The biography of a great poet, author and lyricist (musician, actor, raconteur) demands rare skill to meld these disparate elements into a satisfactory whole. If there are occasional cracks to let the light in, so much the better.
Christophe Lebold with ‘The Man Who Saw the Angels Fall’ has done just that with this expansive, perceptive, often moving memoir of Leonard Cohen, one of the giants – with Dylan and the Beatles – who shaped the rolling revolution of the sixties, lived the zeitgeist and brought us ‘So Long Marianne’, ‘Everybody Knows’, ‘Hallelujah’.
In fact, stored in hundreds of black notebooks, the Montreal born wandering troubadour (1934-2016) left us 140 songs, two novels and 1,000 pages of gritty, uncompromising poetry questioning ‘what we should do with that heart of ours with its infinite aptitude for despair and its constant hunger for love.’
Leonard Cohen was a ‘ladies man.’ Women inspired his art. We will recall that, while the sun pours down like honey, Suzanne is half-crazy; she wears rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters; she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China. She is a sixties girl and Cohen captures in twenty lines the age, the look, the essence of time and place.
Lebold begins his great opus explaining Cohen’s obsession with gravity – the force that inevitably leads to a great fall – and from the fall we navigate the future back on to our feet and become who we were supposed to be.
But love is strong as gravity
And everyone must fall
At first it’s from the apple tree
Then from the western wall.
Leonard Cohen came from a wealthy Canadian family of entrepreneurs and factory owners. He began studying law at Columbia University in New York but stumbled off the track into the night clubs and jazz clubs, the world of beatniks and marginals. He learned to play the guitar. He studied Zen. He meditated and stood on his head. He sat up at night, sometimes all night, shaping words into smooth flowing lines of prose and poetry with subtext and double meaning that he read to live audiences. He followed his own footsteps through the great cities of the world, exploring, noting, observing, ‘the existentialist stranger looking for the meaning of existence.’
After studying – and listening to – his subject for twenty years, Christophe Lebold spent time with Cohen in Los Angeles and has written what is probably the best biography of the year, a beautiful book Leonard Cohen could have written himself. For bibliophiles, the book, too, is an object of beauty, a red covered tome with its haunting black and white dust jacket showing Leonard lighting a cigarette.
Visit Luath Press for more on ‘The Man Who Saw the Angels Fall’ and its full book list.