As though handbooks and companions were not enough for the industry of academic edited collections, Cambridge University Press has started ‘The World of’, with Leonard Cohen following Bob Dylan (reviewed by Simon Frith in PM 41/2, 2022). Trailing Dylan’s total by three, Cohen generates twenty-four essays, for the design of which editor David Shumway deserves the kind of audience whoops and roars heard at the end of Cohen’s Live in London (2009). Four essays of broad overview: biography, literary work, songs, and albums; three ‘musical contexts’: folk, singer-songwriter, rock; three on religion: Jewish, Buddhist, Christian; eight on culture: two literature, one each on cinema and Montreal, two on women, two on politics; finally and inevitably, six lucky dips broadly on reception: another biographical overview, filmed documentaries, masks or personae, age, cover versions, and the exciting Cohen archives, the closing essay a parallel to The World of Bob Dylan. The collection fully employs what might seem surprisingly abundant literature; the select bibliography contains twenty monographs, six edited collections, a graphic novel, and an extensive oral history. (For all that, it’s the collection of published interviews by journalists gathered together by Jeff Burger as a book in 2014 to which most authors are indebted; Cohen seemingly interviewed ad infinitum.) Future students of Cohen, beware.
With so many essays having to get started, and many attempting to cover the entire career, inevitable repetitions abound, the reader enduring several accounts of the fifties Montreal literary milieu, the Greek island Hydra, the television documentary originally intended to feature four poets, and so on. That said, I thought the book benefitted from dealing not once but twice with Cohen’s remarkable fecundity as lover, husband, and father, David Yaffe and Heather Arnet generally admiring of his many and varied adventures although, in truth, when a promiscuous rock star declares ‘I really am for the matriarchy’ (p. 236), with a follower adding that ‘his only loyalty is to the muse’ (p. 229), you wouldn’t mind hearing a sceptical feminist mutter, ‘Yeah, right’. The essays on religion make a useful foil, all three distinctive and contrasting. In his combination of lascivious, bed-hopping ‘ladies’ man’ with high theological meditation, Cohen is reminiscent of the John Updike of the memoir Self -Consciousness (Reference Updike1989) or the novel Roger’s Version (Reference Updike1986). Updike and Cohen were close contemporaries, and the collection as a whole is admirably attentive to Cohen’s being close to a decade older than sixties singer-songwriters such as Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, or James Taylor, but less so to musicians born in the 1930s – writers fare better in that regard.
In one of his pair of essays, editor Shumway is sure Cohen is a genuine and early singer-songwriter, airing again his theory that singer-songwriters got going only around 1968, so that Hank Williams and Buddy Holly were not singer-songwriters, as neither were Beatle Lennon singing and writing ‘In My Life’ (The Beatles, 1965) or Beach Boy Wilson ‘In My Room’ (The Beach Boys, 1963); the key indicative claim is that Bob Dylan made a singer-songwriter album only as late as 1974 with Blood on the Tracks (‘Positively Fourth Street’, 1965, isn’t an album). While this is interesting if productively debatable, elsewhere I do think Shumway is off the mark in suggesting that Cohen was ‘the one clear exception’ (p. 328) among the boomers in contemplating old age. Loudon Wainwright III noted being ‘older than my old man now’ (Reference Wainwright2012); appearing at his iconic sixty-four, Paul McCartney’s Memory Almost Full (Reference McCartney2007) ends with instructions about his funeral; and as Robert Christgau observed of Steely Dan, ‘clearly and explicitly, Two Against Nature is an album about old men trying to get laid’ (Christgau Reference Christgau2000). Bob Dylan ‘doesn’t write from the perspective of an octogenarian’? Well there he is singing, touching eighty, ‘I sleep with life and death in the same bed’.
More to the point, Dylan’s ‘I Contain Multitudes’ (Reference Dylan2020) sounds unmistakably like an old man, as does late-period Leonard Cohen, and the giant if unsurprising problem of The World of Leonard Cohen is that music per se is more or less completely absent. A majority of its contributors either have backgrounds in English literature or teach in the Humanities, and when these people study songs their view of the words is invariably, congenitally, to make them into poems. Cohen is of course an especially interesting specimen since he was a published poet and novelist before and alongside the songs, but we review him in Popular Music not because they’re poems, but because they’re songs and records.
