Prose and Cohens: Leonard Cohen, The Man Who Saw the Angels Fall by Christophe Lebold
A Review by Michael Greenstein
On the cover of Christophe Lebold’s stimulating and provocative biography of Leonard Cohen, the poet sits in a train compartment lighting his cigarette, bathed in a film noir setting, shadows playing across his face. The hazy landscape outside the window frames the subtitle, “The Man Who Saw the Angels Fall.” While cigarettes are simultaneously central and peripheral to Cohen’s life, the cigarette in this photograph may be replaced by a microphone in others. That is, the singer clutches alternating cigarette and microphone, inhaling the former, exhaling into the latter to create sounds that deepen over the decades. Those fingers also bless and caress musical instruments and female bodies in a delicacy that multiplies and disappears with every sleight of hand. The cigarette deepens his voice, darkens his lungs, but lights up his soul, while Los Angeles’s smog and an occasional Jew’s harp further background his musical journey.
With almost 100 pages of Notes and Bibliography, Lebold’s biography surpasses Ira Nadel’s Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen (1996) and Sylvie Simmons’s I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen (2012) – each contributing significantly to an understanding of the writer and his work. Although Lebold acknowledges his debt to the two earlier books, he qualifies the first as “a tinge academic,” while the second is “a little soulless.” His own French verve yields a surfeit of soul and souls. If Nadel offers such chapters as “The Root of the Chord” and “Life in a Golden Coffin,” and Simmons begins with “Born in a Suit,” Lebold proliferates headings such as “TV Tzadik and Pop Poetry,” “A Troubadour in Manhattan,” and “Fedora Bodhisattva.”
“…an exercise in prose performance with neo-rococo rhetoric that captivates his subject and the reader in its hypnotic flow.”
Just as Cohen creates the hagiography of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha in his second novel, Beautiful Losers, so Lebold’s biography approaches hagiography. His biography is also an exercise in prose performance with neo-rococo rhetoric that captivates his subject and the reader in its hypnotic flow. Where the earlier biographies stick to the facts, he boldly declares: “We will not be so shy, for we have invented Leonard Cohen: he is the man we described in the prologue, who sees angels fall and restores the gravity of our lives.” The use of the first-person plural is meant to carry the reader along this journey, yet by the end of the expansive portrait, the author shifts to the singular: “After his death, for a few weeks, I had a little ritual every morning over coffee. I solemnly gave him the Nobel Prize for Literature in my modest kitchen.” The public bravura performance narrows fittingly to domestic routine.
With homes in Montreal, Hydra, and Los Angeles, as well as musical tours around the world, it is virtually impossible to pin Cohen down. From room to room, Lebold tracks and traces multiple identities of saint, troubadour, crooner, Casanova, monk, and more.
The “Prologue” consists of three portraits of Leonard Cohen; and three is one of the favourite numbers in this book that tangles the trinity and pushes a negative dialectic of opposites that are never resolved into a synthesis, but rather recreated in an ongoing process of rediscovery. The author opens with lines from “Gravity” where a b a b rhyme scheme sings in tandem with alternating tetrameters and trimeters: “But love is strong as gravity / And everyone will fall / At first it’s from the apple tree / Then from the western wall.” From Genesis to the destroyed wall that lasts as a remnant rebuilt in the line’s architecture, Lebold constructs a narrative of falling angels, prophetic gravity, flamenco arpeggios, and cosmic jokes. He conducts his performance in various tenses – past, present, and future – that come and go. “For a few years, Cohen will hit the streets of Manhattan and move from one hotel to the next to reinvent the twelfth-century troubadour as a poet of failed love affairs and great solitudes.” The biographer is particularly adept at delineating hotel rooms and elevators – empty nests for touring centuries. Lebold punctuates his seductive rhetoric between series of “perhaps” and “of course” – tentative and assured steps in his dialectical dance to the end of love-life.
The titles of multiple subsections during this vast journey serve as intriguing and telling guideposts. Biographer and subject are centrifugal in “The Triple Calling of the World”: “like Abraham, he was called three times.” Similes take the reader back through the centuries before the triadic divergence: “First, by his own name …. Then by the women that he pursued everywhere, and of course by the life that he wanted to live.” This numbers game syncopates between tripartite structures and “Saying goodbye a thousand times.” Cohen enacted his own priestly surname to bless a community, but the blessing is also a wound, and the poet would be wounded as often as he would bless. In comparing mythologies, he would often turn to other holy figures from Jesus to his Buddhist teacher, Joshu Sasaki Roshi. In his mood swings from Federico Garcia Lorca’s duende to the saudade of falling angels, Leonard swerved into depression. “The third calling, of course, was what would transform Leonard into the professional romantic that seduced the world: the calling of the beauty of women.” The sure-footedness of “of course” points to the course of Cohen’s wandering and Lebold’s narrative, which are on course and digressive simultaneously.
In his centrifugal performance Lebold compares Cohen to Abraham, King David, Jonah in the whale, and Jacob who struggles with the black angel of melancholy. Cohen took some of these biblical characteristics from his Montreal teacher, Abraham Moses Klein, whose creative career ended in twenty years of silence, and whose biblical names attest to the wandering patriarch and receiver of the Mosaic Law. Like Moses, Klein never reached his promised land; instead, he abbreviated to his surname, which means small. In the archives Cohen wrote in pencil on foolscap (the fool’s cap, one of the many ironic hats Cohen donned) in a lecture devoted to Klein. In that lecture, he contrasted the priestly and prophetic roles of the poet. As if to overcome Klein’s silence, Cohen and his friend Irving Layton adopted personae to win over the public.
