Making a long story longer

This book succeeds as a biography better than almost any I’ve ever read. All Leonard Cohen questions are answered. All questions about the times in which he lived are answered. “What Leonard Cohen means to me (the author)” is touched upon lightly and then put down. As far as I can tell no relevant musical or poetic detail is omitted, including my long running question of “Why did he shift from guitar in the 1980s?”

Highly recommended for anyone into Leonard Cohen – well written and very informative.

Things that surprised me

• He spent much more time in the Buddhist monastery than I originally thought
• Far more drug use, especially amphetamines than I would have thought, especially later in life (most people grow out of that sort of thing as they get older, Leonard grew into it)
• His work ethic and perfectionism were quite impressive
• The reason that he moved from guitar based folk was not due to some artistic “growth” but a musical writer’s block regarding guitar accompaniment. His synthesizer accompaniment was no blocked so he rolled with that.
• His youth and his old age lasted for long periods of time, his middle age was quite short

Highlights

Many years later Edgar H. Cohen would go on to write Mademoiselle Libertine: A Portrait of Ninon de Lanclos, a biography published in 1970 of a seventeenth-century courtesan, writer and muse whose lovers included Voltaire and Molière, and who, after a period in a convent, emerged to establish a school where young French noblemen could learn erotic technique.

Leonard did not cry at the death of his father; he wept more when his dog Tinkie died a few years later. “I didn’t feel a profound sense of loss,” he said in a 1991 interview, “maybe because he was very ill throughout my entire childhood. It seemed natural that he died. He was weak and he died. Maybe my heart is cold.”

Chapter Two of the hypnotism manual might have been written as career advice to the singer and performer Leonard would become. It cautioned against any appearance of levity and instructed, “Your features should be set, firm and stern. Be quiet in all your actions. Let your voice grow lower, lower, till just above a whisper. Pause a moment or two. You will fail if you try to hurry.”

Since the age of thirteen Leonard had taken to going out late at night, two or three nights a week, wandering alone through the seedier streets of Montreal. Before the Saint Lawrence Seaway was built the city was a major port, the place where all the cargo destined for central North America went to be offloaded from oceangoing freighters and put on canal boats and taken up to the Great Lakes or sent by rail to the West. At night the city swarmed with sailors, longshoremen and passengers from the cruise ships that docked in the harbor, and welcoming them were countless bars, which openly flouted the law requiring that they close at three A.M.

Lorca was a dramatist and a collector of old Spanish folk songs as well as a poet, and his poems were dark, melodious, elegiac and emotionally intense, honest and at the same time self-mythologizing. He wrote as if song and poetry were part of the same breath. Through his love for Gypsy culture and his depressive cast of mind he introduced Leonard to the sorrow, romance and dignity of flamenco. Through his political stance he introduced Leonard to the sorrow, romance and dignity of the Spanish Civil War. Leonard was very pleased to meet them both.

Over the subsequent years, whenever interviewers would ask him what drew him to poetry, Leonard offered an earthier reason: getting women. Having someone confirm one’s beauty in verse was a big attraction for women, and, before rock ’n’ roll came along, poets had the monopoly. But in reality, for a boy of his age, generation and background, “everything was in my imagination,” Leonard said. “We were starved. It wasn’t like today, you didn’t sleep with your girlfriend. I just wanted to embrace someone.”

In the summer of 1950, when Leonard left once again for summer camp—Camp Sunshine in Sainte-Marguerite—he took the guitar with him. Here he would begin playing folk songs, and discover for the first time the instrument’s possibilities when it came to his social life. You were still going to summer camp at age fifteen? “I was a counselor.

There were a lot of the Wobbly songs—I don’t know if you know that movement? A Socialist international workers union. Wonderful songs. ‘There once was a union maid / Who never was afraid / Of goons and ginks and company finks / And deputy sheriffs that made the raid . . . No you can’t scare me I’m stickin’ with the union.’ Great song.”

Leonard was clearly enthused. Some fifty years after his stay at Camp Sunshine he could still sing the songbook by heart from beginning to end.* In

At the second lesson, the Spaniard started to teach Leonard the six-chord flamenco progression he had played the day before, and at the third lesson Leonard began learning the tremolo pattern. He practiced diligently, standing in front of a mirror, copying how the young man held the guitar when he played. His young teacher failed to arrive for their fourth lesson. When Leonard called the number of his boardinghouse, the landlady answered the phone. The guitar player was dead, she told him. He had committed suicide.

The streets around McGill University were named for august British men—Peel, Stanley, McTavish—its buildings constructed by solid, stony Scotsmen in solid Scottish stone.

Had someone told you the British Empire was run from McGill, you’d be forgiven for believing them; in September 1951, when Leonard started at McGill on his seventeenth birthday, it was the most perfect nineteenth-century city-within-a-city in North America.

The general attitude to bilingualism at that time was not a lot different, if less deity-specific, from that of the first female governor of Texas, Ma Ferguson: “If the English language was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for everybody.”

Fraternities and presidencies might appear surprisingly pro-establishment for a youth who had shown himself to have Socialist tendencies and a poetic inclination, but Leonard, as Arnold Steinberg notes, “is not antiestablishment and never was, except that he has never done what the establishment does. But that doesn’t make him antiestablishment.

But in 1952, between his first and second years, Leonard formed his first band with two university friends, Mike Doddman and Terry Davis. The Buckskin Boys was a country and western trio (Mort had not yet taken up the banjo or it might have been a quartet), which set about cornering the Montreal square-dance market.

