Leonard Cohen’s BEAUTIFUL LOSERS
Leonard Cohen was born in Montreal in 1934, which makes him the same age as my mother. I
don’t quite know how that happened, because he always seemed so much
younger than my parents when I was a teenager obsessively listening to
“The Songs of Leonard Cohen” LP. Today Cohen is best
known for his vast catalog of music, including “Suzanne,” “Joan of
Arc,” “First We Take Manhattan,” and the beautiful “Hallelujah,” which
seems to have been covered by every singer with a recording contract. However,
in the 1960s (after graduating from McGill University in 1955 and
trying law school and some other career paths), Cohen published several
volumes of poetry and two novels: THE FAVOURITE GAME (1963) and BEAUTIFUL LOSERS (1966). I
discovered these books in the 1970s; I enjoyed THE FAVOURITE GAME, but
it was BEAUTIFUL LOSERS I read repeatedly during my teen years.
BEAUTIFUL
LOSERS begins with an unnamed (and undoubtedly unreliable) narrator
who is living in utter squalor, unwashed and filthy. Despite
his living conditions, the narrator is a scholar, a historian whose
major field of study is a luckless Indian tribe whose name has
historically been translated as “loser.” The
narrator tells the story of a love triangle involving himself, his
late wife Edith (one of the last members of the aforementioned tribe),
and F, the domineering man loved by both the narrator and Edith. When the novel begins, F, like Edith, is already dead—although a “Long Letter from F” forms the middle portion of the book. Intertwined
with the hallucinatory story of spiritual and sexual love, betrayal,
drug abuse, mind games, religion, philosophy, politics (especially the
Quebec independence movement), mental illness, and suicide, is the
story of Catherine Tekakwitha, a 17th century Mohawk who converted to
Catholicism, lived a post-conversion life of intense self-denial (one
would be tempted to say masochism), died at a young age, and became a
saint.
This
brief summary does not do justice to the profound depth of the novel,
the various voices within it (comic, tragic, learned, foolish,
yearning, interrogatory), the richness of its language, the rapid
shifts in perspective. Yes, it is a sixties time-capsule: veering
wildly in tone, leaving so much ambiguously half-said, containing
simultaneously so much intellectual heft and so many intensely-detailed descriptions of sex and torture; it seems to epitomize a certain sixties outlook and attitude. This
is not a novel for the weak of heart, but if you know Leonard Cohen
only from his music and you’re in the mood for a real change of pace, I
highly recommend BEAUTIFUL LOSERS.
Incidentally, this is the novel which contains the passage that begins, “God is alive; magic is afoot,”famously used in a chant/song by Buffy Ste. Marie.
