This wasn’t written on the subway walls, or some tenement halls; It isn’t a mashup of parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme; Or the boxer, humming ly-la-lye while homeward bound. But maybe . . . it could turn out to be a Bridge Over Troubled Waters . . .
‘I was a fool’: Art Garfunkel describes tearful reunion with Paul Simon
Singer describes recent meeting where Simon said he was offended by an old interview, and pair reconciled
Maybe a break in the silence?
Art Garfunkel has described a recent tearful reunion with Paul Simon, in which the pair moved past old enmities.
Speaking to the Times, Garfunkel said: “I actually had lunch with Paul a couple of weeks back. First time we’d been together in many years. I looked at Paul and said, ‘What happened? Why haven’t we seen each other?’ Paul mentioned an old interview where I said some stuff. I cried when he told me how much I had hurt him. Looking back, I guess I wanted to shake up the nice guy image of Simon & Garfunkel. Y’know what? I was a fool!
“We’ve made plans to meet again. Will Paul bring his guitar? Who knows. For me, it was about wanting to make amends before it’s too late. It felt like we were back in a wonderful place. As I think about it now, tears are rolling down my cheeks. I can still feel his hug.”
Dear March—Come in— How glad I am— I hoped for you before— Put down your Hat— You must have walked— How out of Breath you are— Dear March, how are you, and the Rest— Did you leave Nature well— Oh March, Come right upstairs with me— I have so much to tell—
I got your Letter, and the Birds— The Maples never knew that you were coming— I declare –
how Red their Faces grew—
But March, forgive me— And all those Hills
you left for me to Hue— There was no Purple suitable— You took it all with you—
Who knocks? That April— Lock the Door— I will not be pursued— He stayed away a Year to call When I am occupied— But trifles looked so trivial As soon as you arrived.
That blame is just as dear as Praise And Praise as mere as Blame—
A Light Exists In Spring — (85)
By Emily Dickinson
A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period —
When March is scarcely here
A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.
It waits upon the Lawn,
It shows the furthest Tree
Upon the furthest Slope you know
It almost speaks to thee.
Then as Horizons step
Or Noons report away
Without the Formula of sound
It passes and we stay —
A quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament.
In a June blog post here about virulent persecution of LGBTQ folk in Uganda based on a draconian new “kill the gays” law, a correspondent known to us as “William Leddra” issued a call to Quakers, who have two yearly meetings in Uganda, and affiliations with Friends United Meeting [aka FUM] based in Richmond, Indiana, to take up the work of speaking out and defending LGBTQ persons in Uganda (and other Africa countries where they are also persecuted). The call to Friends and others is also to exert pressure toward the repeal of this dreadful repressive legislation.
“I have no idea who this ‘William Leddra ‘ is or purports to be – I have never heard of him, he has never contacted us, and he seems ignorant of the efforts of more than 40 Quaker Meetings and Churches.”
Leddra, banished and then hanged for the same offense as Dyer, is less known; but he ended up just as dead, only for the offense of being true to his convictions. (“Our” correspondent “Leddra” feels pseudonymity is a prudent security precaution today, as “promoting” LGBTQ life in Uganda is now punishable by a 20-year prison sentence.)
Fortunately, what happened in the wake of the Boston Quaker Martyrs’ sacrifice was turned into memorable verse by the famed Quaker poet Whittier, a later native of Massachusetts, in his poem, The King’s Missive.
We take this opportunity to reprint the poem below, as it seems to us that there are strong contemporary echoes and resonance in it. Last month, FUM held an international conference in Kenya, which included Ugandan Friends. All participants were under strict instructions not to speak about the new law; or if they were LGBTQ, not to be visible or vocal about that reality. (Those keep silence instructions are reprinted in the postscript to “Leddra’s” column.)
UNDER the great hill sloping bare To cove and meadow and Common lot, In his council chamber and oaken chair, Sat the worshipful Governor Endicott.
John Endicott
A grave, strong man, who knew no peer In the pilgrim land, where he ruled in fear Of God, not man, and for good or ill Held his trust with an iron will.He had shorn with his sword the cross from out The flag, and cloven the May-pole down, Harried the heathen round about,
And whipped the Quakers from town to town. Earnest and honest, a man at need To burn like a torch for his own harsh creed, He kept with the flaming brand of his zeal The gate of the holy common weal.
His brow was clouded, his eye was stern, With a look of mingled sorrow and wrath; “Woe’s me!” he murmured: “at every turn The pestilent Quakers are in my path!
Some we have scourged, and banished some, Some hanged, more doomed, and still they come . . .