Mostly, though, he played guitar—alone, in the quadrangle, at the frat house, or anywhere there was a party. It wasn’t a performance; it was just something he did. Leonard with a guitar was as familiar a sight as Leonard with a notebook.

Leonard, even before he started to write his own stuff, was relentless. He would play a song, whether it was ‘Home on the Range’ or whatever, over and over and over all day, play it on his guitar and sing it. When he was learning a song he would play it thousands of times, all day, for days and days and weeks, the same song, over and over, fast and slow, faster, this and that. It would drive you crazy. It was the same when he started to write his own stuff. He still works that way. It still takes him four years to write a lyric because he’s written twenty thousand verses or something.”

That sense of a lost Eden, of something beautiful that did not work out or could not last, would be detectable in a good deal of Leonard’s work.

“I felt that what I wrote was beautiful and that beauty was the passport of all ideas,” Leonard would say in 1991.

Leonard liked the Beats. They did not return the sentiment. “I was writing very rhymed, polished verses and they were in open revolt against that kind of form, which they associated with the oppressive literary establishment. I felt close to those guys, and I later bumped into them here and there, although I can’t describe myself remotely as part of that circle.”10 Neither did he have any desire to join it. “I

or writing about himself, as he did when one professor, knowing when he was beaten, allowed Leonard to submit a term paper on Let Us Compare Mythologies.

He applied to the U.S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, DC, for a teaching position on a reservation. The bureau, oddly, had little use for a Jewish poet from Montreal with electro-cycle turret lathe skills.

Recalls Aviva Layton, who went to Leonard’s first night with Irving to give moral support, “I don’t remember him reading poetry, I remember him singing and playing the guitar. He perched himself on a high, three-legged stool and he sang—his own songs. That magic that he had, whatever it was, you could see it there at these performances.”

Survival, in discussions of the mystery and motivations of Leonard Cohen, has tended to be left in the corner clutching an empty dance card while writers head for the more alluring sex, God and depression and haul them around the dance floor. There is no argument that between them these three have been a driving force in his life and work. But what served Leonard best was his survival instinct.

Leonard walked through the town, he noticed that there were no cars. Instead there were donkeys, with a basket hung on either side, lumbering up and down the steep cobblestone streets between the port and the Monastery of the Prophet Elijah. It might have been an illustration from a children’s Bible.

On a small island with few telephones and little electricity, therefore no television, the ferry provided their news and entertainment, and their contact with the outside world.

The ritual, routine and sparsity of this life satisfied him immensely. It felt monastic somehow, except this was a monk with benefits; the Hydra arts colony had beaten the hippies to free love by half a decade.

He and I both carry komboloi—Greek worry beads; only Greek men do that. The beads have nothing to do with religion at all—in fact one of the Ancient Greek meanings of the word is ‘wisdom beads,’ indicating that men once used them to meditate and contemplate.”

He quoted himself saying, in his familiar partly humorous, partly truthful fashion, “I shouldn’t be in Canada at all. I belong beside the Mediterranean. My ancestors made a terrible mistake. But I have to keep coming back to Montreal to renew my neurotic affiliations.”

In this drab, run-down part of the Lower East Side, it looked like somebody had bombed a rainbow.

Alighting in Aberdeen, Trocchi made his way to London, where he registered as a heroin addict with the National Health Service and obtained his drug legally.

Leonard had the assistance, or at least the companionship, of a variety of drugs. He had a particular liking for Maxiton, generically dexamphetamine, a stimulant known outside of pharmaceutical circles as speed. He also had a fondness for its sweet counterpoint Mandrax, a hypnotic sedative, part happy pill, part aphrodisiac, very popular in the UK. They were as handsome a pair of pharmaceuticals as a hardworking writer could wish to meet; better yet, in Europe they could still be bought over the counter. Providing backup was a three-part harmony of hashish, opium and acid (the last of these three still legal at that time in Europe and most of North America).

That same year, her former partner became the first black person to be imprisoned under Britain’s Race Relations Act—a statute originally passed to protect immigrants from racism—after calling for the shooting of any black woman seen with a white man; Bacal is white.

The end of De Freitas/X/Malik’s story came in 1975, when he was hanged for murder. The Trinidad government ignored pleas for clemency from people in the U.S., UK and Canada, many of them celebrities. They included Angela Davis, Dick Gregory, Judy Collins and Leonard Cohen.

Leonard also argued to keep the title. It would appeal, he wrote, to “the diseased adolescents who compose my public.”

He put the albums on, Nadel wrote, “to the chagrin of everyone” besides Leonard, who listened “intently, solemnly” and announced to the room “that he would become the Canadian Dylan.”

At his decree, their singer and songwriter Lou Reed, a short, young, Jewish New Yorker, shared the spotlight with a tall, blond German in her late twenties. Nico, said Lou Reed, “set some kind of standard for incredible-looking people.”

While Dylan was babysitting her son, Ari—the result of her brief affair with the French movie star Alain Delon—Dylan wrote the song “I’ll Keep It with Mine,” which he gave to Nico. When

“You’re Leonard Cohen, you wrote Beautiful Losers,” which nobody had read, it only sold a few copies in America. And it was Lou Reed.

