LEONARD COHEN 2

Women play a huge role in Cohen’s life — his need for female affection, along with his difficulty in remaining involved, is the stuff of legend. The biography features some brilliant passages on marriage, Buddhism, therapy and Cohen’s book “Death of a Ladies Man” (1978). In later years, Cohen has frequently quoted a line from his poem “Titles,” which was part of a collection, “Book of Longing”: “My reputation as a ladies’ man was a joke / that caused me to laugh bitterly / through the ten thousand nights / I spent alone.” In the mid-1990s a Swedish interviewer asked Cohen about love. “I had wonderful love, but I did not give back wonderful love,” he said. “I was unable to reply to their love. Because I was obsessed with some fictional sense of separation, I couldn’t touch the thing that was offered me, and it was offered me everywhere.”

Other surprises: Cohen’s decision to add stops at mental hospitals to his 1970 European tour, akin to what Johnny Cash did with prisons; and his persistent experience of war. Cohen was in Cuba at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, and in 1973 he traveled to Jerusalem to sign up on the Israeli side in the Yom Kippur War. He was assigned to a U.S.O.-style entertainer tour in the Sinai Desert and performed for the troops up to eight times a day.

In 1993, Cohen retreated to the Mt. Baldy Zen Center near Los Angeles and in 1996, three years into his stay, he was ordained a Zen Buddhist monk, taking the Dharma name Jikan, meaning a kind of silence. Cohen spent five years at Mt. Baldy, most of it working as the assistant and chauffeur to the Zen master Joshu Sasaki Roshi.

By 2004 Cohen had come down from the mountain and was living in Montreal when, Simmons tells us, he discovered that while he was gone, Kelley Lynch, his business manager and friend, had stolen almost all of his money. Cohen ultimately got a judgment against Lynch, but most of the money could not be recovered. He was broke and forced back on the road, only to find that his fan base had continued to grow and that he’d gone from being a cult hero to an icon, especially in the United States, where there are now multiple generations of Leonard Cohen fans. With his children grown and with children of their own (Cohen became a grandfather for the second time in 2011, when his daughter, Lorca, had a child with the singer ­Rufus Wainwright), it seems that Cohen is ­finally able to allow the love in.

Simmons has deftly narrated Cohen’s evolution, bringing the past into the present and reminding us of the breadth of the journey. “I’m Your Man” is an exhaustive biography, an illumination of an artist who has repeatedly said he’s not much of a self-examiner. Among the book’s side effects is that it sends you back to the source material; as you’re reading, you find yourself craving Cohen’s music in the background. In her interview excerpts, Simmons captures the elliptical nature of ­Cohen’s speech, the wry turns of phrase that are almost like stand-up comedy. Behind it all are a smirk and a wink; you know that Cohen knows how absurd it all is.

And in the end, this biography has the oddest effect: as soon as you finish reading it you feel an overwhelming impulse to go back and begin again, revisiting the story with what you’ve learned along the way. As Leonard Cohen sings in “Anthem”: “Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.
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