The Contemporary Leonard Cohen: Response, Reappraisal, and Rediscovery

By Joel Deshaye

The Contemporary Leonard Cohen is an exciting new study that offers an original explanation of Leonard Cohen’s staying power and his various positions in music, literature, and art.

The death of Leonard Cohen received media attention across the globe, and this international star remains dear to the hearts of many fans. This book examines the diversity of Cohen’s art in the wake of his death, positioning him as a contemporary, multi-media artist whose career was framed by the twentieth-century and neoliberal contexts of its production. The authors borrow the idea of “the contemporary” especially from philosophy and art history, applying it to Cohen for the first time—not only to the drawings that he included in some of his books but also to his songs, poems, and novels. This idea helps us to understand Cohen’s techniques after his postmodern experiments with poems and novels in the 1960s and 1970s. It also helps us to see how his most recent songs, poems, and drawings developed out of that earlier material, including earlier connections to other writers and musicians.

Philosophically, “the contemporary” also sounds out the deep feelings that Cohen’s work still generates in readers and listeners. Whether these feelings are spiritual or secular, sincere or ironic, we get them partly from the sense of timeliness and the sense of timelessness in Cohen’s lyrics and images, which speak to our own lives and times, our own struggles and survival. From a set of international collaborators, The Contemporary Leonard Cohen delivers an appreciative but critical examination of one of our dark luminaries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: Nov 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781771125628

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

THE CONTEMPORARY LEONARD COHEN

KAIT PINDER and JOEL DESHAYE

ON NOVEMBER 9, 2017, ONLY TWO DAYS AFTER THE FIRST ANNIVERsary of Leonard Cohen’s death, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC) opened the doors to Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything. Alongside a collection of Cohen’s self-portraits and a limited selection of personal items, the exhibit displayed eighteen new works by forty multidisciplinary artists from around the world (McGillis). Immersive and conceptual, the installations and performances commemorated an artist whose own catalogue developed over seven decades, crossed two centuries, and regularly reinvented itself in different media. Conceived before Cohen’s death, the delirious celebration and loving tribute…evolved into something suffused in elegy (Zeppetelli and Shiffman 14) in the months between Cohen’s passing and its opening. For example, in Candice Breitz’s I’m Your Man (A Portrait of Leonard Cohen), middle-aged male fans pay posthumous tribute to the late legend by singing their own versions of Cohen’s 1988 album (Zeppetelli and Shiffman 74). The interactive design studio Daily Tous les Jours presented I Heard There Was a Secret Chord, which created a global experience by translating the data produced from people listening to Hallelujah online at any given moment into a vibrating hum in the museum; and Jenny Holzer’s contribution, like the two murals of Cohen that now appear across Montreal’s skyline, wrote his legacy onto the city’s architecture in phrases from his poems and songs projected onto Grain Silo No. 5, in the city’s Old Port. Perhaps most symbolic of the moment, Ari Folman’s Depression Chamber meditated on the melancholic mood of Cohen’s work by inviting visitors one by one into a tomb-like room in which their images were projected on the ceiling and, to the soundtrack of Cohen’s Famous Blue Raincoat, eventually became shroud[ed] with other images of Cohen’s lyrics (34). These installations of the exhibit staged various artistic engagements with Cohen’s life and work, which resonated with both the artists’ and the viewers’ experiences of mourning. By February 2018, the exhibit had received more than two hundred thousand visitors and set a new attendance record for a single exhibition at the MAC. A year after his death, Leonard Cohen had arrived in the world of contemporary art.

Although he was a visual artist himself—he had considered himself a photographer in his high school yearbook, later co-managed the Four Penny Art Gallery in Montreal (Nadel, Various 16), and even collaborated briefly with the sculptor and painter Armand Vaillancourt (Bussières)—Cohen did not fully commit himself to the visual arts, and he never received the recognition from art critics that he did from critics of literature and music.¹ His simple and expressionistic drawings appeared on album and book covers, in the margins of poetry collections, and on the pins sold at merchandise tables at his concerts, but they were complements to other, more elaborate creative achievements. Cohen’s recognition in the world of art, it seems, comes first by way of other artists and, adhering to the cliché, mainly after his death.

In addition to situating Cohen’s work as a point of inspiration and response for visual artists and creating a space for the public mourning of Montreal’s beloved son, the exhibit at the city’s foremost contemporary art gallery also inscribes Cohen in the discourse of the contemporary. Cohen himself was not and is not solely the agent of his own contemporaneity; rather, other artists, writers, musicians, and stakeholders have assumed some of the agency, and not only after his death. This discourse reflects current meditations on a particular category of visual art referred to as contemporary, but also—and more essentially for us—on questions about the relationship of the present to the past and the future, the ethos of an age and the figures from it who become generationally significant, and the often ineffable ways in which communal feelings are attached to a sense of being together in time.

