Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer's suicide
Genius is fragile. Success, even more so. What does it mean then for an artist to fail?
There is a popular story, as Alan Light recounts in his wonderful book “The Holy or The Broken,” about a meeting between Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. In the mid-1980s, Dylan and Cohen were having coffee at a cafe in Paris. Admiring each other’s work, Dylan asked Cohen about a song of his, then largely unknown, and how long it took him to write it. Cohen responded, “A couple of years,” which he later said was probably a lie. It had taken him more than a couple of years. Then, Cohen asked Dylan about one of his songs, “I and I,” and how long it took Dylan to write it. Dylan’s response? “Fifteen minutes.” This brief interaction is a great example of a striking difference between two types of artists: conceptual innovators and experimental innovators.
The song that Cohen mentioned, which took him “a couple of years” to write, was “Hallelujah”. It is a song you have most likely heard, either the original or one of the countless covers. Maybe you watched Jeff Buckley sing it in a YouTube video (which currently has over 200 million views). Maybe you came across this song in passing and just didn’t know what it’s called. If you don’t know this song, or can’t remember it (although I find it hard to believe), then please do me a favor. Go listen to it right now before reading the rest of this essay, or while reading it. Listen to Leonard Cohen’s version, John Cale’s version, Rufus Wainwright’s version, and Jeff Buckley’s version. Each version is as beautiful as the other, although Buckley’s version transcends them all. But, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s go back to the 1980s.
It took Cohen over four years to write Hallelujah. It was a process filled with agony, writing over eighty verses, stuck in a cycle of writing and discarding. In one of the interviews Cohen gave later in his life, he talks about this torment.
“The trouble — it’s not the world’s trouble, and it’s a tiny trouble, I don’t want you to think that this is a significant trouble — my tiny trouble is that before I can discard a verse, I have to write it. I have to work on it, and I have to polish it and bring it to as close to finished as I can. It’s only then that I can discard it.”
In 1984, Leonard Cohen and John Lissauer, his producer on the album Various Positions, which included Hallelujah, took the record to Walter Yetnikoff, the president of CBS Records at the time. Cohen and Lissauer were excited and confident. As Lissauer recalls, “Man, we’re on top of this. This is gonna be the breakthrough.” Yetnikoff’s response?
“What is this? This isn’t pop music. We’re not releasing it. This is a disaster.”
I can imagine the heartbreak Cohen and Lissauer must have felt. I can also imagine Cohen singing,
“I've heard there was a secret chord,
That David played, and it pleased the Lord,
But you don't really care for music, do ya?”
Ultimately, Various Positions did release in 1984, thanks to the independent label PVC Records. The album, in fact, was not the breakthrough. And Hallelujah, the first song on the LP’s second side, went unnoticed. Nobody cared. It seemed Hallelujah was fated for a quick extinction and would disappear into the void like most music, like a ‘broken Hallelujah’.
For several years after its disappointing release, Cohen kept working on Hallelujah like a sculptor, chiseling away at it. By some accounts, he may have written fifteen pages of verses, constantly adding and removing and modifying, trying to crack the code. In one rendition, he made it longer and darker, making it less spiritual and more sexual, ending it with the cold pessimism of a very broken hallelujah. The song seemed uncrackable. Until John Cale stumbled upon it.
In 1991, the French music magazine Les Inrockuptibles assembled a tribute album of Cohen’s works. There was Nick Cave’s cover of “Tower of Song” and the Pixies’ cover of “I Can’t Forget” among many others. Nestled between that beauty, gently resting and waiting to be discovered, was a budding Hallelujah by John Cale. Cale was a fan of Cohen’s music and saw Cohen perform Hallelujah in New York once. He loved the song so much that he asked Cohen to send him the lyrics. As Cale recounts, “I had one of those old fax machines. I went out to dinner and my floor was covered in paper.” Cohen had sent him close to fifteen pages full of verses.
Cale reworked the song, piecing together the spiritual and the sexual, balancing the faith in God with tragic romance, ending the song on a broken hallelujah. Hallelujah, while still years away from its eventual success, was a step closer to it with Cale’s version. While some artists started covering the song, it still remained oblivious to the audiences at large. But one person, a young artist, took notice, and it would change the trajectory of this song and Cohen’s life.
