Bound for Obscure Glory: Leonard Cohen from Poet to Pop Star

‘All of my writing has guitars behind it, even the novels’ - Leonard Cohen

‘The news is sad but it’s in a song so it’s not so bad’ – from The Favourite Game

In his short story ‘Career Move’, Martin Amis created a kind of alternative version of our universe — one that wasn’t so much parallel per se as just enjoyably wonky. Here poets are fêted as superstars. Forever jetting off for meetings in Hollywood, versifiers have the arduous task of dealing with adoration, good lunches and vast sales figures. Screenwriters in the ‘Career Move’ realm, meanwhile, toil in abject obscurity. Their efforts are published to little acclaim in small and largely unread magazines.

Swap pop stars for screenwriters, and we have a tale that, in a way, is curiously apposite to the career of Leonard Cohen. The Favourite Game, though widely reviewed, sold only a thousand or so copies when it was first published in 1963. And part of what persuaded Cohen to throw his lot in with music three years later, which he has admitted in hindsight seems ‘mad’ and ‘a very foolish strategy’, was an attempt to address an ‘economic crisis’. Poetry and fiction, his vocations until then, were simply not bringing in enough money for Cohen to survive on. From this position, it is fascinating, if facile and, of course, ultimately futile, to wonder what would have happened had this novel been a bestseller. A world without that voice, those songs surely is almost as unimaginable to many of us as, perhaps sadly, a planet where poets always fly first class. Equally, almost everyone coming to this novel today is armed with an idea of Cohen as a singer-songwriter. The book’s original readers knew Cohen, if at all, as a poet.

In the absence of a bout of amnesia or some sort of weird mind-wiping device, we can’t, obviously, unlearn what we know about Cohen. Or think we know, at least. Naturally this novel should, as it really deserves, be read as a freestanding, brilliant and inventive work of fiction in its own right. It is, however, also unavoidably a key and irremovable piece in the continuum of Cohen’s art. One that contains certain themes — the allure of the sacred and the profane, and the pain of love and loss, in particular — that admirers of his songs can immediately recognize. Its genre too — fictionalized autobiography — after all, also forms the basis of his musical output. In fact, the distinctions between Cohen the songsmith and Cohen the wordsmith all but dissolve the closer one looks.

Cohen was born and raised in Montreal’s affluent Westmount district. Cohen drew a fictionalized portrait of his formative years in his debut novel. His father, Nathan, died prematurely when Cohen was just nine years old. The young Cohen paid tribute to his father by burying in the garden a note to the dead man, slipped inside an old bow tie. He has said that composing this message, a few lines of verse, was his ‘first experience … with that kind of heightened language that [he] later recognized as poetry’.

The Cohens were observant Jews involved in the garment business. Leonard’s maternal grandfather was the rabbi Solomon Klein. Klein had compiled a thesaurus of Talmudical interpretations and played an important role in Cohen’s education, taking him to the library and instilling in him a love of the traditions and language of the faith. (During the 1990s when Cohen entered a Buddhist retreat and was finally confirmed as a monk, he stated that he wasn’t ‘looking for a new religion’ but was ‘quite happy with the old one, with Judaism’.)

This did not, however, preclude the young Cohen from accompanying his Irish nanny on her visits to the Catholic churches that are such a feature of Montreal’s architecture. These, too, would leave an indelible mark on Cohen’s creative imagination. While certainly chronicling an encounter with a friend who served him Constant Comment tea in her riverside loft, the song ‘Suzanne’, for example, actually offers an elliptical portrait of Montreal. The fusion of religious and nautical imagery in the lyrics was directly inspired by Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours, the sailors’ church in the city harbour. ‘I have to keep coming back to Montreal,’ Cohen once observed, ‘to renew my neurotic affiliations.’

By the time Cohen entered McGill University in 1951, he had discovered the poetry of Federico García Lorca and was playing the guitar. He would go on to name his daughter after the Spanish poet and set his own translation of Lorca’s poem ‘Pequeño vals vienés’ to music with ‘Take this Waltz’.

