In 1941, the German tanks are advancing on Moscow. Soviet leaders famously respond by placing a dummy of Joseph Stalin in a lighted Kremlin window. It sits high enough to escape inspection but close enough to project reassurance. Uncle Joe himself may be parked in a basement far away, but Comrade Stalin remains – unafraid, unbowed, unwilling to forsake the motherland.
The story has often been retold mockingly and understandably so. But I think there’s something to be said for this image of the baffled king casting an unflappable presence for his weary followers. Ten years after Leonard Cohen’s death, as it did on the day I first heard the news, brings to mind the cover photograph of what would become his final living Jewish testament.
Cohen, at the close of 2016, isn’t in quite as bad shape as Stalin, whose ghost he had conjured a quarter-century earlier in the song The Future, that satirical little lyric pasted on to a perky dance beat. Still, he is not exactly in rollicking form.
Yet there he looms before us. The cover of You Want It Darker shows the 82-year-old perched in a window somewhere high above Boogie Street. Double-breasted suit. Hat tilted just so. Lighted cigarette in hand. Same as he ever was.
Except that he isn’t.
The cigarette should be the tip-off. Cohen, a famous smoker, quit years earlier for health reasons. Now he’s puffing away again as though there’s no tomorrow. As indeed there isn’t.
Cohen the man sits far away, his deteriorating condition having tied him to a kitchen chair somewhere in Los Angeles. The work he produces in this unlikely setting is full of mysteries, the greatest of which is how anyone can sound so lucid after being repeatedly slammed by chemo and probably feeling like his head weighs a hundred pounds.
Yet it is from this position that he somehow manages to compose and record the final instalment in an unguessable career. One hopes he knows how clear and beautiful the music he is making sounds. Propped in that chair, he sends sound files back and forth to the musicians, to his son and co-producer Adam, and finally to the listening world at large.
It is the only record he ever makes whose cover photograph withholds those lacquered brown eyes.
The cover of You Want It DarkerANSA
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On the grey-lidded afternoon when I first hear of Leonard Cohen’s death, I am in my car, listening to the downloaded tracks of what is then his startling new album, still playing my favourite game with the man in the window.
I am trying to work out what this final apparition means. I am thinking, too, of my late British father, a fan of Cohen – the Canadian-born artist’s books, alas, rather than the infinitely superior music – and of the name thing, which is obvious but not therefore irrelevant.
If there is one thing I have learnt from a lifetime of listening to Cohen’s gravel-on-velvet voice, it is that why we respond to a particular musical performance can be as difficult to explain to ourselves as to anyone else. Which is not to say it is not fun trying, especially when the object in question is a transfixing new album that kicks the stuffing out of everything else on current release. Music to die for.
When I say music to die for, though, I do not quite mean music to die to. I do not mean that it sounds like the last thing I ever want to hear, and I certainly do not mean that I want it played at anybody’s funeral, still less my own.
No, what I mean is that the title track to You Want It Darker is one of those songs you hear and sincerely believe you will spend the rest of your days listening to. By the time I type this sentence, I will have listened to it a preposterous number of times, not because its meaning has settled, but because it keeps refusing to settle. There are always more ways to hear it.
On the one hand, you could say the song has Cohen driving past the places of his own youth, specifically his old synagogue in Montreal, Shaar Hashomayim, that formed his Jewish ear. It surges out wrapped in a fantastic little acoustic strum-and-string bass. The synagogue’s cantor, Gideon Zelermyer, supplies a soaring counterpoint vocal in the classical Ashkenazi style, all creamy and deep. There is a certain comic symmetry in the fact that the melody pulsing underneath comes from Patrick Leonard, whose earlier claim to pop immortality was having written the music for Madonna’s Like a Prayer. On the other hand, this is a prayer.
But this prayer’s luminosity lies in Cohen’s inimitable return to the binding of Isaac – the Akedah – which, with uncanny timing, would be read in synagogues the week after the record’s release, on the second day of Rosh Hashanah. Cohen’s version is harsher than Genesis 22. Here, the singer casts himself as the wounded believer grieving “the help that never came”. Yet he is also the obedient believer, accepting the summons with Abraham’s terrible word of readiness: Hineni, “Here I am.”
With the IDF in the Sinai Desert in 1973[Missing Credit]
In a career-capping interview with David Remnick of The New Yorker, Cohen explained the track in terms of 16th-century Jewish mysticism, specifically the Lurianic idea that Creation itself is a catastrophe. The reference is to Isaac Luria’s vision of a shattered universe, in which divine light is dispersed through we broken vessels of existence.
In that cosmic drama, human beings move through a world of scattered sparks. The work of repair falls with particular force on the Jew, who is required not merely to admire brokenness but to enter it. So, yes, the song carries traces of the Catholic liturgy Cohen heard as a child with his Irish nanny; but its theological centre lies elsewhere, in a Jewish imagination of rupture. There is something faintly absurd, and rather delicious, about driving through an ordinary afternoon humming Lurianic kabbalah.
