In need of someone to cherish? Here’s your man
In 1987, Leonard Cohen was 52 and a bit out of style when Jennifer Warnes, a movie-soundtrack balladeer who had spent time singing backup for Cohen, released an album of his songs.
Expertly produced, sung by a conventionally competent singer, Famous Blue Raincoat gave audiences a chance to reconsider Cohen’s music without the distractions of his voice and his home-studio synthesizer tinkering. The long third act of Cohen’s life was underway.
He had already found fame as a poet and novelist whose work illuminated the achingly funny intersection of the heart and the libido — a precinct eternally located, as anyone who has wandered along its boulevards after dark knows, in his native Montreal.
Then, at 32, he began setting his words to music. For ever after he would be an acquired taste for some, an addiction for many. Ardent and yearning, gentle and attentive, wise and a fool. “If you want a lover / I’ll do anything you ask me to.”
A brief and probably culturally obligatory stint as a has-been ended when Warnes released her tribute and Cohen followed up a year later with I’m Your Man, an album that ranks among his masterpieces, a suite of songs whose dominant tone is wry futility. “All the rocket ships are climbing through the sky / The holy books are open wide,” he sang. “The doctors working day and night/ But they’ll never ever find that cure for love.”
In 1993, as he was closing in on 60, McClelland and Stewart released Stranger Music, a handsome compendium of his poems and song lyrics. It became possible for those of us who arrived late to the game to take the measure of Cohen’s gift. It was my text during the last year I lived in Montreal.
Some of Cohen’s verse is so lewd and simplistic it is easy to write off as horndoggerel: “Come down to my room / I was thinking about you / and I made a pass at myself.”
But even that scrap touches on two themes, longing and vulnerability, that he could elevate into arias when he felt the wind at his back.
For every mash note he tossed off, he produced something grander, more terrible — but almost always incorporating a wink. “We who belong to this city have never left The Church. The Jews are in The Church as they are in the snow. The most violent atheist radical defectors from le Parti Québécois are in The Church. Every style in Montreal is the style of The Church. The winter is in The Church. The Sun Life building is in The Church.” The poem “A Thousand Kisses Deep,” released as a spoken-word track on the 2001album Ten New Songs, shows Cohen’s art at its peak. It begins with another funny and tentative romance. “You came to me this morning / And you handled me like meat. / You’d have to live alone to know / How good that feels, how sweet.”
But the poem’s ambition grows steadily, verse by verse, never more clearly than in a wistful aside: “I jammed with Diz and Dante — I did not have their sweep — But once or twice, they let me play / A thousand kisses deep.” From the start, Cohen had yearned for greatness and understood that part of getting there was the obstinate desire to produce work that deserved comparison to that of his idols, be they Dizzy Gillespie or the author of Inferno.
In its last stanza, the poem reaches the divine and the hellish: “And now you are the Angel Death / And now the Paraclete / And now you are the Saviour’s Breath / And now the Belsen heap.”
In that breathtaking reference to the Nazi death camps, Cohen was paraphrasing something he wrote 40 years earlier: “It is painful to recall a past intensity, to estimate your distance from the Belsen heap, to make your peace with numbers. Just to get up each morning is to make a kind of peace.”
Cohen sought his peace in the embrace of women, in the example of his elders, in ancient philosophies he studied with humility and discipline, in the adoration of audiences to whom he gave the last full measure of his devotion. He could not shake the terrible knowledge of what happened in the damned 20th century, but he rose each morning to make what peace he could.
A tidbit of information by way of a coda. Cohen always seemed like such a loner, so adrift from the rest of us even when celebrating the flesh and mourning the city, that I was surprised, reading David Remnick’s profile of Cohen in the New Yorker last month, to learn that some of his early adventures were the fruit of a specific Canadian government policy.
In 1960, still only 25, he lived in London and made his way to Greece and Jerusalem, the first steps in a lifetime of travel. It was not the random wandering of a beatnik, it was a course of study he had proposed to the Canada Council for the Arts, for which the Crown corporation had given him the first of two grants he would receive, totalling $3,000. Of course those trips changed his life and art forever.
What struck me is that in 1959, when he received the first grant, the Canada Council was only two years old. It’s as though the thing just came along in time.
The Council’s creation was recommended, to a skeptical Louis St. Laurent, in the 1951 report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, chaired by the patrician Methodist diplomat Vincent Massey.
The Massey Commission report opens with an excerpt from St. Augustine’s The City of God: “A nation is an association of reasonable beings united in a peaceful sharing of the things they cherish; therefore, to determine the quality of a nation, you must consider what those things are.”
Here’s something to cherish. This guy. Leonard Cohen. He’s your man. Paul Wells is a national affairs writer. His column appears Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.