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Song of the Day: Leonard Cohen - Suzanne

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A fine song and even finer piece of poetry (it began life as a poem, published in 1966 as part of a collection titled Parasites of Heaven), Leonard Cohen's signature Suzanne remains one of the most well-regarded and widely-appreciated popular compositions never to crack the Top 40. Part autobiography, part religious allegory, it seems to mean something profound to almost everyone, even though its real meaning is, I've discovered, a matter of fierce debate. In completing my customary research for this entry, I encountered all sorts of interpretations, various writers peeling away layer upon layer of supposed substance, and honestly, I've never in my life had to wade through such a morass of pseudo-intellectual gobbledygook, while emerging none the wiser.

Maybe the self-anointed intelligentsia are making it more difficult than it needs to be. There’s certainly not a lot of allegorical sub-text to the first and final verses, which actually form a straightforward account of his relationship as a young man with one Suzanne Vaillancourt, née Verdal, a bohemian performance artist and blithe free spirit with whom Cohen became close in his years circulating among the various artistes of the Montreal cultural scene. She was, by all accounts, almost irresistibly alluring, and according to Cohen every man she met fell in love with her. Alas, she was married to a fellow artist, a man so attractive in his own right that apparently, every woman who met him fell in love too, and in his best moments, listening to his better angels, Cohen wasn’t about to do anything to insert himself between the two, even if she’d been amenable, which she wasn’t; he once told an interviewer that as a couple, they were inviolate, you just didn’t intrude into the kind of shared glory that they manifested. Not that he didn’t think about it, of course, c'mon, a guy couldn't help but at least toy with the idea, just in the abstract, but he satisfied himself with an entirely platonic, albeit exquisitely intimate, relationship that never developed into anything untoward. This is from an interview conducted by Kate Saunders of the BBC:

Saunders: The song is about the meeting of spirits. It’s a very intimate lyric, very, very intimate.

Suzanne: This is it.

Saunders: It seems very sad that the spirits moved apart.

Suzanne: Yes, I agree and I believe it’s material forces at hand that do this to many the greatest of lovers (laughs).

Saunders: So would you say in a way, in the spiritual sense, you were great lovers at some level?

Suzanne: Oh yes, yes, I don’t hesitate to speak of this, absolutely. As I say, you can glance at a person and that moment is eternal and it’s the deepest of touches and that’s what we’d shared, Leonard and I, I believe.

It was beautiful as it was, and it was enough. Well, mainly it was enough. As Suzanne remembered later, once when he was visiting Montreal, I saw him briefly in a hotel and it was a very, very wonderful, happy moment because he was on his way to becoming the great success he is. And the moment arose that we could have a moment together intimately, and I declined. Over the years, there don’t seem to have been a lot of women who said no to Cohen. But Suzanne didn't want to spoil their special bond.

So this is entirely based in reality, an honest account of a precious moment set to poetry in which no poetic licence is taken:

Suzanne takes you down to a place by the river You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night forever And you know that she's half crazy, and that's why you want to be there And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China And just when you want to tell her that you have no love to give her She gets you on her wavelength, and lets the river answer That you've always been her lover

And you want to travel with her And you want to travel blind And you think you'll maybe trust her For she's touched your perfect body with her mind

Suzanne really did have a place down by the St. Lawrence River, where the two used to meet and watch the ships go by. She really did serve him mandarin oranges and exotic, orange-flavoured tea from somewhere in the far east. The poem is practically a photograph.

Saunders: When you heard the song as opposed to hearing the poem, did you instantly think, that’s me?

Suzanne: Oh yes, definitely. That was me. That is me still, yes...

Saunders: Could you describe one of the typical evenings that you spent with Leonard Cohen at the time the song was written?

Suzanne: Oh yes. I would always light a candle and serve tea and it would be quiet for several minutes, then we would speak. And I would speak about life and poetry and we’d share ideas.

Saunders: So it really was the tea and oranges that are in the song?

Suzanne: Very definitely, very definitely, and the candle, who I named Anastasia, the flame of the candle was Anastasia to me. Don’t ask me why. It just was a spiritual moment that I had with the lighting of the candle. And I may or may not have spoken to Leonard about, you know I did pray to Christ, to Jesus Christ and to St. Joan at the time, and still do.

Saunders: And that was something you shared, both of you?

Suzanne: Yes, and I guess he retained that.

Thus the subsequent lines about Jesus, so moving and in a sense enigmatic, written, as they were, by a Jewish artist, would appear to have everything to do with the deep spirituality of his relationship with Suzanne, Cohen seeming to equate reverence for the divine with his intense artistic and aesthetic appreciation of his beautiful muse. His description of Jesus as a sailor was derived, perhaps, from one of his most lasting impressions of Montreal, where he used to look out over the water and think about the perils faced by the men who go to sea, those thoughts becoming intertwined with his memory of watching the ships go by at Suzanne's place on the river. Said Cohen, recalling the genesis of the poem:

And I knew it was a song about Montreal, it seemed to come out of that landscape that I loved very much in Montreal, which was the harbour, and the waterfront, and the sailors’ church there, called Notre Dame de Bon Secour, which stood out over the river. I knew that there was a harbour and I knew there was Our Lady of the Harbour, which was the virgin on the church which stretched out her arms towards the seamen, and you can climb up to the tower and look out over the river and this song came from that vision.

Black-hearted stone-atheist I may be, but I've always been especially touched by this mournful depiction of a Saviour coming to realize, as he suffers on the cross, that his charges can't be saved, not, anyway, until it's too late to make a difference:

And Jesus was a sailor when He walked upon the water And He spent a long time watching from a lonely wooden tower And when He knew for certain only drowning men could see Him He said all men shall be sailors then until the sea shall free them But He himself was broken long before the sky would open Forsaken almost human, He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone

Only drowning men could see him; it's almost a corollary of the old saying that there aren't any atheists in foxholes, Cohen contending that on the other hand, there aren't any believers outside of them, either. In Cohen's telling, people only turn to God when they're in extremis. Until then they live like sailors too, like Jesus did, lonely and at peril out to sea, until finally, at the end, they come to appreciate what Cohen already understood, and had ever since he used to commune with lovely, beloved Suzanne, the deep, captivating woman in the Salvation Army hand-me-downs who saw beauty in the mundane, knew how to find the treasures amid the uncollected refuse, and held the mirror in which the poet saw himself through her eyes.

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Suzanne Verdal

Source: Song of the Day: Leonard Cohen - Suzanne

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