Travel Blind

On Leonard Cohen's literary juvenilia

Before Suzanne and Marianne, before ‘Chelsea Hotel’, before McCabe and Mrs. Miller, before the Buddhism and the bankruptcy and the decade of farewells that preceded the ladies’ man’s death in 2016, Leonard Cohen was a writer of prose and poetry, author of two novels and several collections of verse. The new volume A Ballet of Lepers collects his early and previously unpublished fiction, a novel and 16 stories written in the late 1950s and early ’60s. It arrives half a century late, like some unexpected gift from a bright boy we thought we’d buried.

In contrast to the other great singer-songwriters of the ’60s—particularly his fellow Canadians Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, as well as the border dweller Bob Dylan—Cohen came to stardom slowly and with experience of the world, or at least Montreal and a few Greek islands. He was 32 when Judy Collins brought him on television to sing duets of his songs. The one she made popular, ‘Suzanne’, has a sagelike narrator who addresses a ‘you’ that, when Cohen sings it, might be a younger and more innocent self, tempted by a woman and drawn to Jesus. It might also have been his audience. He was too old to be a hippie, but he could still get on their wavelength. 

The already mature persona of Cohen’s early songs suggests a youth of burning intensity, wandering by moonlight amid gothic architecture, contemplating the spilled blood of his ancestors, touching perfect bodies with his mind, and so forth. On that score A Ballet of Lepers offers ample confirmation.