Lebold’s triptychs add ballast to Leonard’s angelic gravitas. “Leonard Cohen uses ‘Suzanne’ as a triple reminder to the youth of 1968: sainthood, he warns, has a price; it can be attained only through falling; and the laws of gravity are not negotiable.” Punctuation without pause: commas, colons, semi-colons, and dashes hinge and swing the prose – phrases in a hurry, sentences in a rush throughout Cohen’s calling and falling. On the one hand, we read of the Christian concept of repentance (as if repentance weren’t of significance in Judaism), and slide into the thirteenth century with Thomas Aquinas; on the other hand, Cohen kept his menorah in his monk’s cabin in the Zen centre on Mount Baldy in California. In his irony of comparative mythologies, the poet oscillated between Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism – his personal trinity on the way to multiple explorations.
Where Cohen zeroes in with concise lyrics, his biographer employs a centrifugal style that slides through centuries. To introduce Nico, a femme fatale, he invokes the angelic theology of Denys the Areopagite and Saint Thomas Aquinas, before sliding into the Jesuit Michel de Certeau: “the Christian experience par excellence.” Still on the Femme Fatale and Songs of Leonard Cohen, “It’s as if Bernard de Ventadour had left the twelfth century.” Of Book of Mercy (1984) Lebold notes “the influence of a quasi-Christian theology of love,” and for “The Future” he again compares mythologies: “Like St. John at Patmos, he understands the essential role that love must play.” Or, “like Saint Francis of Assisi before him, Leonard invites us to welcome death as a friend.” At the age of seventy, Cohen was compelled to relaunch his career, “And that is one of the central tenets of Catholic theology.”
In life before Leonard, we encounter mirrors and masks: “I know this can’t be me / Must be my double,” in double-breasted suits. One of many mysteries is the connection between his two novels – The Favourite Game (1963), an autobiographical, realistic Künstlerroman; and Beautiful Losers (1966), mythological, historical and postmodern. Lebold tracks his subject through avalanche, blue raincoat, razor blades, and Roshi’s ginger sake. “Of course, we have put that double to the test of facts; we have consulted the archives …. we have entered Leonard’s life on tiptoes,” as an acrobat swallowed by an avalanche.
Cohen contained a multitude of contradictions: he munched on McDonald’s Filet-o-Fish and quaffed Château Latour from Bordeaux; he mixed genres and sounds; his addictions ranged from asceticism to hedonism; he consulted Rashi (the medieval Jewish biblical commentator) as well as his Buddhist Roshi; and he mediated between crowds and cults. Lebold justifies his triple approach by focusing on an early photograph of Leonard on his tricycle in Montreal and ending sixty years later with a Buddhist magazine called Tricycle, for which he interviewed his Zen master. Of Cohen’s childhood Lebold concludes: “We have all lived in Westmount, Montreal.” (This is the flip side of Cohen’s statement: “Just as there are no Canadians, there are no Montrealers.”) Literally no, figuratively yes, and this biography embellishes the literal through figures of speech. If understatement fails to get at the truth of an elusive subject, then go for hyperbole. Of Cohen’s double lineage, he offers the Rockefellers of Montreal and the flying rabbis of Chagall. And why not? After all, Cohen has penned a similar portrait: “For you / I will be a banker Jew” and “For you / I will be a ghetto Jew.”
Cohen also presents versions of himself in self-portraits sketched with dark facial lines, some verses, and insignias of a rounded, heart-shaped Star of David. After the death of his father at a relatively young age, he seeks other father figures such as Sasaki Roshi; similarly, he replaces his distant mother with offerings of incense to the Virgin Mary. Whether in Hydra or Los Angeles, he carried his menorah, which he used for lighting Sabbath candles. Soul, candle, and ritual bind, ascending and descending in angelic flame, harmony, and irony. Commenting on Beautiful Losers, Lebold tilts his own political hat: “With today’s harsh reign of woke hypocrisy, the book could not even get published.”
When he is not invoking Boethius in the fifth century, Lebold summons such contemporaries as Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard. A tinge academic? The many photographs and illustrations in the book highlight Cohen’s career. Not least among Lebold’s strengths are his acute discussions of music in this bravura biography. Among Cohen’s last words are “Hineini” and “hallelujah.” The former Hebrew word requires three English words in different order: here I am, or I am here, or here am I – the call of the ego’s whereabouts. After that still small voice and egotistical sublime, hallelujah rings out in universal resonance, cracking the light.
About the Author
Christophe Lebold is an associate professor at the University of Strasbourg (France), where he teaches literature, performance studies, and rock culture. A fan and friend of Leonard Cohen, he has travelled extensively in the poet’s tracks. Also a theatre actor and student of Zen, he likes poets, cats, and ― in a good mood ― all sentient beings.
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.
Book Details
Publisher : ECW Press (Sept. 5 2024)
Language : English
Paperback : 576 pages
ISBN-10 : 1770417443
ISBN-13 : 978-1770417441