And yet, as Cohen’s old literary friend Leon Wieseltier observed, the song is never only about God. It is also a million candles burning for sex, beauty, appetite and the stubborn claims of the body. The fellow at the window remains, impressively, a ladies’ man, a poet, a lover, a voluptuary, “a good man with desires who even at 82 has the romantic courage of those desires”.
You Want It Darker is a statement, yes, but it’s a question, too, and while the singer doesn’t specifically get around to answering it, I will. He’s offering a declaration of courage ahead of wrestling the angel. These days many artists study courage as a concept and pronounce themselves moved. Leonard Cohen, on the other hand, has courage.
Leonard Cohen with Marianne Ihlen, his Norwegian lover and muse who inspired many of his songs (Credit: Yonki Books)[Missing Credit]
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Like most people, I first hear the news three days after the fact, and for a moment confuse the date of the announcement with the date of the death. This is one of the occupational hazards of journalism, or perhaps merely of believing too quickly what the media tells you. But there it is, and that is that: Leonard Norman Cohen, 1934-2016.
I send an email to my friend Paul Morris, a professor of religious studies at Victoria University in Wellington and, in my private taxonomy, the professor of Leonard Cohen. I ask him the only question that seems available: how lonely does it get?
“It doesn’t get any darker than this,” he writes back.
The phrase stays with me because it is both exactly right and not quite right. Not where I am living in New Zealand, which will now always have the odd distinction of having hosted Cohen’s final comeback show in Auckland in 2013. Not where I first chanced upon my Canadian namesake while growing up in the 1970s and thereafter charted much of my emotional life in the lyrical company of the artist forever haunted by the famous blue raincoat, who modestly signed out with the line “Sincerely, L. Cohen”.
I had come to him first not through the nicotine-scratched baritone of the records, though that would arrive soon enough, but through a well-thumbed copy of The Favourite Game.
It had belonged to another L. Cohen, my father, and for many years it served as one of the routes back into his memory. The name thing is obvious, but not therefore irrelevant. In Jewish life names are rarely only labels.
The jolt of Cohen’s death unexpectedly exhumes all this because the artist who made such remembering possible has himself moved, in an instant, from the present tense to a past tense.
It does not get darker, exactly, because darkness was never merely his subject. Cohen had spent half a century teaching us that darkness could also be one of light’s stranger instruments. There are performers who blaze in the light for a season – Tim Buckley, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin – all of them Cohen’s contemporaries, one of them, as everybody knows, among his celebrated lovers. Then there is the other kind of artist: the one who appears to glow forever in the dark, insisting across 50 years, 14 studio albums, half a billion cigarettes and endless refills of tea and oranges that there really is a crack in everything, because that is how the light gets in.
Janis Joplin photographed in 1969. The singer and Cohen spent the night together at the legendary Chelsea Hotel in New York, in 1968, a sexual encounter that inspired his song Chelsea Hotel #2, released in 1974[Missing Credit]
The difficulty, when writing about Cohen and death, is not to find something he said about it. There is no shortage of evidence.
It is to choose among the abundance of meditations he left behind, including the recent letter to his dying muse in which he predicted his own imminent departure with a courtliness so exact it almost seemed comic.
One of the sharpest comes from one of the final interviews he gave, on the occasion of the release of You Want It Darker.
Asked whether he had made that most Jewish work with the sense that it would be his last, Cohen replied: “Not specifically, but at this stage in the game, you know that all your activities are subject to abrupt cancellation.”
*
In the days that follow, I learn that Cohen has already been laid to rest beside his parents and grandparents in the family plot of Shaar Hashomayim, the Montreal synagogue that formed his Jewish ear and lent its voices to his final prayer.
The Kaddish evoked in You Want It Darker has now been said over him. So the song goes back where it came from.
Other details soon emerge: the reported leukaemia, the spinal fractures, the “severe visitations” endured in the years when he was still standing before audiences night after night.
At first you assume one of these things must have done it. Cohen had, after all, spent his last tours giving the impression of a man performing through pain rather than despite it.
But none of these, not exactly, is what kills him.
Cohen at the Montreux Jazz Festival on July 5, 2013AFP via Getty Images
The singer who had spent a lifetime turning surrender into eroticism finally goes down not as a symbol, exactly, but as a frail man in the dark, trying not to bother anyone.
He wakes in the dark. Perhaps he should call a nurse, but instead decides not to disturb anyone. He gets out of bed on his own. And he falls. Elsewhere, on the album cover, the man in the window is still upright.
Ten years on, evasion will have to do. I will remember him as my favourite ladies’ man emeritus, bedroom voice, Zen Buddhist bookkeeper of desolation and high priest of the low register.
Other than that, I suppose I won’t think of him often. Only when a voice drops lower than it has any business dropping. Only when a joke gets too close to a prayer, or a prayer gets too close to a joke. Only when mercy goes missing, as it so often does from talk about the Jews. You want it darker? I don’t.
Sincerely,
D. Cohen
David Cohen is a New Zealand-based journalist and author whose books include ‘Book of Cohen: David Cohen on Leonard Cohen’
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