His art was mostly literary and musical, of course. Along with the fourteen studio albums produced in his lifetime, he published two novels, eight collections of poetry (and more selected volumes), and his visual art was exhibited in small galleries in North America and Europe.² He was also a celebrity, an ironically self-fashioned ladies’ man whose relationships with partners from Marianne Ihlen to Rebecca De Mornay were the stuff of legend even before his death. He had lost his fortune quite publicly in the first years of the new millennium, but the final act of his life in art—the last world tours and studio albums—was his most commercially successful, winning him fans not only across the globe but also across generations. Beloved for his golden voice and its signature mixture of the holy and the profane, Cohen continues to grow in popularity and acclaim: along with the release of new work by his estate (The Flame in 2018 and Thanks for the Dance in 2019, with the promise of more to come), Cohen has won several posthumous awards (including his first Grammy in 2018),³ and—perhaps of most interest for his artistic legacy—he has become a figure of creative response and collaboration for artists working in and beyond the media in which he made his own career.⁴

The philosopher Peter Osborne writes that [t]o claim something is contemporary is to make a claim for its significance in participating in the actuality of the present (2). In the years since Cohen’s death, his continued relevance in the present has been claimed by fans, by his estate, by the artists who contributed to the MAC exhibit, and even by American news anchors who have invoked his lyrics as commentary on current events.⁵ In an article for the New York Times in March 2018, Dan Bilefsky reinscribed the characterization of Cohen as the secular saint of Montreal, citing the two murals of Cohen in the city, the MAC exhibit, and a new speakeasy called Bar Suzanne as evidence of the sometimes cultish reverence that has been growing in Montreal since the singer’s passing. McClelland & Stewart’s choice to reissue Cohen’s previous collections promises to introduce younger generations to the singer’s early career as a poet and novelist. The books, now uniformly branded with serious black covers bearing the signature symbol of Cohen’s Order of the Unified Heart, also participate in the emotion economy (Grindstaff and Murray, especially 111, 115, and 122–24) that profits from an artist’s death. At the time of writing, his unpublished first novel, A Ballet of Lepers, is scheduled to be published in the autumn of 2022, and A Crack in Everything, initially scheduled to tour the United States and Europe until 2021, will become a virtual exhibit hosted by the MAC until at least 2024—a plan that suggests the current market for all things Cohen has some staying power.⁶

Occasioned by the renewed popular, creative, and academic interest in Cohen during the last decade of his life, and especially following his death, this book participates in a new phase in Cohen scholarship. The early criticism introduced many of the terms still used to describe Cohen and his personas: Black Romantic (Djwa), phenomenon (Pacey), pop saint (Ondaatje), to name a few. The middle criticism theorized his literary postmodernism (Hutcheon most influentially) and offered definitive biographical accounts of his changing artistic practices that are now touchstones of the field (Nadel and later Simmons). Scholars and fans now must cope with the artist’s absence from a scene where his art continues to circulate; not only that, the art is beloved and the artist sorely missed. The current phase must also validate an expanded definition of artist, a word for Cohen that at least one early critic (Gnarowski) highlighted, which it validates in part by questioning the opinion that celebrity ruins art, and by showing how artful the work of a popular entertainer can be.⁷ See, for example, Brian Laidlaw’s chapter in this book, which looks at the verbal and visual intricacies of Cohen’s way of rhyming—a remarkable demonstration of Cohen’s recourse to the art of the page and the interdependence of poetry and music. Here in Canada, his work is too often appraised mainly through the lens of CanLit, the Canadian-literature industry that his early books helped to popularize, but this book widens the scope, as when Tanya Dalziell and Paul Genoni contextualize Cohen alongside Australian literature written in Greece; when Norman Ravvin, Joel Deshaye, and Patrick Nickleson consider musical sources and contemporaries from and beyond English Canada; and when Laidlaw (an American musician) examines musical and poetic techniques. As these and other chapters in this book suggest, the next phase of Cohen scholarship is one of loss that returns to the past as a site of knowledge in art, and it points to the future: to the scholarship still to be written, to the cultural work that needs doing, and, in the bluntest of terms, to the question of Cohen’s potential relevance to audiences still to come.

