In the mid-80s, soon after the Live-Aid concerts, someone in Chennai where I was then working, started a campaign to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Bob Geldof, its architect. How students hoped to influence the Norwegian committee (Peace is not awarded by the Swedish Academy) I have no idea, but there was a signature campaign. Perhaps the committee would be so intimidated by the 50 or so signatures the students managed to collect that the Nobel would follow.
Rock stars often get dragged into the Nobel Peace cauldron and have been known not to scream and kick at the prospect. Bono of U2 is sometimes mentioned in the same sentence as the Nobel. His campaigns for reducing Third World debt or eradicating Aids in Africa are well known; he is probably more deserving than many recent winners.
The campaign in Canada (inaugurated at a Montreal Literary Festival) to award the Literature Prize to the poet, novelist, singer and songwriter Leonard Cohen therefore, is not as bizarre as it seems. In the 90s, there was a similar campaign (led by Allan Ginsberg) for Bob Dylan. Do songwriters qualify as literary men with a body of work impressive enough to satisfy the Swedish Academy? The Academy which looks down upon the popular and campaigns mounted on their behalf by their fans?
Dylan’s works have been compared to those of Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Keats. Many forms of literature are not meant to be read on the page - drama, for example. Lyrics too. Winston Churchill won the Literature Nobel mainly for his oratory. The 1997 winner Dario Fo was rewarded for shaking up the establishment more than for the literary merit of his plays.
Cohen the novelist has been compared to James Joyce. He was a published poet for a decade before he decided there was more money in singing. Those above a certain age will remember Cohen and songs like Suzanne from their college days. When he sang, ‘You want to travel with her/ And you want to travel blind/ And You know she will trust you/ For you touched her perfect body with your mind’, there was the pathos of the unattainable.
Cohen will be 71 this year (older than Elvis Presley would have been). Naguib Mahfouz was 77 when he won the Nobel, Octavio Paz 76 and Jose Saramago 75. None of them sang professionally. Cohen has the added disadvantage that his albums have regularly shot to number one in Norway.
Cohen has reinvented himself so often that the public tends to see him as a rock star gone right rather than a writer gone wrong. The novel - Beautiful Losers – which inspired comparisons with Joyce was dismissed by another critic as “the most revolting novel ever written in Canada.” In a 1970 pamphlet on the singer, Michael Ondaatje said the book needed the benefit of second thoughts. It's too exhausting to be grasped all at once.
The Nobel-for-Cohen question, therefore comes with two sub-questions: Do songwriters qualify? Among songwriters, does Cohen make the cut?
Cohen is a good minor poet whose work will last, wrote one critic, because of his "sense of the magic of sound in poetry, and a Yeatsian sense of poetic propriety." The "voice for which he will be remembered" is the one that “records permutations of desire, examines the ambiguities in human response to the universe, and sniffs out the sacred in sexual encounters.” It's the voice of Suzanne (which Cohen called his “journalism” because it was based on true life). Kris Kristofferson said Cohen’s epitaph would be: “Like a bird on a wire/ Like a drunk in a midnight choir/ I have tried, in my way, to be free.” (from ‘Bird on a Wire’)
Cohen, who lived as a monk in the 90s might be free enough not to want the Nobel; or practical enough to welcome one. Dylan, Cohen… a decade ago, no one would have seen them as candidates for the Nobel. Perhaps a decade from now, everyone will wonder what the fuss was all about.
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Sunday, May 1, 2005
