BEAT SURRENDER

Two of my favorite literary voices left the planet last year, and it was comforting to come upon their works in National Book Store recently.

Both first gained attention as poets before turning to other crafts: Leonard Cohen was known in Canada for his early poetry volumes before picking up an acoustic guitar and heading to Greenwich Village and the folk scene in the ‘60s. He became an unlikely rock icon, performing with his foghorn croon up into his 80s (he had to, after a former manager embezzled Cohen’s entire retirement nest egg).

Johnson was a poet who spent his childhood in the Philippines, later turning to Beatnik-inspired short stories (Jesus’ Son), travel writing and ambitious

novels (Tree of Smoke) among his other worldly sojourns.

I will miss his writing. His last published novel was a Graham Greene-ish affair titled The Laughing Monsters and it’s pure, undistilled Johnson: cutto-the-bone prose that’s nonetheless poetic, capable of simple arabesques that take the breath away. The son of a US State Department employee, Johnson often charted society’s misfits, those on the bottom rungs who abuse substances and are often themselves abused. Novels like Angels (1983) and

Already Dead (1997) harked to the Beats while the breakthrough collection Jesus’

Son echoed Raymond Carver, who was Johnson’s writing teacher — and frequent drinking partner — at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

The Laughing Monsters concerns Roland Nair, a Danish former intelligence officer with a US passport whose current employer remains mysterious throughout the novel. He meets up with former intel ops pal Michael Adriko in Sierra Leone with a double mission: one, to find out what his old friend has been up to; and two, to keep tabs on him and report back to his bosses.

Freetown, Sierra Leone is the type of landscape in which Graham Greene loved to plant his spies and agents: a place where intelligence is bought either cheaply or very dearly, and almost always unreliably. Roland’s mission gets complicated with the arrival of Michael’s fiancée, Davidia, an Ameri- can whose father was once Michael’s superior officer. It’s all very clandestine and undercover, and it’s Johnson’s storytelling skills that win out in a more compact version of the skullduggery that goes on in his Vietnam opus, Tree

of Smoke. His sparse prose — a clipped mixture of reportorial Hemingway, Greene and something more odd and surreal — carries us through the weirdness:

The room was small and held that aroma saying, “All that you fear, we have killed.” The bed was all right. On the nightstand, on a saucer, a white candle stood beside a redand-blue box of matches.

Roland soon learns that Michael is up to an elaborate ruse involving fake Plutonium, the stuff of black market nukes that rogue nations would pay a Bitcoin fortune for. Bad ideas are his business, in other words.

Michael’s lethal skills and charming, smiling mask allow him to elbow his way deeper and deeper into trouble. He and Roland eventually fall out, in typical noir fashion, over the affections of a woman; but they end up needing each other in this uncertain terrain, lighting out in the end in a manner that almost suggests Huckleberry Finn — wide-eyed white man and freed slave together, on the midnight run once again. Leonard Cohen took off from touring and his recording career in the late ‘90s to join a monastery in California, and his meditations high atop Mt. Baldy (as it’s appropriately known) make up the poems in Book of Longing, published in 2006. It’s good to see Cohen’s literary work out in print once again, and the poems here are very much in character for the Canadian mystic with one foot gently planted in the brothel. Anyone who’s ever parsed Cohen’s lyrics knows he spends as much time finding just the right way to describe carnal longing as he does existential dilemma. Both share the page in his writing here, along with Cohen’s own (sometimes erotic) drawings and handwritten captions that are as droll as his persona. Never really a Beat writer, Cohen had at least a shared interest in Zen Buddhism, and attachment/detachment from the world was a frequent theme of his songs. (His last two song cycles, “Popular Problems” and “You Want it Darker,” were late-blooming masterpieces focusing more and more on God and the actual prospect of death, yet still driven by wry humor.) Here, before the coming Millennium, Cohen is baldheaded and open to the universe, poking fun at his own desires, and also those (like Zen master Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi) who would harness them. His earthly distraction is a frequent fount of humor, and delivers compressed insight: How sweet time feels when it’s too late and you don’t have to follow her swinging hips all the way into your dying imagination. Cohen remained at the monastery from ’94 until 1999, and was eventually ordained as a Zen Buddhist monk. (Dharma name: Jikan, meaning “silence.”) Bonus: he cut down on smoking and drinking during the final years, and never lost his sense of humor about the world.

I enjoy reading Book of Longing in the morning, before too many thoughts enter the mind. (The Laughing Monsters, in contrast, is pure night reading, being a modern noir.) If you’re lucky, a fresh insight or way of looking at your mundane surroundings emerges after a few pages; if you’re really lucky, a poem will slip out. It’s as mind-clearing, for me, as a cup of oolong tea. And it’s refreshing, like meeting an old friend, to come across these now-silent voices, even if only in print, even if only freshly pressed between the covers. Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen and The Laughing Monsters by Denis Johnson are available at National Book Store.