Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen

First published: 1966

Type of plot: Stream of consciousness

Time of work: The mid-1960’s

Locale: Montreal, Canada

Principal Characters:

• The narrator, an unnamed folklorist, a student of his own suffering
• F., a politico, a manipulative lifelong friend of the narrator
• Edith, the deceased wife of the narrator
• Catherine Tekakwitha, a seventeenth century saint, the focus of the narrator’s study

The Novel

Beautiful Losers is divided into three books. In book 1, the narrator speaks. In book 2, F. writes to the narrator. Book 3 is “An Epilogue in the Third Person.” Book 2 fills in gaps (though only for the reader) in the narrator’s story; the epilogue shows the speakers of books 2 and 3 as old men. Cohen once remarked of the writing of this novel that he had to “write or die”; the book is a fictional portrait of one very dark time of the author’s soul.

The constipated, oversexed narrator of book 1 speaks from the vantage point of a man who has lost his wife to a freak accident resulting from a possible suicide attempt and who has lost his best friend to a political suicide. The narrator is a folklorist who is studying a tribe of Indians, the A--s, which is nearly extinct.

Edith, the most recently deceased of the A--s, had felt neglected by her husband because of his devotion to his study. She consequently secreted herself at the base of the elevator shaft outside their basement apartment. She might have been safe in her hiding place, as few visited the basement, and she might have won the attention of her scholar-husband had a delivery boy not descended upon her.

Catherine Tekakwitha is the seventeenth century A--upon whom the narrator focuses his study. Her death, like Edith’s, was hastened by her own acts and by an outside power. A convert to Christianity, Catherine rejected her physical nature in spite of the efforts of tribal associates to find her a suitable spouse. As she grew more disassociated from her physical self and more closely wed to the spiritual, she became more and more abusive of her physical body. Toward the end of her life, her self-inflicted torture was so great that others of her tribe forced her to agree to set limits on her homage to her Savior. Catherine did not, however, stop fasting, and she did not stop punishing her outer body; it was found, too late, that she slept each night wrapped in a blanket of thorns. (The end of Catherine’s story is provided by F. in book 2.) The narrator, who continues to seek communion with Edith, Catherine, and F., all of whom he believes to have predeceased him, is lured to F.’s treehouse by a message he finds from F. in the bottom of a bag of fireworks.

F., like Catherine Tekakwitha, is thought by the narrator to have sacrificed himself to his beliefs. F. had last left the narrator’s side telling him that he was going to blow himself up during Queen Elizabeth’s visit in protest of Canada’s affiliation with Great Britain. The letter reveals that F. lost only a thumb and not his life to the explosion. F. admits in his letter that he has never been perfectly honest with the narrator. Book 1 shows the narrator’s feeling of being the lesser partner in the friendship. Book 2 shows that F. had nurtured the feelings of humility in the narrator because he considered humility a strength, and he thought the narrator the potentially stronger man of the two.

As he had directed the narrator to his study of Catherine and her tribe, F. reveals to his “darling” (the narrator) that he had created the Edith whom the narrator found so beautiful. F., always associated in the narrator’s mind with soap and the perfect body, had, with his medicated products and direction, made Edith the beautiful woman whose face and body the narrator adored. In his tutelage of the narrator, F. now admits, he had held back information because he wanted the narrator, through his pain (the narrator suffers tortures of body and soul), to become the good man that F. feared that he himself could never be.

F. writes his letter from a hospital for the criminally insane. Much of the letter is written with one hand while the other does the physical bidding of nurse Mary Voolnd. Once satisfied, Mary tells F. that it is time for their escape. Mary dies in the attempted escape, but F. appears, free, as the second old man of the epilogue.

In the epilogue, a bearded old man descends from his treehouse. He is still constipated but no longer hopeful that this problem will be resolved. He is still, however, in search of sexual gratification; he is shown in pursuit of young boys. Another bearded old man missing a thumb is likewise shown in pursuit of sexual gratification, also with young boys. (The narrator and F. had begun their physical and spiritual relationship as young boys in a Catholic orphanage.)

The Characters

Leonard Cohen’s novel is a study of four characters, the “beautiful losers.” Their questionable beauty and their status as losers provide the substance of the novel. In their intensive quests for physical and spiritual beauty, they are representative of all human aspiration.

