SAMUEL BECKETT famously declared that he would "neither help nor hinder" Deirdre Bair in her biographical endeavours. Somewhat more positively, Leonard Cohen has stated that Ira B. Nadel's account of his life is "benignly tolerated" by him. He mustn't have read it.
Nor must he have read Leonard Cohen: A Life in Art, a wretchedly produced, poorly researched and badly written effort published by Robson Books in 1995 and written by none other than Ira Nadel. At that time, according to the Robson dust jacket, the author was a teacher in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia; the Bloomsbury book tells us that he's now Professor of English there.
His elevation to professorial status has done nothing for his biographical or writing skills, this book being merely an extended revamping of the earlier adoring work. What is it about academics that they can fix a beady, analytical eye on poets, playwrights and novelists down through the centuries but lose all control of their critical rigour when confronted by current celebrity? Thus you get the spectacle of Christopher Ricks absurdly over praising Bob Dylan, Hans Keller making daft claims for the Beatles, and Camille Paglia seeing in Madonna more than Madonna has ever warranted.
And so with Professor Nadel, whose gushing approach to his subject is of the fanzine school, replete with superlatives and with a Hello style mania for the trivia of a celebrity life. This is a pity because Cohen, far from being a negligible talent, is the author of two interesting novels, a poet of some stature, a superior songwriter and an arresting singer.
He's best known, of course, in the last two capacities, where his work has been striking. It was fashionable in the Seventies and Eighties to deride Cohen as a dreary prophet of doom, but that was to miss the point of his best songs of that period, which were not just fastidiously crafted but also had an ironic elegance - at times, indeed, a playfulness - that lent them an aesthetic justification all their own.
Now, suddenly, Cohen is popular in a way that he had never been since the Sixties, and while both I'm Your Man (1988) and The Future (1992) have been overpraised, they exhibit the same essential strengths as his finest earlier work, while extending and deepening his range - songs like "Everybody Knows" and "Waiting for the Miracle" find him both broadening and fine tuning his persona, while also evincing a mordant wit.
Professor Nadel isn't much interested in such matters or in wondering, except in the most superficial manner, how the songs might relate to the life. Thus, while we learn who Suzanne and Marianne actually were, we don't learn anything interesting about them or what they might have meant to Cohen or to his work. And though we're told where he purchased the famous blue rain boat that gave the title to one of his best songs (apparently it was a Burberry with epaulets and he acquired it in London when he emigrated there from Montreal in 1959), there's no insight into the circumstances or theme of the song itself.
But if Professor Nadel doesn't bother with such considerations, he's even more cavalier when it comes to facts. Joni Mitchell, not Judy Collins, wrote "Both Sides Now"; given Yeats's distaste for public houses, it's unlikely that Cohen spent a brief sojourn in Dublin "visiting the Abbey Theatre and the pubs that Yeats had frequented"; I don't think that in the Greek island of Hydra he met "Irish poet Paul Desmond" (Desmond O'Grady, perhaps? Certainly not Dave Brubeck's alto sax player); the mood of Songs from a Room can hardly be described as both "fragile, gentle" and, five paragraphs later, "grim, hard"; and anyone chronicling the poor critical reception given to Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs Miller, to which Cohen contributed the soundtrack should be aware that both the movie and the score were extravagantly praised in a famous review by Pauline Kael.
However, not a lot can be expected from a biographer who seems to think that "Seems So Long Ago, Nancy" was first featured on Live Songs (1973) when, gas everyone else knows, it's on Songs from a Room, released four years earlier. {CORRECTION} 97011800045
