Ahmed Rashid
Contact me at [email protected]
11/09/2022
Did you read my new article: Is Democracy Dying in Pakistan?
http://www.ahmedrashid.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Is-Democracy-Dying-in-Pakistan.pdf
Did you read my new article: The assault on Pakistan media ahead of vote.
http://www.ahmedrashid.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/The-assault-on-Pakistan-media-ahead-of-vote-1.pdf
Did you read my new Article: A window for peace may be opening in Afghanistan.
http://www.ahmedrashid.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/A-window-for-peace-may-be-opening-in-Afghanistan.pdf
Did you read my new article: What is Behind The Eid Cease Fire with the Taliban.
http://www.ahmedrashid.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/What-Is-Behind-The-Eid-Cease-Fire-With-The-Taliban-1.pdf
Did you read my new Article: Will Pakistan mend its ways on terror?
http://www.ahmedrashid.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Will-Pakistan-mend-its-ways-on-terror.pdf
A New Dawn in Uzbekistan?
http://www.ahmedrashid.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/A-New-Dawn-in-Uzbekistan.pdf
Pakistan canât continue with this suicidal policy
http://www.ahmedrashid.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Pakistan-can%E2%80%99t-continue-with-this-suicidal-policy.pdf
Obituary: Pakistanâs bravest citizen is no more
http://www.ahmedrashid.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Obituary_Pakistans_bravest_citizen_is_no_more.pdf
Pakistan struggles while Afghanistan celebrates Trumpâs cuts.
http://www.ahmedrashid.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Pakistan-struggles-while-Afghanistan-celebrates-Trump%E2%80%99s-cuts.pdf
Militants & Military: Pakistanâs Unholy Alliance
http://www.ahmedrashid.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Militants-Military-Pakistans-Unholy-Alliance.pdf
Lenin and Sultan Galiev â The Struggle For Islam in the Bolshevik Revolution.
http://www.ahmedrashid.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/LENIN-AND-SULTAN-GALIEV-THE-STRUGGLE-FOR-ISLAM-IN-THE-BOLSHEVIK-REVOLUTION.pdf
Iran appears confident it can deal with a hostile US.
http://www.ahmedrashid.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Iran_appears_confident_it_can_deal_with_a_hostile_US.pdf
Afghanistan: What Troops Canât Fix
http://www.ahmedrashid.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Afghanistan-What-Troops-Can%E2%80%99t-Fix.pdf
24/05/2017
A panel discussion held by the Institute for Policy Reforms in Islamabad on May 19 in which Ahmed Rashid was also one of the panelists.
Moscow moves into the Afghanistan vacuum
Financial Times, The Exchange
January 13, 20017
After the Soviet Union was defeated by the Afghan mujahideen and its 10-year occupation ended in a humiliating retreat by the Red Army in 1989, Russia pulled back from the region. Now it is rebuilding its position as a battle for influence heats up.
With US policy in Afghanistan locked in a military and political stalemate, Moscow has made belligerent statements about the remaining 12,000 US and Nato forces there. Russian diplomats are cultivating Afghan politicians and wooing neighbouring states such as China, Iran and Pakistan. Most significantly, Moscow is talking to the Taliban.
The aim seems to be to undermine US policy in Afghanistan, usurp its influence in the region and even possibly foster a peace process between the Kabul regime and the Taliban .[..]..
To read the complete article, please follow the link below
Afghanistan - Articles | Ahmed Rashid
Ahmed Rahid
http://www.ahmedrashid.com/publications/afganistan/articles/
The reluctant Soviet independents
The Financial Times
27 - December, 2016Twenty-five years ago this month, the five Central Asian states were cut off from the Soviet Union and forced to stand on their own. It was a shock to their systems.In the turmoil that saw the break-up of the Union and all 15 of the Soviet republics regain their independence, the five Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan were reluctant participants.
On a freezing night in December 1991, I stood on the tarmac of Ashkhabad airport in Turkmenistan as plane after plane carrying the CA heads of state and their delegations landed. The motley Turkmen band, their fingers frozen, struck up the new national anthems as scowling presidents shook hands with their hosts.
The big story was in Moscow but although this scene was no less fascinating and historic, i was the only international correspondent monitoring the events here, from the perspective of Central Asia.
A few days earlier, on December 8 1991, Russiaâs president, Boris Yeltsin, had signed a treaty with those of Belarus and Ukraine formally disbanding the Soviet Union and creating a new Commonwealth of Independent States. Nobody had asked the CA leaders if they wanted to join. They had been abandoned by their overlord, Russia.
That night in Turkmenistan I spoke to the leaders and other officials in the government dachas. They were furious, and depressed. The particular focus of their anger was Russia, whom CA officials accused of racial and ethnic discrimination and dictatorial behaviour. Moscow, however, had seen the CA states, despite their oil, gas and agricultural wealth, as an economic burden and was eager to be free of their dependency..[..]..
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Central Asia - Articles | Ahmed Rashid
Ahmed Rahid
http://www.ahmedrashid.com/publications/central-asia/articles/
If Trump accepts the status quo, Assad will stay
THE NEWS. INTERVIEW ON SYRIA.
December 25 2016
The News on Sunday: Can we link whatever is happening in Syria today with the Arab Spring?
Ahmed Rashid: Syria was the last country to erupt in demonstrations in order to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad. There was an immediate reaction from the Assad regime to crush the demonstrations. Remember these were multi-ethnic multi-religious demonstrations â Muslims demonstrating with Christians, with Kurds. One of the centres, of course, was Aleppo itself where some of the strongest protest movements took place. And these demonstrators were not armed.
TNS: What were the demonstrators seeking â democracy?
AR: They were basically seeing the overthrow of Assad. Syria had been through a huge economic crisis for two-three years before the Arab Spring. There had been a drought; farming had collapsed and a lot of young peasants had come into the cities. These formed the backbone of the first demonstrations because they had lost their jobs, their farms. Now they were in the cities and they were not trained for any kind of job. So, you had a very severe economic crisis.
Almost immediately when the demonstrations started, there was this problem of provocative firing on the demonstrations by the secret police. .[..]..
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Middle East Interview | Ahmed Rashid
Ahmed Rahid
http://www.ahmedrashid.com/publications/middle-east/interviews/
Ruling by tweet: the experience of Pakistan
Financial Times : The Exchange.
December 14 2016
Controversy continues to erupt over President-elect Donald Trumpâs use of Twitter to convey appointments to his cabinet. He is also using social media to announce future economic and political policies and his random thoughts, including frequent attacks on individuals who criticise him.
Mr Trump is not the first leading political figure who has used and abused Twitter as a tool of governance. He could be taking a leaf out of the Pakistani elites playbook. Over the past three years the military and the civilian government in Pakistan have used Twitter relentlessly to release policy statements on issues as diverse as the war on terror, foreign policy and reaction to daily events. .[..]..
