“Scaling the Mountain” by Julian Cox
Leonard Cohen was to the manor born. His family name—a variant of Kohen—translates as “high priest” in Hebrew, and his first name, Eliezer/Leonard, carefully chosen by his Jewish parents, means “God is my helper.” The second child and first son born into a well-to-do family of rabbis, Talmudic scholars, and businessmen in Westmount, Montreal, Cohen was a kohen shaped by a compelling and convincing sense of destiny.¹ He would become someone and be sure to make a mark. From a young age he possessed a clear notion of his singular gifts, even if he persistently struggled to reconcile his bourgeois background with the vicissitudes of his artistic sensibility. As he evolved into a poet, songwriter, and charismatic troubadour, he presented a transparently unvarnished but deeply authentic persona—suave and urbane, and was gifted with a gravitas that transfixed his audience in public and private settings. Cohen was intentional in everything he did and a skilled navigator. He was purposeful about leaving a posthumous road map in the form of an archive. It was all part of the plan.
Cohen’s instinct to gather and preserve—to assiduously assemble an archive—ran in parallel to his practice as a writer. He typically had a notebook, letter pad, or sheaf of papers on his person at all times, and he would often revisit the same quatrain, elastically revising the language until arriving at a point where the meaning or expression was right (fig. 1). At his neighbourhood synagogue, Shaar Hashomayim, a short walk across the park and down the hill from his childhood home, he imbibed the power of language, and its capacity to inspire and transport. He developed a love of language and reverence for Jewish religious symbolism and took them with him into his undergraduate studies at McGill University, where he emerged as a leader on the debate team. Here he first learned how to perform for an audience and take on multiple guises, gaining important insight into the art of self-portrayal. His comfortable upper-middle-class upbringing enfolded him in a cloak of confidence—that he would be a success was never in doubt. Mostly, the question was when, how, and in what profession.
Cohen’s ascent was sharp, such that by the beginning of his third decade he was the subject of a documentary film, Ladies and Gentlemen . . . Mr. Leonard Cohen, created in 1965 for the National Film Board of Canada. The film profiles an artist on the rise and is inflected by Cohen’s mildly absurdist and self-deprecating humour. One biographer, Sylvie Simmons, aptly describes Ladies and Gentlemen as “less a portrait of a serious literary figure than of a pop/rock celebrity in training.”² Toward the end of the film, we see Cohen at his ironic best: sitting in a bathtub, he writes the words “caveat emptor,” on the bathroom wall in a black marker—essentially sending the warning “let the buyer beware,” and don’t believe everything you see just because it is in a documentary. As portrayed in the film, Cohen’s identity floats between bourgeois and bohemian. It is acutely apparent that he can embrace the mainstream and the counterculture with equal ease. An increasingly recognizable public figure, Cohen embodied these enigmatic tensions and strategically exploited them in his work as a writer and later as a singer-songwriter.
Ladies and Gentlemen features a carefully narrated voiceover by the film’s co-director, Donald Brittain, which includes the statement: “Cohen collects his letters and makes certain he is heavily photographed. He does this simply because he feels he is becoming an important writer and that such material will someday be of value.”³ This conviction had already taken an explicit turn, through an initial sale of Cohen’s papers to the University of Toronto in 1964. The vendor, Laurie Hill Limited, Montreal, described the offering as “a collection of the notebooks, journals, draft and final manuscripts, letters and first editions of this brilliant young Canadian writer. . . . The material in this collection not only covers Mr. Cohen’s writing up to the present time but is rich in biographical material of inestimable future value.”⁴ Although additional tranches of material were transferred to the University of Toronto over the years,⁵ Cohen held back the majority of his archive for his own use and reflection. It was primarily assembled at his home and business office in Los Angeles, and then transferred to the Leonard Cohen Family Trust for safekeeping after his death in 2016.
The archive as it now stands amounts to hundreds of photographs; prints and drawings; notebooks; voluminous quantities of personal and business correspondence; fan mail; musical instruments; touring merchandise; and Cohen’s personal library. It provides rich glimpses into Cohen’s multiple lairs—Montreal, Hydra, New York, Nashville, Mt. Baldy, and Los Angeles—and reveals the tremendous network of colleagues and fellow artists who were integral to the formation of Cohen’s public identity and reputation. However, only a fraction of this material has hitherto been made available to scholars and researchers, and it has not been shown publicly. The exhibition and catalogue Leonard Cohen: Everybody Knows present to audiences for the first time a selection of objects, papers, and artifacts drawn from this archive. They surface an array of materials that provide fresh insight into the arc of Cohen’s protean creative pursuits over six decades.
