Was he, in the end, a musician or a poet? A grave philosopher or a grim sort of comedian? A cosmopolitan lady’s man or a profound, ascetic seeker? Jew or Buddhist? Hedonist or hermit? Across his 82 years, the Montreal-born Leonard Cohen was all of these things – and in his posthumous book of poetry, given the Lawrentian title The Flame by his son Adam, all sides of the man are present.

Other than that, Adam Cohen won’t say much more. “This was all private,” he says, sitting in an office on Los Angeles’s Wilshire Boulevard, near the house where his dad passed away after a late-night fall almost two years ago. “My father was very interested in preserving the magic of his process. And moreover, not demystifying it. Speaking of any of this,” he says, his voice dropping to a whisper, “is a transgression.” But after a few more remarks – stressing that Cohen wrote entirely in solitude, that he would consider discussion of his work a dangerous sort of “vanity” – Adam describes his late father, his sense of himself, and the heart of his achievement reasonably well.

He’d call himself slow. He’d write poems about how Leonard Cohen was a lazy bastard living in a suit Adam Cohen

“It’s all song, and it’s all poetry – for him there wasn’t any delineation,” he says of the decades of wrestling over the nature of his father’s gift. To Cohen himself, though, it was never enough. “He’d call himself slow,” Adam says. “He’d write poems about how Leonard Cohen was a lazy bastard living in a suit.” In fact, Cohen was a fierce perfectionist, devoted to an almost impossible level of rigour, and the bearer of what his son calls “a monastic discipline”.

Adam nods toward a finished copy of the book: “This is what he was staying alive for.” Cohen had leukaemia, and dropped hints about his impending demise on You Want It Darker, his final album. (“I’m leaving the table / I’m out of the game,” he sings on one of its tracks.)

“He was a man on a quest, on a mission,” Adam says, describing his father’s increasing sense of purpose and dedication in his last months, which included sending “do not disturb” emails to friends and family so he could finish the project. “That probably bought him some time on Earth.”

Countless rock singers, from folkies to CBGBs punks, have been lazily dubbed “poetic” but Cohen was, by any measure, the real thing: he published no fewer than four books of verse, across a decade, before the release of his first LP, the mostly acoustic, finger-picked Songs of Leonard Cohen, which led off with the undeniably poetic “Suzanne”. (Oddly, he made early forays into music as a teenager, forming a country-folk band with friends called the Buckskin Boys, but he mostly let music drop until the release of his debut at age 33.) Those first poems emerged from a close-knit group of Canadian versifiers reading stanzas to each other in cafes and flats, printing mimeographed copies. “There were no prizes or grants or awards,” Cohen said in a 1993 radio interview. “There weren’t even any girls.” It seems appropriate that his last words – despite the power of You Want It Darker, released weeks before his death – would come in the form of a posthumous book of verse.

Cohen, pictured performing in 2008. Photograph: Rolf Haid/EPA

As a young man, Cohen’s favourite poet was perhaps Federico García Lorca; he’d later name his daughter after the doomed Spaniard. But his sense of the art stretched back thousands of years and great writing would, he knew, outlive what he saw as his own meagre contributions. “He could recite to the letter,” Adam says. “Byron, Shakespeare, Rumi, the Bible … The guy was outrageously fluent.” Cohen once said his training, and sense of vocation, went back to Robert Burns, the French troubadours, Homer and King David. Adam calls his style “mytho-romantic,” which seems as good a term as any.

Cohen was an exacting reader of the verse of others. In 2005, he sued his longtime business manager, a decade or so after she began taking his money. “He didn’t know where the accountant was cheating,” Adam says. “But you could present him with a poem, and he could tell where the poet was cheating.” For Cohen, faking it was not an option: his own work, Adam says, “was a mandate from God”.

In the same way it’s hard to imagine Cohen with even an untucked shirt – in later life he almost always appeared in full suit and tie, typically with brimmed hat and leather shoes – it’s difficult to conceive of an unfinished song, a number that would have been improved with an additional verse, or played in a different key.

For his final publication, he left almost nothing to chance. Unlike, say, the mass of work, unfinished and otherwise, that often appears after a writer or musician dies – the endless songs and demos authorised by the Jimi Hendrix estate, for instance, or the obsessive mining of Tolkien’s Middle-earth – The Flame shows the emphasis Cohen put on distillation. “Nothing about this book,” Adam says, “is haphazard.”

Reading the notebooks is a bittersweet experience: here are the seeds of Cohen songs we never got to hear

Though Cohen came up during the beat era and admired Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, the cult of spontaneity never appealed to him. (“That’s never worked for me,” he said in 1993. “My first thoughts are dull, are prejudiced, are poisonous. I find last thought, best thought.”)

The Flame is divided, as per Cohen’s instructions, into three sections, and organised by editors Robert Faggen and Alexandra Pleshoyano, scholars in California and Quebec respectively. The first is a selection of 63 poems, some of which have been published before, going back several decades. Adam calls the first, “Happens to the Heart,” the “blueprint” of the entire collection. Most of it is in rhyme and metre; at least half could be described as light verse.

