A Ballet of Lepers: A Novel and Stories by Leonard Cohen
Reviewed by Michael Greenstein
Leprosy, Lechery, Scatology, Eschatology
In his early novella, A Ballet of Lepers, Leonard Cohen introduces many of the themes that occupy his later writing. Walt Whitman’s “Do I contradict myself?” serves as epigraph to this fiction, which is indeed contradictory in the narrator’s life of beautiful losers, favourite games, and a dance of lepers and lechers. Consider the opening sentences which introduce the narrator’s grandfather, as well as a balladeer’s rhyme and rhythm: “My grandfather came to live with me. There was nowhere else for him to go. What had happened to all his children? Death, decay, exile – I hardly know.” This family allegory hints at a European past of devastation where wandering “go” rhymes with “know” in the narrator’s tell-tale ignorance, but not innocence. To answer his question is to understand that he is not only an orphan, but also an unreliable narrator with his irony and ability to contradict himself.
“In addition to this novella, the book also contains shorter stories, vignettes, tableaux or working sketches for his more mature work.”
“But I must not be too gloomy, at the beginning, or you will leave me.” Addressing the reader with his rhyme of gloomy and me, he admits that his parents died of pain, and constantly worries about abandonment, whether by other characters in the story or by his reader. From the beginning he is concerned with eschatological ends – the last in his family, narrative, and messianic line: “Who would begin a story if he knew it were to end with a climbing chariot or a cross?” Cohen redresses his parental pain with various crosses and climbing chariots in his leper and penal colony.
One of his grandfather’s filthy habits is spitting, and he spits out his words in spoken and broken English. “I do not remember my parents speaking so well.” In his Freudian family romance, the narrator reinvents his parents who, when they arrive in Canada, promise each other never to speak another word of their mother tongue. The grandfather’s tongue takes over their parental language which begins “again, all again”: “I remember their slow painful speech,” part of the overall pain in their mysterious lives and deaths. Their individual isolation was monumental; they even refused to develop a private vocabulary of facial expressions, something their son attempts with only partial success in his relationship to others. He is certain that they died of loneliness. “Nothing was very clear in our house and besides they didn’t like to involve me in anything that had to do with the past.” This lack of clarity adds to the narrator’s unreliability.
The narrator rents a room on Montreal’s Stanley Street where he makes love to Marylin, observes couples outdoors, argues with his landlady, and appeals to his reader. He seeks solitude from these events, but wants his reader’s company: “No, please do not turn away, I do not mean you.” His monologue with his reader is as obsessive as his engagement with characters in the story. Just as he tries to seduce women, so he teases his reader with engaging and distancing irony. “Even though I can tell you these reasons, and I hope that I’m not being too tedious, I have never really understood my anger.” Alongside any narcissistic examination of ego, Cohen employs irony to deflate his narrator’s selfhood: “On such occasions as I am describing, it overwhelms me, possesses me, takes me right out of myself. Or maybe I should say right into myself.” Consumed by self-centred emotions and narration, “I feel myself stripped of flesh and organs and the truer heart of hate and violence is exposed.” In his exposé of his narrative self, he constantly appeals to his audience: “Now, I know this might not be very interesting, but I must tell you about myself. I mean what are we here for if I don’t do that?” This rhetorical question forms one part of his narrative rhetoric in which he steps outside of his story – a pilgrim of grammar.
His landlady’s knock on the door, announcing a phone call from New York, interrupts his study of the street scene outside his window where an animated couple appear to be quarreling – a harbinger of all the fraught relationships in this novella. In his imagination he dissects the telephone conversation even before picking up the speaker: “I would hear only one voice and before I had heard and dissected a chorus.” This music to his ears almost foreshadows Cohen’s career as a troubadour in alternating sounds of s and hard c, as well as parallels of “before” clauses: “I would receive only one message and before I had received news, verdicts, laws, prohibitions, and secrets.” In one ear a list of forbidden features; in the other, a voice “heavy with foreign intonation.” After the call he returns to his room to reflect on his new relationship to his grandfather. “Slowly, I felt the return of a deep family love, a bond joining the generations one to another.”
This return of the repressed is manifest in the family line and in the bond of the couple in the street who now embrace rather than quarrel. In the narrator’s romantic vision, he mixes colours and awaits the arrival of his lover Marylin. The first chapter ends with “I heard her steps on the outside stairs” – an announcement of the world transformed for the couple in the street and for the approach of his grandfather.
