BOOKS
Eyewitness accounts of the man and his myth make up a sprawling oral history. By Victoria Segal.
Leonard Cohen, Gary Numan, Joan Baez, Peter Guralnick’s writings and more.
Leonard Cohen, Untold Stories: The Early Years
★★★★ Michael Posner SIMON & SCHUSTER. £25
IN 1965, Leonard Cohen introduced fellow Canadian poet Phyllis Webb to pot before taking her out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Montreal. “He was chattering away,” recalls Webb, “and said ‘aren’t I being brilliant?’ And I said, ‘No.’”
As the first instalment of Michael Posner’s monumental three-volume oral history makes clear, “no” wasn’t a word that Cohen was accustomed to hearing. The ladies’ man who inhabits these pages is very much alive, whether “hypnotising” his family’s maid to take off her clothes or instructing young student Madeleine Poulin to appear at midnight on the balcony of her room at Marianapolis College, an institution run by the Sisters Of The Congregation Of NotreDame. (“Boy, that’s really stepping inside his own myth, isn’t it?” remarks his friend Dennis Lee). Constructed from over 500 interviews with both inner-circle intimates and passing ships, the book is equally promiscuous, unable to turn down the promise of a quick recollection, no matter how shallow and meaningless.
Yet this writhing mass of eyewitness testimony isn’t without its gratifications, vividly exposing just how much life Cohen lived before he decided to make the move from poet and novelist to singer-songwriter. Not every memory is capable of offering up his psyche on a silver platter, but as the anecdotes accumulate up until 1970, they build a compelling picture of the worlds around him – affluent Montreal suburbia, Canadian Jewish summer camps, beatnik coffeehouses, jetset bohemia – grounding his myth in solid context, enriching it with casual detail. Cohen partly turned to music after realising he would struggle to make a living as a poet; a friend’s ostensibly mundane observation that Cohen would shun the cheaper, more distant airport parking for the closer option suddenly offers a sharp sliver of insight into his motives.
After a careful account of his childhood, from his background in “Jewish aristocracy” to his volatile relationship with his Russian mother, Masha, friends and acquaintances trace Cohen’s steep trajectory away from potential futures as a solicitor (he lasted half a term at law school) or grandee of the family clothing firm. His poetry, says friend and artist Vera Frenkel, “awoke empathy. Poor man. The women lined up to comfort. He did that very well.” In 1959, he headed to London, then on to the proto-hippy idyll of
Hydra, the Greek island where he started his turbulent eight-year relationship with
Marianne Ihlen. Cohen might be the central character – scrawling “I change I am the same” in gold on the whitewashed walls of his house during an acid trip, coming close to collapse as he writes his
1966 novel Beautiful
Losers under blazing sun, nursed back to health by a housekeeper with nettle soup – but the milieu around him is equally febrile, the living easy, the morals equally so. “The ’60s were dangerous times for relationships,” says writer and long-time friend Aviva Layton, “and Greek Islands were quadruply dangerous.” Even back in Montreal, recalls another girlfriend, it was “like a pyjama party. Everybody was doing everyone else.”
There is an element of boho soap opera to Leonard Cohen, Untold Stories, the format allowing for wildly unfounded speculation – gossip over whether he ever spent time in a mental institution, for example. Some recount casual cruelties and romantic recklessness; others saw Cohen as a hero even before he’d written a word. Yet as with any good oral history, the stories and opinions slowly coalesce like pointillist dots, shifting into a complex portrait of a man stepping into his myth, becoming brilliant.
“The ’60s were dangerous times for relationships.” AVIVA LAYTON
★★★ Martin Popoff ECW PRESS. £23.99
The author of over 80 books on hard rock and heavy metal, Martin Popoff writes utilitarian prose that sometimes smacks of deadline. He’s great on chronology and minutiae, though, hence his earlier employment as a researcher for Banger Films’ rated documentary Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage. This sequel to Anthem: Rush In The ’70s reveals such unlikely Rush influences from Iceland’s Björk to Nigeria’s King Sunny Adé, and maps the band’s ‘80s metamorphosis via detailed interviews about their embracing of new technologies, lyricist Neil Peart’s switch to acute studies of the human condition, and the unique dynamic that kept the band together for five decades until Peart’s death in 2020. The book’s occasional dryness is offset by a fair degree of revelation. Nowhere else, surely, will you read about their near collaboration with UFO’s Michael Schenker, nor about the ‘Geddycorn’, a mythical female creature who attends Rush concerts alone and sings all the lyrics.