Nico told Leonard she liked younger men and did not make an exception. Her young man du jour, her guitar player, was a fresh-faced singer-songwriter from Southern California, barely eighteen years old, named Jackson Browne. A surfer boy crossed with an angel, his natural good looks appeared unnatural alongside the cadaverous Warhol and his black-clad entourage.

bumped into Jim Morrison a couple of times but I did not know him well. And Hendrix—we actually jammed together one night in New York. I forget the name of the club, but I was there and he was there and he knew my song ‘Suzanne,’ so we kind of jammed on it.” You and Hendrix jammed on “Suzanne”? What did he do with it? “He was very gentle. He didn’t distort his guitar. It was just a lovely thing. I

With “Suzanne” being such a powerful song and Collins such an evangelical cheerleader for its writer, Leonard was getting attention too, including from John Hammond, the leading A & R man at America’s foremost record company, Columbia.

Leonard knew how he wanted to sound, or at least how he did not want to, but as an untrained musician he lacked the language to explain it. He could not play as well as the session musicians, so he found them intimidating.

In 1964 Joni quit art school to be a folksinger, moving to Toronto and the coffeehouses around which the folk scene revolved. In February 1965 she gave birth to a daughter, the result of an affair with a photographer. A few weeks later she married folksinger Chuck Mitchell and gave the baby up for adoption. The marriage did not last. Joni left, taking his name with her, and moved into Greenwich Village, where she was living alone in a small hotel room when she met Leonard.

Any close inspection of Mitchell’s songs pre- and post-Leonard would seem to indicate that he had some effect on her work. Over the decades, Leonard and Joni have remained friends.

“He was tentative and earnest, very unpolished,” says Montreal music critic Juan Rodriguez. Nancy Bacal concurs. “He was horrified, just frozen. He told me, looking out at these people, how could he just become this other person?

producer and music publisher named Jeff Chase whom Mary Martin thought might prove helpful was brought in, and somewhere in the process Leonard appeared to have somehow signed over the songs to him.

When Fields walked into the room, he found the two women “pasting sequins one at a time in a coloring book,” an activity pursued after the age of seven only if a person is on speed.

He was involved and yet not involved—which described his general dealings with the Warhol set. They were more to his taste than the hippie scene on the West Coast that had begun to infiltrate New York: “There seemed to be something flabby about the hippie movement. They pulled flowers out of public gardens. They put them in guns, but they also left their campsites in a mess. No self-discipline,” he said.

This time, when Leonard arrived at Studio B for the first session, there were no musicians waiting for him, just his young producer and the two union-mandated engineers. (“Producers could only talk,” says Simon. “Unless you were in the union, you were strictly forbidden from touching any equipment, mics, mixing board, etc.”)

Three weeks and four sessions later, Leonard nailed “So Long, Marianne,” a song he had recorded more than a dozen times with two producers and with two different titles. In total, since May 1967 Leonard had recorded twenty-five original compositions with John Hammond and John Simon. Ten of these songs made it onto Leonard’s debut album. Four would be revisited on his second and third albums, and two would appear as bonus tracks on the Songs of Leonard Cohen reissue in 2003 (“Store Room” and “Blessed Is the Memory”).

As my friend Leon Wieseltier said, ‘It has the delicious quality of doneness.’

one thing Leonard said he liked about Greece was that he could get Ritalin there—a stimulant widely used for both narcolepsy and hyperactivity—without a prescription. Crill told Leonard that he had stopped taking acid since some of the manufacturers starting cutting it with Ritalin. “Leonard said, ‘Oh, I really loved that.’ He said it was very good for focus.”

Said Leonard, “I always think of something Irving Layton said about the requirements for a young poet, and I think it goes for a young singer, too, or a beginning singer: ‘The two qualities most important for a young poet are arrogance and inexperience.’ It’s only some very strong self-image that can keep you going in a world that conspires to silence everyone.”

“Suzanne,” the opening song, appears to be a love song, but it is a most mysterious love song, in which the woman inspires a vision of Jesus, first walking on the water, then forsaken by his father, on the Cross. “So Long, Marianne,” likewise, begins as a romance, until we learn that the woman who protects him from loneliness also distracts him from his prayers, thereby robbing him of divine protection. The two women in “Sisters of Mercy,” since they are not his lovers, are portrayed as nuns. (Leonard wrote the song during a blizzard in Edmonton, Canada, after encountering two young girl backpackers in a doorway. He offered them his hotel bed and, when they fell straight to sleep, watched them from an armchair, writing, and played them the song the next morning when they woke.)

After his short promotional trip to London, Leonard returned to New York and the Chelsea. He checked into room 100 (which Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen would later make notorious) and propped his guitar in the corner and put his typewriter on the desk.

Leonard thought Scientology, for all its snake oil, had “very good data.”9 He signed up for auditing.

Since Bob Johnston was, as always, busy in the studio, he sent Charlie Daniels to pick them up. In 1968 Daniels wasn’t the Opry-inducted, hard-core country star with the big beard and Stetson, but a songwriter and session musician—fiddle, guitar, bass and mandolin. Johnston

One night Daniels called Johnston and asked if he could get him out of jail—it was advance planning; Daniels was about to get into a fistfight with a club owner. Johnston hollered down the phone that he should “get the fuck out to Nashville,” and he did. Johnston had kept him busy ever since, playing on albums by Johnny Cash, Marty Robbins, Bob Dylan, and now Leonard Cohen.

Johnston taped Leonard singing ten songs. Five would appear on Songs from a Room; one would be put aside for the third album, Songs of Love and Hate; and four have never as yet been released: “Baby I’ve Seen You,” “Your Private Name,” “Breakdown” and “Just Two People”

Other singer-poets are obscure, but generally the feeling comes through that an attempt is being made to reach to a heart of meaning. But Cohen sings with such lack of energy that it’s pretty easy to conclude that if he’s not going to get worked up about it, why should we.”

