What a man, what a man, what a life, what a 20th-century life. It's hard to imagine not enjoying a riverboat ride through the historie of Leonard Cohen, who to maybe the absolute human degree possible seems to have squared the circle in life, drinking the maximum draught of truth and beauty without failing in the priestly or burgherly roles--a surfeit of love and sex and pain and life that never goes from poignant to monstrous. I keep reading this and thinking "it's a lonely way of life, trying in that bird-on-a-wire way to be free, and ultimately it's not quite my (drunk-in-a-midnight-choir?) way, but my God is it compelling." It's also a constant exhortation to keep in touch with your own ways and needs.


Nadel's excellent biography, for its part, is filled with many insightful and diverting anecdotes, although less actual poetic criticism than I'd prefer, and if I'm not rating it a flawless success, then it maybe has more to do with the limits of the biographical form, which is hard to do except by the numbers--its nearest fictional equivalent, the bildungsroman, allows delights and departures the likes of which poor plodding biography, with its "and then this happened, and then this, and then this", has difficulty aspiring to. Various Positions also plays up the tensions and tradeoffs between the authorized and unauthorized biography--the stories, the access, and the general envelope of approval that make this function as an insider work also mean that Cohen is treated to lightly in a world that has treated him too lightly, because he was a priest and a prophet and not a rock 'n' roll ego. But even that voice that climbs the stairs and calls us by our name again and again has faltered, even the intensity that we honour in this man and causes us to forgive what in, you know, Jimmy Page was just douchery, doesn't disguise the fact that he failed a whole host of people in his life who needed him to be just a reliable man, when what he needed was to be free. That's the tradeoff.


It also doesn't disguise the fact that the sixties in general treated women, not like chattels, but like bodies first and humans only if they made that extra effort to shine--and that the route to humanity was often through the body and its efforts. It was a necessary stage, I guess, but it doesn't do to treat it with the indulgent and often prurient eye (liberal, professor, ex-cocktail party guy, wears Armani and turtlenecks?) that Nadel brings. I'm going to put this into italics, as a dictum: Except where unavoidable, use blonde and brunette as adjectives. It would have done a lot, even for sweaty-palmed scenes like the "six-foot-two blonde clad in tinfoil" outside Cohen's hotel room.


But you know, there is a new edition coming out to reflect Cohen's strange last act, the loss of his fortune and so forth, and maybe some of that language will change. I understand that Nadel was trying to sell books, and maybe in 2010 we at last don't need the girl to sell the car. And this is (lest it be forgot) an excellent survey of a life in art, and who knows which particular bit of trivia will been something to the particular reader (I always think on the bit about the women taking over and letting men go and fuck around like we do, which is pertinent and perhaps ironic in light of this review); and Nadel is especially good on the interplay between Cohen's Zen and Judaism. I enjoyed this reread. ( )

Interesting mostly because Cohen's an interesting figure; I kept wishing I had his own writing with me as I read it on the plane. Good scope, but a little disjointed, and obviously written by a fan -- lacking in a critical distance that would be nice to see. ( )