Twists and turns of a troubadour’s tale
THERE are many clues to the Grocer of Despair’s personality in Sylvie Simmons’s fascinating 500-page biography, I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen. The troubadour was born into a wealthy Jewish household in Montreal in 1934, good fortune which shaped him in several ways, not least his impeccable dress sense and good manners. It was his father’s death at nine years of age, however, which had the most profound effect on him.
“He said publicly before that he didn’t cry when his father died,” says Simmons. “It maybe is cold, that it didn’t seem to affect him, but it did. His first piece of writing, apparently, he folded up and put into one of his father’s bow-ties and buried it in a secret ceremony in the garden, so there’s some kind of strange significance there if you like in his writing life, but more pertinently his mum doted on him. He was the only son, though he had one sister. So he was in a house of women. He loved women; women loved him.
