- Title: The World of Leonard Cohen
- Genre: Nonfiction
- Publisher: Cambridge University Press
- Pages: 400
He was a multi-hyphenate before the term existed: poet, songwriter, singer, pop icon, possessed of different religious identities and yet always Jewish, a citizen of the world and yet always a Canadian, and an enigmatic blend of the sacred and profane, the erotic and the neurotic.
Leonard Cohen – controversial before he was mainstream, middle-class before he was countercultural, at the periphery of both rock ‘n’ roll and folk music but somehow also moaning and droning with the strains and sobs of klezmer music – has been a cultural and Canadian obsession for decades.
The World of Leonard Cohen by David R. Shumway.Supplied
Contradictions and complexities like these are the natural resources of celebrity, and of a new volume of essays, The World of Leonard Cohen, assembled and edited by David R. Shumway, that makes good use of the legacy and life of a figure who was (here we go again!) both worldly in his profile and at the same time provincial in his outlook, equally at home (or in rebellion or depression) on the Greek island of Hydra, at a Zen monastery on California’s Mount Baldy, in a guru’s retreat in India, on an unmade bed in the Chelsea Hotel, and in the homey confines of Bagel Etc. at 4320 Boulevard Saint-Laurent in Montreal, where a plaque notes his erstwhile favourite spot to nosh and tend to his neuroses.
Withdrawn and brooding and yet always at the centre of conversation (this line of description has no end, a new one sprouting on virtually every page), Cohen – who, as Lucy J. Boucher puts it in this volume, “created several different representations of himself” – was, and remains after his 2016 death, a helping hand in understanding the vicissitudes of life, a minister to the melancholy, a celebrator of sex and ecstasy.
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Indeed, he was – surface contradictions galore! – a monastic advocate of sex and ecstasy. Robert Fulford called Cohen’s Beautiful Losers “the most revolting book ever written in Canada.” The book sat on our shelf when I was growing up. The unspoken parental order: Don’t even think of even touching it.
They were wrong, of course, and Shumway’s book proves it.
Leonard Cohen, circa 1975. The songwriter has been a cultural and Canadian obsession for decades.Jack Dobson/The Globe and Mail
Cohen’s conviction that “There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in,” is often quoted, but some of his lines and lyrics are inscrutable to some of us without university tenure or who aren’t high. He did, however, seem always to have been on the verge of saying something important. His work was irresistible to English majors.
At least that was the belief of members of my family, which includes no endowed professors, though my mom spent scores of afternoons in the Cohen house with her close friend (and distant cousin) Esther, Leonard’s sister. (I never met Leonard, and though Shumway and I both have berths at Carnegie Mellon, our relationship consists of having once been on panel on a topic I have forgotten.)
For many readers, the Shumway book will clarify their inchoate views of Cohen, moving them, as it did me, to understand that the meditator of Montreal was more than simply what Gordon Lightfoot would call “A minstrel of the dawn” (“He’ll talk of life out on the street/He’ll play it sad and say it sweet”).
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An examination of his relationship with Montreal is one central theme of this book. “I think it is dangerous for a writer to cut himself off from his origins,” he once said. “Mine are in Montreal.”
This comment by Cohen evokes the last line of a poem by Robert Frost titled New Hampshire: “At present I am living in Vermont.” At nearly every “present” in much of his life, the Montrealer was living somewhere else, craving notoriety even as he gained attention for refusing to accept the Governor General’s Award for Selected Poems in 1968.
A mural in downtown Montreal of Cohen pays tribute to the late singer-songwriter who was born in the city. Cohen's relationship to the city is explored in the book.ERIC THOMAS/AFP/Getty Images
In all the moves to discover or to forget, he was the ultimate wandering Jew, not planted in any particular garden. Maybe Ira B. Nadel, writing in these pages, is right that his connection with his muse Marianne Ihlen allowed him to discover “the creative freedom to express his conflicted views of his Montreal past and his artistic present.”
Throughout the book’s pages are meditations on whether Cohen was the “Canadian Dylan.” Those who make that comparison inadvertently suggest what many others feel, that both overwrought singer-songwriters weren’t as deep as their fans devoutly believe – and that they succeeded in crafting public images that suggested otherwise.
Gillian A.M. Mitchell of the University of St. Andrews writes that Cohen was “meaningfully akin to his alleged counterpart, Bob Dylan, but also [should] be considered as one of [Pete] Seeger’s true heirs.” The title of Todd Gitlin’s 2002 American Scholar essay got it right: “Grizzled Minstrels of Angst: Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, Forever Old.”
One of Cohen’s great skills was creating songs that became – acknowledging the contradiction in terms – instant warhorses.
“Cohen created classic examples of a form unknown to 1950s rock & roll more central to post-Dylan rock: War horses,” writes the University of Alabama’s Eric Weisbard. “Elongated songs in the manner of long poems, sequences that even on arrival, before they became festival rituals, or had every take reissued for added overkill, felt well-worn and epic.” Cohen himself appeared well-worn and epic, and Shumway’s essay on aging rock stars suggests to us that Cohen’s work hasn’t grown old.
This volume lingers, as Cohen did, on the matter of sex.
Though he wrote of himself, in the semi-autobiographical The Favourite Game, “that he didn’t command the glory of the flesh,” he indeed enjoyed, relentlessly pursued, luxuriated in, and celebrated, the pleasures of the flesh. The late David Yaffe of Syracuse University described him in his essay Boudoir Poet: A Thousand Kisses with Leonard Cohen (a reference to a sneer by Joni Mitchell, a onetime lover) as “the most sex-besotted great anglophone songwriter,” adding, “If you were to listen to Cohen’s complete oeuvre and play a drinking game, taking a shot every time sex comes up, you’d need your stomach pumped.” Cohen’s self-ascribed role as ladies’ man wasn’t in the service of low-brow porn but instead served to illuminate a high-brow examination of sexual ecstasy. At least, that’s how he got away with it.
Socrates is said to have remarked that the unexamined life is not worth living. This book affirms that the life of Leonard Cohen, among the modern public figures whose lives were most examined, was worth living. To which we can say: Hallelujah.