This collection is the product of a shared intention among contributors across disciplines and across the globe to understand Cohen’s continued appeal today by returning to his past work. The individual chapters examine works from each period of his long career, the artistic circles in which he moved, and the diversity of media in which he worked. Reflecting our title, we tend to align our assortment of methods according to the theme of time. The saintly image of Cohen that has been celebrated since his death appears to be outside of time, but we also situate Cohen in temporal locations and concepts. Specifically, we argue that he and his art are best understood in terms of three temporal themes that are included in theories of the contemporary: the contemporary as a figure who stands adjacent to the trends; the contemporary as a figure who is indeed an outsider but is also acquainted with the generation that helped to define popular culture in the late twentieth century; and the contemporary as a mood or affective ethos that creates a sense of shared time that feels different from other cultural moments. Like Francis Mus in the rationale for his methodology (20, 216) in The Demons of Leonard Cohen (2020), we organized this book mostly thematically, knowing that a strictly chronological organization would limit our ability to connect various times and themes of Cohen’s career. Taken up respectively in the three sections of the book, our themes have been developed by Giorgio Agamben, Peter Osborne, Terry Smith, Pamela M. Lee, Patrick Valiquet, and others, whom we discuss below. As they relate to Cohen, these themes are of the stranger or exile, of being simultaneously in and out of fashion, and of the embodied religious life and the holiness of quotidian experience. We see Leonard Cohen as a contemporary artist in these senses.

Like the polyptych, or the artwork of many surfaces or faces, that informs Joan Angel’s chapter on self-portraiture in this book, our framework crosses disciplinary divisions and helps to explain why Cohen’s major biographers (Nadel and Simmons) and scholars (e.g., Michael Gnarowski, Stephen Scobie) have often tried to deal with all of his art forms together, although rarely his visual art. In From Cohen to Carson: The Poet’s Novel in Canada (2008), Ian Rae mentions in passing that Cohen’s prose technique of abandon[ing] straightforward chronology (42) is eventually made visible in the serial and recursive self-portraits of Book of Longing (2006), a claim related to Rae’s explanation of Cohen’s self-conscious genre-bending as a crossing or traversing of different boundaries (90), including time. These divisions sometimes prompt Cohen’s audiences to admire him as an unclassifiable genius, but we admire him for how his works offer so many different ways of speaking to our lives and times, even after the end of his life—an offering that signals that he is still with the times. As art historian Terry Smith puts it, in its everyday usage, contemporary expresses a recognition of whatever is happening, up-to-date, simultaneous, or contemporaneous (4). Our title and the approaches of our contributors pick up on at least two aspects of this colloquial definition: inspired by Cohen’s afterlives in our present, the chapters of this book reflect the simultaneity of the current or up-to-date interdisciplinary interests and questions of Cohen scholarship, which ranges (in this book alone, not to mention other contributions) through biography, history, theology, musicology, celebrity studies, philosophy, literary theory, and ethical criticism.

But it is most obvious that contemporary positions Cohen as an artist whose oeuvre reflects a time and its movements, and, while such a statement may be made of all artists, contemporary has taken on a particular meaning for critics of twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture. It has bearing, for example, on movements of modernism and postmodernism in literature and art, as well as twentieth-century postwar history more generally. The framework of the contemporary situates Cohen among a generation that came of age artistically in the 1960s. It also helps us to describe Cohen after his work ceased to be as obviously postmodern as it was in the 1960s and ’70s, a range that literary critic Marianne DeKoven describes as the long sixties (3). In The Demons of Leonard Cohen, Mus observes that Cohen’s stubborn adherence to a (pseudo-) romantic ethos of the artist proved hard to reconcile with the then popular movements of postmodernism and postcolonialism (2). Mus continues: This being said, the nonconformity of these projects meant that Cohen could not be easily incorporated into existing movements and threatened to fall through the cracks of dominant and more visible literary and artistic categories (5). The fact is that he did not fall through the cracks, or did so only temporarily in the 1970s (during a period of mental illness and drug abuse) and again in the 1990s (while meditating on Mount Baldy). The question for us is how these periods and movements interacted, and how Cohen reacted to them in turn, so that he could regain and maintain both his artistic integrity and the interest and fondness of his readers and audiences.

