Just under four years ago, I was lucky enough to hear Leonard Cohen at Madison Square Garden nearly four decades after I first stumbled across his early recordings. Yesterday this grand old man died, not long after releasing a fine new album and, just a few months before that, writing this to Marianne Ihlen, that Marianne, as she herself lay dying:
Well Marianne, it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine. And you know that I’ve always loved you for your beauty and your wisdom, but I don’t need to say anything more about that because you know all about that. But now, I just want to wish you a very good journey. Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road.
Yes, he was a musician, and:
“Only in Canada could somebody with a voice like mine win Vocalist of the Year.”
But it was the words that seemed to matter more, even if he only saw himself, he once explained, as a “minor poet”:
I don’t think it represents a particularly modest or virtuous assessment of one’s own work to think of oneself as a minor poet. It’s not bad. I’ve loved the minor poets. I mean Herrick, a poet like Herrick, who’s not considered one of the great ornaments of the tradition, but a small gem in the crown, and I really do feel that, I feel that you know, the enormous luck I’ve had in being able to make a living, and to never have had to have written one word that I didn’t want to write, to be able to have satisfied that dictum I set for myself, which was not to work for pay, but to be paid for my work, just to be able to satisfy those standards that I set for myself has been an enormous privilege. But I don’t fool myself, I know the game I’m in, and I know the tradition I’m in. I feel very privileged to have been accepted at whatever level, and when I wrote about Hank Williams “a hundred floors above me in the tower of song”, I’m not trying to present some kind of inverse modesty. I know where Hank Williams stands in the history of popular song. Your Cheating Heart, songs like that are sublime, in his own tradition, and I feel myself a very minor writer. You know, I’ve taken a certain territory, and I’ve occupied it, and I’ve tried to maintain it and administrate it with the very best of my capacities. And I will continue to administrate this tiny territory until I’m too weak to do it. But I understand where this territory is.
And he made it his own.
There are songs—so many— that I could link to, but today, November 11, it seems right to choose something else, his reading last year of In Flanders Fields by his fellow Canadian, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae.
To say he does it justice, well, see what you think.
R.I.P., Mr. Cohen – and thank you.