THE FLAME BURNS ON
For Leonard Cohen, nothing made him happier than leaving a white page ‘blackened’ with his words. His final book ‘was what he was staying alive to do, his sole breathing purpose at the end.’ Ian McGillis reports on how, from the beyond, he speaks to us ag
Almost two years after his death, Leonard Cohen has the final word — in a posthumous book he undertook in “a state of emergency” and toiled on till the end. What emerges is a portrait of the artist over six decades,
If you’ve got it handy, pull out your copy of Songs of Leonard Cohen — LP or CD, though the former is better, being bigger — and look at the back cover. The image there, often assumed to depict Joan of Arc being burned at the stake, is in fact a piece of Mexican religious folk art, chosen by Cohen to represent, in his words, “the triumph of spirit over matter — the spirit being that beautiful woman breaking out of the chains and fire and prison.”
Fire and flame are multi-purpose motifs throughout Cohen’s writings and songs — so much so that when it came time to choose a title for the book of poems and other writings on which he was working feverishly right up until his death on Nov. 7, 2016, son Adam Cohen was in no doubt.
“He lit the flames and he tended to them diligently,” writes Adam in his introduction to the book that now sees the light of day as The Flame: Poems and Selections from the Notebooks (McClelland & Stewart, 275 pp, $32.95).
“It was a state of emergency,” said The Flame’s co-editor Alexandra Pleshoyano, talking about Cohen’s determination, at age 82, to get the project finished in the face of pain from spinal stress fractures and the effects of leukemia, a combination that weakened him to a state where a fall in his Los Angeles home proved fatal.
“But it was that way all his life, really. Even when there were long gaps ( between albums and books), he was always, always writing.”
It’s a truth underlined further by Adam Cohen, whose introduction tells how, for his father, the book “was what he was staying alive to do, his sole breathing purpose at the end.”
And it all chimes with the artist himself. He frequently claimed that nothing made him happier than the act of leaving a previously white page “blackened” with his poetry and prose.
Université de Sherbrooke professor and Montreal native Pleshoyano came to her role in The Flame via an unconventional route: she’s the first to admit she got out of the Cohen blocks uncommonly late. And that was despite spending parts of her youth at her father’s house on Cedar Ave. in Westmount, just a couple
of streets from where Cohen grew up on Belmont Ave. And despite being of the generation that stoked Cohen’s late-1980s comeback, she was only marginally aware of him until, in 2004 at age 42, a chance encounter with some Dutch Cohen fans converted her.
“A bunch of young people were coming out of a bar, singing a Cohen song in Dutch, although I didn’t know that. We got talking and they said ‘What? You’re from Quebec and you don’t know Leonard Cohen?’ I felt like an idiot.”
Six years later, Pleshoyano had secured a grant to write about Cohen and Jewish mysticism, and was doing graduate work in Strasbourg, France, when Cohen’s Grand Tour came to town. Through a connection with a Swiss Cohen scholar, she found herself having dinner with him. The two spoke of their common interest in the Kabbalah and the Israeli philosopher and scholar Gershom Scholem.
In the ensuing years, Pleshoyano’s standing as a Cohen expert grew. She served, for instance, as a consultant to the Musée d’art contemporain’s A Crack in Everything exhibition, a tribute to Cohen.
She came to the attention of Cohen’s manager, Robert Kory, the man instrumental in reviving Cohen’s finances after the embezzlement he suffered at the hands of his previous manager, Kelley Lynch. Six months after Cohen died, when the time came to organize his vast archive of papers and sketchbooks, and to craft them into a book, Pleshoyano got the call along with cocurator Robert Faggen.
It was a job that could fairly be described as Herculean. It involved transcribing thousands of pages of archives gathered over six decades — a task that fell mostly to Faggen, who dealt heroically with Cohen’s not especially neat handwriting.
Then there was the matter of putting it all in some kind of order, an undertaking complicated by Cohen’s idiosyncratic approach to dating the material: jumping around by years from page to page, sometimes literally having the work of separate eras side by side. Not entirely surprising, given that he was known to work on a single poem or song for years, it still invites a bit of speculation. Might it
all have been a deliberate ploy to throw future scholars off the trail?
“He was into mischief — and mystery,” said Pleshoyano. “So that’s certainly not inconceivable.”
In the end, the determining factor was mostly the order in which the writings appeared. Clearing the technical hurdles, Pleshoyano and Faggen put together a sequence of previously unpublished poems, lyrics for the late-period albums (often slightly but enticingly different from what ended up being sung), reproductions from the notebooks, and other late-life documents. Resisting the temptation to provide extensive marginalia and footnotes — “That would have made it an academic book, and that’s the last thing he would have wanted,” Pleshoyano said — they have assembled an illuminating
and seamlessly readable volume that will be manna to Cohen fans worldwide.
What’s likely to cause the most surprise, though, is the visual component of The Flame. More than a hundred drawings and paintings from Cohen’s sketchbooks enhance the text, chosen by Pleshoyano from among roughly 400 provided. Many are self-portraits, though the designation doesn’t indicate their range: in 2003 alone Cohen did a self-portrait every day, in a variety of media, often with accompanying words expressing the first thoughts that came into his mind upon waking up.
Pleshoyano placed them in thematically appropriate places alongside the poems and lyrics, creating combinations that are sometimes poignant, sometimes funny, and always complementary.
Next to a poem in which Cohen writes “I feel ridiculous / in my grey suit / and my pomaded hair” appears a line drawing of the artist looking heavily pomaded, à la I’m Your Man.
The lyrics to the Anjani song Thanks for the Dance are accompanied by a painting done in a style evocative of Toulouse Lautrec.
More than once, Cohen presents himself staring at his own reflection, though the effect is somehow never narcissistic.
“Mirrors are very important to Cohen,” said Pleshoyano, who often slips into referring to her subject in the present tense. “When he first auditioned for (Columbia Records executive) John Hammond he had to stand in front of a mirror in order to perform. (Hammond signed Cohen in 1967.) They appear all through his work. He was an insecure person, and I think for him mirrors were a way of being sure he hadn’t disappeared.”
He needn’t have worried about that.
Adam Cohen has confirmed that a posthumous album is in the planning stages. It will comprise Cohen’s fifteenth studio collection, consisting of songs post-dating You Want it Darker, the 2016 album previously assumed to be his last musical testament.
And in the pages of The Flame, Leonard Cohen feels more present than ever.
You can keep the body as well-oiled and receptive as possible, but whether you’re actually going to be able to go for the long haul is really not your own choice.
LEONARD COHEN