The simplest answer is about crisis. Contemporary art critic Pamela M. Lee observes her discipline’s ongoing fascination, even obsession, with the artists, artistic developments, and crises of the 1960s (64–5). For Lee, the radical destabilization of cultural authority in the long sixties was answered by the contemporary (72). We will explain how we think it was restabilized or even reappropriated, but space here does not permit much elaboration on the special place of the 1960s in the development of postmodernism and today’s nostalgia for the countercultures of the era. Suffice it to say that Cohen’s contemporaneity reflected a solution to his own crises with drugs and depression in the long sixties, and he became even more compelling to his audience because they intuitively recognized that he had somehow survived. Our idea (below) of contemporaneity as a mood helps to explain how Cohen’s work generates feelings—even obsession—involving urgent identification and vicariousness that makes him totemic, a unifier of his fans, even of those fans who are too young to have lived through the 1960s and ’70s. Together, these facets of the contemporary in Cohen’s career identify him not only as a contemporary artist, but also as a figure of our time whose cultural afterlives function as a meeting of times and temporalities. These afterlives are also a reminder (in keeping with the growing body of scholarship on the concept of the contemporary) that the present is already a historical period, a premise that contemporaneity shares with postmodernism as understood by the likes of Fredric Jameson.⁸ As Ira Nadel has done in borrowing the title of Cohen’s 1984 album for his 1996 biography, we recognize the various positions of Cohen’s contemporaneity.

Historical arcs, too, are a necessary factor to consider when examining a temporally nebulous concept such as the contemporary. Periodization of the contemporary, especially with reference to related movements and what we call them, is tricky enough to prompt the witticisms of titles such as Amy Hungerford’s On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary (2008) and Christian Bök’s Getting Ready to Have Been Postmodern (2010). But it would be irresponsible not to historicize these terms, if for no other reason than to explain their self-evident but undetermined temporality. The musicologist Patrick Valiquet implies that the contemporary will eventually be periodized differently and more specifically (191; see also P. Lee 39, 96), but for now it is helpfully open and serves us in the present by giving us a vocabulary for interpreting difficult-to-categorize literature, music, and visual art—for us, Cohen’s.

Placing him in history is easy, then, but what areas of history are most appropriate? Periodizations of the postmodern and the contemporary have significant macroeconomic dimensions that trickle down to cultural and personal crises. Cohen published his first book, Let Us Compare Mythologies, in 1956, the year of the Suez Crisis, which heightened Cold War tensions over strategic shipments of oil, and which began an era of peacekeeping and internationalism in Canadian politics.⁹ Just one day after Cohen’s death and only seventeen days after the release of his last studio album You Want It Darker, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, ushering in a new era of American oil production, isolationism, and elite enrichment, all part of the promise to Make America Great Again.

It is tempting to view these geopolitical bookends of Cohen’s career as symbolic of the kind of artist that he was. Much of the power and appeal of his contemporaneity is in the expression of spiritual alternatives to materialism and the comic failure of being materialistic anyway. In fact, literary criticism and musicology on the contemporary has tended to periodize it alongside the political and economic extension of materialism known as neoliberalism, starting with the end of the Gold Standard in 1971 (Hyde and Wasserman 4) and the ascendancy of Reaganomics and Thatcherism in the 1980s—ideologies that assert the inevitability of global capitalism and its supposedly natural place in all areas of life, including national governments (Valiquet 195). In 1978, in Death of a Lady’s Man, Cohen wrote that he was ashamed to ask for your money. Not that you have not paid more for less. You have. You do (168). In 1979, on the Field Commander Cohen tour, Cohen sardonically sang himself into neoliberal history as this and nothing more . . . just some grateful faithful woman’s favourite singing millionaire, the patron saint of envy and the grocer of despair, working for the Yankee Dollar (SM 201).¹⁰

Self-deprecatingly aware of his position of privilege, he subordinates himself to the Yankee Dollar by working not only to get it (for it), but because it is also his boss. As a patron saint, he reports to not only the Yankee Dollar but also the almighty dollar, a contemporary comment on the place of the soul in the neoliberal era.¹¹ Partly because of the difficulty of identifying the politics of this amalgam of complicity and critique, Valiquet generalizes that the contemporary [is] a problem in the present (198), a present historicized by neoliberalism.