In 1962, when Roshi was fifty-five, just a kid with a crazy dream, he left Japan for Los Angeles to establish the first Rinzai center in the U.S.

Then, “he locked himself in one of the suites for hours and listened to the music and read the books he had his chauffeur go out and buy of Leonard’s. He came out and said he at least felt I was leaving him for someone worthwhile.”

But Leonard no longer attended the Scientology Center. Disenchantment had set in, as well as anger that the organization had begun to exploit his name. Leonard had “gone clear”; he had a certificate confirming him as a “Senior Dianetic, Grade IV Release.”4 “I participated in all those investigations that engaged the imagination of my generation at that time,” said Leonard. “I even danced and sang with the Hare Krishnas—no robe, I didn’t join them, but I was trying everything.”

It was May 4, 1970, the day of the Kent State massacre in the U.S., and, as some kind of convoluted antiauthority peace gesture, Leonard decided to start the second half of the show by clicking his heels twice and giving the Nazi salute. He had come back onstage to lighted matches and a long standing ovation, but the mood changed instantly.

Leonard took Cornelius, Johnston and Donovan to meet a friend in London who—he told them—had the best acid anywhere. “It was called Desert Dust and it was like LSD-plus,” says Cornelius. “You had to take a needle—a pin was too big—and touch your tongue with this brown dust, and with as much as you could pick up on the end of that needle you were gone, sixteen hours, no reentry.” Ample supplies were purchased and consumed; it would get to where the tour manager made them all hold hands at the airport as they walked to the plane so that he would not lose anyone—“a big conga line,” Donovan says, “with everybody just singing along.”

A review of the show in Billboard described him as “nervous” and “lifeless.” Wrote Nancy Erlich, “He works hard to achieve that bloodless vocal, that dull, humorless quality of a voice speaking after death. And the voice does not offer comfort or wisdom; it expresses total defeat. His art is oppressive.”

“Leonard said, ‘I want to play mental asylums,’ ” says Johnston. And just like he’d done when Johnny Cash told him he wanted to play prisons, Johnston said, “Okay,” and “booked a bunch of them.” Despite appearances, the Henderson (closed now, due to funding cuts) was a pioneering hospital with an innovative approach to the treatment of personality disorders. It called itself a therapeutic community and the patients residents.

The artists who played that year included the Who, the Doors, Miles Davis, Donovan and Ten Years After. Leonard had the slot before last on the fifth and final day, after Jimi Hendrix and Joan Baez and before Richie Havens.

Tension had been rising at the festival for days. The promoters had expected a hundred and fifty thousand people but half a million more turned up, many with no intention of paying. Even

Thirty-nine years later the spellbinding performance was released, along with Lerner’s footage, on the CD/DVD Leonard Cohen: Live at the Isle of Wight 1970

Leonard’s depression begged to differ. Says Suzanne, “Of course, it can feel like a dark room with no doors. It’s a common experience of many people, especially with a creative nature, and the more spiritual the person, the closer to the tendency resembling what the church called acedia”—a sin that encompassed apathy in the practice of virtue and the loss of grace.

He was at the Chelsea, having what might have been a somber, one-man bachelor party.

Leonard tried to get in contact, but he says, “I was just too late.” She had killed herself three days before. Leonard was mentioned in her suicide note. He published her letter on the album sleeve, he said, because she had always wanted to be published and no one would do so.

Leonard said in 1974. “I am committed to the survival of the Jewish people”7), but also bravado, narcissism and, near the top of the list, desperation to get away. “Women,” he said, “only let you out of the house for two reasons: to make money or to fight a war,”8 and in his present state of mind dying for a noble cause—any cause—was better than this life he was living as an indentured artist and a caged man.

“Who by Fire” had been directly inspired by a Hebrew prayer sung on the Day of Atonement when the Book of Life was opened and the names read aloud of who will die and how. Leonard said he had first heard it in the synagogue when he was five years old, “standing beside my uncles in their black suits.”

“We were all kids. I was twenty-two and I had never played a concert before such a big audience, and I’ve never been on tour with a guy who’s revered like he was. In Europe Leonard was bigger than Dylan—all the shows were sold out—and he had the most sincere, devoted, almost nuts following.

Serious poetry lovers don’t get violent but, boy, there was some suicide watches going on, on occasion. There were people who Leonard meant life or death to. I’d see girls in the front row”—women outnumbered men three to one in the audiences, by Lissauer’s count—“openly weep for Leonard and they would send back letters and packages.

The only guy I’ve seen who drew better-looking women than Leonard Cohen was probably Charles Bukowski. These women were all dressed up in seventies style and hanging on Leonard’s every word, during the show and afterwards.”

Leonard was also hungry for hunger. This domestic life had caused him to put on weight and what he needed was to be empty. As he wrote in Beautiful Losers, “If I’m empty then I can receive, if I can receive it means it comes from somewhere outside of me, if it comes from outside of me I’m not alone. I cannot bear this loneliness . . .”—a loneliness deeper than anything that the ongoing presence of a woman and children could relieve.

John Miller replaced Lissauer as musical director, the rest of the band consisting of Sid McGinnis, Fred Thaylor and Luther Rix. Leonard’s new backing singers were Cheryl Barnes (who three years later would appear in the film of the musical Hair) and a nineteen-year-old Laura Branigan (who three years later would sign to Atlantic and become a successful solo pop artist).

