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“Afterword: Leonard’s Masterwork” by Robert Kory

During the last decade of Leonard’s life, I had the privilege and honour as his manager to assist him in realizing a final artistic dream. He had long been recognized as a poet, novelist, and songwriter of the first rank, but recognition as a performing artist had eluded him. That changed with his world tour of 2008 to 2013, which ranks as the most significant artist comeback of all time; and with his studio albums, Old Ideas, Popular Problems, and You Want It Darker, which all achieved number-one status in at least ten countries. No longer was Leonard a cult artist who filled small theaters; he became a worldwide icon who played in stadiums, with reviewer after reviewer nightly proclaiming their Leonard Cohen concert the best they had ever experienced.

When, in 2016, Leonard asked me to serve as the trustee of the Leonard Cohen Family Trust to manage his estate after he died, I accepted the role with little understanding of what lay ahead and with no expectation that Leonard would pass away later that year. In my role as manager while Leonard was alive, my focus was entirely on supporting his needs as a performing artist and in creating new work. That meant his focusing completely on the present and my assisting Leonard in avoiding entanglements of the past. He thrived creatively in a solitary environment, free from the obligations of friendship and custom, and fully present to a performing group that became a “musical family” with the mission of moving audiences every night as only Leonard knew he could. For me, the intense focus on his present performing and creative efforts came at the expense of gaining any understanding of Leonard’s past. There was no time to talk about Leonard’s then forty-year career, and he had no interest in it whatsoever.

How surprised I was, then, following Leonard’s unexpected passing in November 2016, to learn during the first year of my trusteeship that all I had assisted him to achieve during my tenure as his manager paled in comparison to his completely unknown, true masterwork: his archive. In “Famous Blue Raincoat,” Leonard implores his tormentor with the hope that “you’re keeping some kind of record.” That line, though largely unheralded, may be among Leonard’s most important. He kept a record of his life as a multi-dimensional artist—poet, novelist, songwriter, visual artist, and performer—that ranks among the most complete of any modern artist. Only after his passing did I learn that Leonard had declared to his first biographer, Ira Nadel, that his archive was his real masterwork and that the published works were merely volcanic eruptions from the mountain, not the mountain itself.

So, my final duty to Leonard has been to organize an effort to digitize the entire archive—all 550 terabytes—with the intention that it may be made available for scholarship, exhibition, and preservation for future generations. The world of Leonard Cohen is far larger than we know, and I suspect it will take scholars decades to elucidate the brilliance of his unique work. Judy Collins, who first brought Leonard’s songwriting to the public, has said his work reaches us in a place “so deep in our own spiritual development that we in turn benefit from his.” There is no finer summary of why his work is worthy now and will be for generations to come. We have scratched the surface of his masterwork with this first exhibition at the AGO, intended to introduce his archive to Canada. If the recent past is prologue, then this initial inquiry into Leonard’s archive will prove a first step in much more to come.

“Afterword: Leonard’s Masterwork” by Robert Kory, Leonard Cohen: Everybody Knows, Inside His Archive, edited by Julian Cox and Jim Shedden, 2022, p. 167.