To read the complete article, please follow the link below
Pakistan Articles | Ahmed Rashid
Ahmed Rahid
http://www.ahmedrashid.com/publications/pakistan/articles/
The Lace and The Grace Remembering Leonard Cohen
Ohr HaTorah Synagogue in Mar Vista
California
December 13 2016
Lahore, December 10: To mark the international day for Human Rights, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) organized a conference entitled âno right without the right to freedom of expressionâ, at the press club of Lahore; followed by a demonstration outside the club. The speakers at the conference included Ms. Asma Jahangir, Dr. Mehdi Hassan, Mr. Ahmed Rashid, Mr. Saroop Ijaz and Mr. I.A. Rehman,
Mr. Saroop Ijaz focused on the existing legal system, which despite constitutionally providing for freedom of expression, dilutes it extraordinarily, through eight contra-provisions. He also addressed other legal anomalies and judicial ambiguity on contempt of court that serve to negate the right to freedom of expression. .[..]..
To read the complete article, please follow the link below
Pakistan Articles | Ahmed Rashid
Ahmed Rahid
http://www.ahmedrashid.com/publications/middle-east/articles/
No right of freedom of expression without the right to know! â HRCP Press release
HRCP
December 11 2016
Lahore, December 10: To mark the international day for Human Rights, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) organized a conference entitled âno right without the right to freedom of expressionâ, at the press club of Lahore; followed by a demonstration outside the club. The speakers at the conference included Ms. Asma Jahangir, Dr. Mehdi Hassan, Mr. Ahmed Rashid, Mr. Saroop Ijaz and Mr. I.A. Rehman,
Mr. Saroop Ijaz focused on the existing legal system, which despite constitutionally providing for freedom of expression, dilutes it extraordinarily, through eight contra-provisions. He also addressed other legal anomalies and judicial ambiguity on contempt of court that serve to negate the right to freedom of expression. .[..]..
To read the complete article, please follow the link below
Pakistan Articles | Ahmed Rashid
Ahmed Rahid
http://www.ahmedrashid.com/publications/pakistan/articles/
Iranâs Game in Aleppo
Ahmed Rashid
December 02 2016
Over the past few days, Syrian government forces, along with their Russian and Iranian allies, have been pounding rebel-held areas of Aleppo with the kind of destructive air power rarely seen since the bombing of Dresden. A third of the city has been held by a variety of Syrian opposition group since 2012, but they are rapidly losing ground under the onslaught, and now facing a humanitarian disaster that is shocking even by Syrian standards. On Wednesday, the UN Security Council held an emergency meeting to deal with what French Ambassador François Delattre called âone of the biggest massacres of a civilian population since World War II.â
This could be a turning point in the conflict. The fall of East Aleppo would give the regime control of the countryâs five largest cities and the critical western part of Syria where the regime .[..]..
To read the complete article, please follow the link below
Middle East Articles | Ahmed Rashid
Ahmed Rahid
http://www.ahmedrashid.com/publications/middle-east/articles/
General Bajwa: Pakistan's new most influential man has two big tasks
Ahmed Rashid
November 27 2016
The appointment of Pakistan's new army chief, announced on Saturday night by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, had been awaited with extraordinary interest and nervousness by politicians and the public alike. The army is the most powerful institution in the country and its chief is the most influential figure in the country.
Ultimately the appointments of General Qamar Javed Bajwa as the new army chief and General Zubair Mahmood Hayat as Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Committee were carried out according to seniority, and with a welcome absence of politicking.
By being the first army chief to step down on schedule in the past two weeks, General Raheel Sharif had in fact set the tone for the smoothest transfer of military power in decades. The reshuffle comes at a sensitive time when Pakistan's relations with India are near an all-time low..[..]..
To read the complete article, please follow the link below
Pakistan Articles | Ahmed Rashid
Ahmed Rahid
http://www.ahmedrashid.com/publications/pakistan/articles/
17/11/2016
http://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2016/11/15/intv-amanpour-ahmed-rashid-trump-afghanistan.cnn/video/playlists/amanpour/
November 16, 2016
Ahmed Rashid's interview with Christine Armanpour's program on CNN
Trump will face 'dire' situation in Afghanistan - CNN Video The Trump presidency needs to encourage more diplomacy and dialogue between Kabul and the Taliban, journalist and author Ahmed Rashid tells Fred Pleitgen.
Death of Leonard Cohen
Ahmed Rashid
November 11 2016
For millions of people around the world the shock of the US election results will be enormously magnified by news of the death of Leonard Cohen, 82, a singer poet icon who had long sung about his own impending death. Thin and frail he died in Los Angeles in the early morning hours of November 8 - the day of the US elections - according to sources close to the family.
Earlier in the evening, he had fallen badly and gone into a deep coma from which he never recovered. A Canadian by birth, he had long said he wished to be buried in his hometown of Montreal in the family graveyard lying alongside his Jewish forefathers, before any public announcement of his death was made.
The formal announcement of his death has only spoken about a public memorial service to be held in the future in Los Angeles and there is no mention of where or when he was buried. However Jewish tradition demands that burials take place within 24 hours.
Leonard Cohen - the troubadour extraordinaire, poet, novelist, singer, spiritualist,
.[..]..
To read the complete article, please follow the link below
Long Articles | Ahmed Rashid
Ahmed Rahid
http://www.ahmedrashid.com/publications/long-articles/
Pakistanâs Quetta attack blame game
BBC Viewpoint. Ahmed Rashid
October 29 2016
The attack that killed 61 police cadets in Quetta has once again been followed by a government-led blame game. But the government has not faced up to its own failure to conduct a comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy against all extremist groups.
Within a couple of hours of the attack on the Quetta police college on the night of 25 October, and even before sifting through the bloody evidence or taking statements from the 120 injured, government ministers immediately accused Afghanistan of helping the militants, who according to the government, belonged to an extremist anti-Shia group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ).
A few hours later, several groups claimed they carried out the attack but the most believable was the claim by so-called Islamic State (IS), as it also issued a photograph of the three heavily-armed assailants, who blew themselves up in the attack.
The authorities however are in a state of denial about the presence of IS on Pakistani soil. After IS released the photograph, the government claimed that IS had ''outsourced'' the attack to Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.
It is not the first time the government has dismissed a claim by IS. In August, IS said it carried out the su***de bombing of a hospital in Quetta that killed 70 lawyers and patients - a claim that was ignored by the government..[..]..
To read the complete article, please follow the link below
Pakistan - Articles | Ahmed Rashid
Ahmed Rahid
http://www.ahmedrashid.com/publications/pakistan/articles/
China steps in to protect its Pakistan project
Financial Times. The Exchange
28 OCTOBER 2016
Chinaâs diplomats have taken the unprecedented step of intervening in Pakistanâs complex domestic politics to ensure the smooth passage of its $45bn investment in infrastructure projects as part of its One Belt, One Road programme.
In recent weeks the Chinese embassy in Islamabad has twice issued press statements calling on Pakistanâs bickering politicians to resolve their differences over the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.