“So,” says John Lissauer, “the famous missing album. I have the rough mixes but the master tapes just disappeared. Marty culled the two-inch tapes from both studios. He never returned my calls and Leonard didn’t return my calls. Maybe he was embarrassed. I didn’t find out what happened for twenty-five years. I heard this from a couple of different sources. Marty managed Phil Spector and Spector had not delivered on this big Warner Bros. deal; they got a huge advance, two million dollars, and Marty took his rather hefty percentage, but Phil didn’t produce any albums. So Warner Bros. go to Marty, ‘He comes up with an album or we get our money back.’ So Marty said, ‘I know what to do. Screw this Lissauer project, I’ll put Phil and Leonard together.’ ” Which is what he did.

His records were “Phil Spector” records, the artists and musicians merely bricks in his celebrated “Wall of Sound”—the name that was given to Spector’s epic production style. It required battalions of musicians all playing at the same time—horns bleeding into drums bleeding into strings bleeding into guitars—magnified through tape echo. With this technique Spector transformed pop ballads and R & B songs, like “Be My Baby,” “Da Doo Ron Ron” and “Unchained Melody” into dense, clamorous, delirious minisymphonies that captured in two and a half exquisite minutes the joy and pain of teenage love.

Leonard was dressed for work, wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. He looked, Dan Kessel recalls, “like a suave, continental Dustin Hoffman.”

“In the final moment,” Leonard said, “Phil couldn’t resist annihilating me. I don’t think he can tolerate any other shadows in his darkness.”

after his initial misgivings about fatherhood he had taken to it seriously, and his friends say he was grief-stricken at being separated from

Once the book was completed, the public had come sharply back into focus. One big reason for this was that Leonard was running out of money. If Leonard lived like a celebrity, if he’d had a yacht or a cocaine habit, it might be easier to understand. But though he did not spend much money on himself, he still had expenses: Suzanne, the children, Roshi’s monastery and various friends whom he supported financially in one way or another. The majority of Leonard’s income came from his songs, not his books, and five years had passed since his last album.

Lissauer came to the conclusion that Leonard had reached a point in his songwriting where he had “run out of ideas as a guitar player. There were certain things he could do with his guitar playing, but this dopey Casio did things that he couldn’t on his guitar and made it possible for him to approach songwriting in a different way.”

Writing songs was certainly proving torturously difficult for Leonard again. But this cheesy little two-octave keyboard that Leonard seemed so fond of gave him a whole new set of rhythms to work with, and he found he was able to come up with things he could never have created with six strings and what he called his “one chop.”

The first song to feature Leonard playing his Casio was the new album’s opening track, “Dance Me to the End of Love.” The seed of the song was something Leonard had read about an orchestra of inmates in a concentration camp, who were forced by the Nazis to play as their fellow prisoners were marched off to the gas chambers. As a testimonial to Leonard’s way with words and a romantic melody, it would go on to become a popular song at weddings.

Love is there to help your loneliness, prayer is to end your sense of separation with the source of things.”

“Hallelujah” took Leonard five years to write. When Larry “Ratso” Sloman interviewed him in 1984, Leonard showed him a pile of notebooks, “book after book filled with verses for the song he then called ‘The Other Hallelujah.’ ” Leonard kept around eighty of them and discarded many more. Even

after the final edit, Leonard kept two different endings for “Hallelujah.” One of them was downbeat:     It’s not somebody who’s seen the light     It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah The other had an almost “My Way” bravado:     Even though it all went wrong     I’ll stand before the Lord of Song     With nothing on my tongue but     Hallelujah Bob Dylan said he preferred the second version, which was the one Leonard finally used on the album, although he would return to the darker ending at various concerts.

Dylan showed Leonard his new song “I and I.” Leonard asked how long it took him to write, and Dylan said fifteen minutes. Leonard showed Dylan “Hallelujah.” Impressed, Dylan asked how long it took Leonard to write it. “A couple of years,” said Leonard, too embarrassed to give the true answer. Sloman,

It is an intensely moving song, intimate and fragile, and sung in a voice that had deepened with age. Lissauer noted that it had dropped four semitones since he and Leonard had last worked together.

Leonard remembers, “Walter Yetnikoff said, ‘Leonard, we know you’re great, we just don’t know if you’re any good.’

Zembaty’s Polish version of Leonard’s adaptation of “The Partisan” had become an unofficial anthem of the Solidarity movement.

Famous Blue Raincoat was released in 1987. It featured nine songs,* including a few that Judy Collins had previously covered (“Bird on the Wire,” “Joan of Arc,” “Famous Blue Raincoat”) and a few that Warnes—like Collins in the past—would release before Leonard had recorded his own versions.

You’re stuck with the consequences of your actions, but in your work you can go back.”1 He had left behind him, he said, a “shipwreck of ten or fifteen years of broken families and hotel rooms for some kind of shining idea that my voice was important, that I had a meaning in the cosmos. . . . Well, after enough lonely nights you don’t care whether you have a meaning in the cosmos or not.”

Another Cohen-Robinson cowrite made it onto this album. On a visit to her house, he had handed her a sheet of verses—a litany of world-weary wisdom and cynicism—and asked her if she could write a melody. She did, and it became the song “Everybody Knows.”

When Marty Machat died on March 19, 1988, aged sixty-seven, Lynch took various files on Leonard from the offices of Machat & Machat that the lawyers said could be taken legally, including documents relating to the publishing company that Marty Machat had set up for Leonard. Lynch took the files to L.A., where she set up shop and began making herself as indispensable to Leonard as Marty had once been. At one point Leonard and Kelley became lovers. Eventually she became his manager.

