A Reluctant Star
https://www.australianjewishnews.com/a-reluctant-star/
Michael Posner describes Leonard Cohen as “one of the towering cultural figures of our time”. While there have been other biographies written about Cohen, they’ve all left Posner wanting more.
“I felt there was more information, more stories and more insights to be had,” the Canadian journalist explained. So he set about interviewing hundreds of people on his mission to speak to anyone who knew the iconic singer-songwriter.
It’s a mammoth project, but one that Posner believes needed to be written. Throughout the process, Posner has been privy to information like never before.
“I heard so many interesting stories about him and many of them were completely new stories, and many of the people I interviewed had never spoken before about him or about their relationship with him,” he said. “There were lots of interesting revelations for me and I hope for readers.”
The pessimistic poet
Cohen was often referred to as ‘the poet laureate of pessimism’, or ‘the godfather of gloom’, but he remains one of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century, if not of all time. His influence has spanned decades with many of his songs still enjoying playbacks and international fame.
Cohen’s musical career lasted nearly 50 years, with his final album, You Want it Darker, released mere weeks before his passing in 2016.
He was a reluctant pop star. But despite being in the public eye, there was much that wasn’t known about him. Which is exactly what Posner is revealing.
“A major part of the book is devoted to a woman never previously identified who had a six-year relationship with Cohen in the 1980s, and who was an influence on the song Hallelujah and the song Take this Waltz,” said Posner. “Theirs was a long and somewhat tortuous relationship with many positive elements, but one that ended with a tragic second-trimester abortion and considerable emotional pain for her. It’s always interesting to try to connect the life of the poet or writer to his or her work, and I think telling these stories can help us do that.”
A story in three parts
Posner has now released two volumes of the three-part biography. The first concluded with Cohen’s first major concert tour, aged 36. The second volume follows on from the end of the tour in 1971 to the late 1980s. Described as a challenging time for Cohen, with his personal life in chaos and his career in shambles, Cohen turned to Zen Buddhism to help him cope.
But what surprised Posner most of all about Cohen was his ability to maintain so many romantic liaisons simultaneously while at the same time remaining proactive as a songwriter and a poet.
“He really laboured at these songs, sometimes for years, literally years,” said Posner. “Writing and rewriting and rewriting until he felt he could not improve upon the lyric any further.”
Hallelujah, in fact, took 10 years to write. It’s something that resonates with Posner, who has been writing the oral biography since November 2016, starting the project soon after Cohen’s death.
He was a reluctant pop star. But despite being in the public eye, there was much that wasn’t known about him. Which is exactly what Posner is revealing.
“The challenge and fun of the work has been trying to find people who are still alive, had some involvement with Leonard, knew about events or certain moments in his life and could comment on them knowledgeably,” he told The Times of Israel last year when he released the first volume.
“Part of the challenge has been locating specific people who I knew were out there, but I didn’t know where, or whether they would talk to me if I found them.”
Revealing the true Cohen
The biographies show the true Leonard Cohen, revealing what was really behind the public persona – the good and the ugly. Posner has spoken to so many people in Cohen’s world that he has become an expert on the musician.
“What I’ve learned is that I don’t want to reduce Cohen to a simple kind of binary character,” Posner told The Times of Israel.
“I don’t want to say he was a saint. I certainly don’t want to say he was a devil, but I think he was capable of encompassing aspects of both.”
He believes, though, that Cohen’s greatest love affair was with his work.
“I knew he had worked hard, but I had no idea exactly how hard.”
While Posner knows the three volumes will give a detailed insight into the man that Cohen was, he says it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
“I don’t think any biography, including these, can definitively encapsulate the life of someone like Cohen,” he said. “I hope they will make a contribution to our understanding of the man and his work, and of his essential complexity.”
Leonard Cohen Untold Stories: From This Broken Hill, Volume 2 by Michael Posner
https://mtltimes.ca/books/leonard-cohen ... el-posner/
Canadian journalist and author Michael Posner’s most recent books delved into the lives of some of Canada’s most high profile personalities. His first project of that nature was as a ghostwriter for singer/songwriter Anne Murray’s autobiography All of Me. Then it was an oral biography of revered and controversial writer Mordecai Richer called The Last Honest Man. For his next subject, Posner decided to continue with the oral biography approach, as he examines the life and works of legendary singer, songwriter, novelist and poet Leonard Cohen.