Beijing is growing increasingly frustrated on a number of fronts at a time when Islamabad faces increasing international and regional pressure for continuing to host militant groups and is having to depend on Chinaâs sole support in international groupings such as the UN. And if Beijing needed a reminder of the precarious security situation, an attack by terrorists this week on a police training college in Quetta, Baluchistan, left 60 police cadets dead and 120 wounded. Several militant groups active in the province claimed credit for the attack.. ..[..]..
To read the complete article, please follow the link below
Pakistan - Articles | Ahmed Rashid
Ahmed Rahid
http://www.ahmedrashid.com/publications/pakistan/articles/
The way forward for India and Pakistan over Kashmir
Financial Times. The Exchange
October 18 2016
The bellicosity between India and Pakistan has subsided for now but the issues that have caused the trouble remain, keeping alive the fear of war between the two nuclear powers.
Both countries are in trouble. While there is mounting criticism of Indiaâs Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his failure to address the unrest in Kashmir, Pakistan is isolated in the region. This was highlighted by the cancellation of the summit of South Asian leaders due to be hosted by Islamabad in November. The meeting had promised to be a rarity in a region that sees little internal trade or economic co-operation.
But India refused to attend the summit after militants in Kashmir â which has its territory split between Pakistan and India â last month killed 18 Indian soldiers at a militarybase in Indian Kashmir, an attack for which it blamed Pakistan. Then everyone else also pulled out â Nepal, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. What shocked Pakistanis was that they all cited the countryâs harbouring of militant groups as a reason for cancelling.
Pakistanâs opposition political parties and the liberal media are concerned at the damage being caused to the countryâs status internationally, but the government and army insist on spending their energy confronting India and claim China as an ally to repudiate allegations of isolation. ..[..]..
To read the complete article, please follow the link below
Afghanistan - Articles | Ahmed Rashid
Ahmed Rahid
http://www.ahmedrashid.com/publications/central-asia/articles/
New Yorker. Leonard Cohen Makes It Darker
At eighty-two, the troubadour has another album coming. Like him, it is obsessed with mortality, God-infused, and funny.
By David Remnick
When Leonard Cohen was twenty-five, he was living in London, sitting in cold rooms writing sad poems. He got by on a three-thousand-dollar grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. This was 1960, long before he played the festival at the Isle of Wight in front of six hundred thousand people. In those days, he was a Jamesian Jew, the provincial abroad, a refugee from the Montreal literary scene. Cohen, whose family was both prominent and cultivated, had an ironical view of himself. He was a bohemian with a cushion whose first purchases in London were an Olivetti typewriter and a blue raincoat at Burberry. Even before he had much of an audience, he had a distinct idea of the audience he wanted. In a letter to his publisher, he said that he was out to reach âinner-directed adolescents, lovers in all degrees of anguish, disappointed Platonists, pornography-peepers, hair-handed monks and Popists.â
Cohen was growing weary of Londonâs rising damp and its gray skies. An English dentist had just yanked one of his wisdom teeth. After weeks of cold and rain, he wandered into a bank and asked the teller about his deep suntan. The teller said that he had just returned from a trip to Greece. Cohen bought an airline ticket.
Not long afterward, he alighted in Athens, visited the Acropolis, made his way to the port of Piraeus, boarded a ferry, and disembarked at the island of Hydra. With the chill barely out of his bones, Cohen took in the horseshoe-shaped harbor and the people drinking cold glasses of retsina and eating grilled fish in the cafés by the water; he looked up at the pines and the cypress trees and the whitewashed houses that crept up the hillsides. There was something mythical and primitive about Hydra. Cars were forbidden. Mules hu**ed water up the long stairways to the houses. There was only intermittent electricity. Cohen rented a place for fourteen dollars a month. Eventually, he bought a whitewashed house of his own, for fifteen hundred dollars, thanks to an inheritance from his grandmother.
Hydra promised the life Cohen had craved: spare rooms, the empty page, eros after dark. He collected a few paraffin lamps and some used furniture: a Russian wrought-iron bed, a writing table, chairs like âthe chairs that van Gogh painted.â During the day, he worked on a sexy, phantasmagoric novel called âThe Favorite Gameâ and the poems in a collection titled âFlowers for Hitler.â He alternated between extreme discipline and the varieties of abandon. There were days of fasting to concentrate the mind. There were drugs to expand it: pot, speed, acid. âI took trip after trip, sitting on my terrace in Greece, waiting to see God,â he said years later. âGenerally, I ended up with a bad hangover.â
Here and there, Cohen caught glimpses of a beautiful Norwegian woman. Her name was Marianne Ihlen, and she had grown up in the countryside near Oslo. Her grandmother used to tell her, âYou are going to meet a man who speaks with a tongue of gold.â She thought she already had: Axel Jensen, a novelist from home, who wrote in the tradition of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. She had married Jensen, and they had a son, little Axel. Jensen was not a constant husband, however, and, by the time their child was four months old, Jensen was, as Marianne put it, âover the hills againâ with another woman.
One spring day, Ihlen was with her infant son in a grocery store and cafĂ©. âI was standing in the shop with my basket waiting to pick up bottled water and milk,â she recalled decades later, on a Norwegian radio program. âHe is standing in the doorway with the sun behind him.â Cohen asked her to join him and his friends outside. He was wearing khaki pants, sneakers, a shirt with rolled sleeves, and a cap. The way Marianne remembered it, he seemed to radiate âenormous compassion for me and my child.â She was taken with him. âI felt it throughout my body,â she said. âA lightness had come over me.â
Cohen had known some success with women. He would know a great deal more. For a troubadour of sadnessââthe godfather of gloom,â he was later calledâCohen found frequent respite in the arms of others. As a young man, he had a kind of Michael Corleone Before the Fall look, sloe-eyed, dark, a little hunched, but high courtesy and verbal fluency were his charm. When he was thirteen, he read a book on hypnotism. He tried out his new discipline on the family housekeeper, and she took off her clothes. Not everyone over the years was quite as bewitched. Nico spurned him, and Joni Mitchell, who had once been his lover, remained a friend but dismissed him as a âboudoir poet.â But these were the exceptions.
Leonard began spending more and more time with Marianne. They went to the beach, made love, kept house. Once, when they were apartâMarianne and Axel in Norway, Cohen in Montreal scraping up some moneyâhe sent her a telegram: âHave house all I need is my woman and her son. Love, Leonard.â
There were times of separation, times of argument and jealousy. When Marianne drank, she could go into a dark rage. And there were infidelities on both sides. (âGood gracious. All the girls were panting for him,â Marianne recalled. âI would dare go as far as to say that I was on the verge of killing myself due to it.â)
In the mid-sixties, as Cohen started to record his songs and win worldly success, Marianne became known to his fans as that antique figureâthe muse. A memorable photograph of her, dressed only in a towel, and sitting at the desk in the house on Hydra, appeared on the back of Cohenâs second album, âSongs from a Room.â But, after theyâd been together for eight years, the relationship came apart, little by littleââlike falling ashes,â as Cohen put it.
