The first time I came across Leonard Cohen – before I had ever heard his songs – I was an opinionated 16-year-old. I was drawn to a volume of his poetry in a bookshop but when I got it home dismissed it as a) too depressed and b) – more snootily – as not literature. Now, decades later, I no longer care whether Cohen’s work is literature. This grand book, The Flame, elegantly and posthumously published by Canongate, includes lyrics of last-gasp beauty from You Want It Darker – his final album with its against-the-odds satisfactions (to do partly with the octogenarian unlikeliness of its existing at all). The Flame is also a selection of the Canadian singer-songwriter’s unpublished work. Cohen’s son, Adam, has been its sensitive custodian. And as for the depression, it has a heroism now. Perhaps there was too much of the old man in the younger poet; youthful spark in the older writer is a finer thing.
Whatever the truth, what is remarkable is that Cohen remained an unreconstructed romantic right to the end (he died in 2016, aged 82). Some of his late poems (balanced between illusion and disillusion) are about trying to resist erotic temptation, as in the wonderful On the Level, about love’s beckoning ecstasies. “I said I best be moving on / You said, we have all day / You smiled at me like I was young / It took my breath away.” He uses the ballad to make life bearable: discord finds harmony. His songs are also a dance; this is the poetry of relationship.
The book is illustrated by Cohen’s bold, pen-and-ink self-portraits. One is struck by how little his harrowed face changes: pouchy cheeks, downturned mouth, tragic jowl. But the captions that go with the pictures vary constantly: sweet’n’sour. Jewishness features in some poems, especially the sympathetic Old Friends in which Cohen tells a friend over the phone he is going to shul. The friend says the virtue of going is cancelled out by bragging about it. Cohen ends up in a pretty derelict place of worship with a police helicopter roaring overhead and fluff coming out of a cushion and concludes to his old friend, with what comes across as lugubrious Jewish humour: “…you have a point”.
The revealing speech with which he accepted the Prince of Asturias award in Spain, in 2011, is also included. He tells his audience a moving story about how he learned to play the guitar in Montreal from a young Spaniard who spoke no English (they communicated in broken French). He was taught simple sets of chords, the foundation, he explains, for all his songs. When he learned that this guitar teacher, about whose life he knew little, had committed suicide, he was naturally horrified. It does not seem fanciful to think that Cohen picked up where the young Spaniard left off – he stayed faithful to the guitar and what he had learned. Not that he makes this claim: he is ever modest about his achievements.
The Spanish influence went deep: Federico García Lorca was an idol (he even named his daughter Lorca). And you can see the affinity: like Lorca, Cohen has an ability to tap directly into love, desire and despair. By the end, he was writing at once to stay alive and to prepare for death (I Pray for Courage). His rhyming pieces come across most successfully because of their simplicity, their raw ingredients. Leonard Cohen does not use language to pose, startle or to reinvent. Words are his old comrades, and see him through to the end.
• The Flame by Leonard Cohen is published by Canongate (£20). To order a copy for £17.20 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
Antique Song
Too old, too old to play the part,
Too old, God only knows!
I’ll keep the little silver heart,
The red and folded rose.
And in the arms of someone strong
You’ll have what we had none.
I’ll finish up my winter song
For you. It’s almost done.
But oh! the kisses that we kissed,
That swept me to the shore
Of seas where hardly I exist,
Except to kiss you more.
I have the little silver heart,
The red and folded rose.
The one you gave me at the start.
The other at the close.
He waited for you all night long.
Go run to him, go run.
I’ll finish up my winter song,
For you. It’s almost done.
