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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
