Leonard Cohen, Untold Stories: The Early Years by Michael Posner

Leonard Cohen, Untold Stories: The Early Years by Michael Posner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“Let the man watching me know, that this is not entirely devoid of the con.” — Leonard Cohen, Ladies & Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen

“Leonard was probably the most seductive man I’ve ever met. Seductive not just to women but to men.” — Aviva Layton

Leonard Cohen’s legacy seems perched at an unusually perilous moment.

When he was alive he traded in adeptly crafted confessions that withheld just enough blood-and-guts messiness to cast doubt on the veracity of their integral claims. He posed as a holy man while pointing directly to the sheer lunacy of any such posture. Leonard Cohen’s public image was, indeed, “not entirely devoid of the con.” But the beauty of the con lies in the willingness of the mark to invest confidence in a patent scam.

Thus far the biographies written about Leonard Cohen have partaken of the con and, paradoxically, sludged the legacy. When in his more frayed states, Cohen would mutter darkly about being an ape amongst apes, but this is rarely an acknowledged reality for most biographers (anywhere). The demand for narrative structure compels the biographer to surrender to The Great Man Of History template.

But Cohen was indeed an ape amongst apes — the beauty of Michael Posner’s “oral biography” lies in its chorus of voices from the tribal collectives Cohen moved through. The reader gets a sense not just of the man but of the enormous haptic feedback chamber he steeped in, as he graduated from Old Montreal, to Jewish summer camps in the Laurentians, to the university poetry scene, to the unfettered bacchanalia on Hydra Island, backstage and on the road.

Accounts are, as Posner immediately points out, often not just contradictory but also maddening. The generosity embedded in Posner’s scrupulous method is his faith in a reader’s ability and willingness to apply their own intelligence and skepticism to what is on offer — to read between the lines and flesh-in some of the spaces with reasonably informed conjecture.

Just one example (which reviewers are getting stuck on): debate over who introduced Marianne Ihlen’s then-adolescent son, Axel, to LSD — was it Cohen? Ihlen and Cohen together? Axel’s father alone? Did this happen on Hydra, or in Mexico? The matter occupies less than two pages in a book that reaches nearly 500, and the only element anyone can agree on is the trauma this inflicted on an already traumatized kid. This of course does nothing to determine who did what to whom, and where. But a page-and-a-half can say volumes about the group mentality on Hydra — where particular attitudes, explorations and behaviours were expected and encouraged.

In this scene Cohen sold himself, most persuasively, as a troubador who’d graduated to social and spiritual expectations that were revolutionary — expectations that, via Media’s Massage, were on the verge of penetrating and saturating the collective consciousness in the suburbs of the West.

All in all, this makes for a truly unique approach to Leonard Cohen. I eagerly await the next two volumes.

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