Cohen needed solitude but at the same time craved attention. Making photographs responded to both impulses, and he took to working with a Polaroid Swinger Model 20 Land Camera beginning in the fall of 1967.⁶ This apparatus was portable and easy to use, its compact roll film accommodating eight exposures and generating prints that fit comfortably in the palm of the hand. The set-up of camera and film allowed the operator to explore an incremental and sustained attention to a specific subject. Its use could be intensely private, an advantage that allowed Cohen to be very deliberate about each picture. The development time for each exposure was so brisk that the results were at once immediate and indelible. The camera ejected the type 20 film with the positive and negative sandwiched together and, after about fifteen seconds, the user peeled them apart. To do this well required concentration and exactitude.
A journal entry accompanying one self-portrait from 1968 (fig. 2) informs us that Cohen was not always a successful operator: “White scratches in the hair indicate technical incompetence with Polaroid Land Swinger Model 20.” We know that he was persistent, because in the same notebook that Cohen used during visits to New York and Nashville between 1967 and 1969, it is apparent that photography and writing were integral to his daily regimen and practised symbiotically as forms of self-expression.
When on the road, Cohen would set up a worktable in his hotel room to serve as the anchor for his creative pursuits. His notebook records an entry on January 9, 1969, in room 217 of the Chelsea Hotel, New York City, next to a snapshot of his desk and typewriter with a note that reads: “a rare and much-loved work table in the life of the author.” Another talismanic photograph, this from his room at the Noelle Hotel, Nashville, shows a harvest of Polaroids from a session of intensive shooting (fig. 3). Here we see the self-contained activity of the artist-writer in retreat. More than twenty Polaroids are scattered across the table, suggesting the extent of Cohen’s preoccupation with recording and image-making. A big part of this was his obsession with self-care and body image (a lifelong fixation), continually focused on a distillation of his corporeal and spiritual landscape towards its essence. A pair of close-up self-portrait views of his torso (fig. 4) is accompanied by the inscription: “Still wake up dead but body improving with daily exercise; morning somewhat tolerable with devotion to this book.”
This attention to ritual and the observance of daily habits was in part shaped by Cohen’s multi-faith perspective. He was first and foremost Jewish but sought wisdom, solace, and companionship in a multitude of spiritual teachings. Cohen’s yearning for ascetic growth and curiosity for new ways of experiencing the world played out in his exploration of the I Ching, Christianity, especially Catholicism, Scientology, Zen Buddhism, and Hinduism. He drew inspiration from each as sources for his writing and performing; he accompanied many of his later self-portraits with stamps of two symbols that reflect the breadth of his spiritual ideals (fig. 5). The first stamp represents the Order of the Unified Heart, signifying love, harmony, and faith in humanity through a design that alludes to the Star of David but with softened edges and two interwoven hearts. It is welcoming to all. The second stamp is a Chinese aphorism presented in two aspects: the left side signifying the ego, the self, and the “I”; and the right side standing for the good-natured, fair-minded character. The stamps—which he used widely, incorporating them in his later prints and publications—reflect Cohen’s hope for a lasting humanity and deftly meld his present concerns with traditions from the past.⁸
Repeatedly throughout his career as a recording artist, Cohen incorporated photographs from his archive as elements of the artwork for his albums and printed publications. He did so with great intentionality, understanding the totemic power of photography and its utility as a representational tool. One of Suzanne Elrod’s photographs of Cohen (fig. 6), made during a trip to Acapulco in 1971, was deployed on the back cover of his collection of poems The Energy of Slaves (1972) and on the front cover of Leonard Cohen: Live Songs (1973). Meanwhile, his lifelong interest in drawing was mostly kept private until 2007, when a trio of exhibitions shared examples of his work in a variety of media—napkin doodles, pastels, watercolours, charcoal sketches, and digital images produced by drawing on a computer tablet.⁹ Although he had no desire to seek recognition for being a visual artist, nor to be remembered as one, the profusion of drawings and sketches in his archive affirms the centrality of visual art to his creative pursuits. Cohen’s artwork was employed robustly in Book of Longing (2006) and posthumously in The Flame: Poems and Selections from Notebooks (2018).
As part of his process of artistic discovery, Cohen preserved all his work in its various stages. He revised his writing obsessively, fine-tuning a verse or a sentence until its shape satisfied. Cohen himself positioned his archive as being “at the very center of the thing. I see the work floating on the material. [The published songs or poems are] just the Beacon, the designation—somehow the signal for the investigation of the entire work. . . . The archive is the mountain, and the published work the volcano.”¹⁰ In its depth and breadth, the archive shows the many roads taken, revealing more of the journey than the destination. Unmistakably, it demonstrates Cohen’s tireless will to create. He may not have considered his life’s expedition as prospecting for gold, but he delivered it anyway.
“Scaling the Mountain” by Julian Cox, Leonard Cohen: Everybody Knows, Inside His Archive, edited by Julian Cox and Jim Shedden, 2022, pp. 9-13.