In 1992, a young artist by the name of Jeff Buckley was cat-sitting for a friend, Janine Nichols, while she was out of town for a few days with her family. Going through some records, he found Hallelujah, John Cale’s version. He started doing a rendition of Hallelujah as part of his set wherever he played and soon it became his signature. With each performance, Buckley reworked the song, playing with its feel and emotion, searching for the perfect Hallelujah. “It was the perfect song for Jeff Buckley”, recalled Steve Berkowitz, an A&R executive at Columbia Records in 1992, “because of his voice but also because of how he looked singing it. It’s a song that begins with King David, and Jeff kind of looked like Michelangelo’s David. And when he sang it, it was as if a Renaissance painting had come to life.”
As Buckley’s popularity grew, he was signed by Columbia Records to make his debut album. While Buckley and his producer tinkered with many songs, debating what should end up on the album, there was one song that had solidified its position on the track list: Buckley’s Hallelujah. Constantly reshaping it, Buckley must have recorded twenty versions of the song for his debut album, Grace. It seemed he had finally cracked the code and the song, which started its journey almost fifteen years ago, would finally attain the success it so deserved. In 1994, Grace was released amid a lot of hype but flopped. It received some limited success outside of the US but Hallelujah remained abandoned. Nobody paid any attention to it. While the song had achieved perfection under Buckley, it seems genius is not always recognized. It remained, even after fifteen years, largely forgotten. Sometimes, it is simply the wrong time for a work of art and it needs a bit more time. And sometimes, genius is simply denied by the gatekeepers.
Around 1961, a charming young writer and professor from New Orleans was drafted into the US military to serve in Puerto Rico, teaching English to Spanish-speaking recruits. John Kennedy Toole, motivated by his desire to get a private office, quickly climbed the ranks and attained the rank of sergeant within a year. Toole had borrowed a typewriter from his friend, David Kubach. Late at night, Toole typed away at his typewriter, working on a novel: a comic story of Ignatius J. Reilly and his tirade against everything and everyone in the world, set in New Orleans. “A Confederacy of Dunces” is the funniest novel I have ever read, and it was almost lost to us. A work of genius that was denied a life.
After receiving a hardship discharge from the military in 1963, Toole returned home to New Orleans and started teaching at Dominican College. He stopped writing for a while, especially after falling into severe depression after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but ultimately completed the novel in 1964. He submitted the manuscript to the publisher Simon and Schuster, where it reached the desk of Robert Gottlieb, a young but influential editor at the time. Gottlieb was also responsible for the publication of Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” although not all stories have a happy ending.
Robert Gottlieb and Toole were mired in a correspondence that lasted several years, with neither satisfied with the other. Toole wanted to publish his novel as he had written it. Gottlieb had some issues with the novel which he saw as crucial points that needed to be revised, in addition to one big issue. Gottlieb felt that while the novel was funny, it didn’t have any meaning. According to him, it wasn’t really about anything. As Gottlieb wrote in one of his letters to Toole, “What must happen is that they [various threads in the book] must be strong and meaningful all the way through…In other words, there must be a point to everything you have in the book, a real point, not just amusingness that's forced to figure itself out.”
Ultimately, Toole grew weary of Gottlieb’s demands and asked him to return the manuscript as he couldn’t see a way forward. As Toole wrote to Gottlieb, “Aside from a few deletions, I don't think I could really do much to the book now—and of course even with revisions you might not be satisfied.” Toole was devastated. Gottlieb suggested Toole write something else, but Toole believed in his novel. He simply could not give up on the book. In a letter to Gottlieb, he said, “I don't want to throw these characters away. In other words, I'm going to work on the book again. I haven't been able to look at the manuscript since I got it back, but since something of my soul is in the thing, I can't let it rot without trying.”
In one of his last letters to Toole, Gottlieb encouraged Toole to revise the novel and if he did so, Gottlieb would consider it. He would “read, reread, edit, perhaps publish, generally cope, until you are fed up with me. What more can I say?” At the end of this years-long ordeal, Toole was so heartbroken that he ceased work on his novel. In the years since, many people have studied Toole’s life and Gottlieb’s role in it.
In 2012, Cory MacLauchlin wrote a book on Toole’s life called “Butterfly in the Typewriter.” It makes a strong case for Gottlieb’s unfair and flawed handling of Toole’s manuscript. Gottlieb essentially failed to understand what Dunces was and never gave it a fair shot. He was looking for something that didn’t exist, a version of Dunces that had an inherent meaning to it. Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David like to say that Seinfeld, probably the biggest TV sitcom that ran on NBC from the late 80s to mid 90s, was a show about nothing. What if NBC had said, “Yes it’s funny. But it needs to have inherent meaning. Not just episodic comedy, but it needs to be meaningful all the way through?” If that had happened, Seinfeld would never have seen the light of day.
