LEONARD COHEN – THE MAN WHO SAW THE ANGELS FALL

The new biography of Leonard Cohen – ‘The Man Who Saw the Angels Fall’ – is the definitive memoir of one of the most important poets, songwriters and thinkers of our times.

Writer Christophe Lebold spent twenty years researching his subject and grew close to Leonard spending time with him in Los Angeles not long before he died in 2016. The book was first published in France to a plethora of excellent reviews and is out now in the UK in a quality edition published by Luath Press.  

Leonard Cohen explored through his novels, poetry and lyrics themes of betrayal and redemption, faith and mortality, isolation and depression, love, regret and loss. To capture his ideas, misgivings, philosophy, Christophe Lebold journeyed in the footsteps of Cohen from his birthplace in Canada to the United States, Europe and his hideaway house on the Greek island of Hydra.

What Lebold has achieved is capturing the very essence of the man, his gentleness, kindness, reserve, his ability to listen – qualities I know to be true from my own memories and experience.

Leonard Cohen in Hydra

After four years as a junior reporter and six months learning to be a sub-editor at the Kent Messenger in Maidstone, I made a three months journey around Europe, including some weeks visiting the Greek islands. The combination was enough for me to get the job at age 23 as the editor of the English-language daily ‘The Athens News.’

It was 1971 during the time of the Greek Military Junta. I was followed, my phone was bugged – you can hear the click – and my days were long editing opinion pieces with subtle anti-government themes and filling the columns with international news that came over the wires from Reuters and the other news agencies.

My girlfriend, Chelça, met the poet Gregory Corso at the Acropolis, where she went every day to paint and sell water colours, mainly to American and Australian Greeks discovering their homeland for the first time. Gregory was one of the beat poets – with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S Burroughs – best known for his collection ‘Elegiac Feelings American.’

Being a poet, he was always broke and spent six weeks sleeping on our sofa. Daily papers are ‘put to bed’ at night and I rarely left work before one in the morning. Chelça and Gregory would wait up those warm summer nights and we would sit in the square near our flat in Kolonaki eating plump Kalamata olives and houmous with pitta bread.

Gregory was a friend of Leonard Cohen and took us one weekend to Hydra to stay at Leonard’s whitewashed stone house. It had one unforgettable feature. The guest bedroom had a missing strip of flooring and, instead of using the narrow stairs, you could jump through the gap on to the sofa below in the living room.

We swam in a deserted bay close to the house and sat that night below flickering lights on the edge of the sea. We ate fresh fish and drank retsina. Leonard asked questions about my job and Chelça selling paintings, something she would never have had the confidence to do at home in England. Likewise, it was unlikely that we would ever have met Gregory Corso or Leonard Cohen. We learned to enjoy olive oil, Greek music, life beside the Mediterranean. Travel doesn’t only broaden the mind, it opens it and you become in time a different person. 

Leonard was introverted but seemed happy. He has just released his third album, ‘Songs of Love and Hate,’ and it had been well received by the critics. We left on the last ferry Sunday evening and that slow weekend remained a distant memory that slipped back into my mind thanks to ‘The Man Who Saw the Angels Fall.’

Eighteen months after I arrived in Athens, I was ‘asked’ to leave the country when I reported on the anti-government speech given at the university by Günter Grass, the German author of ‘The Tin Drum.’ He was put under house arrest at the Hotel Grande Bretagne and smuggled out through the kitchens into the trunk of a car by two men in black suits and black ties. Grass was flown back to Germany from the American airbase and I was out of a job.

‘The Man Who Saw the Angels Fall’ is rich in detail, moving and compelling. It is available from Luath Press.