Leonard Cohen Untold Stories: From This Broken Hill, Volume 2 by Michael Posner (Simon & Schuster, $40)
However, the life, works and complexities that were part of Leonard Cohen’s 82 years of existence couldn’t be packed into a single volume. Instead, the impressions of Cohen that were garnered from interviewing a total of 550 people who knew, respected and adored him became a three-volume work of oral biography. It started last year with the first volume that was entitled The Early Years, and continues with the recent release of volume two, called From This Broken Hill (the third and final volume will be published next fall).
“Leonard Cohen was a fascinating, complicated character who had a multidimensional life,” said Posner during a recent phone interview. “He was a poet, novelist, singer/songwriter, a Zen student, a studier of Judaism, and a romancer of women, as opposed to Richler, who was not only known as a great writer, but also an anti-social animal and a curmudgeon.”
Posner admitted that Leonard Cohen grew on him because of the different kind of life he lead, but realized there was more to him than others from outside his circle knew about. So in 2016, he decided to write a biography of Cohen, but somehow stumbled upon the oral approach.
“I started talking with one person who knew him, who recommended that I talk to another person because they had interesting stories about him, and so on and so forth,” said Posner. “The other biographies that were published about Cohen (Various Positions and I’m Your Man) relied on the conventional narrative format, but I didn’t want to take that position. An oral biography leads to a structure where people tell things how it was, whether it be wrong or different, and lets the reader decide.”
“I like the oral format. It gives the reader more voices and tells the same story, but from a different point of view; it’s like the narrative that Akira Kurosawa followed in his classic 1951 movie Rashomon,” added Posner.
In volume two of his epic Leonard Cohen oral biography trilogy, it covers his dark period between 1971 and the late 80s. Following his sudden fame that enveloped him from the mid-60s to 1971 (thanks to the success of his first albums and novels The Favorite Game and Beautiful Losers), Cohen experienced a period in his life when his albums and books met with very little success in North America (but were successful in Europe), which resulted in him falling into a deep depression.
“During that period, Cohen’s personal life was a complete mess, he wasn’t getting the same acclaim like he did during the 60s, and he suffered from depression. He was the person who was seen walking around in his famous blue raincoat, and that was as good as it gets, and his personal and professional life doesn’t turn around until 1986,” he said.
Another impression the reader gets from volume two is that Cohen was quite the ladies’ man, and had a large succession of girlfriends and female lovers. “He was the embodiment of his book and album Death of A Ladies’ Man. He had a strong libido. He was a rock star with a fortunate position, which was that women literally threw themselves at him, and he didn’t have to work very hard at it,” he said.
Volume 2 of Posner’s oral biography trilogy of Leonard Cohen works so well in so many ways, because of the large myriad of people he interviewed for the book, plus the myriad of stories they tell of their encounters and friendships with him. Thanks to these multitude of voices from so many points of view and walks of life, the reader gets a multi-layered, mosaic portrait of one of the most legendary – and most complex – writers and musicians that Canada has ever produced during the latter half of the 20th century. Leonard Cohen was a multi-talented individual, but a complicated, divided soul, and thanks to Michael Posner and the more than 550 people he interviewed for this project, we get a much better, humanistic understanding at what drove the talented enigma that was Leonard Cohen.
However, Posner has this impression of Leonard Cohen’s artistic legacy. “As a lyricist and poet, he possessed great strength. Cohen was able to articulate different aspects of the human condition in a meaningful way. He was able to absorb and marry his rich skills with the melodies he wrote and composed. Bob Dylan may be the voice of our generation – and that’s true in many ways – but Leonard Cohen took that to another level, and became the voice of many.”
“Leonard Cohen was a towering great artist, and can be regarded as one of the few great Canadian cultural products. And as a singer/songwriter, he’s right up there with Dylan, Paul Simon and Jacques Brel. His work will last for a long time, mainly because it connects with people in an emotional, powerful, way,” he added.
