Photo Credit: Etye Sarner
Review by Janice Weizman
We all have a fascination with the paradox of genius; on one hand, individuals touched by extraordinary gifts have, by definition, access to realms and abilities that are out of reach to most. On the other they, like the rest of us, still deal with the onerous and quotidian business of living. They too contend with the demands of family, the challenges of establishing an identity, the failures and frustrations of daily life, the problem of finding meaning in what they do. How do these disparate dimensions come together in the life of a single person, however gifted? It is curiosity of this sort that drives us to read biography, hoping to gain perspective on the lives of people that stand out in their exceptionality.
Oral biography has been called a means of “democratizing history,” as it juxtaposes numerous and sometimes conflicting voices, thereby creating a 360 degree perspective through which subtle but distinctive truths emerge. Leonard Cohen, Untold Stories: The Early Years, is the first volume in a new three-part oral biography that, in its multiplicity of voices, sheds light on the way that Leonard Cohen became Leonard Cohen. (Part 2 is due out in the fall of 2021, and the final part will be published in the fall of 2022.) The trilogy is the result of over five-hundred interviews conducted by author and journalist Michael Posner, a former senior writer for The Globe and Mail.
Volume I covers Cohen’s childhood in his upper-middle class neighbourhood in Montreal, his adolescence, during which his charisma and talents unequivocally emerged, his early success as a young poet, his time on the Greek Island of Hydra in the early ’60s, and his first steps as a singer-songwriter and recording artist. But what emerges in these recollections is not only a multi-valenced portrait of a brilliant, charismatic searcher who never stopped searching, but also a depiction of an era, when writers, musicians, artists and yes, poets, broke open the conservative norms of the 1950s and ushered in a new age of free love, drugs, and boundary-pushing that irrevocably altered society.
Posner was working as a freelancer when he had the idea of putting together an oral biography about Cohen. With no publishing contract or proposal, he began reaching out to people who had a connection to Cohen, with the aim of collecting enough stories to generate a book proposal. I spoke to him about the long and complex process of researching and compiling the book.
Janice Weizman: What first inspired you to take on this project?
Michael Posner: I read the Sylvie Simmons biography that came out in 2012, and it occurred to me that there’s got to be more. Journalistically, your instinct is that there’s always more. I started by reaching out to people whom I thought might have an interesting perspective on their dealings with Cohen, and as soon as I began gathering material that had not been published I felt that it could be turned into a book. I would interview someone and they’d tell me, “speak to so and so,” and when I’d find that person they’d say, “so and so can tell you even more,” and before I knew it I had fifty people.
JW: It sounds as if the process of tracking down and speaking to people was almost organic.
MP: It was organic. People would give me a name and say “I have no idea where this person is, but you should try and find them.” The internet was a tremendous help. With Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram you can find someone anywhere in the world. I enjoyed the challenge; can I find this person, and if I can, how can I convince them to participate when they may not want to? Most of the time I succeeded, but many times I did not.
JW: What reasons did those who refused give for saying no?
MP: The general reply in those cases was, Leonard was very private, and I wouldn’t want to violate that privacy. I would say to that: I fully understand your position, but think about Shakespeare; the actual known facts about Shakespeare’s biography are few. Most of what we know today is mere speculation. And one of the reasons is that we don’t have any contemporaneous interviews with friends and associates. Leonard Cohen’s work is going to last a long time, and isn’t it amazing that we have this opportunity to collect, for future researchers and fans, material about the man and his work.
JW: The book seems to focus on the more commonplace aspects of his life.
MP: Perhaps, but the reality was that the people he saw on a day to day basis weren’t necessarily encountering his artistic side. The people in the music studios did perhaps, and his editors at McClelland & Stewart did, but most of the interview subjects describe regular human interactions, about having dinner or playing pool; the conversations weren’t about the meaning of the lyrics in “Famous Blue Raincoat.” In fact, he was generally reluctant to talk about the meanings of any of his songs.
JW: What did you find out that surprised you most?
MP: A number of things. One would be the degree to which he was almost constantly on the move, at least in the period of the first book. He was really restless. He’s just everywhere. He’s in New York, he’s in L.A, he’s visiting friends in California, he’s in Montreal, in Paris, London, he’s on Hydra, he’s in Jerusalem. Some of that is touring, but that’s only after 1969. He’s a guy who suddenly appears in your life, and then you turn around and he’s gone.
The other thing would be his work ethic, his willingness to write and rewrite a lyric an endless amount of times, changing a comma or a letter or a word until he had it right. He was steadfast in his commitment to the craft. You have to wonder, when did he have the time to do that, given all the womanizing he was doing, but he did.
JW: The era of the 1960s forms a powerful backdrop for most of the book.
MP: Yes. The whole culture was in ferment. It began with the death of JFK––that was the pivotal event, the end of the illusion. After that, suddenly you get the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and you get drugs. The world is overtaken within months by LSD, and other drugs come after that. You have the Vietnam war, the protests, and the world is exploding. This was a revolutionary moment. And this was definitely the backdrop to this period in Leonard Cohen’s life. The scene at the Chelsea Hotel, for example––the place was a zoo.
JW: How did you go about organizing the vast amount of material you collected?
MP: I tried to make it as chronological as possible, but occasionally a theme emerges, for example Leonard Cohen’s sense of humour, or his depression, so that even if you have a related quote that’s out of the time context, it feels like that’s the right place for it. The jigsaw puzzle process of moving the pieces around until they more or less fit is the best you can do. So there are people in the first volume who have no reason to appear in, say, 1970 but if I felt that a quote was apt for a particular theme, I put it in.
JW: Has your perception of Leonard Cohen changed from what it was when you first began the project?
MP: Of course, I have a much deeper appreciation for his artistic talents, and his complexity; the enormous challenge of being Leonard Cohen on a day-to-day basis. It was Aviva Layton who said [in our interview], “You could not own Leonard in any way, shape or form. Leonard couldn’t own Leonard.”
JW: Would you say that he was more deserving of the Nobel Prize than Bob Dylan?
MP: Well, that’s a whole discussion that occurs in the third volume when Dylan wins it. I asked that question to virtually everyone I spoke to, and I got a whole range of answers. There was no definite consensus. Some said, “Absolutely, Dylan deserved it.” But there are others who say Leonard deserved it, and some who say that they should have given it to both.
One woman, who became Leonard’s lover for a short time in the mid ’70s, and remained friends with him for the rest of their lives, said, “Dylan deserved it…he’s the voice of his generation. But Leonard is a voice for all time.” I agree with her. Dylan is the prime articulator of the angst of the 1960s and beyond, voicing the opinions of that generation, but Leonard was working on another level entirely.
Michael Posner is an award-winning writer, playwright, journalist, and the author of seven books. These include the Mordecai Richler biography, The Last Honest Man, and the Anne Murray biography, All of Me. He was Washington Bureau Chief for Maclean’s magazine, and later served as its national, foreign, and assistant managing editor. He was also managing editor of the Financial Times of Canada for three years. He later spent sixteen years as a senior writer with The Globe and Mail.
Janice Weizman is the author of the historical novel, The Wayward Moon. Her writing has appeared in World Literature Today, Queens’s Quarterly, Ha’aretz, and other places.