Cohen was spending more time away from Hydra pursuing his career. Marianne and Axel stayed on awhile on Hydra, then left for Norway. Eventually, Marianne married again. But life had its burdens, particularly for Axel, who has had persistent health problems. What Cohenâs fans knew of Marianne was her beauty and what it had inspired: âBird on the Wire,â âHey, Thatâs No Way to Say Goodbye,â and, most of all, âSo Long, Marianne.â She and Cohen stayed in touch. When he toured in Scandinavia, she visited him backstage. They exchanged letters and e-mails. When they spoke to journalists and to friends of their love affair, it was always in the fondest terms.
In late July this year, Cohen received an e-mail from Jan Christian Mollestad, a close friend of Marianneâs, saying that she was suffering from cancer. In their last communication, Marianne had told Cohen that she had sold her beach house to help insure that Axel would be taken care of, but she never mentioned that she was sick. Now, it appeared, she had only a few days left. Cohen wrote back immediately:
Well Marianne, itâs come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine. And you know that Iâve always loved you for your beauty and your wisdom, but I donât need to say anything more about that because you know all about that. But now, I just want to wish you a very good journey. Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road.
Two days later, Cohen got an e-mail from Norway:
Dear Leonard
Marianne slept slowly out of this life yesterday evening. Totally at ease, surrounded by close friends.
Your letter came when she still could talk and laugh in full consciousness. When we read it aloud, she smiled as only Marianne can. She lifted her hand, when you said you were right behind, close enough to reach her.
It gave her deep peace of mind that you knew her condition. And your blessing for the journey gave her extra strength. . . . In her last hour I held her hand and hummed âBird on the Wire,â while she was breathing so lightly. And when we left the room, after her soul had flown out of the window for new adventures, we kissed her head and whispered your everlasting words.
So long, Marianne . . .
Leonard Cohen lives on the second floor of a modest house in Mid-Wilshire, a diverse, unglamorous precinct of Los Angeles. He is eighty-two. Between 2008 and 2013, he was on tour more or less continuously. It is highly unlikely that his health will permit such rigors ever again. Cohen has an album coming out in Octoberâobsessed with mortality, God-infused, yet funny, called âYou Want It Darkerââbut friends and musical associates say theyâd be surprised to see him onstage again except in a limited way: a single performance, perhaps, or a short residency at one venue. When I e-mailed ahead to ask Cohen out for dinner, he said that he was more or less âconfined to barracks.â
Not long ago, one of Cohenâs most frequent visitors, and an old friend of mineâRobert Faggen, a professor of literatureâbrought me by the house. Faggen met Cohen twenty years ago in a grocery store, at the foot of Mt. Baldy, the highest of the San Gabriel Mountains, an hour and a half east of Los Angeles. They were both living near the top of the mountain: Bob in a cabin where he wrote about Frost and Melville and drove down the road to teach his classes at Claremont McKenna College; Cohen in a small Zen Buddhist monastery, where he was an ordained monk. As Faggen was shopping for cold cuts, he heard a familiar basso voice across the store; he looked down the aisle and saw a small, trim man, his head shaved, talking intently with a clerk about varieties of potato salad. Faggenâs musical expertise runs more to Mahlerâs lieder than to popular song. But he is an admirer of Cohenâs work and introduced himself. They have been close friends ever since.
Cohen greeted us. He sat in a large blue medical chair, the better to ease the pain from compression fractures in his back. He is now very thin, but he is still handsome, with a full head of gray-white hair and razory dark eyes. He wore a well-tailored midnight-blue suitâeven in the sixties he wore suitsâand a stickpin through his collar. He extended a hand like a courtly retired capo.
âHello, friends,â he said. âPlease, please, sit right there.â The depth of his voice makes Tom Waits sound like Eddie Kendricks.
And then, like my mother, he offered what could only have been the complete catalogue of his larder: water, juice, wine, a piece of chicken, a slice of cake, âmaybe something else.â In the hours we spent together, he offered many refreshments, and, always, kindly. âWould you like some slices of cheese and olives?â is not an offer you are likely to get from Axl Rose. âSome vodka? A glass of milk? Schnapps?â And, as with my mother, it is best, sometimes, to say yes. One day, we had cheeseburgers-with-everything ordered from a Fatburger down the street and, on another, thick slices of gefilte fish with horseradish.
Marianneâs death was only a few weeks in the past, and Cohen was still amazed at the way his letterâan e-mail to a dying friendâhad gone viral, at least in the Cohen-ardent universe. He hadnât set out to be public about his feelings, but when one of Marianneâs closest friends, in Oslo, asked to release the note, he didnât object. âAnd since thereâs a song attached to it, and thereâs a story . . .â he said. âItâs just a sweet story. So in that sense Iâm not displeased.â
Like anyone of his age, Cohen counts the losses as a matter of routine. He seemed not so much devastated by Marianneâs death as overtaken by the memory of their time together. âThere would be a gardenia on my desk perfuming the whole room,â he said. âThere would be a little sandwich at noon. Sweetness, sweetness everywhere.â
Cohenâs songs are death-haunted, but then they have been since his earliest verses. A half century ago, a record executive said, âTurn around, kid. Arenât you a little old for this?â But, despite his diminished health, Cohen remains as clear-minded and hardworking as ever, soldierly in his habits. He gets up well before dawn and writes. In the small, spare living room where we sat, there were a couple of acoustic guitars leaning against the wall, a keyboard synthesizer, two laptops, a sophisticated microphone for voice recording. Working with an old collaborator, Pat Leonard, and his son, Adam, who has the producerâs credit, Cohen did much of his work for âYou Want It Darkerâ in the living room, e-mailing recorded files to his partners for additional refinements. Age and the end of age provide a useful, if not entirely desired, air of quiet.
âIn a certain sense, this particular predicament is filled with many fewer distractions than other times in my life and actually enables me to work with a little more concentration and continuity than when I had duties of making a living, being a husband, being a father,â he said. âThose distractions are radically diminished at this point. The only thing that mitigates against full production is just the condition of my body.