Despite his imagination of himself as Field Commander, and despite having once said in an interview that he could not endorse pacifism because it would enable future Holocausts,¹² he has also famously refused to take sides (Simmons, I’m Your Man 345). His saintly reputation (at least partly self-consciously ascribed in the character of Field Commander Cohen) as someone who is above the lowly political disputes of others is complicated by the afterlife of the Holocaust and the threat of mutually assured destruction during the Cold War, which he writes about by alluding to the Cuban Missile Crisis in his 1964 poem Style: the early morning greedy radio eats / the governments one by one the languages / the poppy fields one by one (FfH 31). Although he implies here that nuclear war that is metonymically associated with radio would destroy the governments of any nation, his career was supported by new funding from the Canadian government during a period of overt nationalism that saw the celebration of Canada’s centennial and the establishment of new policies on multiculturalism.¹³ It took him to Israel during the Yom Kippur War in 1973, to Cuba in 1961, to Poland when Cold War politics were undermining the Communist regime (Simmons, I’m Your Man 92–96, 272–74, 344–45). His career was intensely international and transnational, and his Canadian grant in the 1960s did not impel him take the side of one country over another.

The theoretical valences of the term contemporary arise in the same postwar and neoliberal contexts in which Cohen lived and worked, and their characteristic adjacency to the more dominant terms of modernism and postmodernism contribute to the usefulness of the term for analyzing Cohen’s participation in these and other artistic movements. Valiquet asks rhetorically whether the contemporary in music is merely a zombified simulacrum (197) of postmodernism—basically a copy that’s less smart—but he points to alternative examples, such as contemporary Indigenous classical music, that disrupt expectations of historical development by staggering and overlapping historical timelines. In What Is Contemporary Art? (2009), Terry Smith explains that while contemporary first served as a secondary concept of the already critically established notion of the modern, it has begun in recent decades to articulate a world picture and relationship to the present that is distinct from either early twentieth-century modernism or the postmodernism that is usually seen as replacing it. Building on the Latin etymology of the word (con meaning with, and temporalis referring to time), Smith notes that the contemporary now signifies multiple ways of being with, in, and out of time, separately and at once, with others and without them (6).

These sorts of statements might appear to be only theoretical, but Cohen himself seems to have entertained similar ideas. In Book of Mercy (1984), he writes a psalm for every year of his life to that point (fifty years), thereby enclosing the iterations of his own temporality in the simultaneity of a single volume. In The Demons of Leonard Cohen, Mus notices the variety of album titles that are explicitly temporal and historical (101–2): New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974), Recent Songs (1979), The Future (1992), Ten New Songs (2001), and Old Ideas (2012). When Valiquet suggests that theories of the contemporary should include counterfactual propositions that minimize the logic of history and emphasize alternative histories (193), we think of Cohen’s gestures toward counterfactual, alternative histories in Democracy on The Future. Democracy is coming to the USA (SM 367), he sings, provocatively suggesting that the United States did not yet have democracy at the time of The Future in 1992, that it was still to come and not in the past. (The premise remains relevant.) While these modes of relation to time have always existed, they have become more popular in the contemporary period of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (Smith 6). Meanwhile, postmodernism has fallen out of favour as the (too) radical fringe or unsavoury companion. In other words, as modernism transformed into, and was paralleled by, postmodernism, a third way was laid down alongside them: an alternative histor[y] for the twentieth century.¹⁴

Arising in the long decade in which Marianne DeKoven argues postmodernism emerges and outpaces modernism, Cohen’s literary career has relatedly been understood as a hinge between modernism and postmodernism in Canada. In fact, it is in the earlier and somewhat more colloquial sense of contemporary as modern that Michael Gnarowski locat[es] Cohen in the general flow of Canadian modernism . . . as the third stage in the unfolding of the contemporary sensibility (5). For Gnarowski, Cohen complete[s] the process of modernist rebellion begun by A.J.M. Smith and F.R. Scott in the 1920s (5); however, Cohen did not stay in this supposedly conclusive phase for long. The critic Sylvia Söderlind puts it another way in claiming that some of his work is a somewhat nostalgic farewell to modernism (270)—which may also be seen as a farewell to Canadian political and stylistic efficiencies (Söderlind’s term, which we could illustrate with the minimalism of writers such as W.W.E. Ross, following Ezra Pound) and an indulgence in more worldly excesses (such as the sexual traumas and escapades of Beautiful Losers, or the doubling of Death of a Lady’s Man with Death of a Ladies’ Man). Cohen’s movement between modernism and postmodernism was not even his first major demonstration of a talent for projecting himself through different eras; Sandra Dwja’s memorable explanation of the early Cohen is that of his Black Romanticism, or in other words his Decadent response to the first-generation Romanticism of Wordsworthian poets (Djwa 35–36). Through these phases, Cohen showed that he was not at home in only one of them.

