Opinion Reading Leonard Cohen’s ‘A Ballet of Lepers’

There is a bittersweet joy in discovering an artist’s work — unpublished, unseen and unheard — after he is no longer able to create. Years before Leonard Cohen became the soundtrack for happiness, despair, love and longing for scores of people around the world — before Hallelujah and Suzanne were sung — there was a young man who wanted to write. Now, six years after his death, a book of Cohen’s thus far unpublished writings — A Ballet of Lepers — consisting of a novella and some short stories, is set to release. One of the stories, The Jukebox Heart, is available in the public domain. And in its words, fans and fanatics are searching for the genealogy of Cohen’s poetry, set to music.

Is Mariette, the woman in the story who seems to suffuse the senses even from the two dimensional page, the origin of So Long Marianne? Are the dark streets of Montreal, the men in their overcoats, the roots of the “demons that were middle class and tame” in You Want it Darker? And as the young lovers — part memory, part fantasy and a projection into the future — lie languorously, those who know the song cannot help but think that the story is a precursor to Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.

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This kind of literary forensics is, perhaps, the only tribute people can pay to artists who have given them much more than the price of admission to a museum, theatre or a CD. Tupac Shakur’s posthumous music often seems prophetic, and every time another book compiled by Christopher Tolkein — of unpublished writings of his father — came out, Lord of the Rings fans had something to obsess over. In a way, there is something more honest in a posthumous work of art than a memoir. The truth of the artist’s origins, the demons and milieu that defines them, can be uncovered and revisited. And sometimes, as with Cohen, in the prose of a musician, there is a vivid image of a genius in the making.