page_title: Beautiful Losers
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Beautiful Losers / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: The town of Hydra on Hydra island, Greece Deutsch: Die Stadt Hydra auf der gleichnamigen Insel, Griechenland
context_page_description: Beautiful Losers is the second and final novel by Canadian writer and musician Leonard Cohen. It was published in 1966, before he began his career as a singer-songwriter.
  Set in the Canadian province of Quebec, the story of 17th-century Mohawk saint Catherine Tekakwitha is interwoven with a love triangle between an unnamed anglophone Canadian folklorist; his Native wife, Edith, who has committed suicide; and his best friend, the mystical F, a Member of Parliament and a leader in the Quebec separatist movement. The complex novel makes use of a vast range of literary techniques, and a wealth of allusion, imagery, and symbolism. It is filled with the mysticism, radicalism, sexuality, and drug-taking emblematic of the 1960s era, and is noted for its linguistic, technical, and sexual excesses.
  Cohen wrote the novel in two eight-month spurts while living on the Greek island of Hydra in 1964 and 1965. He fasted and consumed amphetamines to focus his creativity on the novel. Despite a lavish rollout, sales were disappointing, and critics were initially unsympathetic or hostile.
context_section_description: Cohen had published a number of books of poetry since the 1956 appearance of Let Us Compare Mythologies, and one novel, The Favourite Game (1963).   He had been living on the Greek island of Hydra in the early to mid-1960s, and had composed The Favourite Game and a book of poetry, Flowers for Hitler, there.  On Hydra, English was spoken, and there was an artists' colony there.
  Cohen wanted to write a "liturgy, a big confessional oration, very crazy, but using all the techniques of the modern novel ... pornographic suspense, humor and conventional plotting".
  Cohen wrote most of the novel during two concentrated eight-month periods in 1964 and 1965.  He wrote using a typewriter in a house in Hydra while listening to a portable record player, on which he listened to his favourite Ray Charles record, The Genius Sings the Blues.  At first he managed only three pages a day, and sometimes wrote only one hour a day.  When the novel began to take shape, he worked up to fifteen hours a day, with the help of amphetamines.  He later claimed that amphetamine use was a mistake "for depressed people", as coming down was particularly hard.  He said it took "ten years to fully recover".
  The first period of writing was interrupted when Cohen returned to Canada in October 1964 to receive the Prix littéraire du Québec for The Favourite Game, followed by a reading tour.  One result of the tour was the film Ladies and Gentlemen... Mr. Leonard Cohen, released in 1965 from the National Film Board of Canada.  The tour embittered Cohen, though, as he complained about money and the lack of exposure for his first novel.  He found himself torn on the issue of Quebec separation that had arisen as the Quiet Revolution heated up.  Montreal's francophone community was asserting itself against the anglophone elite.  The Front de Libération du Québec had begun targeting anglophones with bombs in 1963, and a statue of Queen Victoria on Sherbrooke Street was destroyed with a bomb on 12 July.  This political turmoil found its way into Cohen's work when he returned to Hydra.
  Cohen practised fasting during the composition of the novel, believing that it helped focus his creativity and spirituality.  Following its completion, Cohen broke down, collapsing from sunstroke and amphetamine consumption.  He had hallucinations, and had withered to 116 pounds after going without food for ten days.
  Cohen published another book of poetry, Parasites of Heaven, in 1966, but by then it became clear to Cohen that he would be unable to make a living as a writer.  He shifted focus to music, particularly after becoming interested in Bob Dylan in 1966.  That year, he decided to devote himself seriously to a singing career.  It was his music for which he later became well known.
caption: The island of Hydra, where Cohen wrote Beautiful Losers
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