Beautiful Losers
By Leonard Cohen
Villard Books 1993
Leonard Cohen is best known for an astonishing musical career. Revered for his masterful
lyrics, it is perhaps surprising that his output as a novelist is often overlooked. Words have always held the greatest lure for Cohen, who was a poet and novelist long before he deduced that writing songs might be equally appealing.
Beautiful Losers was described by one reviewer as ‘the most revolting book ever written in Canada.’ But in the forty years since, it has come to be regarded as a daring work and Cohen was recently voted among the greatest Canadians of all time. So while the 1960s censors might have been dismayed by the unabashed sexuality and confessional realism, time has revealed the inherent richness and quality of the novel.
The seedy backstreets of sixties Montreal provide the unlikely setting for what is essentially a hagiography: at its root this is a book of saints and lovers. It is a love triangle with four points – the unnamed scholar narrator, his wife Edith, his mentor and homosexual lover F. and a seventeenth-century Canadian aboriginal saint with whom the narrator is obsessed.
It is an untenable situation and one that necessitates violence and destruction. Our narrator emerges as the lone survivor, coping with the aftermath of the self-indulgent and self-destructive deaths of his lovers F. and Edith. As he tells the story that has brought him to the lowest point of his life, it gradually becomes evident that the narrator has no choice but to seek absolution.
This quest for amnesty is rooted in his obsession with the saint, Catherine Tekawitha, an Iroquois who converted to Catholicism and was said to have subsequently developed an extraordinary threshold for physical suffering and the capacity for miraculous self-healing. It is no coincidence that she roamed the Canadian wilderness – what is now modern day Montreal – and through a series of revelations we begin to understand the narrator’s obsession.
The scholar yearns after Tekawitha’s sacred powers to the extent that his desire manifests itself in his own romantic relationships. His wife Edith is herself an Iroquois and one cannot help but wonder whether this is his attempt to invoke the saintly in his own marital bed.
When the long-suffering Edith commits suicide, the narrator punishes himself for having neglected her. He spirals into a world of degradation in which his physical circumstances manifest themselves as metaphorical self-flagellation. Subconsciously mimicking the sacrifice of the saint in his own life, the narrator embarks upon meaningless and destructive relationships to fulfill base physical desires. And as the story unfolds, Cohen gradually reveals a protagonist who is searching for someone to show him how to forget. This desire to transcend human suffering is linked with the novel’s ideas on the nature of sainthood:
What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love.
This is a novel full of damaged human beings seeking congress with the divine the only way that they know how to: through acts of vulgarity and corruption. Ultimately they are each motivated by love, imperfect as it might be.
Written in Cohen’s inimitable style Beautiful Losers is rhetorical and rhapsodic, lilting and lyrical. Cohen proves himself a master of language, weaving raunchy interludes with moments of transcendent beauty to produce a novel that is unabashedly confessional and exquisitely poetic.