William Leddra, a Quaker banished on pain of death from Boston for “heresy.” He returned to the city and was hanged on Boston Common in May of 1661.
Fast as the tide of yon bay sets in, Sowing their heresy’s seed of sin.
“Did we count on this? Did we leave behind The graves of our kin, the comfort and ease Of our English hearths and homes, to find Troublers of Israel such as these?
Shall I spare? Shall I pity them? God forbid! I will do as the prophet to Agag did They come to poison the wells of the Word, I will hew them in pieces before the Lord!”
The door swung open, and Rawson the clerk Entered, and whispered under breath, “There waits below for the hangman’s work A fellow banished on pain of death– Shattuck, of Salem, unhealed of the whip, Brought over in Master Goldsmith’s ship At anchor here in a Christian port, With freight of the devil and all his sort!”
Twice and thrice on the chamber floor Striding fiercely from wall to wall, “The Lord do so to me and more,” The Governor cried, “if I hang not all! Bring hither the Quaker.” Calm, sedate, With the look of a man at ease with fate, Into that presence grim and dread Came Samuel Shattuck, with hat on head.
“Off with the knave’s hat!” An angry hand Smote down the offence; but the wearer said, With a quiet smile, “By the king’s command I bear his message and stand in his stead.” In the Governor’s hand a missive he laid With the royal arms on its seal displayed, And the proud man spake as he gazed thereat, Uncovering, “Give Mr. Shattuck his hat.”
He turned to the Quaker, bowing low,– “The king commandeth your friends’ release; Doubt not he shall be obeyed, although To his subjects’ sorrow and sin’s increase. What he here enjoineth, John Endicott, His loyal servant, questioneth not. You are free! God grant the spirit you own May take you from us to parts unknown.”
So the door of the jail was open cast, And, like Daniel, out of the lion’s den Tender youth and girlhood passed, With age-bowed women and gray-locked men. And the voice of one appointed to die Was lifted in praise and thanks on high, And the little maid from New Netherlands Kissed, in her joy, the doomed man’s hands.
And one, whose call was to minister To the souls in prison, beside him went, An ancient woman, bearing with her The linen shroud for his burial meant. For she, not counting her own life dear, In the strength of a love that cast out fear, Had watched and served where her brethren died, Like those who waited the cross beside.
One moment they paused on their way to look On the martyr graves by the Common side, And much scourged Wharton of Salem took His burden of prophecy up and cried “Rest, souls of the valiant! Not in vain Have ye borne the Master’s cross of pain; Ye have fought the fight, ye are victors crowned, With a fourfold chain ye have Satan bound!”
The autumn haze lay soft and still On wood and meadow and upland farms; On the brow of Snow Hill the great windmill Slowly and lazily swung its arms;
Windmills on Old Boston Harbor
Broad in the sunshine stretched away, With its capes and islands, the turquoise bay; And over water and dusk of pines Blue hills lifted their faint outlines. . . .
But as they who see not, the Quakers saw The world about them; they only thought With deep thanksgiving and pious awe On the great deliverance God had wrought. Through lane and alley the gazing town Noisily followed them up and down; Some with scoffing and brutal jeer, Some with pity and words of cheer.
One brave voice rose above the din. Upsall, gray with his length of days, Cried from the door of his Red Lion Inn “Men of Boston, give God the praise No more shall innocent blood call down
The bolts of wrath on your guilty town. The freedom of worship, dear to you, Is dear to all, and to all is due.
“I see the vision of days to come, When your beautiful City of the Bay Shall be Christian liberty’s chosen home, And none shall his neighbor’s rights gainsay. The varying notes of worship shall blend And as one great prayer to God ascend, And hands of mutual charity raise Walls of salvation and gates of praise.”
So passed the Quakers through Boston town, Whose painful ministers sighed to see The walls of their sheep-fold falling down, And wolves of heresy prowling free. But the years went on, and brought no wrong; With milder counsels the State grew strong, As outward Letter and inward Light Kept the balance of truth aright.
The Puritan spirit perishing not, To Concord’s yeomen the signal sent, And spake in the voice of the cannon-shot That severed the chains of a continent. With its gentler mission of peace and good-will The thought of the Quaker is living still, And the freedom of soul he prophesied Is gospel and law where the martyrs died.
Uganda, tragic home of many martyrs of today . . . Will Friends now raise their voice to help to drive this plague away?
[NOTE: I’m a latecomer to Leonard Cohen fandom. His early songs seemed gloomy, slight and self-indulgent, his young voice nasal and whiny. I much preferred Bob Dylan then.
