September would have been Leonard Cohen’s 90th birthday. So a biographical tome from a French university lecturer, who has written three dissertations and created a study course on the Canadian singer-songwriter-author, promised an intriguing step further into the shadowy, nocturnal world of the beloved “grocer of despair”.
To find the essence of Cohen, all you have to do is press play. So a biography needs to be something special in dealing with a life already writ large through art; the albums, novels and poetry, all combining to create Cohen’s “manual for living in defeat”. Ideally it will dig up some hidden treasures, too.
Lebold displays a desire for something unconventional from the beginning, with not one but three collective prologues, while also giving an early sense of the spirit of the pages ahead when he describes Sylvie Simmons’s definitive biography, I’m Your Man, as “a little soulless”, with her (crazy idea this) decision “to let the facts tell the story”.
Instead, Lebold wished to write a book that’s “part biography, part analysis, part ode”, with this doorstopper being a newly translated and expanded version of the 2013 French edition. “We will not be so shy,” he writes, “for we have invented Leonard Cohen.” That’s fine up to a point, but here also lies the problem. Lebold never stops inventing Cohen in his own mind, never lets up in his fantasising around the facts of a life, to the point where it all feels like a misfiring mess of Marc Antony’s immortal line in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
The author praises Leonard, as he likes to call him, so profusely with celestial meanderings and overblown religiosity that he also buries him in such an endless blizzard of gushing; almost to the point where, I’d never thought this possible, you become bored of Cohen. A reader of Simmons’s biography from more than a decade ago learns nothing new either.
The necessary movement of any good biographical narrative, along with Cohen’s spirit, is continuously blocked by Lebold’s baroque interventions and bombastic associations – the author annoyingly keeps getting in the way of his subject. Nor does Cohen’s genius require further endowment by the biographer repeatedly banging the reader over the head as to why he is important (we are here, aren’t we?).
Lebold always wants to frame his subject in the epic, and it becomes silly, laughable, at points. For example, he cannot just relay that the singer became very ill with sunstroke in Greece in 1965 – he has to compare Cohen to Icarus and describe it as “an encounter with an element: the fire in the sky”. Time for Spinal Tap to do Stonehenge is the feeling from many passages. The album cover of I’m Your Man, meanwhile, is described as “at once heroic, hilarious, and philosophically challenging – you can look at it for twenty years and not be bored”. Really?
Lebold often overreaches, too, going as far as linking Everybody Knows to a speech given by Charles de Gaulle in Algiers at the height of the Algerian war of independence. And he has a habit of dropping plenty of Partridge-esque clangers, especially a “gag” in particularly bad taste on the murder of Lana Clarkson by Phil Spector, who produced Cohen’s Death of a Ladies’ Man. No one will ever be funnier than Cohen himself, so just tell it like it is – for instance, when he writes so many poems to Anne Sherman, she asks for a break. Cohen answers in verse that silence would just be another poem.
Which is a pity, for when Lebold gives it to us straight, as his subject did in his art and life, he often writes of the cedar-scented Spanish guitar and Casio keyboard ages of Cohen with grace and knowledge, although worn with the fanboy weight of a famous blue raincoat. (Even here, on arguably Cohen’s best-known song after you know what, Lebold cannot help himself: following an astute judgment of the music and lyrics, he adds “wearing [a raincoat] reminds you that on the front lines of our respective lives we are all heroes, even if our heroic act is to just go out and confront the rain”.)
The many eremitic cycles of Cohen are a fascinating part of his story, and with Lebold describing himself as a “practitioner of Zen”, a reader is hopeful of studied insight here. But yet again the outré approach and ideas are laid on so thick that patience grows thin. If only his editors told Lebold to rein it in a bit. When the writing is unadorned and leaves room for the reader to work in – like Cohen did with his music – he can cut to the heart of the matter. Like this on 1969’s Songs from a Room: “just a chord here and there (of Hammond organ) to give the songs a vaguely sacramental colour. At the centre of it all: crystalline melodies. Around them: almost nothing – just silence put into music.”
But too much overblown riffing in the writing and meandering metaphysical jams make the book feel indulgent – the antithesis to Cohen’s own songcraft – and leave a raddled reader. It could be summed up by a Zen saying: nothing special, life itself. If you have previously read Simmons’s book, then you have already climbed the mountain. Go around this one.