âFor some odd reason,â he went on, âI have all my marbles, so far. I have many resources, some cultivated on a personal level, but circumstantial, too: my daughter and her children live downstairs, and my son lives two blocks down the street. So I am extremely blessed. I have an assistant who is devoted and skillful. I have a friend like Bob and another friend or two who make my life very rich. So in a certain sense Iâve never had it better. . . . At a certain point, if you still have your marbles and are not faced with serious financial challenges, you have a chance to put your house in order. Itâs a clichĂ©, but itâs underestimated as an analgesic on all levels. Putting your house in order, if you can do it, is one of the most comforting activities, and the benefits of it are incalculable.â
Cohen came of age after the war. His Montreal, however, was nothing like Philip Rothâs Newark or Alfred Kazinâs Brownsville. He was brought up in Westmount, a predominantly Anglophone neighborhood, where the cityâs well-to-do Jews lived. The men in his family, particularly on his fatherâs side, were the âdonsâ of Jewish Montreal. His grandfather, Cohen told me, âwas probably the most significant Jew in Canada,â the founder of a range of Jewish institutions; in the wake of anti-Semitic pogroms in the Russian imperium, he saw to it that countless refugees made it to Canada. Nathan Cohen, Leonardâs father, ran Freedman Company, the family clothing business. His mother, Masha, came from a family of more recent immigrants. She was loving, depressive, âChekhovianâ in her emotional range, according to Leonard: âShe laughed and wept deeply.â Mashaâs father, Solomon Klonitzki-Kline, was a distinguished Talmudic scholar from Lithuania who completed a âLexicon of Hebrew Homonyms.â Leonard went to fine schools, including McGill and, for a while, Columbia. He never resented the familyâs comforts.
âI have a deep tribal sense,â he said. âI grew up in a synagogue that my ancestors built. I sat in the third row. My family was decent. They were good people, they were handshake people. So I never had a sense of rebellion.â
When Leonard was nine, his father died; this moment, a primal wound, was when he first used language as a kind of sacrament. âI have some memories of him,â Cohen said, and recounted the story of his fatherâs funeral, which was held at their house. âWe came down the stairs, and the coffin was in the living room.â Contrary to Jewish custom, the funeral workers had left the coffin open. It was winter, and Cohen thought of the gravediggers: it would be difficult to break the frozen ground. He watched his father lowered into the earth. âThen I came back to the house and I went to his closet and I found a premade bow tie. I donât know why I did this, I canât even own it now, but I cut one of the wings of the bow tie off and I wrote something on a piece of paperâI think it was some kind of farewell to my fatherâand I buried it in a little hole in the back yard. And I put that curious note in there. . . . It was just some attraction to a ritual response to an impossible event.â
Cohenâs uncles made sure that Masha and her two children, Leonard and his sister, Esther, did not suffer any financial decline after her husbandâs death. Leonard studied; he worked in an uncleâs foundry, W. R. Cuthbert & Company, pouring metal for sinks and piping, and at the clothing factory, where he picked up a useful skill for his career as a touring musician: he learned to fold suits so they didnât wrinkle. But, as he wrote in a journal, he always imagined himself as a writer, âraincoated, battered hat pulled low above intense eyes, a history of injustice in his heart, a face too noble for revenge, walking the night along some wet boulevard, followed by the sympathy of countless audiences . . . loved by two or three beautiful women who could never have him.â
And yet a rock-and-roll life was far from his mind. He set out to be an author. As Sylvie Simmons makes plain in her excellent biography âIâm Your Man,â Cohenâs apprenticeship was in letters. As a teen-ager, his idols were Yeats and Lorca (he named his daughter after Lorca). At McGill, he read Tolstoy, Proust, Eliot, Joyce, and Pound, and he fell in with a circle of poets, particularly Irving Layton. Cohen, who published his first poem, âSatan in Westmount,â when he was nineteen, once said of Layton, âI taught him how to dress, he taught me how to live forever.â Cohen has never stopped writing verse; the poem âSteer Your Wayâ was published in this magazine in June.
Cohen was also taken with music. As a kid, he had learned the songs in the old lefty folk compendium âThe Peopleâs Song Book,â listened to Hank Williams and other country singers on the radio, and, at sixteen, dressed in his fatherâs old suĂšde jacket, he played in a country-music combo called the Buckskin Boys.
He took some informal guitar lessons in his twenties from a Spaniard he met next to a local tennis court. After a few weeks, he picked up a flamenco chord progression. When the man failed to appear for their fourth lesson, Cohen called his landlady and learned that the man had killed himself. In a speech many years later, in Asturias, Cohen said, âI knew nothing about the man, why he came to Montreal . . . why he appeared at that tennis court, why he took his life. . . . It was those six chords, it was that guitar pattern, that has been the basis of all my songs, and all my music.â
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Marianne Ihlen at the port of Hydra, Greece, in 1962. Ihlen was known to Leonard Cohenâs fans as that antique figureâthe muse.
Photograph from âSo Long, Marianne: A Love Story,â by Kari Hesthamar / Courtesy ECW Press
Cohen loved the masters of the bluesâRobert Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson, Bessie Smithâand the French storyteller-singers like Ădith Piaf and Jacques Brel. He put coins in the jukebox to listen to âThe Great Pretender,â âTennessee Waltz,â and anything by Ray Charles. And yet when the Beatles came along he was indifferent. âIâm interested in things that contribute to my survival,â he said. âI had girlfriends who really irritated me by their devotion to the Beatles. I didnât begrudge them their interest, and there were songs like âHey Judeâ that I could appreciate. But they didnât seem to be essential to the kind of nourishment that I craved.â
The same set of ears that first tuned in to Bob Dylan, in 1961, discovered Leonard Cohen, in 1966. This was John Hammond, a patrician related to the Vanderbilts, and by far the most perceptive scout and producer in the business. He was instrumental in the first recordings of Count Basie, Big Joe Turner, Benny Goodman, Aretha Franklin, and Billie Holiday. Tipped off by friends who were following the folk scene downtown, Hammond called Cohen and asked if he would play for him.
Cohen was thirty-two, a published poet and novelist, but, though a year older than Elvis Presley, a musical novice. He had turned to songwriting largely because he wasnât making a living as a writer. He was staying on the fourth floor of the Chelsea Hotel, on West Twenty-third Street, and filled notebooks during the day. At night, he sang his songs in clubs and met people on the scene: Patti Smith, Lou Reed (who admired Cohenâs novel âBeautiful Losersâ), Jimi Hendrix (who jammed with him on, of all things, âSuzanneâ), and, if just for a night, Janis Joplin (âgiving me head on the unmade bed / while the limousines wait in the streetâ).
After taking Cohen to lunch one day, Hammond suggested that they go to Cohenâs room, and, sitting on his bed, Cohen played âSuzanne,â âHey, Thatâs No Way to Say Goodbye,â âThe Stranger Song,â and a few others.
When Cohen finished, Hammond grinned and said, âYouâve got it.â
A few months after his audition, Cohen put on a suit and went to the Columbia recording studios in midtown to begin work on his first album. Hammond was encouraging after every take. And after one he said, âWatch out, Dylan!â
Cohenâs links to Dylan were obviousâJewish, literary, a penchant for Biblical imagery, Hammondâs tutelageâbut the work was divergent. Dylan, even on his earliest records, was moving toward more surrealist, free-associative language and the furious abandon of rock and roll. Cohenâs lyrics were no less imaginative or charged, no less ironic or self-investigating, but he was clearer, more economical and formal, more liturgical.
