What Leonard Cohen got from wrestling with religion

Do you ever feel that a book should be an essay, an essay a paragraph, a paragraph a sentence? That’s not quite the case with Harry Freedman’s “Leonard Cohen: The Mystical Roots of Genius,” a guided tour of the singer-songwriter’s various spiritual influences. But it’s one of those good books that, its charms notwithstanding, would have been even better after a little surgery.

Cohen’s grandfather was a rabbi, and Cohen grew up in the heart of Montreal’s Jewish community. So it’s not surprising that his art drew from the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament); the Talmud, that manyvolumed repository of Jewish law and custom, legend and folklore; and the commentary on Hebrew scripture known as Midrash. More importantly, he was inspired by the Kabbalah, a mystical tradition that became of greater popular interest early in this century after it was embraced by Madonna and other celebrities.

Every true artist is eclectic, so like his contemporary Bob Dylan, Cohen drew from Christian sources as well, most famously in “Suzanne,” which in many ways is a musical rewrite of the life of Jesus. But whereas Dylan changed his name from Robert Allen Zimmerman, Cohen was almost defiantly faithful to his decidedly Jewish identity. He once told a nosy interviewer that, yes, he’d thought of changing his name — to “September” — and when she asked if he meant “Leonard September,” he said: “No! September Cohen.”

Nevertheless, he grew to think that the Judaism of the synagogues was fossilized and mechanical, and he defined himself in a 1967 interview as “a priest of a catacomb religion that is underground, just beginning.”

Cohen spent three years in a Zen monastery in California and was ordained as a Zen monk, but as Freedman points out, Zen is more a way of looking at the world than a belief system and a set of rules like Judaism. Far more impactful on his writing were the poems of Federico García Lorca. The young Cohen wanted to be known for his poetry more than anything else. He said the Spanish poet “led me into the racket of poetry,” that “he educated me,” as did the medieval Persian poet Rumi and three of Cohen’s Canadian contemporaries — poets Irving Layton, Louis Dudek and A.M. Klein.

The content of this book is terrific, in other words. It’s the delivery system that could have used a little work.