Famous Blue Joyce – An Irishman’s Diary on Leonard Cohen’s debt to Dublin

The late singer’s work was peppered with Joycean imagery and references

Leonard Cohen  in Dublin in 2009.  Photograph: Dave Meehan
Leonard Cohen in Dublin in 2009. Photograph: Dave Meehan

Listening to Leonard Cohen's Famous Blue Raincoat yet again over the weekend, I was struck for the first time by the song's similarity, at least in theme, with James Joyce's The Dead.

They’re both set at Christmas, share bad weather as a sub-plot, and their chief protagonists have both lost their women to another man, even though in each case, she’s still physically present.

In Joyce's story, the love rival is in a west-of-Ireland cemetery (his demise having been hastened by lack of a raincoat).

In Cohen’s song, the rival is not dead, exactly, although he’s also out west somewhere, “deep in the desert”, and removed from the world: “You’re living for nothing now . . . ”

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And of course the formats are very different. Famous Blue Raincoat is a masterpiece of compressed narrative, with a life-changing experience and the resultant jealousy, grief, and acceptance all packed into a handful of verses. The Dead, by contrast, stretches the definition of a short story, to about 50 pages.

Cohen’s devotion to another Irish writer, Yeats, is well known; to Joyce not so much.

But sure enough, a trawl through the archives found him acknowledging The Dead's "decisive" influence. This was all the more impressive because he seemed not to remember the story's title, only that it had a passage about snow being general all over Ireland.

In the same interview, he also cited a scene from Portrait of the Artist, about "a woman with seaweed on her thigh".

And he mentioned a passage from the Book of Samuel in which David sees Bathsheba bathing on a roof (an image referenced in another of his classic songs, Hallelujah).

Then, having given Joyce influence two mentions to the Bible’s one, he joked of their haunting effect: “There are three or four scenes like that that destroyed my life”.

The Joycean inheritance didn’t go completely unnoticed by critics. Before he became a songwriter, Cohen was a novelist.

And of his 1966 book, Beautiful Losers, one review commented: "James Joyce is not dead. He is living in Montreal under the name of Cohen."

Alas, this was not true, even figuratively. Beautiful Losers was its author's second and last novel. After that, he emulated Joyce in reverse, by giving up prose for a singing career.

Having died physically when Cohen was only six, meanwhile, Joyce was never in a position to return the compliments. But he did include two characters called "Cohen" in Ulysses (about which epic, the songwriter appears to have been silent).

Indeed, as detailed in Vivien Igoe's recent book The Real People of Joyce's Ulysses, both figures were historical, although it might be too much to hope they had relatives in Montreal.

The more notorious one was Ellen "Bella" Cohen, born in Gloucester circa 1850, but by 1904 running a brothel in Dublin's Monto. Described by Joyce as "a massive whoremistress", she intimidates Leopold Bloom, while also inspiring in him a fantasy in which both change genders and engage in activities that could not be described in a Leonard Cohen song, never mind a family newspaper.

It was perhaps just as well for everyone involved that the real-life Bella was no longer around by the time Ulysses appeared. According to Igoe, she had "either died or retired by 1905".

The book’s other Cohen, by contrast, lived until 1932, although he was already being called “Old Cohen” in 1904.

In real life, he was David Abraham Cohen, a Gibraltar shopkeeper. But he features in Ulysses as the former owner of the book's most important piece of furniture, Molly Bloom's bed.

The fictional Molly had been born in Gibraltar, where her father was an officer. He bought the bed from Cohen and later passed it to Molly as a dowry. In between, she had been conceived in it.

And rather more recently, on the day Ulysses takes place, she has entertained her adulterous lover there, as her husband knows.

Like the “lumpy old jingly bed” itself, the Blooms’ marriage does not run smooth.

There is deceit even in the bed’s origins, since Molly tells us that Leopold thinks her father bought it from “Lord Napier”, an idea that falters him.

Molly also knows where her husband has just been – her soliloquy even mentions Bella. But despite all this, the day and book end with the Blooms together-apart in “Old Cohen’s bed”.

And whether he ever knew of it, I don’t know. But as a man who spent his life writing about love and lust and sexual politics, another Old Cohen would have enjoyed the joke.