Prince Charles, whose charity the concert benefited, was also a Leonard Cohen fan.

I’m Your Man had outsold all of his earlier albums.

Leonard appears to have remained good friends with many of his former lovers, remarkably few of whom seem to bear him any ill will.

But as Roshi told him, “You can’t live in God’s world. There are no restaurants or toilets.”

An old Eastern European adage says that a man should pray once before going to sea, twice before going to war and three times before getting married, but when it came to the last of the three, Leonard never seemed to stop praying.

During the four months Adam spent in the hospital, Leonard stayed there, keeping vigil. He would sit in the room quietly, watching his son, who remained in a coma. Sometimes he would read aloud to him from the Bible. When Adam finally regained consciousness, his first words to his father were, “Dad, can you read something else?”

Early on in their relationship, Rebecca was “whining about the various pain I had, my childhood, and this and that. And Leonard is the best listener, but at a certain point he said, ‘I understand, it must have been really terrible for you, Rebecca, having had to grow up poor and black.’ ” Rebecca laughed.

In his acceptance speech at the 1992 Juno Awards ceremony, Leonard deadpanned, “It’s only in a country like this that I could win a best vocalist award.”

“The light,” Leonard explained, “is the capacity to reconcile your experience, your sorrow, with every day that dawns. It is that understanding, which is beyond significance or meaning, that allows you to live a life and embrace the disasters and sorrows and joys that are our common lot. But it’s only with the recognition that there is a crack in everything. I think all other visions are doomed to irretrievable gloom.”

He was returning to the place where he had moved quietly, with no announcement, a few months before, not long after the last date of the Future tour. A small, bare hut on a mountain, where he had chosen to live as the servant and companion of an old Japanese monk.

Leonard became expert at rustling up soups. At the age of sixty-one, he would earn a certificate from San Bernardino County that qualified him to take work as a chef, waiter or busboy.

Rinzai monks, Leonard liked to boast, were “the Marines of the spiritual world”4 with a regimen “designed to overthrow a twenty-year-old.”

By the midsummer of 1993, when the tour was finally over, Leonard and Rebecca’s engagement was too.

When I finished my tour in 1993 I was approaching the age of sixty; Roshi was approaching ninety. My old teacher was getting older and I hadn’t spent enough time with him, and my kids were grown and I thought it was an appropriate moment to intensify my friendship and my association with the community.”

The old man, now approaching his ninetieth birthday, instructed Leonard that he wanted a traditional, open-pyre cremation. If Leonard would like to, Roshi said, he could keep one of his bones.

Among the uninvited guests, in Kigen’s words, was “a beautiful young lady who came up one evening and was wearing rags and feathers, literally. ‘Where’s Leonard? I’m here for Leonard.’

Leonard particularly enjoyed creating art on a computer. He just liked computers.

His interest in Macs started early on, thanks in part to the Apple company giving away free computers to select Canadian writers—among them Leonard, Irving Layton and Margaret Atwood—and sending tutors to their homes to show them how to use them.

He thought he had read somewhere “that the brain cells associated with anxiety can die as you get older,”39 although the general intelligence is that depression worsens with age. Perhaps

Leonard had left the monastery with around two hundred and fifty songs and poems in various states of completion.

In Canada, meanwhile, where new ways of honoring Leonard were still, miraculously, being found,

Leonard returned in September, at the request of Trudeau’s children, to be a pallbearer at Trudeau’s funeral.

Kelley took care of Leonard’s business affairs—good, reliable Kelley, not simply his manager but a close friend, almost part of the family; he even employed Kelley’s parents. Leonard, who took little interest in such things, had given Lynch broad power of attorney over his finances. He trusted her enough to have named her in his living will as the person responsible in an extreme medical circumstance for giving the order as to whether he should live or die. Lynch had been there almost continuously during the making of Dear Heather and they had been in regular contact since the album was completed, just as they always were, and Kelley had said nothing about any financial problems.

He repeated the same understatement to the media once the lawsuits began and the story went public. And what a strange story it would turn out to be, one with a tangled plot whose cast of characters included a SWAT team, financiers, a tough-talking parrot, Tibetan Buddhists and Leonard’s lover Anjani’s ex-husband.

To have been redeemed from depression in his old age only to have to spend it in an eternity of legal and financial paperwork was a cosmic joke so black as to test even Leonard’s famous gallows humor.

Leonard had wanted to walk away from the whole thing, but the lawyers said he couldn’t. They told him that lot of the missing money had been in retirement accounts and charitable trust funds, which left Leonard liable for large tax bills on the sums withdrawn and no money with which to pay them. It was no good telling the IRS that he had not been the one who had made the withdrawals; they needed proof. Which was why Leonard was sitting at his desk with Anjani and Lorca, in the house he had been forced to mortgage in order to pay his legal bills, grimly going through stacks of financial statements and e-mails.

Kory and Rice explained to Leonard that a case could probably be made that between ten and thirteen million dollars had been improperly taken. “That stunned him,” says Kory. “It stunned me.”

In 2001, Kelley, Greenberg and Westin orchestrated the sale of Leonard’s future record royalties to Sony/ATV for $8 million. After various cuts, Leonard apparently netted $4.7 million, according to documents later filed in Los Angeles Superior Court.

