The grace in Cohen’s work a map for today

JUST as the guns along the Western Front fell silent 98 years ago yesterday, their work set aside for just a short while, the Canadian poet, musician, and artist Leonard Cohen also fell silent on Armistice Day, almost a century later.

There is a symmetry in this, one that might appeal to Cohen’s wonderfully black sense of humour. He was one of our times’ great war poets in mufti. His frontlines were our emotional landscapes and the dark shadows always ready to cloud them over, our deep discomfort with the candour that lifted his work far, far above the ordinary, our sexual confusions, ambitions and ambiguities, and the celebration of the empowering/crushing need to engage with some sort of spirituality that many deny but very few escape.

That these highly moral, save-yourselves, save-each-other invocations were delivered in a voice that dripped maple syrup hiding the steel in his velvet glove. His haunting, bass purring could not really hide the snarl, the chastisement in his work. He may have seemed avuncular but he had travelled far too far, seen and heard far, far too much to pretend all was rosy in the garden. For anyone who cared to hear, he called us to account for ourselves, our actions and, probably most of all, our capacity to look away, to ignore.

The comparison between Cohen’s death, at 82, and the end of WWI may seem utterly wrongheaded but in a week when the essential themes of Cohen’s work, the warm human heartbeat of his legacy, were trampled in the mud by a tide of nasty populism, when his wisdom seemed trumped by our coarser, more afraid natures, the wonderful grace that shines through all of his work, stretching from Flowers for Hitler published in 1964 to his last album You Want It Darker just weeks ago, seems ever more redemptive and powerful. It seems undefeatable, Hallelujah. That surge of clenched-fist populism, that recapture of the public square by ideas Cohen would have regarded as barbarism — the root of both world wars — must have clouded his last days. You can almost hear him asking: “Why, oh why. Why again?”

He was acutely aware of mortality. In recent months and in poor health he asserted that “I am ready to die ... That’s about it for me.” Earlier this year, just last July, Cohen sent a beautiful last letter to his muse Marianne Ihlen as she was dying. That letter may even have surpassed the song she inspired — ‘So Long Marianne’. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine ... Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road, he wrote in what must be one of the most reassuring letters anyone facing death has got.

Always the romantic, but always unafraid of the inevitable, he seemed at ease with fate in a way that many of us are not. In a year when death overstretched hyperbole, Cohen’s death was a moment when our world was diminished, a moment when some warm colour was washed away. Unlike others who died this year, he had a long life and recognised that his work was done. And what a body of work that is. It is nearly 40 years since Cohen released Death of A Ladies’ Man but as his rich, wise legacy shows, he was much, much more.