Chapter II opens with Marylin’s rapturous lyrics or operatic rhetoric: “How ardent you are … Tonight, you are my ardent lover. Tonight, we are gentry and animals, birds and lizards, stone and water, slime and marble.” Marylin slithers in poetry and the caress of her lover: “Tonight, we are glorious and degraded, knighted and crushed, beautiful and disgusting.” Cohen’s black romantic dichotomies are replete with ironic overtures: “Sweat is perfume, groans are gold, gasps are bells, shudders are silver.” Marylin concludes her litany of lust: “This is why I must have left the others, the hundreds who try and snag my ankle with crippled hands as I speed to you.” Another beautiful loser, Marylin speeds to Leonard through her lechery and leprosy. Both lovers are mouthpieces for Cohen’s favourite game: “This is the kind of romantic game we played when we were at our best. At our worst, it was no game at all but vicious combat.”
Favourite game and beautiful losers merge in this early ballet, as Marylin proclaims, “Christ of the Andes” and the narrator inserts “The Andes themselves.” Cohen’s comedy and irony work through their monumental exaggeration and hyperbolic hedonism. He thinks of marble thighs and knees of stone colossus, and repeats “heal me” with mock supplication, while she cries “Heal me yourself,” laughing and collapsing over his body. Their ritual continues through the beauty of candle and mirror, but any attempt at sublime transcendence is met with mundane reflection. When she announces that “We are lovers,” he considers her statement “as if she were stating the axioms before attempting a geometry proposition.” A Ballet of Lepers is, among other things, an exercise in geometric proportions and propositions.
They stand naked before a mirror which becomes self-referential and metafictional. Marylin comments on people in the street who would see the naked couple in their bower of bliss or garden of Eden: “That person would become immediately aroused … the way we become aroused when we read a provoking sexual description in a novel.” Voyeuristic readers dance in “A Ballet of Lepers,” as the narrator reacts to Marylin’s language: “I winced at the word sexual. There is no word more inappropriate when two are locked in sexual embrace.” The chapter ends with Marylin falling asleep in a heavy fashion, as if she were swollen with grief. The narrator then dreams “of a huge cloak flung onto my shoulders from a weeping man in a flying cart.” This burden of the past takes the form of his grandfather’s weeping weight and flying foreignness.
If this chapter ends by extolling the beautiful body, then the next begins with another favourite game, as the narrator comments on his love affair: “I sometimes picture the whole thing as a great game of musical chairs.” Cohen sings his lyrical game with his hallmark rhythm and rhyme: “When the music stops, a few, a very few unfortunate ones cannot continue in the game; the rest find a place to sit before the music starts again.” This brief chapter ends with the narrator in Montreal’s crowded railway station awaiting the arrival of his grandfather and thinking about how Marylin takes him down: “And Marylin should have known that in such a soul-less city, where the ill and well go hand in hand, she should put away her leper’s bell and dance with everyone who asks.”
He spots his grandfather who is spitting at a policeman in an absurd gesture of defiance or Chaplinesque slapstick: “He clung his cane against a lamppost that we passed and laughed and did a little dance step.” With this cane, he strikes the policeman and dances around him, as his vulgarity spreads from spitting to urinating in public. His grandson laughs with a kind of admiration: “The bond of blood seemed more important to me than anything. The bond of family, the bond of love.” In addition to family love, the narrator seeks the love of his reader, as he tries to make his story credible: “I desire your love only by the telling.” If the narrator is unreliable, so too is his grandfather whose violence increases. The old man seizes a small bronze figure of Byron to smash a window in the apartment. He then leans out of the window to spit and urinate on the sidewalk. Grandfather and grandson are iconoclasts, intent on revenge.
The narrator returns to the train station to retrieve his grandfather’s luggage. He romanticizes his surroundings where the loudspeaker announces the names of cities of an “impossible odyssey.” He finds a brotherhood and bond of community among people in the station. The baggage clerk is a kind of leper: “He did not have a harelip, but his mouth was twisted.” Aptly named Cagely, the clerk is grotesque and fascinates the sadistic narrator who must humiliate him. Cohen’s strange heroism examines his behaviour toward this leprous clerk: “Those legends of Christianity, the beauty of the oppressed and the invalid, how have they withered so totally before the striding hero?” Cohen’s anti-hero picks at scars and scabs before turning once again to his reader: “I have no intention of burdening you with any further details concerning it.” The burden of the missing valise is part of the narrator’s baggage with his grandfather, Marylin, Cagely, and a bookkeeper at work. The leper’s luggage accompanies the pilgrim on his impossible odyssey.
The narrator ruminates on beauty, violence, the hunt, lure, seduction, ritual, essential act of relief, purging, and purification, before landing on a rhyme: “observing my grandfather during his few moments of glory, the evening before. The landlady greeted me at the door.” Marylin arrives with her rhyme: “many a Canaan shore where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come no more.” Cohen’s polarities of Canaan and Canada come to the fore: “And I thought of Canada, no patriot, but awestruck at its sudden size stretching out, beyond the flesh.” His Canadian prophet, priest, or pilgrim strides and stumbles across land, language, and comparative mythologies.