At McGill, he formed a country and western band called The Buckskin Boys who played at college dances and functions. Living during this period ‘beside jukeboxes’, Cohen was also writing verse in earnest, encouraged by his tutors, the Montreal poets Irving Layton and Louis Dudek. (They were men who Cohen credited with ‘acting in many ways’ as his absent father.)

Cohen’s first publication came in 1954, when ‘A Halloween Poem to Delight My Younger Friends’ appeared in CIV/n, a shortlived literary quarterly founded by Layton, Dudek and Aileen Collins. His debut collection, Let Us Compare Mythologies, appeared in the McGill Poetry Series in 1956, the year Cohen left Montreal for New York and a postgraduate course at Columbia University.

Cohen’s stint at Columbia was relatively brief, but there he met fellow student Anne Sherman. An intelligent and liberal-minded brunette, Sherman would serve as a longstanding muse and provide the basis for the character Shell in The Favourite Game. His spell in New York coincided with the publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Greenwich Village, Manhattan’s bohemian enclave, was then in its Beat movement heyday. At the Village Vanguard, Cohen caught Jack Kerouac, whose epoch-defining novel On the Road remained unpublished at that point, reciting verse backed by a bebop jazz combo.

As Cohen has often stated since, music and writing were two activities that he himself had ‘never really separated’. His writing, he has maintained, ‘grew out [of an] interest in folk music and the lyrics of folk music’. And similarly, he has said: ‘I always felt there was an invisible guitar behind the prose writing that I’ve done and even the verse that I’ve done.’ Even in this early poetic period the guitar, or at least music, was not entirely invisible. Back in Montreal, Cohen often gave recitals accompanied by musicians at a jazz club in Dunn’s Steak House, an eatery famed for its ‘black radish with onions and chicken fat’.

While Cohen had already established his own poetic voice before exposure to the Beats, he shared many of their preoccupations and sensibilities. Although more generally associated with the 1960s, it was in the previous decade that antiestablishment ideas about sexual liberty, spiritual fulfilment, Eastern religions and the consciousness-improving possibilities of drugs took on a greater urgency for artists, intellectuals and writers. It was Beat writers such as Kerouac and Ginsberg, along, arguably, with J. D. Salinger, who helped to popularize Zen Buddhism in the West. And like Kerouac, whose parents were of French- Canadian extraction, Cohen took amphetamines to enhance his concentration and used hashish and opium in the intellectually questing spirit of Baudelaire or De Quincey. (Though they would also be used, along with wine, to stave off the depression that dogged Cohen for nearly half a century. More recently he has said of drugs: ‘The recreational, the obsessional and the pharmaceutical — I’ve tried them all. I would be enthusiastically promoting any one of them if they worked.’)

Cohen is, in many ways, much more a product of the 1950s — the era when Henry Miller’s Sexus and J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man were denounced as pornography — than of the countercultural maelstrom that came later. A few months older than Elvis Presley, he experienced the arrival of rock ’n’ roll not as a teenager, like, say, fellow Hank Williams fan Bob Dylan, but as a published poet in his twenties.

With a summer back in Montreal under his belt, writing and working as a counsellor at a youth camp where his duties included leading folk-singing sessions and teaching the kids to devise haiku, Cohen had his next collection, The Spice-Box of Earth, accepted by the prestigious Toronto house of McClelland & Stewart. An arts scholarship from the Canadian Council gave him the funds to travel, and so, in December 1959, Cohen headed to London with the aim of working on a novel. ‘I started to write novels because I couldn’t read other people’s,’ he claimed in 1970.

Though the book, an early draft of The Favourite Game, progressed well enough, Cohen found London drab and damp. The weather forced him to purchase what would be immortalized as the ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ from Burberry in Piccadilly. Another London shopping trip saw him acquire the green Olivetti typewriter that his poems, novels and lyrics were typed on for over twenty years — and which can be spied on the back cover of his Songs from a Room LP.

Wandering in the City, after a dental appointment in the East End, Cohen chanced upon a branch of the Bank of Greece. Entering it, he was greeted by a teller, who, in stark contrast to the rest of the financial district’s pasty-faced inhabitants, looked tanned and healthy. Learning that the man had just returned from Greece, Cohen booked himself a one-way ticket to Athens. From there he made his way to Hydra, an idyllic island that, while lacking electricity and telephones, boasted a lively community of expat artists and writers. (In due course, Cohen, who in September 1960 bought a house on Hydra, turned the eventual arrival of overhead cables on the island into ‘Bird on a Wire’.)

