ΠΩΣ ΑΝΑΚΑΛΥΨΕ ΤΗΝ ΥΔΡΑ Ο ΚΟΕΝ

By A. M. HOMES

He is poet and prophet, Buddhist bard “born in a suit,” a wandering Jew ever searching. A man of many generations, Leonard Cohen is still debonair, “looking like a Rat Pack rabbi.” His languorous voice grows deeper year by year as he gets us on his wavelength with recurring themes of love, religion, sex and loss.

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Roz Kelly/Michael Ochs Archives — Getty Images

Leonard Cohen, circa 1960.

Leonard Norman Cohen was born in Montreal in 1934, into an upper-middle-class Jewish family. His mother was the daughter of a Talmudic scholar, Rabbi Solomon Klonitzki-Kline, his paternal grandfather, Lyon Cohen, a leader of the Canadian Jewish community. Nathan Cohen, his father, worked in the clothing business and died when his son was 9 years old. Cohen has talked about having had a “messianic” childhood and the strong sense that he was going to do something special, that he would “grow into manhood leading other men.” He was also “well aware that he was a ­Kohen, one of a priestly caste.”

A poet in the 1950s who wrote “Let Us Compare Mythologies” (1956) and a novelist in the 1960s with “The Favorite Game” (1963) and “Beautiful Losers” (1966), Cohen became disappointed with his lack of financial success and moved to the United States to pursue a career as a singer-­songwriter. His first album, “Songs of Leonard Cohen,” was released in 1967 and now, 45 years later, Cohen has put out “Old Ideas,” his 12th studio album, while embarking on a tour that will spin him in circles around Europe and North America.

In 1969 he told The New York Times: “There is no difference between a poem and a song. Some were songs first and some were poems first and some were simultaneous. All of my writing has guitars behind it, even the novels.”

In taking on this artful dodger, Sylvie Simmons, a well-known British rock journalist and the author of biographies of Neil Young and Serge Gainsbourg, bumps up against the inherent difficulty of telling the story of a storyteller. “I’m Your Man” demonstrates that it’s hard to write about a writer whose work is so language- and phrase-specific, so intimate and distant at the same time, perpetually engaged in the dance of seduction.

One reads Simmons’s hefty volume longing for a bit more historical context or counterpoint; Cohen came of age against the backdrop of World War II, the growing sexual revolution, the advent of LSD, and so forth. But once one realizes it is unrealistic to expect the biographer to write with the same gift of voice and precision as the artist, there comes great joy. There is a familiarity to much of Simmons’s material, the sense of being on the inside, as though the reader were sitting at the table during the conversations Simmons reports, and the overall experience is of a thoughtful celebration of the artist’s life.

And, it turns out, she tells us an enormous amount that even I, a Cohen aficionado, didn’t know, including exactly how Jewish Cohen’s upbringing was — he was steeped in Judaism — and that his religious exploration included a brief period as a Scientologist. This detail illuminates the line in Cohen’s song “Famous Blue Rain Coat,” “Did you ever go clear?,” an explicit reference to Scientology that until now was always opaque to me.

It was in London in 1960 that Cohen heard about Hydra, a small Greek island, sunny, warm, a colony of writers, artists and thinkers from around the world. With his inheritance from his grandmother, Cohen bought a house there for $1,500 and began a long relationship with a now celebrated woman called Marianne (Ihlen), not to be confused with the slightly more celebrated muse Suzanne (Verdal), whom he didn’t actually bed — or the second Suzanne (Elrod), the mother of Cohen’s two children, Adam and Lorca.

In the mid-1960s in New York, Cohen met Judy Collins and played her a few songs. She immediately recorded “Dress Rehearsal Rag” and “Suzanne,” and released them on “In My Life” in 1966. A short but fruitful relationship with Joni Mitchell is echoed in Mitchell’s classic songs “Chelsea Morning” and “Rainy Night House,” the second of which makes reference to Mitchell spending the night in Cohen’s mother’s house. Listening to the song again with the knowledge of their relationship adds a newfound resonance. Simmons’s illuminations of Cohen’s artistic cross-pollination give the reader the experience of dipping into cultural ephemera — the kind of extended liner notes that all fans love.