As an instructive example, both Shumway (on the singer-songwriter) and Arnet (on said matriarchy) compare Cohen’s Reference Cohen1967 ‘Suzanne’ with James Taylor’s Reference Taylor1970 ‘Fire and Rain’, which names its own Suzanne. Two real-life Suzannes, why not? Shumway compares the writers’ view of their lyrics by autobiographical proximity, while Arnet usefully counts up first-persons I and we. Both points could be read from the printed page, but listening to the recordings reveals two very different conceptions of the word-music relationship. Cohen’s is a series of similarly metred verses – he’d have worked on them like a poet (see Ian Rae at p. 169) – but Taylor’s words build: in the line, with the music, through the verses, across the song. To put it reductively but quantitatively, the syllable count of the first verse in Cohen is 12-15-16-17-16-16-8, while the last verse is 14-15-16-16-16-16-7: admire the similarity. James Taylor has a first verse 13-11-12-10, and third verse 17-14-19-13: spot the difference. With Taylor, as music accumulates, so do the words: Russ Kunkel isn’t adding those off-beat drums just for fun, and Taylor gains higher pitches in the final chorus because the song pushes towards them. Cohen’s devotees are impressed by his writing however many verses to ‘Hallelujah’ but, from the perspective of songs and records, taking place in certain amounts of time, so what? Indeed by my hearing, Cohen’s recordings become more interesting when interplay with female voices enters the line, the melodic line, and the verbal line intertwined.
Elsewhere, Alan Light takes the lavish critical view that Cohen’s songs have ‘a precision and a concision unmatched in pop songwriting’ (p. 48) but, first, I could think of dozens of precise and concise pop and rock songs (I doubt if Robert Forster could be imprecise and verbose even if he tried) and, second, one of the key features of Cohen is indeed not concision but (as indeed with ‘Hallelujah’) prolixity, the readiness to keep the verses coming, something shared with the Bob Dylan of ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ (Reference Dylan1975, among very many), the Joni Mitchell of ‘The Sire of Sorrow (Job’s Song)’ (Reference Mitchell1994), or the Gruff Rhys of ‘Skylon’ (Reference Rhys2007). This is not to say, however, that Cohen can also be concise within the line and verse, simply that he allowed for very many of them.
If the collection’s engagement with song is skewed towards words-as-poetry, the book’s three chapters on Cohen’s literary output raise no such qualm. Scholars of Canadian literature and culture will find useful chapters, with Ian Rae and Francis Mus working well as a pair looking inward and outward, locally and globally, respectively. Julian Stannard reads as a reliable and sympathetic-but-critical guide to the non-musical Cohen, making a good case for actually reading Cohen’s second novel, Beautiful Losers (Reference Cohen1966) – Erin MacLeod at p. 215 gives up on it – despite the marvellously bleak estimation made by ‘the Dutch critic Gerrit Komrij’ quoted at p. 42: ‘imagination nil, structure nil, originality nil, style nil, self-control nil, premise nil’.
Since I reviewed his book on a tribute album for Leonard Cohen in PM (39 3/4, 2020), I welcome Ray Padgett’s further contribution to the topic. Here he seems to me too impressed by the mere quantity of cover versions, the noteworthy feature of I’m Your Fan: the Songs of Leonard Cohen (1991) being the quality of so many of the tracks among which R.E.M., Lloyd Cole, Robert Forster, and John Cale’s door-opening ‘Hallelujah’. Padgett signalled the producer of tribute albums as a key factor and, in my view, the best collection of Cohen tributes has since appeared, produced by Larry Klein (Here It Is: a Tribute to Leonard Cohen, Reference Posner2022), following similar, jazz-based Klein tributes for Joni Mitchell (Herbie Hancock, Reference Hancock2007) and Laura Nyro (Billy Childs, Reference Childs2014). Certainly something in Cohen’s songs attracts interpreters.
Finally, I commend David Boucher on Cohen’s decidedly dodgy political views: while it’s reasonable to expect a volume like this to be generally celebratory, with hagiography a persistent peril, it’s refreshing to find a dissenting voice prepared to spoil the party; maybe Boucher’s being born in Ebbw Vale in south Wales helps, a short bus ride from the Manic Street Preachers. In the collection, his piece is rare in quarrying the not-one-but-three volumes, 496 pages each, of Cohen oral history edited by Michael Posner (Posner, Reference Posner2020, Reference Posner2021, Reference Posner2022). One harbours the unexamined assumption that the emergent generation of rock musicians was entirely and impeccably liberal, but Boucher shows Cohen following the Beats into ‘anti-establishment bohemian anarchistic individualism’ (p. 267), and what good is that? Quiz question, who said this? ‘I would really go in and bomb the countries that are supplying drugs to America’ (p. 238). Trump? No, ‘the countercultural rebel, the Jewish philosopher, the spiritual seeker, the unapologetic seducer’ himself (p. 197). It may be worth remembering next time you see an earnest singer gazing into the teary distance while belting out ‘Hallelujah’.
Who’s this book for? Only the most patient devotee will read it cover to cover. Students of Canadian literature, film, politics, culture will find much substance. For scholars of popular music, the book might serve as a source for thinking about the role of the literary in songwriting Leonard Cohen, well-read it’s well-known, with his Lorca, Joyce, and Jean Genet. Does it matter? How does it matter?
There is much to ponder in Leonard Cohen and much to admire, and The World of Leonard Cohen opens several doors to its study.
