Leonard Cohen: A Novel

1

Dear Leonard Cohen,

Could I ask you something, just between us? How was it that you never changed your name? You could have been Lawrence Cole. You could have been Lindsay Kohl, or Lionel Cone. Or you could have dropped your last name and been Lenny Norman. Jewish entertainers do that one all the time, drop their last name, go by their middle name. But you, no, you couldn’t do that. Sound less Jewish? Sound more like a show-biz guy? Not you, you had to be authentic, you had to sound like an accountant or a dentist. I’m joking, really, kind of. But not completely, not entirely. And now it’s a little on the late side to do anything about it, isn’t it? You see, I, too, am Leonard Cohen. And this has been a problem.

Not for the first twenty-two years of my life, it wasn’t. I’d never heard of you. I grew up in peaceful middle-class American bliss, or narcosis if you must, Ashkenazic division, in upstate New York, in Rochester, where it snows so much it’s almost like your Montreal. We were almost neighbors, if you think about it that way, which I often have. Neighbors across the great lake or up the great river. Lenny and Lenny, unknown to each other. Were you a Lenny? I was. Never a Len.

As for a middle name, I was Leonard Stuart Cohen. Leonard S. Cohen. Not that anybody knew anybody’s middle name. But it’s a sort of distinction, isn’t it? Leonard Norman Cohen versus Leonard Stuart Cohen, Leonard N. Cohen versus Leonard S.Cohen. If I’d known then what I know now, that sort of thing.

For twenty-two years my life was my own. I failed with girls, I watched my parents’ marriage dissolve, I played my guitar. It was on Hydra, my first trip to Greece, first trip anywhere really, the summer of my graduation, when I first heard of you. More on that later, but enough to say for now you were just getting started then, you’d left the island and Marianne to be back in New York to begin your assault on the heights of the musical universe. Sorry, I can’t think of a better phrase, musical universe, but anyway that’s what it was, wasn’t it? 1968. Big doings in the world. Everything on the brink, or that’s what some people thought anyway.

But for me, that summer, it all started with finding out that there was another Leonard Cohen, who played the guitar, who wrote songs, who was out there, on his way.

I’ve always hated to be embarrassed. And it was embarrassing to be the other. Someone whose life was preempted, whose life became a shadow, meet anybody, Oh, you’re Leonard Cohen? Ha-ha, a life lived in reference to another. I suppose it could be true, too, of all the Elizabeth Taylors around, there’s got to be a lot of Elizabeth Taylors, but even there the difference would be, in my opinion, that Leonard Cohen is so specific. Elizabeth Taylors, you’d expect there would be Elizabeth Taylors, it’s almost a generic name, look up the Taylors in the phone book, there’s got to be a ton more of them than Cohens, even in New York. I even looked a little like you when I was young. Dark, eyebrows, hungry. Conceivably a little mournful, from which I could break out a big smile every now and then just to keep it all off-balance. This brings me, a little anyway, to the other reason I would be writing you. I followed you sufficiently through your illustrious career to believe that you’re someone who is an aficionado of miracles. Or at least you’re willing to give them a chance, their day in court, so to speak. What temperament would be better suited than yours, the cynical and the credulous all mixed up, a willingness to suspend disbelief all the way down? Suspending disbelief, I understand people say that about books, but for people like you and me, isn’t it more about a faith that takes us by surprise? My story is what some would call a miracle. I would call it, simply, love. Me, Lenny, big shot, love.

Yours,

Leonard

2

In the early days of August the meltemi blew strong and the sea bucked the old ferry and tossed it around and on the deck of the Hellenic Maiden hippies and gypsies and the middle-aged giving it a last fling held on in the dark and spray and wiped the salt from their eyes and enough of them sang as if the ship were going down. There had been a ship go down, the Crete car ferry a couple of years before, its great doors in neglect left unlocked and flung open and that was that, but the Hellenic Maiden was doing no more than giving its customers a ride. Inside, in the classes, natives who had never absorbed the sea vomited in their chairs and the toilets overflowed, but on the soaking, sloshing deck it was a time of people’s lives. Affairs were plotted, arguments for humanity’s future were made, community was found or lost, and Leonard played his guitar.