Among those who Cohen befriended there were the Norwegian novelist Axel Jansen and his girlfriend, Marianne Ihlen, a former model, and their son, Axel. When Jansen left, Cohen and Ihlen struck up a relationship that endured for a decade and whose dissolution was meditated upon in song.

Dividing his time between Hydra and Canada, where The Spice-Box of Earth had been published to enormous acclaim in 1961, Cohen’s literary star was on the rise. Although it went through several rounds of revisions before it was published, The Favourite Game was awarded the $4,000 Prix Littéraire du Québec in 1964.

The poetry collections Flowers for Hitler (1964) and Parasites of Heaven (1966) that followed would, however, prove more controversial as did his next — and to date last — novel, Beautiful Losers (1966).

Eschewing the largely autobiographical bent of his debut, Cohen had vowed to write a ‘liturgy … [a] big confessional oration, very crazy, but using all the techniques of the modern novel … pornography … suspense, humor and conventional plotting’.

The final novel would be preoccupied with sublime grace and redemption and its recurring motifs were those of submission, saintliness and suicide. Central to its freewheeling narrative was the historical figure of Catherine Tekakwitha, the Mohawk who became the first Native Canadian saint. Cohen later maintained: ‘She spoke to me … she embodied in her own life, in her own choices, many of the complex things that face us always.’

Cohen wrote most of the book sitting on the terrace of his house on Hydra, a portable Dansette record player with a copy of Ray Charles’s The Genius Sings the Blues LP on almost constant rotation, normally by his side. Consuming a heady dose of amphetamines, Cohen often tapped away for twelve hours at a time. Perhaps not surprisingly given this regimen, when he finished a draft of the novel in 1965, he ‘flipped out completely’ and, hallucinating for about a week, was hospitalized on the island.

A gust of wind later carried Cohen’s only copy of the manuscript into the Aegean Sea — fortunately his New York publisher had a carbon copy.

The novel, like its predecessor, went through several further drafts but when it was completed Cohen regarded it as the best thing he’d ever done. ‘It’s a technical masterpiece. It was written with blood,’ he said, not long after its publication and scarcely exaggerating. The novel, however, initially polarized opinions (see ‘Nothing But Raves’ ) and sold modestly. By now, Cohen was growing tired of his peripatetic, centcounting existence. Left with little in the bank, he contemplated a career in broadcasting before hatching the slightly unorthodox plan of solving his financial woes by moving to Nashville and becoming a country singer.

Heading initially to New York, Cohen wound up staying in the city for most of the next two years — and a good part of that lodging in the notorious Chelsea Hotel. Located at 222 West 23rd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues and counting Mark Twain, Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Edie Sedgwick, Patti Smith and Sid Vicious as boarders at one point or another, the Chelsea in the late 1960s was the residential epicentre of New York’s artistic demi-monde. Cohen was the right man in the right place at the right time. While his attempts to woo Nico, the Velvet Underground’s icily Teutonic chanteuse, didn’t go quite so well, Cohen befriended the then-popular folk singer Judy Collins who recorded a version of ‘Suzanne’ for her album In My Life in 1966. And on 30 April 1967, Collins was performing at an anti-Vietnam concert in New York’s Town Hall. Collins had persuaded Cohen to appear. Shaking with fear, Cohen mounted the stage. His voice virtually a whisper, and his guitar audibly out of tune, he got halfway through the first verse of ‘Suzanne’ before stopping. Making his apologies, he fled. From the wings, however, he could hear the audience urging him to return. Collins gently ushered Cohen back into the limelight. Finishing ‘Suzanne’, he was met with rapturous applause. A pop star had just been born.

Leonard Cohen’s two novels, The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers, were reissued by Blue Door this July. The extraordinary and inimitable singer-songwriter’s classic novels are among his most critically acclaimed literary work, echoing the dark poetry and wry humour of his timeless songs of loss, love, sex and religion.