Do we really need another biography of Leonard Cohen? A cursory look reveals that almost 30 such books already exist on the late, great, gravel-voiced boulevardier. They range from the authoritative — Sylvie Simmons’s, I’m Your Man — to those with a significantly Jewish twist, such as Matti Friedman’s peerless glimpse of Cohen in the Sinai during the Yom Kippur War, Who By Fire, or Harry Freedman’s enjoyable The Mystical Roots of Genius.
At least Christophe Lebold, a professor of literature and rock culture at the University of Strasbourg, has the grace to recognise that his own contribution is perhaps superfluous, telling us on the flyleaf of his mammoth new biography: “The first edition of my book was published in French in late 2014 to good reviews and few readers”.
Certainly one can’t help but wonder what prompted his publishers to decide that what the world was lacking was yet another book about Leonard Cohen.
Nearly 450 pages later I am not much wiser. Lebold assumes a knowledge of Cohen’s life on the part of the general reader as a springboard for many and varied musings on his Judaism, his early start in Montreal, the period he spent on the Greek island of Hydra, the drugs, the womanising, the six years he spent up a mountain studying Buddhism, and so forth. Those familiar with Cohen will know these building blocks already, those less so might be bewildered.
What’s more Lebold has a somewhat worrying tendency — I can’t imagine what this was like in French — to try to emulate his subject in poetic expression. For example:“Leonard had no desire to follow Kraftwerk [the German pop band] into a Warholian dream of men-machines”. Or: “In a voice now so low it can cause minor seismic incidents…” — having informed the reader only a page earlier that Cohen’s voice was “so deep it leaves us charred”.
The book opens with a strange and poetic disquisition on the nature of falling. According to Lebold, Cohen was “the man who saw the angels fall” and may even have been a fallen angel himself. Apparently “an even simpler reason why crowds gave the poet so many encores is that you simply don’t let an angel go”. To which I can only respond: “Oy, vey.”
Lebold has done his research, and he had the added advantage of meeting and getting to know Cohen. Quite what Cohen made of Lebold is moot; Lebold tells us: “Although he was not well, he let me watch him live for a little. We said things to each other that I can’t repeat. It is not that they are secret; they are just very delicate. Like butterflies or hummingbirds. To repeat them would destroy them”.
Did I learn anything from this book, part hagiography, part PhD thesis? Some tiny details, perhaps, such as Cohen, in the last year of his life, cooking for Lebold in his Los Angeles kitchen, a homely image not generally associated with the great man. But the “angel” motif becomes almost risible by the end. From my own encounter with Cohen, I reckon he would have been one of the very last people to describe himself, as Christophe Lebold does, as an “archangel” providing “protection” to lesser beings.
Is this vanity publishing under the fig leaf of a respectable publisher? To my mind, it’s a damned close-run thing. Even for completists, this book is one too many.
Leonard Cohen, The Man Who Saw Angels Fall,
By Christophe Lebold
Luath Press, £35
