Sylvie Simmons - I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

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Epub ISBN: 9781448161478

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VINTAGE

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Copyright Sylvie Simmons 2012

Afterword Sylvie Simmons 2017

Cover Ethan Hill/Contour by Getty Images

The right of Sylvie Simmons to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

First published by Vintage in 2013

First published in hardback by Jonathan Cape in 2012

penguin.co.uk/vintage

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Biography

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Fiction

Too Weird for Ziggy

To N. A., in loving memory

The way you do anything is the way you do everything.

Tom Waits

He is a courtly man, elegant, with old-world manners. He bows when he meets you, stands when you leave, makes sure that youre comfortable and makes no mention of the fact hes not; the discreet stroking of the Greek worry beads he carries in his pocket gives the game away. By inclination he is a private man, rather shy, but if probing is required hell put his feet in the stirrups with dignity and humour. He chooses his words carefully, like a poet, or a politician, with a habit of precision, an ear for their sound, and a talent and a taste for deflection and mystery. He has always liked smoke and mirrors. And yet there is something conspiratorial in the way he talks, as there is when he sings, as if he were imparting an intimate secret.

He is a trim man theres no excess to him at all and smaller than you might think. Shipshape. You imagine that he wouldnt find it hard to wear a uniform. Right now he is wearing a suit. It is dark, pinstriped, double-breasted, and if its off the peg it doesnt look it.

Darling, says Leonard, I was born in a suit.

When Im with you

I want to be the kind of hero I wanted to be

when I was seven years old

a perfect man

who kills

The Reason I Write, Selected Poems 19561968

The chauffeur turned off the main road by the synagogue which took up most of the block, and headed past St Matthias Church on the opposite corner, and up the hill. In the back of the car was a woman twenty-seven years old, attractive, strong-featured, stylishly dressed and her newborn baby son. The streets they passed were handsome and well appointed, the trees arranged just so. Big houses of brick and stone you might have thought would collapse under the sheer weight of their self-importance appeared to float effortlessly up the slopes. Around halfway up, the driver took a side road and stopped outside a house at the end of the street. 599 Belmont Avenue was large, solid and formal-looking, English in style, its dark brick softened by a white-framed veranda at the front, and at the back by Murray Park, fourteen acres of lawns, trees and flowerbeds, with a sweeping view of the St Lawrence River to one side and, on the other, downtown Montreal. The chauffeur stepped out of the car and opened the rear door, and Leonard was carried up the white front steps and into his family home.

Leonard Norman Cohen was born on 21 September 1934 in the Royal Victoria Hospital, a grey stone pile in Westmount, an affluent neighbourhood of Montreal, Canada. According to the records, it was at 6.45 on a Friday morning. According to history, it was halfway between the Great Depression and World War II. Counting backwards, Leonard was conceived between the end of Hanukkah and Christmas Day during one of the subarctic winters his home town managed to deliver with both consistency and brio. He was raised in a house of suits.

Nathan Cohen, Leonards father, was a prosperous Canadian Jew with a high-end clothing business. The Freedman Company was known for its formal wear, and Nathan liked to dress formally, even on informal occasions. In suits, as in houses, he favoured the formal English style, which he wore with spats, and tempered with a boutonnire and, when his bad health made it necessary, a silver cane. Masha Cohen, Leonards mother, was sixteen years younger than her husband, a Russian Jew, a rabbis daughter, and a recent immigrant to Canada. She and Nathan had married not long after her arrival in Montreal in 1927. Two years later she gave birth to the first of their two children, Leonards sister, Esther.

Early photographs of Nathan and Masha show him to be a square-faced, square-shouldered, stocky man. Masha, slimmer and a head taller, is in contrast all circles and slopes. The expression on Mashas face is both girlish and regal, while Nathans is rigid and taciturn. Even were this not the required camera pose for the head of a household at that time, Nathan was certainly more reserved, and more anglicised, than his warm, emotional, Russian wife. As a baby, Leonard, plump, compact and also square-faced, was the image of his father, but as he grew he took on his mother Mashas heart-shaped face, thick wavy hair, and deep, dark, sloping eyes. From his father he acquired his height, his tidiness, his decency and his love of suits. From his mother he inherited his charisma, his melancholy and his music. Masha always sang as she went about the house, in Russian and Yiddish more than in English, the sentimental old folk songs she had learned as a child. In a good contralto voice, to imaginary violins, Masha would sing herself from joy to melancholy and back again. Chekhovian is how Leonard described his mother. Masha Cohen was not a nostalgic woman, she did not talk much about the country she had left. But she carried her past in songs.