Over the decades, Dylan and Cohen saw each other from time to time. In the early eighties, Cohen went to see Dylan perform in Paris, and the next morning in a cafĂ© they talked about their latest work. Dylan was especially interested in âHallelujah.â Even before three hundred other performers made âHallelujahâ famous with their cover versions, long before the song was included on the soundtrack for âShrekâ and as a staple on âAmerican Idol,â Dylan recognized the beauty of its marriage of the sacred and the profane. He asked Cohen how long it took him to write.
âTwo years,â Cohen lied.
Actually, âHallelujahâ had taken him five years. He drafted dozens of verses and then it was years more before he settled on a final version. In several writing sessions, he found himself in his underwear, banging his head against a hotel-room floor.
Cohen told Dylan, âI really like âI and I,â â a song that appeared on Dylanâs album âInfidels.â âHow long did it take you to write that?â
âAbout fifteen minutes,â Dylan said.
When I asked Cohen about that exchange, he said, âThatâs just the way the cards are dealt.â As for Dylanâs comment that Cohenâs songs at the time were âlike prayers,â Cohen seemed dismissive of any attempt to plumb the mysteries of creation.
âI have no idea what I am doing,â he said. âItâs hard to describe. As I approach the end of my life, I have even less and less interest in examining what have got to be very superficial evaluations or opinions about the significance of oneâs life or oneâs work. I was never given to it when I was healthy, and I am less given to it now.â
Although Cohen was steeped more in the country tradition, he was swept up when he heard Dylanâs âBringing It All Back Homeâ and âHighway 61 Revisited.â One afternoon, years later, when the two had become friendly, Dylan called him in Los Angeles and said he wanted to show him a piece of property heâd bought. Dylan did the driving.
âOne of his songs came on the radio,â Cohen recalled. âI think it was âJust Like a Womanâ or something like that. It came to the bridge of the song, and he said, âA lot of eighteen-wheelers crossed that bridge.â Meaning it was a powerful bridge.â
Dylan went on driving. After a while, he told Cohen that a famous songwriter of the day had told him, âO.K., Bob, youâre Number 1, but Iâm Number 2.â
Cohen smiled. âThen Dylan says to me, âAs far as Iâm concerned, Leonard, youâre Number 1. Iâm Number Zero.â Meaning, as I understood it at the timeâand I was not ready to dispute itâthat his work was beyond measure and my work was pretty good.â
Dylan, who is seventy-five, doesnât often play the role of music critic, but he proved eager to discuss Leonard Cohen. I put a series of questions to him about Number 1, and he answered in a detailed, critical wayânothing cryptic or elusive.
âWhen people talk about Leonard, they fail to mention his melodies, which to me, along with his lyrics, are his greatest genius,â Dylan said. âEven the counterpoint linesâthey give a celestial character and melodic lift to every one of his songs. As far as I know, no one else comes close to this in modern music. Even the simplest song, like âThe Law,â which is structured on two fundamental chords, has counterpoint lines that are essential, and anybody who even thinks about doing this song and loves the lyrics would have to build around the counterpoint lines.
âHis gift or genius is in his connection to the music of the spheres,â Dylan went on. âIn the song âSisters of Mercy,â for instance, the verses are four elemental lines which change and move at predictable intervals . . . but the tune is anything but predictable. The song just comes in and states a fact. And after that anything can happen and it does, and Leonard allows it to happen. His tone is far from condescending or mocking. He is a tough-minded lover who doesnât recognize the brush-off. Leonardâs always above it all. âSisters of Mercyâ is verse after verse of four distinctive lines, in perfect meter, with no chorus, quivering with drama. The first line begins in a minor key. The second line goes from minor to major and steps up, and changes melody and variation. The third line steps up even higher than that to a different degree, and then the fourth line comes back to the beginning. This is a deceptively unusual musical theme, with or without lyrics. But itâs so subtle a listener doesnât realize heâs been taken on a musical journey and dropped off somewhere, with or without lyrics.â
In the late eighties, Dylan performed âHallelujahâ on the road as a roughshod blues with a sly, ascending chorus. His version sounds less like the prettified Jeff Buckley version than like a work by John Lee Ho**er. âThat song âHallelujahâ has resonance for me,â Dylan said. âThere again, itâs a beautifully constructed melody that steps up, evolves, and slips back, all in quick time. But this song has a connective chorus, which when it comes in has a power all of its own. The âsecret chordâ and the point-blank I-know-you-better-than-you-know-yourself aspect of the song has plenty of resonance for me.â
I asked Dylan whether he preferred Cohenâs later work, so colored with intimations of the end. âI like all of Leonardâs songs, early or late,â he said. â âGoing Home,â âShow Me the Place,â âThe Darkness.â These are all great songs, deep and truthful as ever and multidimensional, surprisingly melodic, and they make you think and feel. I like some of his later songs even better than his early ones. Yet thereâs a simplicity to his early ones that I like, too.â
Dylan defended Cohen against the familiar critical reproach that his is music to slit your wrists by. He compared him to the Russian Jewish immigrant who wrote âEaster Parade.â âI see no disenchantment in Leonardâs lyrics at all,â Dylan said. âThereâs always a direct sentiment, as if heâs holding a conversation and telling you something, him doing all the talking, but the listener keeps listening. Heâs very much a descendant of Irving Berlin, maybe the only songwriter in modern history that Leonard can be directly related to. Berlinâs songs did the same thing. Berlin was also connected to some kind of celestial sphere. And, like Leonard, he probably had no classical-music training, either. Both of them just hear melodies that most of us can only strive for. Berlinâs lyrics also fell into place and consisted of half lines, full lines at surprising intervals, using simple elongated words. Both Leonard and Berlin are incredibly crafty. Leonard particularly uses chord progressions that seem classical in shape. He is a much more savvy musician than youâd think.â
Cohen has always found performing unnerving. His first major attempt came in 1967, when Judy Collins asked him to play at Town Hall, in New York, at an anti-Vietnam War benefit. The idea was that he would make his stage dĂ©but by singing âSuzanne,â an early song of his that Collins had turned into a hit after he sang it to her on the telephone.
âI canât do it, Judy,â he told her. âI would die from embarrassment.â
As Collins writes in her memoir, she finally cajoled him into it, but that night, from the wings, she could see that Cohen, âhis legs shaking inside his trousers,â was in trouble. He got halfway through the first verse and then stopped and mumbled an apology. âI canât go on,â he said and walked off into the wings.
Out of sight, Cohen rested his head on Collinsâs shoulder as she tried to get him to respond to the encouraging shouts from the crowd. âI canât do it,â he said. âI canât go back.â
âBut you will,â she said, and, finally, he acceded. He went out, with the crowd cheering, and finished singing âSuzanne.â
Since then, Cohen has played thousands of concerts all over the world, but it did not become second nature until he was in his seventies. He was never one of those musicians who talk about feeling most alive and at home onstage. Although he has had many successful performance strategiesâwry self-abnegation, drugs, drinkâthe act of giving concerts often made him feel like âsome parrot chained to his stand.â He is also a perfectionist; a classic like âFamous Blue Raincoatâ still feels âunfinishedâ to him.
