Bits Blog: Kleiner Perkins, for Better or Verse

Eloy Alonso/ReutersLeonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen’s “Book of Longing” must be the most discussed book in Silicon Valley since Walter Isaacson’s life of Steve Jobs. The Canadian songwriter’s collection of verse and drawings, first published in 2006, plays a highly visible role in the suit Ellen Pao has filed against her employer, the venture firm of Kleiner Perkins. That case will again be in the news on Friday, when Kleiner goes to court to argue that it should go to arbitration.

When thinking about the case, “Book of Longing” offers a useful prism. Are these poems and sketches offensive, as the plaintiff charges, or benign, as the defense would have it?

Ms. Pao asserts that she was harassed into a brief affair with an unmarried colleague, and that her efforts to deal with this and other instances of unseemly behavior were met with retaliation and punishment. Kleiner says there is little record of her formally or even informally complaining, and denies any retaliation.

Mr. Cohen, now in his late 70s, is an unlikely artist to figure in a Silicon Valley trial. His recordings are redolent of the Beat era of coffeehouses; “Suzanne,” his most covered song, dates from the late 1960s. Like much of Mr. Cohen’s work, “Suzanne” deals with the mystery and wonder of women: “You can spend the night beside her/ And you know that she’s half-crazy,” etc.

Ms. Pao suggests in her suit that a senior partner’s gift of “Longing” was equivalent to making a crude proposal or touching in an inappropriate place — way beyond the pale for acceptable office behavior. That senior partner, Randy Komisar, says the truth is more prosaic, according to the legal papers. He and Ms. Pao had a discussion about Mr. Komisar’s Buddhism, and she gave him a statue of Buddha as a holiday gift, the papers say. Mr. Komisar’s wife chose the Cohen book as a return gift. Kleiner notes in the papers that The New York Times called the book “profound.” True. But the same review also called it “steamy.”

What to make of this? Well, if I gave a copy of this book to a co-worker who decided she was offended, there are plenty of lines I would be uncomfortable hearing read to me by someone from the Human Resources Department: “You came to me this morning/ And you handled me like meat/ You’d have to be a man to know/ How good that feels how sweet.”

“The Mist of Pornography” begins this way:

when you rose out of the mist
of pornography
with your talk of marriage
and orgies
I was a mere boy of fifty-seven
trying to make a fast buck
in the slow lane

Other poems here could not be quoted in a family newspaper.

On Friday morning in a San Francisco court, Kleiner will get another chance to move the case to arbitration and avoid the humiliation of a trial. If the firm loses this bid, and wants to avoid a public trial, it may end up paying a very large settlement to Ms. Pao. Someone will lose big here. Which somehow brings to mind a poem of Mr. Cohen’s:

I said I’d be your lover
You laughed at what I said
I lost my job forever
I was counted with the dead