COHEN, Leonard (Norman)

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Nationality: Canadian. Born: Montreal, Quebec, 21 September 1934. Education: McGill University, Montreal, B.A. 1955; Columbia University, New York. Family: Has lived with Suzanee Elrod, one son and one daughter; has lived with Rebecca De Mornay. Career: Composer and singer: has given concerts in Canada, the United States, and Europe. Awards: McGill University literary award, 1956; Canada Council award, 1960; Quebec literary award, 1964; Governor-General's award, 1969 (refused), 1993; Canadian Authors Association award, 1985. Order of Canada, 1992. D.L.: Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1971. Lives in Montreal and Greece. Address: c/o Stranger Management Inc., 419 North Larchmont Boulevard, Suite 88, Los Angeles, California 90004–3013, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Let Us Compare Mythologies. Montreal, Contact Press, 1956.

The Spice-Box of Earth. Toronto, McClelland and Steward, 1961; New York, Viking Press, 1965; London, Cape, 1971.

Flowers for Hitler. Toronto, McClelland and Steward, 1964; London, Cape, 1973.

Parasites of Heaven. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1966.

Selected Poems 1956–1968. New York, Viking Press, 1968; London, Cape, 1969.

Leonard Cohen's Song Book. New York, Collier, 1969.

Five Modern Canadian Poets, with others, edited by Eli Mandel. Toronto, Holt Rinehart, 1970.

The Energy of Slaves. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, and London, Cape, 1972; New York, Viking Press, 1973.

Two Views. Toronto, Madison Gallery, 1980.

Book of Mercy. Toronto, McClelland and Steward, London, Cape, and New York, Villard, 1984.

Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs. New York, Pantheon, 1993.

Dance Me to the End of Love. New York, Welcome Book, 1995.

Recordings: The Songs of Leonard Cohen, Columbia, 1968; Songs from a Room, Columbia, 1969; Songs of Love and Hate, Columbia, 1971; Live Songs, Columbia, 1973; New Skin for the Old Ceremony, Columbia, 1974; The Best of Leonard Cohen, Columbia, 1975; Death of a Lady's Man, Warner Brothers, 1977; Recent Songs, CBS, 1979; Various Positions, CBS, 1985; I'm Your Man, CBS, 1987; Leonard Cohen Takes Manhattan, Sony Music, 1992; Tower of Song, Sony Music, 1995.

Plays

The New Step (produced Ottawa and London, 1972). Included in Flowers for Hitler, 1964; in Selected Poems, 1968.

Sisters of Mercy: A Journey into the Words and Music of Leonard Cohen (produced Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, and New York, 1973).

A Man Was Killed, with Irving Layton, in Canadian Theatre Review (Downsview, Ontario), spring 1977.

Novels

The Favorite Game. New York, Viking Press, and London, Secker and Warburg, 1963.

Beautiful Losers. Toronto, McClelland and Steward, and New York, Viking Press, 1966; London, Cape, 1970.

Other

Death of Ladies' Man (novel-journal). Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1978; London, Deutsch, and New York, Viking Press, 1979.

Fingerpicking Leonard Cohen. New York, Amsco Publications, 1989.

Leonard Cohen Anthology. New York, Amsco Publications, 1991.

You Do Not Have to Love Me. Outremont, Quebec, J. Trépanier, 1996.

The Concise Leonard Cohen. London, Wise Publications, 1997.

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Bibliography: By Bruce Whiteman, in The Annotated Bibliography of Canada's Major Authors 2 edited by Robert Lecker and Jack David, Downsview, Ontario, ECW Press, 1980.

Manuscript Collection: University of Toronto.

Critical Studies: Leonard Cohen by Michael Ondaatje, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1970; The Immoral Moralists: Hugh MacLennan and Leonard Cohen by Patricia Morley, Toronto, Clarke Irwin, 1972; Leonard Cohen: The Artist and His Critics edited by Michael Gnarowski, Toronto, McGraw Hill Ryerson, 1976; Leonard Cohen by Stephen Scobie, Vancouver, Douglas and McIntyre, 1978; Leonard Cohen: Prophet of the Heart by L.S. Dorman and C.L. Rawlins, London, Omnibus Press, 1990; "Canadian Cryptic: The Sacred, the Profane, and the Translatable" by Sylvia Soderlind, in ARIEL (Calgary, Alberta), 22(3), July 1991; "Leonard Cohen, Phyllis Webb, and the End(s) of Modernism," in Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value, edited by Robert Lecker, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1991, and "The Counterfeiter Begs Forgiveness: Leonard Cohen and Leonard Cohen," in Canadian Poetry (London, Ontario), 33, Fall-Winter 1993, both by Stephen Scobie; "Leonard Cohen and His Works" by Linda Hutcheon, in Canadian Writers and Their Works, edited by Robert Lecker and others, Toronto, ECW, 1992; Discoveries of the Other: Alterity in the Work of Leonard Cohen, Hubert Aquin, Michael Ondaatje, and Nicole Brossard (dissertation) by Winfried Siemerling, University of Toronto, 1993; "The Proceedings of the Leonard Cohen Conference, Red Deer College, October 22–24, 1993," in Canadian Poetry (London, Ontario), 33, fall-winter 1993; Take This Waltz: A Celebration of Leonard Cohen edited by Michael Fournier and Ken Norris, Ste. Anne de Bellevue, Quebec, Muses, 1994; Leonard Cohen: A Life in Art by Ira Nadel, Toronto, ECW, 1994; "Neurotic Affiliations: Klein, Layton, Cohen, and the Properties of Influence" by Michael Abraham, in Canadian Poetry (London, Ontario), 38, spring-summer 1996; "Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, and Other Recurring Nightmares" by David Layton, in Saturday Night, 111(2), March 1996; "Leonard Cohen's Traffic in Alterity in Beautiful Losers" by Andrew Lesk, in Studies in Canadian Literature, 22(2), 1997.

