`I don't give a damn about the truth except the naked truth." Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for the comeback of all comebacks: Leonard Cohen, the poet of delicate, erotic despair, has cast aside his Zen Buddhist robes and come down from the mountain-top (or, to be precise, Mount Baldy Zen Centre, 80 kilometres south of Los Angeles, 2,000 metres above sea level).
His departure was made official in June 2000, but it wasn't until January of this year that, through an intermediary, Cohen - who had been living in the centre for almost five years as a monk - swapped his loose, utilitarian robes for an Armani suit. He was known in the centre, perhaps not surprisingly, as "the silent one" (the translation of the dharma name, Jikan).
He would rise at 3 a.m. to sip scented tea in solitude, study, chant, meditate, do menial tasks, cook and serve as a secretary for 92-year-old Joshu Sasaki Roshi, the leader of Rinzai, the most exacting branch of Zen. Right now, the silent one is travelling through Greece, Asia and India, overseeing a new studio album (his first since 1992's The Future) and working on a volume of (he says) amusing poems, to be titled The Book Of Longing.
"Religion is my favourite hobby," Cohen informed Florence newspaper La Nazione late last year. "It's deep and voluptuous. Nothing is comparable to the delight you get from this activity. Apart, obviously, from courting."
Leonard Cohen, once described as "a Lothario of insatiable stamina" and a onetime member of the Israeli army, is 67 years old. For close on five decades (give or take five years of strategically placed absences), he has been in our collective face. He's been through some bad times, notably when his work was derided as the equivalent of having your wrists slit. Yet despite the sarky headlines through the years, Cohen's apparent only fault has been to suffer from what one of his biographers, Ira Nadel, describes as "Tibetan desire". It's a phrase that surfaces in Cohen's 1966 novel, Beautiful Losers, and represents the conflict between yearning and renunciation and the difficulty in separating one from the other. When you really think about it, all the topics that Cohen has investigated (cruelty, desire, God, war, love, lust, religion, deceit, sex, Buddha, prayer, pretty much everything between the sacred and the profane) have been written about with scalpel-thin exactitude, style and a sense of humour sadly overlooked by public perception.
Born in Montreal, Canada in 1934, in the upper-middle-class area of Westmount, he discovered at the age of 15 a volume of poetry by Federico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet and dramatist who was murdered by Nationalist partisans after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. During the 1950s, inspired by Lorca, he emerged as part of Montreal's bohemian literary set, led by poets and teachers such as Irving Layton, Louis Dudek and A.M. Klein. Performing in poetry readings at various jazz lounges, he was soon part of the city's small but confident poetry scene. He has said that each time the poets met, they felt it was a landmark in the history of thinking, let alone poetry.
"We had a very exalted view of things, but a humorous view, too," he told Q magazine in 1991. "We had a good time; it wasn't anguished. Being called a poet is not very attractive - it's like being called a hippy - but a few of us were on fire, and we'd write for each other and any girl that would listen."
Poetry collections (Let Us Compare Mythologies, The Spice-Box Of Earth, Flowers For Hitler) were followed by novels such as The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers; and these in turn were followed by a singing career. In 1967, his debut album, the bleak and introspective Songs Of Leonard Cohen, appeared in the midst of psychedelia. It was, perhaps, the perfect example of the struggling artist being just that, with no business agenda or strategy laid out for a rosy future. While the rest of the First World was getting stoned and experimenting with studio trickery, Cohen was singing about guilt and incarceration and being a heterosexual man in the wrong hotel rooms with the wrong women. His financial circumstances weren't the best, either. For some years he'd been travelling between Montreal and the Greek island of Hydra, an idyllic retreat that crumbled around him in the 1970s when, he said, "everything had gotten hard-nosed and materialistic".
Eventually, the records stopped selling in sufficient numbers, and by the time the 1980s arrived, Cohen, who, despite his intelligence, had signed over the publishing rights to some of his most successful songs, was virtually bankrupt.
Perhaps the lowest point came with the scarcely prophetic Death Of A Ladies Man in 1977. Suffering from the pain of having a dying mother and a dissolving relationship with the mother of his children (son Adam and daughter Lorca), Cohen got locked into a dissipated partnership with record producer Phil Spector, involving liberal amounts of drink, drugs and guns. One night during the recording of the album, Spector, a gun in one hand and a bottle of booze in the other, stumbled over to Cohen. He locked his arm around Cohen's neck and, cocking the trigger of the gun, said: "Leonard, I love you, man." Cohen croaked back: "I sure hope you do, Phil." Universally lambasted, Cohen has since disowned the album, but his lesson was learnt, as it spurred him on to write music more melodic, inventive and edgy.
By the end of the 1980s, his career had picked up. Former backing singer Jennifer Warnes recorded an entire album of his songs, Famous Blue Raincoat, which became an international success. In albums such as Various Positions, I'm Your Man and The Future, a sensual sleekness became apparent in Cohen's music as he played the microphone like an early Sinatra and instigated a charm attack. Tribute albums such as Tower Of Song and I'm Your Fan introduced Cohen to a whole new generation through covers of his songs by U2, The Pixies, Echo and The Bunnymen, John Cale, Nick Cave, Fatima Mansions and REM. The world and women were once more at his fingertips, yet following 1992's The Future, he retreated yet again. In the 1960s, it was Hydra; 30 years later, it was Zen Buddhism.
"People are always inviting me to return to a former purity I was never able to claim," he remarked at the time. In 1993, he published another anthology of poetry, Stranger Music. It contained poems, noted one reviewer, that "inebriate with the aim of temperance. They are a fragrant accompaniment of the slide from the holy to the unholy - perfumed exercises in the art of sinking".
But now Leonard Cohen has resurfaced, possibly aiming to take his rightful place among near-contemporaries such as Neil Young, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, perhaps the only three singer/songwriters from the 1960s who can match Cohen's output in terms of scabrous confession and exquisite emotional distraction. A new live album overseen by him, Field Commander Cohen, has just been released, but it's the new studio recordings that many thousands are waiting for. They might just be the answer to one of the questions of our time: how can celebrities survive their own fame and preserve a hint of dignity? His imminent new book of poetry just might hold the key. "The Book Of Longing," he told the Los Angeles Times towards the close of last year, "is me writing about a longing for the future. But my monk's name is Jikan, the silent one. I'm sure that silence, sooner or later, will arrive."
Field Commander Cohen: Tour of 1979 (Columbia) is currently on release.