Predominantly, however, the most influential assessment of Cohen’s literary output has been Linda Hutcheon’s designation in The Canadian Postmodern (1988) of Beautiful Losers (1966) as a paradigmatic postmodern text for its exemplary historiographic metafiction, though even this designation occurred two decades after the novel was published, and well after Cohen had moved on from his postmodern experiments in fiction. Looking back, Hutcheon explains that [t]he sixties, for all their undeniable self-indulgence and ‘presentism’ (the ‘now’ generation), were years of a general challenge to authority that left their mark on postmodernism in Canada, as elsewhere (11). One specific challenge was to use and abuse (a phrase that Hutcheon repeats) the authority of the modernist and modern realist novels. Hutcheon quotes an interview in which Cohen says that he was using all the techniques of the modern novel which was the discipline in which [he] was trained—so there’s this huge prayer using the conventional techniques of pornographic suspense, of humour, of plot, of character development and conventional intrigue (29). Her reference to the modern novel anticipates Stephen Scobie’s view of Cohen as a modernist masquerading as a postmodernist (Leonard 61), but, however keen the observation of the linkage, Cohen himself would seem to reject it; Hutcheon notices F.’s injunction to ‘connect nothing’ (29). We may go a step further into the periodization here to contextualize this postmodernist injunction to ‘connect nothing’ with the humanist view that could still oppose modernism in E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910): Only connect. . . . Live in fragments no longer (174). Beautiful Losers is one of the postmodern sites where Forster’s statement can no longer be sustained, where history can no longer be recovered from fragments.

So, as influential as Hutcheon’s reading of Beautiful Losers has been, Cohen’s postmodernism, like his modernism, reflects only one part of his long career. Moreover, in recent years scholars have questioned postmodernism’s acuity as a critical discourse following its peak in the 1980s (McHale 328). Hillary Chute notes that postmodernism has lost its critical agency (356), and Emilio Sauri observes that any discussion of postmodernism today is, with notable exceptions, already directed at conceptualizing its exhaustion in advance (474). While we agree that the death knell of postmodernism has perhaps been rung too early,¹⁵ and that the canonical theories of postmodernity—especially Jean-François Lyotard’s analysis of the postmodern condition and Fredric Jameson’s critique of late capitalism—continue to illuminate the economic and cultural logic of the contemporary period, we need another term to theorize Cohen’s multivalent career and his reappearances and reaffirmations in today’s culture. Understanding Cohen as contemporary respects his affiliations with modernism and especially postmodernism, and it provides a related alternative that is broader and less radical,¹⁶ and hence more likely to account for his mainstream success at different times in his career.

After Beautiful Losers, Cohen started his career in music, which moved him closer to the mainstream from literary fields defined by postmodernism (Beautiful Losers) and modernism (his far more imagistic and yet aesthetically unified 1963 Künstlerroman, The Favourite Game). His poetry collections from the 1970s, The Energy of Slaves (1972) and Death of a Lady’s Man (1978), can both be described as postmodern and postmodernist, but his albums were not so obviously experimental, except perhaps in the music-text interplay of the latter book and its musical counterpart, Death of a Ladies’ Man (1977).¹⁷ His albums of the 1970s were not especially popular either, but they were clearly in folk and folk-rock genres that were popular then. He certainly seemed to be aspiring to greater celebrity through his strained relationship with producer Phil Spector (to say the least of a relationship that famously involved Spector’s demands made at gunpoint), but he also seemed intent on keeping a grip on literature. When Book of Mercy arrived in 1984, it was genre-defying but had none of what Mark Abley has called the self-conscious games of postmodernism (qtd. in Pezzarello 3), and it evoked a sincerity (Pezzarello 3–7) that, in retrospect, seems to have predicted the remaining course of Cohen’s life in art. Book of Mercy might have been the true farewell, though the chapter in this volume by Paul Robichaud situates valediction mainly in its honorary sequel, Book of Longing. By positioning Robichaud’s chapter after that of Brian Trehearne on Cohen’s guilt and detachment, we imply a cause and effect: that Cohen’s lack of attachment to ideas that have become doctrines enabled him to say goodbye to them one by one.