“Butterfly in the Typewriter” also makes the case that Gottlieb never knew himself what he specifically wanted Toole to do. He had some criticisms but as a whole, he didn’t understand what he wanted Dunces to be. Was it supposed to be a literary work that may not sell very well but would be critically acclaimed, or was it supposed to be a book that sold well irrespective of what the literary scholars thought of it? As the noted Toole scholar Jane Bethune comments, “He [Gottlieb] just said, it needs more work, it needs more work. And as an artist I don’t think that Toole was ready to do that. Nor should he have because what he had was a gem, a masterpiece. And he knew it. But the authority figure didn’t know it and asked him to do something else with it – which would have destroyed it.”
Leslie Marsh at the University of British Columbia wrote a review of “Butterfly in the Typewriter,” in which she takes Gottlieb’s criticisms of Dunces, and addresses all of them, stating, “Had Gottlieb grasped the notion of the picaresque, the vulgar demand for meaning would be redundant.” In Butterfly, MacLauchlin writes, “From this vast parade, Toole selected, merged, refined, and wove characters together with all the absurdities that form the human condition.” If you have read Dunces, you know that few books have such an eclectic mix of characters, each better (and more outrageously a dunce) than the previous.
In her review, Leslie Marsh perfectly states the importance of editors and the tightly interwoven relationship between a writer and an editor. “Exceptional writers need exceptional editors: how different would the world’s intellectual landscape have been were it not for the insight and foresight of Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor? Whatever the flaws of Confederacy they do not detract from the palpable quality of the writing, the authenticity of the voice and the sheer delight millions of readers from many countries and all walks of life, have derived from reading it. Confederacy was a promissory note for greatness that came perilously close to oblivion.”
In 1969, at the age of 31, and about five years after finishing “A Confederacy of Dunces,” Toole committed suicide. He had driven to Biloxi, Mississippi, and killed himself by running a garden hose from the exhaust pipe in through the window of his car. The devastation he had felt after the constant rejection of his novel led to a life that had slowly started to fall apart over the years. Once a charming and witty professor, Toole had become increasingly withdrawn over the years. His brilliant, yet denied, work of art would remain atop an armoire in his room for several years, lost to all, slowly gathering dust.
In his book “The Holy or The Broken,” Alan Light writes, “If Leonard Cohen was the author of ‘Hallelujah’ and John Cale was its editor, Jeff Buckley was the song’s ultimate performer. A decade after its original recording, the song had found its defining voice and the Grace recording would essentially become the version against which future versions would be measured.”
Between 1994, the year Grace came out, and 1997, Leonard Cohen had gained more popularity, with artists like Elton John and U2 covering his songs, and Columbia Records releasing many tribute and compilation albums. Cohen himself had removed himself from the world and was spending his years in a Zen monastery at Mt. Baldy in California. Meanwhile, Buckley had spent his years touring and working on a new record. Then, it all changed.
In 1997, Buckley and his friend impulsively decided to go for a swim in the Wolf River, a tributary of the Mississippi, a spot Buckley had previously visited. In the darkness of the night, Buckley went in swimming, singing Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love”, and disappeared. Six days later, his body was found by a passing riverboat. At the age of thirty, his star only ascending in popularity, his ambitious dreams still unachieved, Buckley had drowned and left the world.
I remember stumbling across Buckley’s Hallelujah on YouTube several years ago when I was still an undergraduate student. I thought Buckley’s version was the original. I remember being mesmerized by the song, Buckley’s voice, and his guitar. I listened to it all the time. While researching for this essay, I listened to over 10 different renditions of Hallelujah by different artists, but nothing comes close to Buckley’s version. It holds you and doesn’t let go of you. Maybe I love it because his version feels full of angsty sadness, the feeling you get when you hate that you love someone you can’t have. It is the Hallelujah of a broken heart, a lover in pain unable to move on.