The second section reprints the lyrics (sometimes differing from their recorded versions) from Cohen’s last three albums, plus “Blue Alert”, a 2006 recording by his former backing vocalist and romantic partner Anjani Thomas. (Cohen produced and wrote the lyrics.) On the page, the poise and polish of these songs remain striking.

The third part is a selection from Cohen’s notebooks – distilled from more than 3,000 pages across roughly 60 years, up to and including, apparently, the day he died. A 2001 acceptance speech for a Spanish award serves as a brief coda. (There is also an email exchange with a friend; even his online correspondence seems to be in rhyme and metre.)

Included in various proportions are love, sex, death, regret, exaltation, piety and gentle fondness. The blending of the earthy with the spiritual – in his last years Cohen was as influenced by a Hindu teacher as much as the Buddhist guru he studied with on a California mountain – would give John Donne and Marvin Gaye a run for their money.

‘The guy was outrageously fluent’ ... Adam Cohen. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

Throughout the book are sketches by Cohen, mostly self-portraits, with a few, unsurprisingly, of musical instruments and topless women. Even as the body failed, the flame of Cohen’s libido seemed to continue burning.

While the notebooks are uneven, reading them makes for a bittersweet experience: it’s hard not to see these as the seeds of Cohen songs we never got to hear, finished poems we’ll never get to read.

But Cohen never rushed his output, and could go almost a decade between albums. This wasn’t because ideas and images didn’t flow: he apparently filled notebooks every day of his life, and Adam describes finding them, as a child, in the poet’s desk drawers and jacket pockets, even, later, while seeking a bottle of tequila, coming upon a chilled, forgotten notebook in the freezer.

This is an artist who worked on a single song – what would become “Hallelulah” – for several years, writing 80 drafts and as many verses, only to have it rejected by his record label. (The final, much shorter, version became, after covers by John Cale and Jeff Buckley, Cohen’s most recorded song.)

He wasn’t, then, one to dash things off. Despite the generous and world-weary humour that emerged in his last decades, – his early, folkie work was denounced as “humourless” –the task of writing was deadly serious. He surely knew the line from Yeats – a poet he deeply admired – about how “The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the work.” On this wager, Cohen was unambiguous.

“Religion, teachers, women, drugs, the road, fame, money,” Adam quotes his father saying; “nothing gets me high and offers relief from the suffering like blackening pages, writing.” It was also, he writes in his foreword, “a statement of regret”, since Cohen sacrificed so much – he never married, considered himself a poor father, let his health and financial state decline – for the Muse. Amidst numerous liaisons and botched relationships, poetry is the one thing he remained entirely faithful to. The Flame is the incontrovertible proof.

‘Nothing gets me high like writing’ … Leonard Cohen in around 1960. Photograph: Roz Kelly/Getty Images

Happens to the Heart

I was always working steady

But I never called it art

I was funding my depression

Meeting Jesus reading Marx

Sure it failed my little fire

But it’s bright the dying spark

Go tell the young messiah

What happens to the heart

There’s a mist of summer kisses

Where I tried to double-park

The rivalry was vicious

And the women were in charge

It was nothing, it was business

But it left an ugly mark

So I’ve come here to revisit

What happens to the heart

I was selling holy trinkets

I was dressing kind of sharp

Had a pussy in the kitchen

And a panther in the yard

In the prison of the gifted

I was friendly with the guard

So I never had to witness

What happens to the heart

I should have seen it coming

You could say I wrote the chart

Just to look at her was trouble

It was trouble from the start

Sure we played a stunning couple

But I never liked the part

It ain’t pretty, it ain’t subtle

What happens to the heart

Now the angel’s got a fiddle

And the devil’s got a harp

Every soul is like a minnow

Every mind is like a shark

I’ve opened every window

But the house, the house is dark

Just say Uncle, then it’s simple

What happens to the heart

I was always working steady

But I never called it art

The slaves were there already

The singers chained and charred

Now the arc of justice bending

And the injured soon to march

I lost my job defending

What happens to the heart

I studied with this beggar

He was filthy he was scarred

By the claws of many women

He had failed to disregard

No fable here no lesson

No singing meadowlark

Just a filthy beggar blessing

What happens to the heart

I was always working steady

But I never called it art

I could lift, but nothing heavy

Almost lost my union card

I was handy with a rifle

My father’s .303

We fought for something final

Not the right to disagree

Sure it failed my little fire

But it’s bright the dying spark

Go tell the young messiah

What happens to the heart

June 24, 2016



Flying Over Iceland

over Reykjavik, the “smokey bay”

where W.H. Auden went

to discover the background

of all our songs,

where I myself was received

by the Mayor and the President

(600 miles an hour

30,000 feet

599 miles an hour

my old street number on Belmont Ave)

where I, a second-rater

by any estimation,

was honoured by the noblest

and handsomest people of the West

served with lobster

and strong drink,

and I never cared about eyes

but the eyes of the waitress

were so alarmingly mauve

that I fell into a trance

and ate the forbidden shellfish

I Pray for Courage

I pray for courage

Now I’m old

To greet the sickness

And the cold

I pray for courage

In the night

To bear the burden

Make it light

I pray for courage

In the time

When suffering comes and

Starts to climb

I pray for courage

At the end

To see death coming

As a friend

• The Flame is published by Canongate.