We certainly see the benefit of continuing to read Cohen even as we are listening to his songs, and it is not only our training in literary criticism that persuades us to read critically. Because of our own involvement in celebrity studies, we are wary of participating in what Emily Hyde and Sarah Wasserman call the glib, self-promoting frenzy of making or naming a work of contemporary art (1; see also P. Lee 38–39). Similarly, we are skeptical of the way critical approaches that endlessly nuance terms can promote the exceptionalism of a writer in the context of others of the same generation (e.g, Colby 7) and so can be co-opted as branding exercises. The risk of appearing to commodify an artist such as Cohen is especially high, even though most of his career has been in the limelight, as suggested by a 1967 commentary that predates the release of his first album at the end of that year: Desmond Pacey’s article The Phenomenon of Leonard Cohen in the journal Canadian Literature. In spite of this success, Cohen was not wealthy at every stage of his life; his late-career success was partly the result of a change of management from Kelley Lynch, who stole several million dollars of his savings, to Robert Kory, who recognized the appeal of European style in some of Cohen’s earlier phases and encouraged his late fashion, the hard work of touring, and renewed writing. The dilemma of any critic is to be grateful for the new material but concerned about heaping praise for the sake of association with famous or trendy people. We and the contributors to this book want a rigorous criticism of his work, which should hold up to scrutiny and continue to inspire other artists if we are to participate critically in his canonization. We feel the problematic draw of Cohen’s celebrity and its canonizing effect of making him always up-to-date.

So that we can better understand him as a creative who negotiated his output between different but related fields of cultural production, this book explains Cohen partly as a star whose reputation as a genius must be understood in the context of a network of contemporaries who shared inspirations, promotional strategies, and sometimes career arcs. It should be plausible by now that Cohen’s stardom is dependent far more on his contemporaneity than his postmodernism, with the implication (somewhat beyond the scope of this introduction) that stardom and contemporaneity are at least coincident if not also codependent—pop music being full of self-fashioned rebels or outsiders who chastise the system even as they benefit from it; celebrity being a time-sensitive phenomenon defined in part by current trends in production and reception. Cohen scandalized readers with Flowers for Hitler and Beautiful Losers, and he gained prominence by association with Irving Layton in the newly integrated multimedia of literature, television, and film; and then his reputation transferred to other fields—and countries—when he saw an opportunity for poets (thanks in part to the Beats and Bob Dylan) on the music scene and on radio.

While Brian Trehearne points out later in this book that, for some readers today, Cohen is losing his contemporaneity (see page 285 in this volume), Cohen’s fans do not appear to respond to him as if he were yet another edgy popular musician going through the motions of contract fulfillment or trend chasing. Instead, they see him as a fellow-traveller in dark times, our contemporary, someone who speaks for us and gives us a way of seeing the actions playing out in our moment. Again, the agency of his contemporaneity is partly out of his hands. More than complicit, he appears authentic to his fans, even those who are generations younger than him; his concerns, from the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s, and onward, are expressed so that we see their relevance for us today. If the contemporary, as a term of literary and art criticism and musicology, denotes a period beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, it also describes the artists who remain with us or are held fast by us, together in time. Such a position is distinct from the modern and the postmodern because, in contrast to avant-garde notions of the present as the rupture point through which we may gain access to a revolutionary future, the contemporary conceives of the present as defined by the presence of multiple ways of being with and in time, or as Osborne puts it, "a coming together not simply ‘in’ time, but of times (17). Similarly for Valiquet, the contemporary . . . is less a specific place in time than an abstract relation with time, the coordinates, capacities and tensions of which interpellate an observer with a particular perspective on time" (187). We may add that to think through the contemporary in Cohen’s oeuvre is also to recognize its many overlaps and tensions with the artistic and literary movements—namely modernism and postmodernism—that offered him diverse temporalities and traditions with which to experiment.

THE CONTEMPORARY AS THE OUTSIDER

Periodization is, of course, only one lens through which to examine Cohen’s contemporaneity. While the chapters of this book examine Cohen’s work against the socio-political and economic backdrops described above, the sections are organized around more conceptual themes of the contemporary that appear in and illuminate Cohen’s art. As literary critics Michael D’Arcy and Mathias Nilges note, [c]ontemporaneity . . . describes more than a simple matter of being present (6). Rather, they argue that it is a relation to the present that does not simply live the now but that interrogates the present as history, a relationship, therefore, of being simultaneously with and without, [as well as] in and out of time (6). Their focus here on being helps us to recognize that the contemporary is not only a period; it is also a figure who embodies a particular attitude toward the present, as we have already implied by explaining the periodicity of the contemporary in relation to Cohen’s positions in various literary-historical movements. The chapters in the first section of this book—‘A Man Must Be Very Alone’: The Contemporary as the Outsider—take up this characteristic of the contemporary to examine how Cohen’s meditations on alienation and authenticity in his early fiction (Cameron and Gélinas-Faucher), his community on the Greek island of Hydra (Dalziell and Genoni), his reading of Nietzschean philosophy (Pinder), and his experiments with the avant-garde (Betts) position him as adjacent to and often critical of the popular movements, groups, and ideas of his time. Contrary to the way that the everyday use of the term suggests an endorsement of the present as the apotheosis of coolness—whatever is newest is hippest—theorists of the contemporary note that the figures aligned with contemporaneity often appear out of keeping with their time. Viewed as a figure, the contemporary is thus not the person who best follows the trends and values of a given historical period—not the run-of-the-mill Instagram influencer today, for example—but the one who appears slightly adjacent to the newest new of the now.

