I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen
By Sylvie Simmons
McClelland & Stewart, 576 pp., $35
When you think of the great comebacks in the music industry, one of the very first names to come to mind has to be Leonard Cohen. The Montreal poet, writer and singer literally disappeared for significant chunks of the late 1990s, retreating into seclusion as a Zen monk at the Mt. Baldy Zen Center for five years, only to come roaring back, almost a decade later, with a globe-spanning tour that sold out arenas almost every night and spawned not one but two live albums. This year saw the release of a new record, Old Ideas, the launch of yet another world tour, and, this month, the publication of Sylvie Simmons' stunning new biography, I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen.
Writing a biography of a subject who is not only still alive but still vital, still active (and Cohen has, arguably, never been more so), is somewhat akin to trying to hit a moving target with an arrow, shooting from horseback: No matter how close you come, you're likely to miss, though only time will tell by just how much.
Consider Vancouver writer Ira B. Nadel's Various Positions: A life of Leonard Cohen. When it was published in 1996, the book was considered the definitive account of the writer and musician's life and career, and rightly so. Cohen's career, however - and the regard with which it is held - continued to grow and develop, and now, 16 years later, Nadel's book seems to lack a crucial perspective.
Take the matter of Hallelujah. In the last decade, the song has become Cohen's best-known and among his most highly regarded. There are more than 300 cover versions of the track out there (I have a playlist of 40 or so on my iTunes), it's been named to numerous Top Songs of All Time lists, and in December 2008, three versions of the song - including Cohen's original and Jeff Buckley's haunting cover - appeared on the British charts simultaneously.
The song, however, isn't mentioned in Nadel's biography, not even during the discussion of Various Positions, the album on which it first appeared.
You can't fault Nadel, however: as they say, tempus fugit. It's the nature of the beast.
With her new book I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen, music journalist Sylvie Simmons not only brings the Cohen story up to date, but she goes far deeper than that.
Reading Simmons' account of Cohen's childhood - the son of a respected and prosperous Montreal family - his early years (including glimpses into his sojourns at summer camp), as a student at McGill, where he was more devoted to poetry and to living as a poet than he was to his studies, and his life in London and on the Greek island of Hydra as he worked on his first novel The Favourite Game, one cannot help but come away with a deeper understanding of the desires and torments which drove Cohen, at points, to the very edges of sanity, and which have fuelled his entire body of work.
To give but one example, Cohen's life as a ladies' man, the conflict between his need for female attention and companionship with his aversion to any sense of domesticity, seems to have its roots in his coming of age in a "house of women" following the death of his father when Cohen was nine, the dynamic interplay between seeking and savouring his mother's attention and chafing at the restrictions of that maternal focus. It is tempting, I know, to fall into the trap of viewing Cohen as some combination of ladies' man, poet, singer and icon, but Simmons illuminates an entire psychic world underlying those masks.
Does she get to the "real" Cohen? Well, there's only one person who could say for sure (and I doubt Cohen himself subscribes to the idea of a "real" identity in those terms), but Simmons and her readers benefit from seemingly unfettered access to Cohen's friends, fellow musicians, fellow writers, lovers and family members, including Judy Collins, Lou Reed, Rebecca De Mornay and dozens of others. The portrait of Cohen that emerges is rich and compelling, a life detailed and honoured with rigour and honesty, and with enough verve and insight to satisfy the most demanding of fans (including, one would assume, those ferries full of people heading over to his concert at Rogers Arena tomorrow evening).
Sylvia Simmons' I'm Your Man is the very best sort of biography: one which deepens our understanding of the subject - and not always in positive ways - while never losing sight of those elements that drew us to them in the first place.
Victoria writer Robert J. Wiersema, a devoted Leonard Cohen fan, regrets he will not be making the pilgrimage to Vancouver for tomorrow night's concert.
