Michael Posner - Leonard Cohen, Untold Stories: Thats How the Light Gets In, Volume 3

The most revealing portrait of the legendary songwriter and wordsmith to date.

Nicholas Jennings, bestselling author of Lightfoot

Michael Posner

Leonard Cohen

Untold Stories: Thats How the Light Gets In

In memory of Paul Michaels, mensch

Oral biography is an imperfect genre. It relies almost entirely on human memory, which is notoriously fallible. On the page, it frequently juxtaposes one confident viewpoint with another, completely contradictory, but no less confident, viewpointand then with a third, which might offer an entirely different perspective. The result tends to leave readers a little confused about who to believe, or what version of events to trust. Instead of a convenient, unified, well-argued thesis, it offers no thesis whatsoever, convenient, unified, or otherwise. It thus imposes the tyranny of choiceand some will resist.

On the other hand, memory is always suspect, even in conventional biographies. Moreover, in oral historys typical incarnationthe multidimensional story of important cultural figures or eventsthe ostensible liabilities may become assets. Readers are exposed to a wider range of opinion than they might encounter in a traditional, authorial narrative. Points of view conflict, but those very conflicts collectively offer a closer approximation of reality, something more nuanced, more faithful to the chiaroscuro complexity of truth. Reconstructing history is not unlike putting a jigsaw puzzle together; the more pieces that are available, the greater the likelihood that a more complete, more accurate picture will emerge.

Oral biography confers another advantage, particularly relevant in the case of Leonard Cohen, the cultural figure who has occupied my attention these last several years: it collates and amalgamates memories and observations before they would be lost forever. Cohen passed away in November 2016 at the age of eighty-two. Inevitably, many of his contemporaries, men and women who knew him best, areor werealso senior citizens, skiing the perilous downslope of life. Indeed, since I began research on this project, twenty-seven interviewees have also died.

One of these was the late American poet Jack Hirschman, who passed away in August 2021, at the age of eighty-seven. I met him only brieflya long, delightful conversation in San Franciscos historic Caffe Trieste, his daily breakfast nook. In many respects, he and Cohen were light-years apart. Jack was a committed social activist; Cohen could barely be persuaded to sign an SPCA petition, let only carry a political protest sign. Until his final breath, Jack was an unrepentant socialist, if not a card-carrying Communist; Cohen carried another membership cardthe National Rifle Associationsand his own ideological instincts, at least on issues of foreign policy, defence, and security, tilted decidedly to the right, however well he may have concealed them. It should also be said that, aside from the six months that Hirschman and his then wife, Ruth Seymour, spent on Hydra in 1965, he and Cohen were not particularly close. Still, there was an implicit and genuine bond between them, and mutual respect. It was essentially a cultural connection; they were, as Jews say, lantzmen.

When Hirschman heard news of Cohens passing, he wrote a poem, The 4 Questions Arcane. Its a kind of digest of their relationship, such as it was. The four questions allude to a ritual part of the Passover sederhe and Cohen had celebrated the Jewish holiday together on Hydra in 1965. Arcane, of course, means hiddenHirschmans recognition that, at the heart of the Leonard Cohen story, lies an unsolved mystery. What was it that lifted Cohens work so far above virtually all of his fellow workers in song? What secret formula did he have access to? Cohen himself seemed not to know the answer. As he said many times, If I knew where the good songs came from, Id go there more often.

Attempting to explain the essential genius of both Cohen and Bob Dylan, music executive Don Was likes to invoke the notion of creative etherinspirational strands, floating through some imaginary troposphere. You reach up and pull ideas out, he says. The best stuff is way up there, and a couple [people] can reach the very top. Thats Bob and Leonard.

Jack Hirschman only saw Cohen onstage once, at Oaklands Paramount Theatre in 2013. I forgave him everything when I saw him perform, he told me, savouring his morning bagel with cream cheese. The everything would have pertained to the political gulf between them. A reference to that performance concludes his poem:

I realized from

the way you literally

ran from wings to mic

at center-stage you

were a great showman able

to lift your hat like

the tip of a poem,

your singing Being itself,

in the beginning, so,

so long, Leonard Cohen,

your genius voice that set

a table of poems /

rooted in scripture

and blues of affirmation

across the decades

ears will never stop

feasting on, rest assured,

dear Label. Yours, Yankel.

The great showman represents only one of the incarnations of Leonard Cohen we encounter in this third and final volume of Untold Stories. The first book, The Early Years, chronicles his childhood, adolescence, and emergence as the golden boy of Canadian letterseffectively, a portrait of the artist as a young manending with his ambitious segue from literature to music in 1970. The second book, From This Broken Hill, documents Cohens turbulent middle yearsjuxtaposing commercial success, especially in Europe, with his creative struggles, his relentless pursuit of women, his immersion in Zen Buddhism, the burdens of fatherhood, his fractured marriage, and his chronic battle with depression.

In Thats How the Light Gets In, we accompany Cohen on the roller-coaster ride of his last thirty years. After resurrecting his moribund career in the late 1980s, he nevertheless remains profoundly broken. Sex, alcohol, psychotherapy, hard drugs, pills of every conceivable kindhe tries everything to shake the black dogs gnawing at his psyche. Nothing works. On the cusp of sixty, walking away from an engagement to actress Rebecca De Mornay, he enters the rigorous Rinzai-Ji monastery on Mount Baldy, east of Los Angeles, surrendering to the ministry of his longtime Zen master, Joshu Sasaki Roshi, arguably the single most important relationship of his life. In the end, even submission and asceticism are unavailing. The endless hours of meditation, all the wisdom of Zen, cannot fill the hole inside of him.

Then, miraculously, after exploring the world of Advaita Vedanta Hinduismsix trips to India over five years starting in the late 1990slight pierces the veritable crack: Cohen begins to notice that his dark incubus is slowly dissolving. Ironically, the lifting of his depression coincides with the discovery that five million dollars, much of his life savings, has also evaporated, allegedly spent by his trusted friend, one-time lover, and personal manager, Kelley Lynch. Ironic on another level as wellthe private life of this most private of men unavoidably splashes across newspapers and magazines.

And then the final, more delicious irony. The lurid Lynch saga becomes the catalyst for his hugely successful return to the concert stagemore than three hundred sold-out performances over six years that, in the words of promoter Rob Hallett, replaces all of his financial losses, and then some. And then a lot some. During this period, Cohen also manages to complete two new albums, and, after illness strikes, yet anotherone last, searing confrontation with God,