But when a good friend gave me his album “Democracy” thirty or so years later the title song and several others bowled me over: his voice had aged into a superb gravelly instrument, perfectly tuned to his mature melancholy. And there were so many lines and couplets and images in his poetry that became breathtaking, unforgettable. I realized I had grown largely indifferent to Dylan, and felt his Nobel was misplaced: it should have gone to the mystic of Montreal.
But if Leonard didn’t shrug off the slight, the Zen-master Cohen would have, so what the hell? When I saw him live, in Brooklyn in 2013, he seemed completely real, and the performance meticulously rehearsed and intricately authentic.]
A fascinating collection of early fiction foreshadows motifs and concerns that Cohen the performer later mined across decades
This collection of Leonard Cohen’s early fiction – a novella and 15 short stories, plus a play script – was all written between 1956 and 1961, before Cohen really thought of himself as a songwriter or performer. He didn’t release his first record until 1967, when he was 33. The bulk of the pieces might be classified as unpublished juvenilia except, of course, that the composer of Famous Blue Raincoat and Hallelujah was never wholly young and free of care.
The title piece, written when Cohen was 22 and doing postgraduate study in law at McGill University in Montreal, justifies the decision to bring these things to light and not only for the insights it offers into the artist that Cohen was to become. The novella is a strange confessional – it is hard to imagine Cohen writing in any mode other than the first person – involving a youngish office worker, his doomy occasional lover Marylin and the aged Jewish “Grampa” who unexpectedly arrives to share his one-room apartment in Montreal.
It has a subliminally rhyming opening that, you might say, sets the gravelly spoken-word tone for all the 60 years to come: “My grandfather came to live with me. There was nowhere else for him to go. What had happened to his children? Death, decay, exile – I hardly know. My own parents died of pain. But I must not be too gloomy, at the beginning, or you will leave me and that, I suppose, is what I dread the most. Who would begin a story if he knew it were to end with a climbing chariot or a cross?”
As ever in Cohen’s work, that inherited sense of anxiety and tragedy and religious weight of feeling – his uncle was the unofficial chief rabbi of Montreal, his maternal grandfather a famous rabbinical scholar – comes to be set against a dark wit and the intoxicating, troubling freedoms of the coming sexual revolution.
Marylin, the name itself a harbinger, matches the archetype of many of the author’s subsequent muses, idealised, unattainable and finally discarded. The comedy of their initial couplings, in which she is both his addiction and his torment and where their pillow talk occasionally catches cadences of the Song of Solomon, can sound like early Philip Roth. Their affair, though, is undone by the presence of Grampa, spitting and shitting and cursing and hitting out with his cane, in whose demented company Cohen’s narrator loses his own inhibition and starts to match his house guest in violence and taboo-breaking.
What follows is a curious and compulsive examination of the boundaries of honesty and cruelty. Taking his grandfather’s example, the narrator becomes briefly and disturbingly sadistic towards a stranger, and then to his lover and his landlady; a sort of bohemian Canadian Raskolnikov. Cohen made four full drafts of the book before he gave up on it. You can see why the novella – poetically astute and quite psychologically unhinged – never found a publisher in the mid-50s, but also why Cohen considered it a more interesting book than his subsequent more conventional novels, The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers, of nearly a decade later.
Cohen performing in Brooklyn, 2013.
That trajectory might also be traced in the stories that follow in this collection. Some were written in Montreal, later ones after Cohen had moved to Hydra island in Greece. There are familiar refrains, connection and lack of connection, intimacy and all its detailed discontents. One story is concerned with the complicated effects of a wife’s leg-shaving ritual on her husband’s libido. Here’s an exchange from A Week Is a Very Long Time that might serve to summarise the Montreal years: “She closed her eyes against his arm, ‘Oh, it’s been a beautiful week.’ He said, ‘You’re beautiful.’ She said, ‘Will we ever do this again?’ ‘Maybe you’re too beautiful,’ he said, because he didn’t want to say anything else.”
At the same time as he was writing these stories Cohen was also writing poetry, with more success, including, after his time in Greece, some of the lyrics – Suzanne and Sisters of Mercy – that would appear on his first album. Reading the final stories here is to witness his attention wandering from the form; what he calls in one his “jukebox heart” was already elsewhere.
•A Ballet of Lepers by Leonard Cohen is published by Canongate (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com.
This collection of Leonard Cohen’s early fiction – a novella and 15 short stories, plus a play script – was all written between 1956 and 1961, before Cohen really thought of himself as a songwriter or performer. He didn’t release his first record until 1967, when he was 33. The bulk of the pieces might be classified as unpublished juvenilia except, of course, that the composer of Famous Blue Raincoat and Hallelujah was never wholly young and free of care.