Devotees make pilgrimage to songwriting legend’s home
MONTREAL— Montrealers continued to mourn on Friday, as a memorial to the late, great Leonard Cohen grows with each passing day.
Swelling and waning all day, crowds made their solemn pilgrimage to 28 Rue de Vallieres, where the famous poet and songwriter owned a home, laying flowers, lighting candles and listening to his famous baritone blast through a boom box decorated by a black fedora.
The mood is sombre. Real tears fall down the cheeks of those who have gathered here; a sense of loss is visceral. What is Montreal without its patron saint of songwriting?
“We love him, I will not say we loved him. We love him,” said Chantal Ringuet, who published a French-language anthology Les revolutions de Leonard Cohen last April (published by PUQ in 2016), which features artists, translators, researchers and personal essays about the prolific poet.
“I think that he had this ability to help us dream, to love, to live through the difficult moments . . . and he was what we call a passeur in French, a bridge-builder between cultures.”
Cohen is part of the Canadian literary canon, but Quebec — and especially Montreal — also fiercely claim him as their own, and one of the few symbols, other than the Habs, that unite both English and French Montrealers with pride.
He’s anchored here, Ringuet said. This city played a key role in his life and vice versa. She doesn’t think his ghost is going anywhere.
In Bagel Etc. on Saint-Laurent Blvd., one of his haunts, “That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” is playing on the loudspeaker, over the din of clinking dishes and nostalgic conversations about its most famous patron. Here, he would often sit at the counter of the coffee shop, wearing his signature dark suit and carrying a notebook. And before he left, Leonard Cohen would seek out every patron who had approached him and thank them.
“He’d give them a little handshake and say ‘thank you, friend,’ ” said Simon Rosson, the co-owner.
Will McClelland is at the bar. He’d met Cohen three times in Montreal but says he’s “been studying (Cohen) my entire life.”
McClelland tells me about a particular poem in Book of Longing where Cohen describes the waitresses’ behinds reflected in the mirrors that surround us.
“My brother and I used to call him the street father. The Main (a colloquial nickname for Montreal’s famous Saint-Laurent Blvd) figures so much in his work,” McClelland continues. “To my mind the most amazing thing is how much religious knowledge he smuggled into our withered souls.”
McClelland hopes the prolific Montrealer is memorialized with a Leonard Cohen walking tour of the city. He doesn’t think that naming an institution after him would be the right thing to do.
From his Jewish Westmount upbringing at 599 Belmont Ave., to Congregation Shaar Hashomayim, a synagogue with long-standing ties to the Cohen family, to the Main Deli Steakhouse, Cohen’s favourite smoked meat restaurant, the tour could be the greatest tribute to a man and to a city that defined him.
“They could walk you to the Queen Victoria statue that gets its hand blown off in (Cohen’s novel) Beautiful Losers, or the Montreal Pool Room, which he frequented and has been an institution on the Main since 1912 . . . ”
Perhaps it could include the Montreal cemetery where Cohen was buried before his death became publicly known.
The legendary singer-songwriter received a graveside memorial service on Thursday, according to Shaar Hashomayim of which he “was a beloved and revered member.”
The evidence of his burial lies beneath a conspicuous covering of fallen brown leaves in front of an unmarked gravestone, which covers the unsettled earth and wet cement.
The memorial across the street at Park du Portugal is cathartic yet ephemeral, McClelland says — although a bigger tribute is being planned there for Saturday at 4 p.m.