“I’m Your Man” by Sylvie Simmons

“Trust the art, not the artist,” I’ve heard.

Leonard Cohen has been iconic to me, and I was wary about reading his biography. A friend told me he wasn’t painted in the best light, particularly where women are concerned, and I didn’t want to lose my idealized image of the man who has been my man since early college when I heard him sing “Suzanne”. Much of his music transports me to another stratosphere. Ed and I printed and framed, “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in,” from “Ring the Bells” and placed it on our dresser. We often quote it to each other.

 Wary or not, I was intrigued enough to dive into I’M YOUR MAN, and stayed engaged enough to finish. Music journalist and rock historian Sylvie Simmons did her homework, and in my grading system, gets an A minus, the “minus” because I wish she’d condensed a bit more.

I’M YOUR MAN follows Cohen’s life with intricate detail on his travels, his family, his friends, his lovers, his spiritual practices, and the excruciating processes he went through to produce his poetry and his music. I’m sure this will delight information lovers, though it wore thin with me. But within each barrage of information, Simmons includes somebody, Janis Joplin maybe, or Phil Spector, or Roger McGuinn, with whom I’m familiar and that kept me reading. And I learned the meaning of “Did you ever go clear?”, something I’ve wondered about since the first time I heard “Famous Blue Raincoat”.

Leonard Cohen was a brilliant, charming, tormented, complex mess. A spiritual seeker plagued with bouts of deep depression, his artistic quest drove him hard as he searched for the words, the music, the instrumentation, the production, to present his deepest knowings to the world as right and true. A consummate artist in that he could not stop creating nor stop trying to improve his creations, he turned the deep depression in his psyche into diamonds in his poetry and his music.

I was tempted to go into therapist mode as I read about Cohen, especially his relationship with his mother and his subsequent relationships with women. “It felt good to be alone. It felt bad to be alone,” Simmons describes the push-pull in Cohen’s affairs and marriages. Instead, I reacted to Cohen much like a panel of Swiss therapists reacted to David Helgrot, the Australian pianist in the documentary “Hello, I am David”. They were fascinated with and would not diagnose David. He was too unique, too brilliant, too “different” to pigeonhole. Like Leonard Cohen.

I finished the book knowing tons more about Cohen’s life, and yet didn’t feel even close to fully knowing him. I think that’s how he felt about himself. Simmons describes his struggle as “complete perfectionism related to a craving for complete authenticity”. The combination produced phenomenal art, while the artist remains enigmatic.

New York Post reviewer Ira Glass said, “If ever there was an award for emotional laureate of the pop world, L. Cohen would be the uncontested winner.” Simmons’ account of Cohen’s life led me to agree.

By the end of the book, I no longer idealized Leonard Cohen. But I trust that he was as fully himself as he could possibly be. And I now want to listen to everything he ever recorded. And he is still my man.

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