HE HAD little to bring, Leonard Cohen said. He worked with what he’d got. Simple chords on his guitar, which he wished he could play better. A finger or two on a keyboard. His “golden voice”, a wry joke (for yes, he often joked, when he could raise his brooding eyes out of his despair). He was a singer in the lesser choirs, ordained to raise his voice so high and no higher; though certainly low and, after decades of Marlboro Lights, yet lower.

No ideas filled his songs either, in his view. All he had to offer was his own experience. Like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and so many others in the age of protest, he sang about democracy, devastation, a future bleak as a blizzard and an unkind world in which, like a bird on the wire, he tried to be free. But the songs that welled up instinctively were about women: Suzanne, who took him down to her place by the river and fed him tea and oranges that came all the way from China,

And you know that she’s half-crazy

but that’s why you want to be there

Or Marianne, his Norwegian muse, who lit up the island of Hydra for four years,

I loved you in the morning

our kisses deep and warm

your hair upon the pillow

like a sleepy golden storm

but who tried with her fine spider-webs, grey clothespins and gardenias to fasten his ankles to a stone, so that he had to break away:

Well so long, Marianne,

It’s time that we began

To laugh, and cry, and cry, and laugh, about it all again.

With another Suzanne he had a son and a daughter, but domesticity repelled him; he always sang “kitchen” with a snarl. Like a gypsy-boy or a sailor, he preferred to roam among the world’s wealth of going-down women and unmade hotel beds.

Singing came late. Words came first, the charged speech he heard in the synagogue his prosperous family had built in Montreal, sitting in the third row. The rhythms of the cantor, too, seemed full of light. Canada, by contrast, clung like a dying animal. He rejected its snow and provincialism though, from time to time, he drifted back to Montreal; and he was buried there.

By his mid-30s he had published two novels and four books of poetry, and knew what it was to pace grey European streets in a raincoat with his head full of Lorca and Joyce. But he was also starving. Raising his voice brought fame and fortune. There was no hit record, but audiences in the tens of thousands, including 600,000 at a hippy festival in 1970 in the Isle of Wight where, like drunken fireflies in the pre-dawn dark, his listeners lit matches at his command. Destiny flared with them. He was paying his rent in the Tower of Song, where 27 angels had long ago tied him down.

David with his harp

Celebrity didn’t charm him, though. His tastes were modest: elegant, but worn, suits, sometimes a straw palliasse to sleep on. He would sing over café meals to soothe friends. Live performances brought stage-fright so severe that neither speed nor Chateau Latour, in large doses, could get him through it. The songs took months, years. And the outward show had less and less meaning. Since his youth he had been seeking a vision of God and a master who could take him there, out of the uselessness and ruins of himself. His “Book of Mercy” of 1984, heavily based on the Psalms, showed him trying to sing out of the wilderness. He wanted to raise up his song to the Lord as David did on the harp, though still damp from the body of Bathsheba, with nothing on his tongue but “Hallelujah!” And for that, the road lay inward.

Judaism was his home, but he freely stole from others. He sought alternative cures. The tormented Catholic Christ hung in his songs and bled there, like himself. From 1993-98 his need for silence drew him to Zen, to a monk’s life in a shack (with essential espresso machine) 6,500 feet up a mountain in California. There he wrote, smoked, shovelled snow, romped in his dreams with an immense cloudy woman, and came down, back to Boogie Street, convinced he had no gift for spiritual matters.

The songs, when he returned to them, said otherwise. His concerts became more like prayer gatherings: in 2013, when he went out on the stage of the world one last time, he was dropping to his knees to sing. He was still railing at God and growling at the apparent randomness of everything: if God was the dealer, he was out of the game. Yet he was also calm. He might be old, but he was still fine-looking, natty in his grey fedora. And he was not afraid of what was coming. This summer, he assured the far-away dying Marianne that if she stretched out her hand, she could reach his; he was just behind her on the road. He had learned, with Abraham, to sing “Here am I”; he had learned too to accept that his true song, his great song, could never be perfect, for there was a crack in everything; that’s how the light got in.