At that meeting, Kory held out the possibility of a reasonable settlement if Kelley would disclose what had happened to all the money. The alternative, he said, would be serious litigation and ultimately the destruction of her life as she knew it. Her response, Kory said, was “Hell will freeze over before you find out what happened to the money. It was my money.”

By Lynch’s account, the police took her on a long drive, interrogating her en route about her friendship with Phil Spector (who had been freed on $1 million bail while awaiting trial for murder). The journey ended at a hospital across town, where Lynch was taken to the psychiatric ward. She claimed that she was involuntarily drugged and held in the hospital for twenty-four hours, and that during this time Steve Lindsey filed for and subsequently won custody of their son. Lynch believed that Leonard and Kory were behind the whole episode, as well as several other strange things she claimed had happened to her following the hostage incident, such as being rear-ended by a Mercedes and threatened by a mysterious man.

Lynch’s subsequent accounts, related in thousands upon thousands of words she posted on the Internet, involved long, elaborate conspiracies, in which Phil Spector’s murder trial seemed to feature frequently and in which Lynch claimed to be a scapegoat in a scheme devised to hide Leonard’s lavish spending and tax fraud. Rather than fight Leonard in court, Kelley did so in cyberspace. Wherever Leonard was mentioned online and there was a space for comments, she left them, and not in brief. She sent innumerable lengthy e-mails to Leonard and his friends, family, musicians, associates and former girlfriends, as well as to the police, the district attorney, the media, the Buddhist community and the IRS.

Lynch had ignored Leonard’s lawsuit, including requests for discovery, and he was frustrated by her ability to avoid any accountability, even in litigation. But once a court issues the writ, Rice explained, the person who filed it can take it to the sheriff’s office and ask for officers to go with him to where his property is being held and take it back.

On a rainy October morning at nine A.M., Rice and her paralegal showed up, unannounced, at Lynch’s house in Mandeville Canyon with two armed sheriffs in riot gear, to search the house and garage and take possession of Leonard’s documents per the court order. The sheriffs emerged with one box after another.

Lynch, who continued her ceaseless assault of blogs and e-mails full of accusations and invective, also began to make threatening phone calls—to Leonard, to Kory and to friends and associates from various places across the U.S.

She thanked the millions of her fellow countrymen who failed to buy his early poetry books and novels, “because without that he might not have turned to songwriting.”

“Who Do You Really Remember” catalogs various deaths—his dog, his uncles and aunts, his friends—that occurred between his father’s death, when Leonard was nine, and his mother’s, when he was forty-three.

describes a conversation with the ghost of a dead friend, conducted while Leonard was on the twenty-year-old speed he’d found in the pocket of an old suit.

In the abbreviated, six-line version of his poem “Not a Jew” he asserts that he remains unswervingly Jewish. In “One of My Letters” he signs off not with “L. Cohen” but with his Jewish and his Buddhist names, Jikan Eliezer.

Finley remembers that he had talked about marriage “as an opportunity to be of service to another human being, an opportunity for the deepest human transformation, because you’re so deep in the presence of another human being. Which takes work, it takes mindfulness, it takes commitment, it takes discipline.

In his first conversation with Leonard, the rabbi had asked him, “You’re a Buddhist priest, how does that square with Judaism?” It was the same question Leonard had been asked by the press when he was ordained a monk; he had answered it in his poem “Not a Jew.” Leonard answered Finley that it did not have to square; Buddhism was nontheistic and Roshi was a great man with a great mind. “Leonard made it very clear to me that it had nothing to do with his religion, nor his beliefs. As we got to know each other better, I was delighted to see that he is a very learned Jew. He’s deeply well-read, very committed to understanding Kabbalah and—in a very similar way that I do—is using the Kabbalah not so much as a theology but as spiritual psychology and a way to mythically represent the Divine. If you understand that human consciousness is basically symbolic, then one has to find some kind of symbol system that most closely articulates one’s understanding of all the levels of reality.”

He gets the inner ethos of brokenness and healing and the tragedy of the human condition, in that we’re not particularly well suited for this life but you still have to find your way through.”

Blue Alert, the album Leonard and Anjani had worked on together, was released, as was Book of Longing, in May 2006.

In a few weeks’ time Roshi would be one hundred years old, and yet here he still was, the constant in Leonard’s life, the good friend, the wise father figure who disciplined and indulged him and never left, not even when Leonard had left him.

When he quit smoking, Leonard had promised himself he could start again when he reached seventy-five. He blamed his abstinence from cigarettes for the loss of the two lowest notes in his vocal range, even if in truth they had only ever been audible to certain mammals and devoted female fans. His voice now was deeper than it had ever been.

He had to stop counting how many tribute albums there were—more than fifty by this point, from twenty different countries.

because it was recorded by his first and most stalwart champion, was Democracy: Judy Collins Sings Leonard Cohen—from 2004,

Major artists were increasingly making their money from touring, charging considerably higher ticket prices than under the old system, when concerts existed to promote album sales. Although

Rob Hallett was getting anxious. Leonard had been rehearsing for at least four months now and all he had was bills. “About a million dollars later, I started panicking. Then Leonard said, ‘Okay, come and see the rehearsals.’ ”

Leonard, the band and crew, and Kory and Hallett arrived several days early so that they could rehearse some more in the theater, five, six hours a day.

He took a deep breath; one lesson he had learned from his years at the monastery was to “stop whining.”

But here he stood in the spotlight in his sharp suit, fedora and shiny shoes, looking like a Rat Pack rabbi, God’s chosen mobster.

Leonard sang as if he had come to this place alone to tell all these people in the seats, individually, a secret.