It is the narrator’s tortured mind, spirit, and body that are revealed in the unraveling and the raveling of the plot in book 1. While first-person narrative is by its nature limited, it is the limitations themselves that are the subject of the narrative. The narrator is all too aware of his shortcomings, and book 2 confirms and adds to the idea of these. He is physically and intellectually inhibited: He is constipated, and, though he does not know it, he has been in all ways manipulated by his closest friend. His spiritual longings and his ability to ejaculate, however, are unlimited. (He, literally, and his pages, figuratively, are covered in semen.)

The narrator’s anonymity and his refusal to name the tribe he studies in order to save them the humiliation of association with him are evidence of the narrator’s self-deprecation. While his frequent discussions of the condition of his bowels is in keeping with his self-deprecatory manner, his constant discussion of his sexuality remains more ambiguous.

Longing is the essence of the narrator’s being. He longs for physical and spiritual union with F., his friend and physical mate from boyhood. He longs for physical and spiritual union with Edith and with the sainted Catherine. Blaming his scholarship for the death of his wife, the narrator blames himself as well for not having the courage of his convictions, as F. had in sacrificing himself for his beliefs. F.’s letter shows that, in fact, the narrator had been the more truly dedicated of the two. While F. created his physical self in the image of an Adonis advertised in the pages of a comic book and Edith as his physical counterpart, and while he directed the narrator’s studies, he shows himself to believe himself the spiritual inferior of the narrator. The epilogue, in keeping with the dark tone of the novel, shows the two men as equals in look and in action—the only difference being that one old man is missing a thumb.

The female characters are presented as physically flawed: Edith had not always been beautiful, and in her final appearance she had been damaged beyond recognition by an elevator; Catherine Tekakwitha had smallpox as a child and was wasted and tortured to death by her wish to deny the flesh in the elevation of her spirit. Spiritually, Edith’s longings are satisfied by her union with the narrator and with F. and by drugs; Catherine’s are consecrated in her sanctification by the Catholic Church and by the narrator.

Critical Context

Beautiful Losers, Cohen’s second novel, was hailed upon its publication as demonstration of the continued existence of James Joyce. It combines the ridiculous and the sublime, the moral and the immoral, the sexual and the spiritual, the serious and the comic.

Cohen, a student of literature, calls to mind Dante Alighieri’s La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802) as his novel probes the depths of hell and the journey toward heaven. Cohen’s scruffy pilgrims are reminiscent of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims as they so imperfectly travel toward a spiritual shrine. His is surely the Slough of Despond of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come (1678); his characters are secular descendants of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). His tortuous humor recalls the apocalyptic humor of William Blake: As the heaven of Blake’s major prophesies makes readers laugh and, immediately, cry at their monstrous stupidities and aspirations, so does Cohen’s hell in Montreal make readers almost laugh and almost cry as it causes them to marvel at their monstrous journey.

The novel has obvious associations with Fyodor Dostoevski’s Zapiski iz podpolya (1864; Letters from the Underworld, 1913; also known as Notes from the Underground) as the two narrators write literally from underground and from the cavernous depths of their despair. The narrator of Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée (1938; Nausea, 1949) seems a spiritual brother to Cohen’s narrator. American Saul Bellow has with great good humor explored the ridiculous and the sublime in the low-keyed heroes of his novels, though Bellow’s heroes are much more appealingly presented than Cohen’s. Cohen’s contemporaries John Updike and Philip Roth have had their fictional characters wallow and revel in their sexuality as Cohen’s narrators wallow and revel in theirs.

Though the novel was not initially successful, by 1998 some 800,000 copies of Beautiful Losers, Cohen’s second and last novel, had been sold. Its success has doubtless been spurred by the popularity of its author as a poet and, especially, as a singer and songwriter.

Bibliography

Devlin, Jim. Leonard Cohen: In Every Style of Passion. New York: Omnibus Press, 1996. A biography that is also a guide to Cohen’s work.

Hutcheon, Linda. Leonard Cohen and His Works. Toronto: ECW Press, 1989. A deep analysis of Cohen’s life and works.

Morley, Patricia A. The Immoral Moralists: Hugh MacLennan and Leonard Cohen. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1972. Addresses the obvious problem of Cohen’s novels and writing. The study includes a bibliography and an index.

Nadel, Ira Bruce. Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen. New York: Pantheon Books, 1996. An in-depth study of the man and the artist.

Ondaatje, Michael. Leonard Cohen. Montreal: McClelland and Stewart, 1970. Traces Cohen’s early career as an artist.