A posthumous novella sheds light on Leonard Cohen’s earliest work

I’ve been thinking a lot about Leonard Cohen lately. For one thing, he has a new book out. For another, I’ve been watching his life as a young man unfold on television.

Cohen died in 2016, and he’s best remembered now as the debonair old cat in the hat who was giving superb concerts of his songs to worldwide audiences (including myself) well into his 70s. Back in the 1960s, he was an ambitious poet and novelist, unknown outside his native city of Montreal. He came to the Greek island of Hydra to seek seclusion, sunshine, cheap housing and a place to write.

Charmian Clift and American poet Charles Heckstall with Cohen in Hydra in October 1960.Credit: James Burke/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images

So Long Marianne, an eight-part drama series on SBS, tells the story of those Hydra years, when artists and writers were drawn to the island for their taste of untrammelled creativity in paradise. In this hedonistic atmosphere, Cohen took more than his share of wine, women and song. But the series centres on his long love affair with the beautiful Norwegian Marianne Ihlen (Thea Sofie Loch Naess), a wife and mother very disillusioned with marriage and men.

We Australians know about Hydra mainly through the lives of Sydney expat writers George Johnston and Charmian Clift (played by Noah Taylor and Anna Torv) who act here as mentors and supporters of the bohemian crowd. Cohen himself is an inspired piece of casting: Alex Wolff portrays him as a skinny, round-shouldered fellow with a deep-voiced witty charm. You can see why, as Ihlen later put it, “all the girls were panting for him”.

This is also a tale of an obsessive, depressive writer who nearly dies in the pursuit of his art. We see Cohen sitting in his jocks at his typewriter, a mad dog in the noonday sun, fuelling himself with cigarettes, wine and drugs, shouting and bashing his head on the ground when he can’t get the words out. And then his novels didn’t sell. It was only when he turned to singing and songwriting and travelled away from Hydra that he found fame, and that inevitably drew him away from long-suffering Marianne.

Alex Wolff and Thea Sofie Loch Naess in the TV series about Cohen’s life on Hydra, So Long, Marianne.Credit: Nikos Nikolopoulos

When I first came across Cohen’s songs in the 1970s, to me, he was just some guy droning on about touching your perfect body with his mind. (Much later, I became a fan.) At that time, girls I knew couldn’t get enough of his songs, and boys I knew couldn’t get enough of his novel Beautiful Losers, rumoured to be a thoroughly filthy read.

A Ballet of Lepers, the new paperback edition, sheds more light on Cohen’s early work. The title work is Cohen’s rediscovered first novel, accompanied by 16 short stories. Some readers have been disturbed by its violence. Reviewing it in the UK Guardian, Toby Litt is more benign: he finds the book “an endearingly ragbag bunch of tryouts”.

Young Leonard was certainly an extraordinary boy. When he was 13, he read a book on hypnotism and tried it out on the housekeeper. She took off her clothes.

At the same age he wrote a surprisingly accurate if romanticised picture of himself as a future writer: “raincoated, battered hat pulled low above intense eyes, a history of injustice in his heart, a face too noble for revenge, walking the night along some wet boulevard, followed by the sympathy of countless audiences … loved by two or three beautiful women who could never have him.”

Litt says that in order to become the truly heroic man we saw in those later concerts, “Cohen had first of all to win the love of those countless audiences, and then overcome his need for it”. How true.

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