âIt stems from the fact that you are not as good as you want to beâthatâs really what nervousness is,â Cohen told me. âThat first time I went out with Judy Collins, it wasnât to be the last time I felt this.â
In 1972, Cohen, now accompanied by a full complement of musicians and singers, arrived in Jerusalem at the end of a long tour. Just to be in that city was, for Cohen, a charged situation. (The following year, during the war with Egypt, Cohen showed up in Israel, hoping to replace someone who had been drafted. âI am committed to the survival of the Jewish people,â he told an interviewer at the time. He ended up performing, often many times a day, for the troops on the front.) Out onstage, Cohen started singing âBird on the Wire.â He stopped after the audience greeted the opening chords and phrase with applause.
âI really enjoy your recognizing these songs,â he said. âBut Iâm scared enough as it is out here, and I think something is wrong every time you begin to applaud. So if you do recognize this song, would you just wave your hands?â
He fumbled again, and what at first had seemed like performative charm now appeared to signal genuine anxiety. âI hope you bear with me,â he said. âThese songs become meditations for me and sometimes, you know, I just donât get high on it and I feel that Iâm cheating you. Iâll try it again. If it doesnât work, Iâll stop in the middle. Thereâs no reason why we should mutilate a song just to save face.â
Cohen began singing âOne of Us Cannot Be Wrong.â
âI lit a thin green candle . . .â
He stopped again, laughing, unnerved. More fumbling, more deflective jokes.
âI have my rights up here, too, you know,â he said, still smiling. âI can sit around and talk if I want to.â
By then, it was apparent that there was a problem. âLook, if it doesnât get any better, weâll just end the concert and Iâll refund your money,â Cohen said. âI really feel that weâre cheating you tonight. Some nights, one is raised off the ground, and some nights you just canât get off the ground. And thereâs no point in lying about it. And tonight we just havenât been getting off the ground, and it says in the Kabbalah . . .â The Jerusalem audience laughed at the mention of the Jewish mystical text. âIt says in the Kabbalah that if you canât get off the ground you should stay on the ground! No, it says in the Kabbalah that, unless Adam and Eve face each other, God does not sit on his throne, and somehow the male and female parts of me refuse to encounter one another tonightâand God does not sit on his throne. And this is a terrible thing to have happen in Jerusalem. So, listen, weâre going to leave the stage now and try to profoundly meditate in the dressing room to get ourselves back into shape.â
I recalled this incident to Cohenâitâs captured on a documentary film that floats around the Internetâand he remembered it well.
âIt was at the end of the tour,â he told me. âI thought I was doing very poorly. I went back to the dressing room, and I found some acid in my guitar case.â He took the acid. Meanwhile, out in the hall, the audience started singing to Cohen as if to inspire him and call him back. The song was a traditional one, âHevenu Shalom Aleichem,â âWe Have Brought Peace Upon You.â
âHow sweet can an audience possibly be?â Cohen recalled. âSo I go out on the stage with the band . . . and I started singing âSo Long, Marianne.â And I see Marianne straight in front of me and I started crying. I turned around and the band was crying, too. And then it turned into something in retrospect quite comic: the entire audience turned into one Jew! And this Jew was saying, âWhat else can you show me, kid? Iâve seen a lot of things, and this donât move the dial!â And this was the entire skeptical side of our tradition, not just writ large but manifested as an actual gigantic being! Judging me hardly begins to describe the operation. It was a sense of invalidation and irrelevance that I felt was authentic, because those feelings have always circulated around my psyche: Where do you get to stand up and speak? For what and whom? And how deep is your experience? How significant is anything you have to say? . . . I think it really invited me to deepen my practice. Dig in deeper, whatever it was, take it more seriously.â
Back inside the dressing room, Cohen wept fiercely. âI canât make it, man,â he said. âI donât like it. Period. So Iâm splitting.â
He went out one last time to speak to the audience.
âListen, people, my band and I are all crying backstage. Weâre too broken up to go on. But I just want to tell you, thank you and good night.â
The next year, he told the press, half-seriously, that the ârock lifeâ was overwhelming him. âI donât find myself leading a life that has many good moments in it,â he told a reporter for Melody Maker. âSo Iâve decided to screw it. And go.â
For many years, Cohen was more revered than bought. Although his albums generally sold well enough, they did not move on the scale of big rock acts. In the early eighties, when he presented his record company with âVarious Positionsââa magnificent album that included âHallelujah,â âDance Me to the End of Love,â and âIf It Be Your WillââWalter Yetnikoff, the head of CBS Records, argued with him about the mix.
âLook, Leonard,â he said, âwe know youâre great, but we donât know if youâre any good.â Eventually, Cohen learned that CBS had decided not to release the album in the U.S. Years later, accepting an award, he thanked his record company by saying, âI have always been touched by the modesty of their interest in my work.â
Suzanne Vega, a singer-songwriter who is in her late fifties, sometimes tells a funny story onstage about Cohenâs secret-handshake appeal. When she was eighteen, she was teaching dance and folksinging at a summer camp in the Adirondacks. One night, she met a handsome young man, a counsellor from another camp up the road. He was from Liverpool. And his opening line was âDo you like Leonard Cohen?â
This was nearly four decades ago, and, in Vegaâs memory, admirers of Leonard Cohen in those days were a kind of âsecret society.â Whatâs more, there was a particular way to answer the young manâs semi-innocent question: âYes, I love Leonard Cohenâbut only in certain moods.â Otherwise, your new friend might think you were a depressive.
But because the young man was English, and not given to the âfake cheerâ of Americans, he replied, âI love Leonard Cohen all the time.â The result, she says, was an affair that lasted for the rest of the summer.
In the years to come, Cohenâs songs were fundamental to Vegaâs own sense of lyrical precision and possibility. âIt was the way he wrote about complicated things,â Vega told me recently. âIt was very intimate and personal. Dylan took you to the far ends of the expanding universe, eight minutes of âone hand waving free,â and I loved that, but it didnât sound like anything I did or was likely to doâit wasnât very earthly. Leonardâs songs were a combination of very real details and a sense of mystery, like prayers or spells.â
And there was the other thing, too. Once, after Cohen and Vega became friendly, he called and asked her to visit him at his hotel. They met out by the pool. He asked if she wanted to hear his latest song.