In spite of Cohen’s own celebrity, he rarely seemed entirely comfortable in his celebrity skin, as seen in his belligerent stare on the back cover of The Energy of Slaves (1972) or in the awkwardness of his pose on the cover of I’m Your Man (1988), where he wears a suit and sunglasses but holds a half-eaten banana. Certainly, there was an art to being Leonard Cohen, as Mark Cooper suggested (qtd. in Simmons, I’m Your Man 342), and there was a confidence in his per-formances and even his own branding; however, as when he let the cameras see him half-naked in the bath in Ladies and Gentlemen . . . Mr. Leonard Cohen (1965), he was also undermining the confidence: caveat emptor. In a 1969 interview with Michael Harris he claimed, I don’t like to think of myself as defining a generation or as speaking for somebody (Cohen, I Have No Idea), openly denying the position that his growing celebrity granted him relative to his audiences. Indeed, the chapters in this book by Betts, Ravvin, Deshaye, and Nickleson all point to the diffusion of that role of defining a generation or being the voice of a generation. He also once said, I never married the spirit of my generation because it wasn’t attractive to me. . . . [T]he thing died very quickly, the merchants took over, nobody resisted. . . . [M]y purity was based on the fact that nobody offered me much money (qtd. in Nadel, Various 160). However, he also claimed in a letter to Jack McClelland about his plans for Flowers for Hitler that anyone from his generation would recognize his project from the book in their hands (Nadel 119–20). As the philosopher Giorgio Agamben puts it, [t]hose who coincide too well with the epoch, those who are perfectly tied to it in every respect, are not contemporaries, precisely because they do not manage to see it; they are not able to firmly hold their gaze on it (11).

To interrogate the present as history, as D’Arcy and Nilges put it, is to recognize it as the immanence of not one but many times. The present is not only shared with people who happen to live in the same moment, but also with other times, other temporalities. For Agamben, this figure’s perception of anachronism within the present makes him one who, dividing and interpolating time, is capable of transforming it and putting it in relation with other times (18). The contemporary, then, not only views his moment as history; he also views history as present. He breaks open the projected unity of the present in order to insert, to bring forward, to experiment with the past. Drawing on the Latin etymology of interpolation, which means to polish [polate] between [inter], we may say that the contemporary in Agamben’s sense shines (or brightens) the fractures between times that otherwise appear smoothed out or glossed over in the colloquial sense of the contemporary. For Cohen, as it turns out, "[t]here is a crack in everything. / That’s how the light gets in" (SM 373).¹⁸

Such a figure of contemporaneity appears in Loneliness and History, the speech Cohen delivered to the Jewish Public Library in 1964 from which we borrow our title for this section of the book. Meditating on A.M. Klein’s famous silence, Cohen describes the difference he sees between the figure of the priest and the figure of the prophet. (Klein’s error, according to Cohen, is that he had attempted to be both.) History, Cohen explains, is the description of the path of an idea, a description of an idea’s journey from generation to generation (a).¹⁹ While there was a time in the ancient past when the person who understood the idea was both prophet and priest, the two roles are now split between two figures. The priest attempts to serve his community by conserving the initial form of the idea. The prophet exiles himself by following the idea as it takes new form and moves through time: he continues to serve the idea as it changes forms, trying never to mistake the cast off shell with the swiftly changing thing that shed it. He follows it into regions of danger, so that he becomes alone, and by his nature becomes unwelcome to the community. The community is a museum to the old form and dedicated to it, and change[s] very slowly, and usually only under violence (b). Cohen’s prophet remains outside the community of his peers. This early speech is one of the only pieces of writing from Cohen that resembles an artist’s statement or manifesto (his letter to Jack McClelland mentioned above, written just a year before this speech, is another example, along with his 2011 acceptance speech for the Prince of Asturias Award—an annual prize given in Spain—published in The Flame [267–89]). Exiled from a community that is governed by past forms of the idea, the prophet eventually becomes the figure of that community’s union: A man must be very alone, Cohen writes near the end of his notes,