He was hardly alone. There were others with guitars and there were harmonicas and someone with a zither sat on a stack of life rings and played Harry Lime’s theme and each of these had their followers arrayed around them so that the only order to any of it was as a cacophonous prayer, its dissonance all in all. The Maiden was running late. A few who were destined for the more distant islands unrolled their sleeping rolls and angled for sleep and the gypsies tripped over them or pricked their air mattresses with pins. Leonard played whatever those around him sang, doleful and drunk on retsina and raki and the spray, as one after another the dark humps of the islands took form out of the Aegean night, sleeping animals of the sea. Then trucks would chug onto light-strewn quays, backpackers would troop off and on like prisoners in an exchange, and finally the ferry doors would clang shut and it was off once more on the rollercoaster waves, a voyage arguably more about what they were leaving behind than what they were approaching. Leonard slipped down a Dramamine. Others pawed the air and an American couple spontaneously remembered old Kingston Trio lyrics, as if more innocent times implausibly loomed. It was past midnight when he counted down the ferry’s calls and knew that S. was next. There wasn’t a harbor dredged for the ferries on S. so a caique came out to get them and people tumbled into the caique with their backpacks first and last so that what was created was a heap of humanity in the bottom of a leaky boat plus Leonard’s guitar which he held with an arm stretched stiff over his head as if the guitar would be the last to drown. They reached the port at three and he found a beach just past where the caique beached and slept what was left of the night.

In the morning he washed his face in the sea and picked up the bits of canvas and clothing he had slept on and wandered into the town and the first café he found with a working toilet he put his pack and his guitar down. It was on S. that he was to meet his friends in five days’ time because the friends had heard there were Danish girls to be found here, but there were no Danish girls around and it was eight o’clock and the sun was beating down. Leonard considered especially the chance his friends had been mistaken in choosing S. He drank his coffee sweet and rubbed his eyes and was oracular with himself when there was no one to contradict him. Then he wandered off. It was a Cycladic town that hugged its port in an old embrace, a town of refuge anciently Christian and white, as if guaranteeing itself with a show of modesty. No gaudy umbrellas defaced the modest esplanade nor gun emplacements the kástro and Leonard climbed the whitewashed steps and ducked through the urinous alleys and then he descended onto a single row of shops, a butcher, a dry goods shop, a place for bicycle tires and hardware, a grocery, a kiosk, a storefront where it was hard to tell what was on offer as there was nothing in the window but a cat, and at the narrow corner where the commercial strip angled back to the esplanade, at the terminus of this row of enterprise, a building that looked squeezed and punished, so stuffed on its narrow lot that having a door to enter allowed scarcely width for a selling window at all, which, straightened as it was, displayed little more than maps of the island, blank airmail notebooks, and a spray of Pelican Shakespeares. On the door hung a handprinted sign on a string, ‘English Bookstore’, and he went in.

It was a shop that felt as if it had shriveled and dried in the sun and it was comfortingly dark and hard to move in the aisles, so he left his pack and his guitar by the desk. The girl at the desk nodded and kept to herself, adding figures on an ancient adding machine. Leonard felt enwombed, as if he had found a familiar place. He made his way through the Pelicans and Penguins and guidebooks to the stacks of Durrell and Henry Miller, in that year 1968 the explainers of place and spirit to the arrivals from the north with their power and melancholy and money, then after these there was a box of records and he stopped to browse. He was the shop’s only customer, he could have been the first of the day, it wasn’t yet nine-thirty, or in desolate counterpoint it was even conceivable that the shop never had any other customers at all, it was all an arrangement awaiting the likes of himself. The girl got off her stool and went down an aisle. There seemed only enough air in the place for the two of them. He became more aware of her, her dark sweep of hair, her heavy figure, her peasant blouse, she could have been twenty years old, she looked briefly his way and disappeared behind an old-fashioned door of pebbled glass in a wooden frame, so that he first imagined it must lead to a storeroom with perhaps a toilet at the back of it, but then, on account of the pebbled glass, that it might instead go to some sort of living space, a mom-and-pop operation, in this tiny building all of it contained. The records in the box were mostly Greek, Hadjidakis, Theodorakis, lefties defiant in this the evil time of the colonels’ coup, but in there too he had found Leonard Cohen’s first album, and he stared at the cover as