Flesh forward to his landlady’s sordid affair with his grandfather who flings his feces at her. She becomes “the old whore” engaging in the “democracy of lust,” which is “foul and glorious.” When Marylin and the narrator announce that they are going to get married, they invite their landlady to celebrate: “The landlady bore the bottle of scotch like a precious scroll, dancing like a rabbi of some obscure happy sect.” This ballet of lepers takes the form of a Hassidic dance, where the grandfather makes a toast in his European language.
Back at the railway station the narrator pursues Cagely to the bathroom where the clerk masturbates in “loathsome beauty.” The narrator asks if this is a regular morning ritual, and he then quotes from scripture: “Those commandments are too old, we cannot be pure in the sanctuary; it is only among lepers that we can be pure.” Cohen confronts sanctuary and profane cubicle, purity and prurience, lepers and lechers. “The temple became a lavatory” for purging the flesh. Cohen is both priest and prophet in his fiction. “Each of us had his secret ceremony; each of us had his secret art. I embraced the routine throngs with a smile.” His wide Montreal smile incorporates the ceremony of irony, as he questions compassion in the burning bush garden: “What is the deep evil in the martyr’s blood that holds him happy in the holy fire?” In his breakup with Marylin his grandfather joins in to form a ménage à trois – “the same frantic dance, like three items of debris on the same wave of a heaving sea.” And a similar rhyme closes the chapter: “She was bleeding from one eye. She did not say goodbye.”
Examining his personal rituals and storytelling, he argues that these are as factual as Buchenwald or Bergen-Belsen. He is obsessed with prayer, shame, and humiliation as he carries on a sordid affair with Cagely’s wife in gratuitous revenge. Mrs. Cagely and the narrator arrange to confront Cagely with their affair in bed where she vomits. In the sickening fluid the narrator thinks: “This is the end…. We are drowning for the very last time, and I am happy to be struggling out my last breath, naked and burning in this poisonous bed in the half-dark waiting room of death.” On her breast he dreams of galaxies whirling in the firmament, as Cohen indulges in comic and cosmic rhymes of irony and apocalyptic ends. A Ballet of Lepers is a danse macabre, a tango of more than two, and a waltz taken to the end of love.
In addition to this novella, the book also contains shorter stories, vignettes, tableaux or working sketches for his more mature work. At times there may be a Kafkaesque quality to absurdity in the fiction that is frequently autobiographical. “Ceremonies” begins with “I suppose I will never lead the ordered life my father lead.” The story recounts his father’s death and his own inability to follow the rituals of his privileged upbringing. The coffin remains in his living room where his uncles gather. His father is “swaddled in silk, wrapped in a silvered prayer shawl. His moustache was fierce and black against his white face.” His father’s death coincides with his sister’s birthday, so at the end of the story he tells her not to cry and considers it his “best moment.”
“David Who?” was originally titled “Diary of a Montreal Leper,” which could also be applied to other stories in this collection. The narrator shows up with his bohemian hair at his cousin’s concert, which is a failure. The next morning, he plays Bach on his guitar for her. When his lover tells him that he resembles King David with his hair, he reacts: “Fools, fools across the whole city, what do any of you know about hair?” Cohen becomes more experimental in “ive had lots of pets,” which abandons any punctuation. “Strange Boy with a Hammer” is the most overtly Jewish of all the stories, as Mrs. Eliezer interacts with her sone Josh who is both a Jesus figure and jokester. She addresses him in Yiddish, “Only little children,” and sings “Oif’n Pripichik,” as distant city bells chime nine o’clock. Josh prepares for his Bar Mitzvah and hammers wood as she hums and the bells chime across Montreal. In a surprise ending she goes to his room to investigate: “He was hanging by one hand from a large cross of polished wood which was fastened to the door. In his other hand, he held a hammer. He had bled to death.” Cohen hammers home his message about a strange boy in a chorus of martyrs and lepers. Cohen’s coming-of-age fiction undergoes its own apprenticeship.
About the Author
Leonard Cohen’s artistic career began in 1956 with the publication of his first book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies. He published two novels, The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers, and ten books of poetry, most recently Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs and Book of Longing. During a recording career that spanned almost fifty years, he released fourteen studio albums, the last of which, You Want It Darker, was released in 2016. Cohen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010, and was awarded the Glenn Gould Prize in 2011. He died on November 7, 2016.
About the Reviewer
Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.
He has published 250 essays and reviews in books and journals across Canada, the United States, and Europe.
Book Details
Publisher : McClelland & Stewart
Publication date : Oct. 21 2025
Language : English
Print length : 272 pages
ISBN-10 : 0771018274
ISBN-13 : 978-0771018275