Crying and laughing about it all

For many biographers of popular musicians, the obvious problem is that the only interesting bit comes when your subjects are in their brief creative pomp. For Sylvie Simmons, the situation is rather different — and not just because Leonard Cohen has been somewhere near his pomp for nearly 50 years. The real trouble is that every other aspect of his life is fascinating too.

To do the man justice, you first need to know about the wealthier parts of Jewish Montreal in the 1930s, where the new-born Cohen arrived home from hospital in a chauffeur-driven car. There’s also the fact that he didn’t become a working musician until he was 33, having first been a respected poet and novelist, who smoked French cigarettes with the best of them, among the artists and drifters of two continents. Along the way, his unashamed interest in spirituality has led from synagogue to Scientology, bohemianism to Buddhism — often at the same time.

And then of course, there’s all his women. No wonder that at one point Simmons somewhat exasperatedly quotes Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: ‘A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousands.’

Happily, Simmons — a music journalist of impeccable pedigree — triumphantly rises to all challenges. Certainly, the depth of her research can’t be faulted. She seems to have spoken to almost everybody who’s ever met Cohen, as well as to the man himself — and in one typical passage tells us not merely the name of his boyhood dog (Tinkie) but the name’s history. (‘His mother had originally given it the more dignified name of Tovarich, the Russian word for “ally”, but it was vetoed by his father’).