“Who is Leonard Cohen?” asks editor David Shumway in the opening sentence of his introduction to The World of Leonard Cohen. The twenty-four essays in this collection seek, implicitly or explicitly, to answer the question by closely examining the work of the enigmatic poet, novelist, songwriter, musician, and performer.
There is much to examine in a career that spanned nearly fifty years. The essays, arranged thematically, are written mainly by academics who analyse the “enormously complex and powerful artist” from various positions. They are serious studies that offer insights ranging from line-by-line analyses to cultural contexts to personal experiences.
What runs throughout the essays is a theme of dichotomy, of contradictions existing side-by-side in a man who was Jew and Buddhist (he did not consider Buddhism a religion); who maintained he was not political, yet visited Cuba in 1961 and in 1973 went to Israel intending to fight in the Yom Kippur war (he was thirty-nine, and ended up entertaining the troops); whose roots were in Montreal yet who lived outside Canada for much of his life; who was a songwriter for whom writing songs was “arduous and painful”; whose writing could be bleak (Leon Wieseltier called him “Prince of Bummers”) yet who did not consider himself particularly solemn (his final album, which came out just weeks before he died in 2016, aged eighty-two, was titled “You Want It Darker”).
The essays frequently expound on Cohen’s incongruities, offering context, relating them to those of other literary or musical figures, or citing other explanations.
Julian Stannard, who teaches at the University of Winchester in England, describes Cohen’s poetry in his first collection, Let Us Compare Mythologies, published in 1956 in Canada when Cohen was twenty-two, as “neither Rimbaudian nor Ginsbergian.” The young poet’s writing could be “brittle or formulaic” but on the whole was “intelligent and reflective.”
Alan Light, a journalist and author, focuses on Cohen’s transition from writer to songwriter in 1967. The story is generally well known: Cohen went to New York, was introduced to Judy Collins, and sang “Suzanne” for her. She recorded it, and his music career began. Anthony DeCurtis, lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, notes that Cohen’s “entire career unfurls like one long, ever-evolving song.”
In his essay on Cohen’s Judaism, Elliot R. Wolfson, Professor of Religion at the University of California, Santa Barbara, finds ample expression in Cohen’s poetry and his songs. Jewish culture, mysticism, Kabbalah, and spirituality were consistently part of Cohen’s life and work. Several of the contributors, in differing contexts, quote lines that Wolfson characterizes as “profoundly Jewish” and kabbalistic: “There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.”
Cohen’s hymn-like song “Hallelujah” evokes Kabbalah in the line “There’s a blaze of light in every word.” Cohen’s oeuvre is that blaze of light.