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The figures of Leonard Cohen's poems rise like figures in Chagall, transformed from the ordinary, surprised into a world of visionary experience. Out of the junk of the everyday—"the garbage and the flowers"—the magical world of the imaginative is created. There is a strong sense that his poetry is a prodigious search of experience for the exit from the ordinary, but it is not always violently so. Some of the earlier works—"Go by Brooks," for instance—have a simple lyricism that is also intense. Occasionally it slopes off into a characteristic wry humor. More often its apparent Emily Dickinson-like simplicities conceal a toughness and a danger for which only the ballad form is adequate. And it is in the ballad that Cohen's greatest strength lies. The concentration of the imagery and the force of the rhyme give a telling intensity to the surrealist experiences of his imagination, an intensity that becomes at times almost gnomic:

   History is a needle
   for putting men asleep
   anointed with the poison
   of all they want to keep.

Certain themes preoccupy Cohen as certain images haunt his imagination. His search is for the sensual heaven of "The Sisters of Mercy," not the skeletal world of the ideal, the astringent dead world of "I Have Not Lingered in European Monasteries." Indeed, his religion is the rejection of the suffering ascetic—"I disdain God's suffering./Men command sufficient pain"—for a world in which liturgical celebrations are the extreme of the physical, a "constant love/and passion without flesh." But even in the physical world his fear of entrapment by the deadly females of such poems as "The Unicorn Tapestries" or "I Long to Hold Some Lady" is strong. In his poetic fabric they become the creatures of the liturgy of death. "The Story of Isaac" lurks behind the sacrificial metaphors to which he recurs. What is most telling in this balladic preoccupation with the undefined horror is Cohen's recognition of it not as external to himself but as part of his own psyche. Dachau is everyday Montreal, and the amatory is also the murderous—"tasting blood on your tongue/does not shock me." So the poetry is exculpatory, especially in the 1964 book Flowers for Hitler, and the desire to escape from the "ape with angel glands" the more intense.

In Cohen's later poetry there is a sense of imminence. The partisan's retreat is more embattled even than "the small oasis where we lie" of his earlier love poems. His concern with freedom, his feeling of the "incomparable sense of loss" to which he refers in "Queen Victoria and Me," is more than nostalgia for a lost land of freedom and the spirit. It is a matter of skirmishes in the hills "on the side of the ghost and the king," a matter of escaping from the horrific city whose terrors are also the terrors of "the armies marching still" toward the war that must surely come.

A mode like Ferlinghetti's saves such poems as "The Killers That Run Other Countries" from sentimentalism. And Cohen's "Song for My Assassin," another ballad, has the same wryness as his love songs, a wryness that recognizes that the pretty fictions, even his women, are in large measure self-amusements. Occasionally he slips from his customary Horatian tone to a heavy-handed Juvenalian, and when feeling is too close to be contained, the poem can be very flat indeed. But even in the ostensible absence of the muse Cohen can write a fine poem, of which "The Poems Don't Love Us Anymore" (in The Energy of Slaves) is a good example.

Cohen's voice is most sympathetic and most telling in his celebrations of the poet's capacity not only to hold out against the faceless butchers but also to make acclaim of "orange peels,/cans, discarded guts." The surrealism that is so much a part of the Canadian sensibility provides him with a new way of seeing the ordinary transformed: "One of the lizards/was blowing bubbles/as it did pushups on the carpet." The conclusion to this poem is that "I believe the mystics are right/when they say we are all One." Cohen's voice celebrates the beauty, entirely human, that prevails over "the clubfoot crowds." Its affirmation is that not only all poets but also "all men will be sailors."

—D.D.C. Chambers