We long-term aficionados of the late, great Leonard Cohen are only too aware that what he lacked in singing ability, always a focus of debate, he more than made up for in his exquisite approach to language. A last, much-worked-on collection, The Flame, brings together many aspects of Cohen’s work over decades, with a foreword by his son Adam, also a musician.
It emerges that wherever in the world Leonard Cohen laid his hat (and he had many eclectic head-coverings), he also had an extensive collection of notebooks, featuring thoughts, jottings, half-completed poems and some gently ironic illustrations. They ran to more than 3,000 pages over 60 years of his life.
The Gargantuan task of editing the notebooks fell to two Canadian academics, Professors Robert Faggen and Alexandra Pleshoyano, though Cohen himself worked on the collection in the last months before his death in 2016, often in great pain. And the editors admit that their work was an uphill endeavour:
“Though Leonard participated in the selection of notebook entries for The Flame, he did not specify a final order. It would be challenging… to proceed chronologically because Leonard would often work in the same notebooks over many years with various coloured inks showing different entries. Leonard numbered the notebooks in a system that we do not understand”.
The importance of the notebooks is underlined by Adam Cohen. As a child, he says, he would ask his father for money to buy sweets, and Cohen would tell him to look in the pockets of his blazer for loose change. Inevitably, the little boy found a notebook. “Later in life, when I would ask him if he had a lighter or matches, I would open drawers and find pads of paper and notebooks. Once, when I asked him if he had any tequila, I was directed to the freezer, where I found a frosty, misplaced notebook”.
Despite everything we know of Cohen’s battles with drink and drugs, his chief joy, he told Adam, was “blackening pages, writing”. Leonard Cohen was a unique artist, a musician whose gravelly voice was a standing joke among his contemporaries for years — until it was recognised that just such a voice lent gravitas to his songs.
But his uniqueness really lay in his approach to his songs, every one of which started life as a poem. With Cohen, you don’t just get a lyric, you get a painful, lovingly crafted piece of poetry. Not every poem became a song but each song was always a poem first.
Words shine out from the pages of The Flame, cropping up in familiar lines — “heart”, “love”, “murder”, “flag”, “promises”.
But not everything in the book works. Once you get past the poems, the notebook meanderings blur, and, for me, fail to engage.
The illustrations — Cohen’s own drawings — are plentiful and show that his wry sense of humour applied equally to truths about himself as to comments on his numerous lovers.
Overall, this is a beautiful legacy, but probably for besotted fans only. A second edition should jettison the prose and keep to the poetry, celebrating Cohen’s gorgeous facility with language — and his gift for “blackening the pages”.
Jenni Frazer is a freelance writer
The Flame
By Leonard Cohen,
Canongate, £20
