Monomania

Back in graduate school, I lived in a series of unusual houses. For a while I shared a very small sixteenth-century cottage (this was in England) with an ambassador’s daughter who spent most of the night, every night, phoning people in her home country and complaining to them very loudly. I won’t even go into the episode with the boyfriend and the whip, which was even louder. After I moved out, I lived for a few short frigid months in a flat with a woman who refused to have the heating on. (This is not as uncommon in England as one might think.) I moved there in February and brought a vase of flowers with me; the water in the vase froze and never thawed during my entire stay there. After a couple of months of that, I was happy to take refuge in the large and rambling house of some down-at-heel aristocratic folks I’ll call the Fudgepackets.

The Fudgepacket children had moved on to greater things, so Mrs. Fudgepacket (or it may have been Lady Fudgepacket) rented out their rooms to needy grad students. The catch was that we were not allowed to change anything in the rooms, which had to be preserved for the time Camilla, Jemima, and Tristan returned home. Even the clothes had to stay in the bureaus -- we were enjoined to live out of boxes. Camilla, Jemima, and Tristan were very tony youngsters and had rooms festooned with hockey sticks and relics of Empire and 18th-century furniture with dry rot and nary a sign that the twentieth century had occurred to the family at all. They also had fleas. This was a source of wonderment, as the house had no pets. Anyway, you can see that only students taking refuge from even dodgier accommodation ended up at the Fudgepackets.

The student in the room below mine was clearly one of these. He had a stereo, and he played only one song: “Suzanne,” by Leonard Cohen. It was not so loud that I couldn’t hear myself think, but it was loud enough that I could hear it faintly, like a tune playing in your mind, over and over again, for hours every day, every time he was home. Over and over and over.

This put me in mind of when I had first heard “Suzanne.” It was back when I was 14, and I had just bought an album by a singer so embarrassing that wild horses wouldn’t drag the name out of me now. For convenience’s sake, let’s say it was Wayne Newton. (The fact that I am willing to use Wayne Newton as a less embarrassing substitute for the real name shows how cringeworthy my taste was at that time.) At age 14, I sat dreamily by the stereo listening to one terrible cheesy song after another, when suddenly I came upon this embarrassing singer doing a version of “Suzanne.” I just thought, what in heck? The words didn’t make any sense.

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river...
And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China...
And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked upon the water...
And the sun pours down like honey
On our lady of the harbor...
There are heroes in the seaweed
There are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love
And they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds the mirror.

It was the first song I’d heard that didn’t basically go “Julie, Julie, Julie, do ya love me? Julie, Julie, Julie, do ya care?” (No, my embarrassing singer wasn’t Bobby Sherman. Bobby Sherman would have been a step up.) It was baffling. I figured out that the song had been written by a guy named Leonard Cohen, and so I bought a book of his poetry, and went on a small binge trying to figure it all out. A lot of it never became clear until I talked to a Canadian student in grad school, who revealed that there is a sailors’ church known as Our Lady of the Harbour in the Montreal harbor, which explains a lot of it. But I also figured out that things that didn’t make sense on the surface could make sense in other ways.

After that little binge at age 14, I didn’t think much about it (though I continued to think about poetry) until I heard “Suzanne” incessantly at the Fudgepackets’. It would have driven nearly anyone crazy. However, I’m reminded of the reason psychologists are wary of forming support groups for phobics — they trade phobias. People afraid of bridges talk about their phobia and other people in the group start being afraid of bridges, or dogs, or heights, or other phobias brought in by the members. Similarly, I caught “Suzanne” from this guy underneath me (who, incidentally, I never even glimpsed). "Suzanne" started playing in my brain night and day, even without the stereo going. I began to acquire every album Leonard Cohen ever recorded.

This brings me to the present day, umpteen years later, when I have been watching “Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man,” a recent documentary. Various punk and niche musicians performed at a concert of Leonard Cohen songs (called, tweely, “The Came So Far For Beauty Concert”), and others like Bono utter awed comments, and, more appealingly, there are a lot of snippets of Cohen himself making pronouncements in a witty deadpan. Most of the musicians add Earnest Feeling to the songs, which makes them look as if they’re trying way too hard, but Rufus Wainwright does “Hallelujah,” which ranks up there with “Suzanne,” and of course some poor soul tries his best at “Suzanne,” sounding a lot like Wayne Newton. Cohen explains that the tea and oranges that came all the way from China was Constant Comment. And he himself sings “The Tower of Song,” with that wonderful couplet:

I said to Hank Williams, How lonely does it get?
Hank Williams hasn’t answered yet.

What’s my point here, you may ask? This is all by way of saying that monomania can be an excellent thing. If you have something like “Suzanne,” which thrilled you at 14 and still thrills you now, why not play it night and day? As I am right now. Assuming, of course, that it’s not Wayne Newton.