Asked about his state of mind on the eve of the launch of his new album, Popular Problems, Leonard Cohen replied: "I'm a closet optimist."
When another questioner queried if there was a political dimension to the recording’s themes of conflict, the response was: “I’ve tried over the years to define a political position that no one can decipher.”
As he turns 80 next week, it might be fair to say that no one appreciates the complexity of Leonard Cohen more than the man himself. Poet, novelist, songwriter, musician – he defies easy categorisation.
Looking back on eight decades, Cohen knows that nothing gets easier. He has endured matrimonial, financial, spiritual and creative crises, and emerged through them all with at least his sense of humour intact.
Explaining the mystery of the creative process in Rolling Stone magazine this month, he observed wryly: "If I knew where the good songs came from, I'd go there more often."
One of those songs is Hallelujah. It's fair to say that most people would associate it with the animated film Shrek or the version by the late Jeff Buckley that in turn was inspired by a John Cale cover.
For Cohen, like Shrek, his best-selling song has been something of an ogre.
He’s ambivalent about its popularity, saying: “I think it’s a good song, but I think too many people sing it.”
At the same time, he’s ready to include it in his own concert repertoire again, explaining: “It seems to call down some beneficial energy ... in the face of catastrophes.”
Hallelujah, for all its easy pop-popularity, might be as good a place as any to examine Cohen. Released when he was 50, its lyrics draw deep on Biblical references, including the story of Samson, but in its observation of King David’s adulterous lust for Bathsheba, also reflect his complex and sometimes difficult relationships with women.
Those roots go back to his childhood, which he has described as “Messianic”, explaining in 1967: “I was told I was a descendant of Aaron, the high priest.”
Cohen was born on September 21, 1934, in an English-speaking part of Montreal. His parents were middle-class Canadian Jews of Polish descent, a faith that remains embedded in his DNA despite his later acceptance of Buddhism.
By his teens, he was already immersed in the arts. At school he studied music and poetry, learning the guitar. By the late 1950s he was alternating between Montreal and New York, attempting to establish himself as a writer and poet with mixed success – a combination of good reviews and poor sales.
He was already in his 30s when his first album, The Songs of Leonard Cohen, was released in 1967. It included what for many – Hallelujah aside – is his best-known song, Suzanne, inspired by his platonic relationship with the girlfriend of a sculptor he knew in Montreal. It became a massive hit for his friend, the folk singer Judy Collins.
The success of his recording career established Cohen as, above all, a musician, if hardly one of universal chart appeal (his work has been described as "music to slit your wrists to"). His fan base grew with Songs From a Room in 1969, featuring Bird on a Wire, inspired by an earlier part of the 60s when he escaped to a house he had bought on the Greek island of Hydra. In total, he has recorded just 13 albums in a career that stretches now into its fifth decade.
Various Positions, released in 1984, and including Hallelujah, restored a career that had began to flag, leading, bizarrely, even to a guest acting appearance on the cop TV series Miami Vice. There were several changes of style, including the "grotesque" Death of a Ladies' Man in 1977, produced by Phil Spector, of which Cohen later recalled: "I was flipped out at the time, and he certainly was flipped out. For me, the expression was withdrawal and melancholy, and for him, megalomania and insanity and a devotion to armaments that was really intolerable."
By now, Cohen was romantically involved with a French photographer, Dominique Issermann, who made his first music video, for Dance Me to the End of Love.
Many of Cohen’s relationships seem to fit neatly into decades. In the 60s, it was a Norwegian woman, Marianne Jensen. The 70s saw two children, Adam and Lorca (named after the poet Federico García Lorca) with Suzanne Elrod, a Los Angeles artist. By the 90s, he had moved on to the actress Rebecca De Mornay. He has never married – the closest he came was with Elrod, but has said “cowardice” and “fear” held him back.
Such anxieties are part of Cohen’s psyche. His work is suffused with larger themes of political inequality, but also personal angst. He has admitted to widespread use of experimental drugs. For much of his life he has battled with depression, reflected in themes of self-harm in several of his songs (perhaps explaining his adolescent appeal).
In the past decade, he has spoken of beating back the black dog, recalling the day when he realised: “Wow, this must be like everybody feels.” His compulsion for endless, painful self-analysis was over. “It’s like that joke,” he told one interviewer. “When you’re hitting your head against a brick wall, it feels good when it stops.”
Some of this may be attributed to his interest in Buddhism and his friendship with the monk and teacher Kyozan Joshu Sasaki, who died this July at the age of 107.
Cohen was a regular visitor to Sasaki’s Mount Baldy Zen Centre in California from the late 1970s, serving him as a personal assistant during a period of retreat and seclusion in the 1990s.
Cohen’s Jewish identity remains complex. Following the outbreak of fighting in the 1973, he left his retreat in Hydra, flying to Israel, where he performed to troops near the front line. In 2009, his world tour brought him back to Israel, despite widespread calls for a cultural boycott over Palestinian rights. Cohen decided to go ahead with the concerts, but announced that the profits would go to both Palestinian and Israeli peace projects aimed at bringing together the families from both sides who had been killed in the conflict.
That tour was a response, in part, also to his financial difficulties. In late 2004, his daughter, Lorca, began to suspect financial irregularities by Cohen’s longtime manager and close family friend Kelley Lynch. Further investigations uncovered the distressing truth that most of his money was gone, including charitable trust funds and US$5 million (Dh18.4m) from his retirement accounts.
Although a civil suit against Kelley saw him awarded $9 million in damages, it has been widely reported that the money has never been paid. Later, Kelley was given an 18-month prison sentence, Cohen magnanimously remarked: “It gives me no pleasure to see my one-time friend shackled to a chair in a court of law, her considerable gifts bent to the services of darkness, deceit, and revenge.”
Such an experience, indeed many of the tribulations of Cohen’s life – both external and internal – might have broken another man. Yet just days from his landmark birthday, he looks fitter and trimmer than ever. For a man whose reputation has been largely founded on pessimism, gloom and despair (his albums always do best in Scandinavia), his current mood seems unnaturally cheerful.
These days he seems to know the joke is on him. Reminded persistently that he had once vowed to resume smoking if he hit his 80th birthday, Cohen responded to interviewers last week: “I think a lot about smoking. I’m thinking about it right now.”
[ jlangton@thenational.ae ]
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