – Correct.

  – But you were trying to protect me, weren’t you? Oh, F., do you think I can learn to perceive the diamonds of good amongst all the shit?

  – It is all diamond.

  – Damn you, rotten wife-fucker, that answer is no comfort. You ruin everything with your saintly pretensions. This is a bad morning. My wife’s in no shape to be buried. They’re going to straighten her out in some stinking doll hospital. How am I going to feel in the elevator on my way to the library? Don’t give me this all diamond shit, shove it up your occult hole. Help a fellow out. Don’t fuck his wife for him.

  Thus the conversation ran into the morning we could not perceive. He kept to his diamond line. Catherine Tekakwitha, I wanted to believe him. We talked until we exhausted ourselves, and we pulled each other off, as we did when we were boys in what is now downtown but what was once the woods.

  6

  F. talked a great deal about Indians, and in an irritating facile manner. As far as I know he had no scholarship on the subject beyond a contemptuous and minor acquaintance with my own books, his sexual exploitation of my four teen-age A——s, and about a thousand Hollywood Westerns. He compared the Indians to the ancient Greeks, suggesting a similarity of character, a common belief that every talent must unfold itself in fighting, a love of wrestling, an inherent incapacity to unite for any length of time, an absolute dedication to the idea of the contest and the virtue of ambition. None of the four teen-age A——s achieved orgasm, which, he said, must be characteristic of the sexual pessimism of the entire tribe, and he concluded, therefore, that every other Indian woman could. I couldn’t argue. It is true that the A——s seem to present a very accurate negative of the whole Indian picture. I was slightly jealous of him for his deduction. His knowledge of ancient Greece was based entirely on a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, a few homosexual encounters with restaurateurs (he ate free at almost every soda fountain in the city), and a plaster reproduction of the Akropolis which, for some reason, he had coated with red nail polish. He had meant to use colorless nail polish merely as a preservative, but naturally he succumbed to his flamboyant disposition at the drug-store counter when confronted with that fortress of bright samples which ranged the cardboard ramparts like so many Canadian Mounties. He chose a color named Tibetan Desire, which amused him since it was, he claimed, such a contradiction in terms. The entire night he consecrated to the staining of his plaster model. I sat beside him as he worked. He was humming snatches from “The Great Pretender,” a song which was to change the popular music of our day. I could not take my eyes from the tiny brush which he wielded so happily. White to viscous red, one column after another, a transfusion of blood into the powdery ruined fingers of the little monument. F. saying: I’m wearing my heart like a crown. So they disappeared, the leprous metopes and triglyphs and other wiggly names signifying purity, pale temple and destroyed altar disappeared under the scarlet glaze. F. sa
id: Here, my friend, you finish the caryatids. So I took the brush, thus Cliton after Themistocles. F. sang: Ohohohoho, I’m the great pretender, my need is such I pretend too much, and so on – an obvious song under the circumstances but not inappropriate. F. often said: Never overlook the obvious. We were happy! Why should I resist the exclamation? I had not been so happy since before puberty. How close I came, earlier in this paragraph, to betraying that happy night! No, I will not! When we had covered every inch of the old plaster bone F. placed it on a card table in front of a window. The sun was just coming up over the sawtooth roof of the factory next door. The window was rosy and our handicraft, not yet dry, gleamed like a huge ruby, a fantastic jewel! It seemed like the intricate cradle of all the few noble perishable sentiments I had managed to preserve, and somewhere safe I could leave them. F. had stretched out on the carpet, stomach down, chin in hands supported by wrists and elbows, gazing up at the red akropolis and the soft morning beyond. He beckoned to me to lie beside him. Look at it from here, he said, squint your eyes a bit. I did as he suggested, narrowed my eyes, and – it burst into a cool lovely fire, sending out rays in all directions (except downward, since that was where the card table was). Don’t weep, F. said, and we began to talk.

  – That’s the way it must have looked to them, some early morning when they looked up at it.

  – The ancient Athenians, I whispered.

  – No, F. said, the old Indians, the Red Men.

  – Did they have such a thing, did they build an akropolis? I asked him, for I seemed to have forgotten everything I knew, lost it in stroke after stroke of the small brush, and I was ready to believe anything. Tell me, F., did the Indians have such a thing?