That his choices leaned toward the more stirring, later songs than the naked early ones was perhaps in part an old man’s delicacy, but more likely because they worked better with a large band, and Leonard needed a large band to drown out the noise of doubt. Equally

They played for almost three hours that night, with a short intermission—and no one played three-hour shows, certainly not a man in his seventies who had not sung more than a handful of songs in succession on a stage in a decade and a half.

At another of the concerts, two young women rushed the stage, prompting Leonard to comment wryly, or wistfully, or both, as security gently led them off, “If only I were two years younger.”

This was quite a change from Leonard Cohen tours in the past, which had been fueled by cigarettes and alcohol or the drug du jour. (By the end of his last tour, with The Future, Leonard had been smoking two packs a day and drinking three bottles of Château Latour before every show.)

“As the Irish say, with the help of God and two policemen, [it] may last a year and a half, or two.”

Michael Eavis was. The dairy farmer who founded the UK’s biggest and best-loved rock festival had been trying to get Leonard to agree to play there, he said, “for almost forty years.”

Songs of Leonard Cohen came with two old songs released for the first time: “Store Room” and “Blessed Is the Memory,” which were recorded during the 1967 sessions and shelved.* The reissued Songs from a Room also had two additional songs, the previously unheard versions of “Bird on the Wire” (titled “Like a Bird”) and “You Know Who I Am” (titled “Nothing to One”) that Leonard recorded with David Crosby before making the album with Bob Johnston.

It was a reflection of Leonard’s growing confidence onstage that he premiered more new material on the 2009 U.S. tour, “Feels So Good” and “The Darkness.” The set list, remarkably, had continued to expand, now featuring more than thirty songs.

The new decade began with “Hallelujah” at the top of the iTunes download charts in 2010—the version Justin Timberlake and Matt Morris sang on the Hope for Haiti telethon—and the first of a new slew of awards.

Then, while doing a Pilates exercise, he threw out his back—a spinal compression injury, the doctors told him, that would take four to six months of physical therapy to fix. Leonard insisted he was fine. His friends say he was not, that he was in great pain and could barely move. The tour was postponed. Since he was stuck in one place, Leonard thought he might as well do something. He began recording a new album.

“A sublime experience,” said Leonard, staying just long enough to have his photograph taken with an arm around Taylor Swift and to tell Rolling Stone that his new album, “God willing, will be finished next spring.”

These past three years on the road, with their three-hour shows and two-hour sound checks, sometimes barely a day off in between, had been more than rigorous, but much as Leonard had said of Roshi’s monastery, “once you get the hang of it, you go into ninth gear and kind of float through it all.”

On April 1, as he donned his monk’s robes to visit Roshi, who was celebrating his 104th birthday, Leonard learned that he had won the prestigious Glenn Gould Prize.

After a long stretch of contentment with his synthesizer, Leonard found himself returning to the guitar, playing it on four of the tracks. His guitar on “Crazy to Love You” takes the listener back to his earliest albums, in particular to Songs from a Room.

Leonard had returned, at least part-time, to his old job of driving Roshi around, running errands and taking him food; Roshi had become quite fond of Leonard’s chicken soup. Roshi, weeks away from his 105th birthday, was still working;

He doesn’t think too much about the future, he says, other than looking forward to the promise he made himself to take up smoking again on his eightieth birthday.

While we sat drinking at the small kitchen table, which was pushed up against the wall, by an open window through which a cool breeze blew, he asked how things were going with the book—a book, I should add, that he did not ask me to write and did not ask to read, neither of which appeared to inhibit his support.

(Biographers always lament the ones who got away, and I was sad not to have added Joni Mitchell, Jennifer Warnes and Phil Spector to this list. I tried. )

Jarkko Arjatsalo, founder and overseer of LeonardCohenFiles.com—Leonard calls him “the General Secretary of the party”—to whose website Leonard contributes;

Most of all, thank you, Leonard Cohen, for being so considerate as to choose the second I hit puberty to release your first album, for continuing to move and enlighten me with your music and words ever since, for permitting me to out you as a ukulele player, and for living a remarkable life that has run me ragged these past few years.

It was only his duties to Roshi—which now regularly included driving him back and forth to doctors’ appointments—that kept him off the road. Roshi, by this point, was a hundred and five years old.

Once again it was completed at remarkable speed: nine months. Popular Problems, Leonard announced, would be released on his eightieth birthday.

Leonard dedicated Popular Problems to Roshi, who had died in a Los Angeles hospital on July 27, 2014, age one hundred and seven.

All the space that’s left when the passing of time takes away everything—friends, family, libido, his taste for alcohol, his health—there’s nothing left to fill it but work. So Leonard lit a cigarette and worked.

But though his mind was still sharp, Leonard’s body betrayed him. Time and touring had taken their toll. No more skipping onto a stage or falling to his knees; he had multiple compression fractures of the spine. He was also fighting cancer. Immobilized by pain, in the words of a man of soldierly habits, he was “confined to barracks.”

“There were hilarious, esoteric arguments fueled by medical marijuana,” Adam said, “episodes of blissful joy that sometimes lasted hours, where we’d listen to one song on repeat like teenagers.”

Leonard died at home in his sleep on November 7, 2016, following a fall in the middle of the night. He was buried three days later, according to his wishes, in a plain pine box next to his parents in the Shaar Hashomayim Cemetery in Montreal.

I’ve worked at my work     I’ve slept at my sleep     I’ve died at my death     And now I can leave.