Propelled by the mystique behind Buckley’s sudden death, a plethora of covers started to pop up. In 2001, the soundtrack for the first Shrek movie included Hallelujah. While the movie itself had John Cale’s version, the soundtrack had a new rendition by Rufus Wainwright. Shrek became a global phenomenon and Hallelujah became the Shrek Song! This was followed by a tribute video MTV did for the victims of 9/11 which included Hallelujah as the background track. As the years passed, Hallelujah became one of the most covered songs of all time, popping up in movies and TV shows whenever there was a need for a sad and heartfelt song.
In 2004, Buckley’s version was included at number 259 in Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Cohen had come down from Mt. Baldy to create more music (partly motivated by an artist’s never-ending thirst and partly by his manager swindling him out of most of his money). In 2009, Cohen gave a performance of Hallelujah at Coachella in California, a festival dominated by, as Alan Light puts it, “tens of thousands of young, jaded Americans.” Cohen was in his 70s by then. His performance transfixed the audience, who joined him in singing and cheered him, to his surprise. Touched by the recognition by an audience he had not expected, with genuine surprise on his face, he took off his fedora, put it to his chest, and nodded in appreciation as his eyes filled with tears. John Lissauer was right in 1984, “This is gonna be the breakthrough…Hallelujah just jumped out at you.” After 2 decades, Cohen’s art was recognized. Cohen, Cale, and Buckley had perfected the secret chord. Hallelujah was in its full glory, with no signs of slowing down.
A few years after John Kennedy Toole’s death, his mother found a manuscript atop an armoire in his room. She started sending it to publishers, believing in her son’s talent and hoping his work would be finally recognized. Over five years, she sent it to seven different publishers, each time facing rejection. In 1976, she started trying to get in touch with Walker Percy, the writer of “The Moviegoer,” who had recently started teaching at Loyola University of New Orleans. After many unsuccessful attempts, one day she went to his office and forced herself in, demanding he read the manuscript or she wouldn’t leave.
“A Confederacy of Dunces” was published, in its original form as Toole had intended, in 1980. Walker Percy had championed the effort and had made sure that it remained true to its original form. In the foreword to the published novel, Percy writes, “While I was teaching at Loyola in 1976 I began to get telephone calls from a lady unknown to me. What she proposed was preposterous. It was not that she had written a couple of chapters of a novel and wanted to get into my class. It was that her son, who was dead, had written an entire novel during the early sixties, a big novel, and she wanted me to read it. Why would I want to do that? I asked her. Because it is a great novel, she said.”
Percy caved and took the manuscript from Toole’s mother. He had hoped to read a few pages, decide it was bad enough, and return it to the mother. In this case, he read on and on, unable to stop. As Percy writes, “First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good.”
In 1981, “A Confederacy of Dunces” by John Kennedy Toole won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, over 15 years after Toole had first finished it, a decade after his tragic death. His genius, denied by the gatekeepers, had finally found recognition. When I was writing this essay, I had my copy of Dunces on the table at a cafe I had been working out of, when a man, likely in his fifties and the look of a professor, walked past me and noticed the book. He said, “That is the funniest book I have ever read,” and walked away to order his coffee at the counter. I am sure many people who have read Toole’s masterpiece would have the same reaction.
On his podcast, Revisionist History, Malcolm Gladwell presents his theory on two types of artists: conceptual innovators and experimental innovators. Conceptual innovators create their best work early on in their careers. They plan precisely, then execute, often leading to great art and early success, like Picasso and Bob Dylan. Experimental innovators, on the other hand, are slow innovators. They often go through an arduous process of trial and error, perpetually unsatisfied with their work. To these artists, art is elusive, like Cezanne and Leonard Cohen. I think there is a third type, one that is simply denied recognition by the gatekeepers.
Genius is fragile. Success, even more so. One has to wonder how many songs have been written that didn’t have a Jeff Buckley to rescue them from obsolescence. How many manuscripts and artworks lay in forgotten places, lost to us and future generations? I can’t help but feel that the success of an artist, and more importantly, the success of a work of art depends highly on happenstance. Whether we call it luck, or fate, or destiny, or chance, there is certainly some randomness to success and greatness, and if so, then failure for an artist need not always feel final. Perhaps all that’s needed is more time for the work to find its true form. Or maybe it just needs a different gatekeeper, someone who would see the work for what it truly is. What can the artist do? Keep chiseling away at her craft, and say Hallelujah!
Small typo report:
> partly motivated by an artist’s never-ending thirst and party by...
The second "partly" is missing an L.
I felt the same when I first heard about this song and Toole's life. As Joyce Carol Oates said, "So much of life is accidental."