âAnd as I listened to him recite this songâit was a long oneâI watched as one woman after another, all in bikinis, arranged themselves on beach chairs behind Leonard,â Vega recalled. âAfter he finished reciting, I said to Leonard, âHave you noticed these women in bikinis arranging themselves here?â And completely deadpan, without glancing around, Leonard said, âIt works every time.â â
A world of such allurements had costs as well as rewards. In the seventies, Cohen had two children, Lorca and Adam, with his common-law wife, Suzanne Elrod. That relationship fizzled when the decade did. Touring had its charms, but it, too, wore down his spirits. After a tour in 1993, Cohen felt utterly depleted. âI was drinking at least three bottles of ChĂąteau Latour before performances,â he said, allowing that he always poured a glass for others. âThe wine bill was enormous. Even then, I think, ChĂąteau Latour was over three hundred bucks a bottle. But it went so beautifully with the music! I donât know why. When I tried to drink it when there wasnât a performance coming, it meant nothing! I might as well have been drinking Wild Duck or whatever they call it. I mean, it had no significance.â
At the same time, a long relationship with the actress Rebecca De Mornay was beginning to come undone. âShe got wise to me,â Cohen has said. âFinally she saw I was a guy who just couldnât come across. In the sense of being a husband and having more children and the rest.â De Mornay, who remains friends with Cohen, told the biographer Sylvie Simmons that he was âhaving all these relationships with women and not really committing . . . and having this long relationship to his career and yet feeling like itâs the last thing he wants to be doing.â
Since his days davening next to his uncles in his grandfatherâs synagogue, Cohen has been a spiritual seeker. âAnything, Roman Catholicism, Buddhism, L*D, Iâm for anything that works,â he once said. In the late sixties, when he was living in New York, he studied briefly at a Scientology center and emerged with a certificate that declared him âGrade IV Release.â In recent years, he spent many Shabbat mornings and Monday evenings at Ohr HaTorah, a synagogue on Venice Boulevard, talking about Kabbalistic texts with the rabbi there, Mordecai Finley. Sometimes, on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Finley, who says that he considers Cohen âa great liturgical writer,â read from the pulpit passages from âBook of Mercy,â a 1984 collection of Cohenâs that is steeped in the Psalms. âI participated in all these investigations that engaged the imagination of my generation at that time,â Cohen has said. âI even danced and sang with the Hare Krishnasâno robe, I didnât join them, but I was trying everything.â
To this day, Cohen reads deeply in a multivolume edition of the Zohar, the principal text of Jewish mysticism; the Hebrew Bible; and Buddhist texts. In our conversations, he mentioned the Gnostic Gospels, Lurianic Kabbalah, books of Hindu philosophy, Carl Jungâs âAnswer to Job,â and Gershom Scholemâs biography of Sabbatai Sevi, a self-proclaimed Messiah of the seventeenth century. Cohen is also very much at home in the spiritual reaches of the Internet, and he listens to the lectures of Yakov Leib HaKohain, a Kabbalist who has converted, serially, to Islam, Catholicism, and Hinduism, and lives in the San Bernardino mountains with two pit bulls and four cats.
For forty years, Cohen was associated with a Japanese Zen master named Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi. (âRoshiâ is an honorific for a venerated teacher, and Cohen always refers to him that way.) Roshi, who died two years ago at the age of a hundred and seven, arrived in Los Angeles in 1962 but never quite learned the language of his adoptive home. Through his translators, though, he adapted traditional Japanese koans for his American students: âHow do you realize Buddha nature while driving a car?â Roshi was short, stout, a drinker of sake and expensive Scotch. âI came to have a good time,â he once said of his sojourn in the States. âI want Americans to learn how to truly laugh.â
Until the early nineties, Cohen used to study with Roshi at the Zen Center, on Mt. Baldy, for periods of learning and meditation that stretched over two or three months a year. He considered Roshi a close friend, a spiritual master, and a deep influence on his work. And so, not long after getting home from the ChĂąteau Latour tour, in 1993, Cohen went up to Mt. Baldy. This time, he stayed for nearly six years.
âNobody goes into a Zen monastery as a tourist,â Cohen told me. âThere are people who do, but they leave in ten minutes because the life is very rigorous. You are getting up at two-thirty in the morning; the camp wakes up at three, but you have to light fires in the zendo. The cabins are only heated a few hours a day. Thereâs snow coming in under the badly carpentered doors. Youâre shovelling snow half the day. And the other half of the day youâre sitting in the zendo. So in a certain sense you toughen up. Whether it has a spiritual aspect is debatable. It helps you endure, and it makes whining the least appropriate response to suffering. Just on that level itâs very valuable.â
Cohen lived in a tiny cabin that he outfitted with a coffeemaker, a menorah, a keyboard, and a laptop. Like the other adepts, he cleaned toilets. He had the honor of cooking for Roshi and eventually lived in a cabin that was linked to his teacherâs by a covered walkway. For many hours a day, he sat in half lotus, meditating. If he, or anyone else, nodded off during meditation or lost the proper position, one of the monks would come by and rap him smartly on the shoulder with a wooden stick.
âPeople have the idea that a monastery is a place of serenity and contemplation,â Cohen said. âIt isnât that at all. Itâs a hospital, and a lot of the people who end up there can barely walk or speak. So a lot of the activity there is to get people to learn how to walk and speak and breathe and prepare their own meals or shovel their own paths in the winter.â
Allen Ginsberg once asked Cohen how he could reconcile his Judaism with Zen. Cohen said that he wasnât looking for a new religion, that he was well satisfied with the religion he had. Zen made no mention of God; it demanded no scriptural devotion. For him, Zen was a discipline rather than a religion, a practice of investigation. âI put on those robes because that was Roshiâs school and that was the uniform,â he said. Had Roshi been a professor of physics at the University of Heidelberg, Cohen says, he would have learned German and moved to Heidelberg.
Roshi, toward the end of his life, was accused of sexual misconduct. He was never charged with any crime, but some former students, writing in Internet chat rooms and in letters to Roshi himself, said that he had sexually groped or coerced many Buddhist students and nuns. An independent Buddhist panel determined that the behavior had been going on since the seventies, and that those âwho chose to speak out were silenced, exiled, ridiculed, or otherwise punished,â according to the Times.
One morning, Bob Faggen drove me up the mountain to the Zen Center. A former Boy Scout camp, the center comprises a series of rough-hewn cabins surrounded by pines and cedars. It was striking how few people were around. One monk told me that Roshi had left no successor and that the center had not yet recovered from the scandal. Cohen, for his part, took pains to explain Roshiâs transgressions without excusing them. âRoshi,â he said, âwas a very naughty guy.â
In 1996, Cohen became a monk, but that did not safeguard him from depression, a lifelong nemesis; two years later, it overwhelmed him. âIâve dealt with depression ever since my adolescence,â he said. âMoving into some periods, which were debilitating, when I found it hard to get off the couch, to periods when I was fully operative but the background noise of anguish still prevailed.â Cohen tried antidepressants. He tried throwing them out. Nothing worked. Finally, he told Roshi he was âgoing down the mountain.â In a collection of poems called âBook of Longing,â he wrote:
I left my robes hanging on a peg
in the old cabin
where I had sat so long
and slept so little.
I finally understood
I had no gift
for Spiritual Matters.
In fact, Cohen was hardly done with his searching. Just a week after returning home, he boarded a flight to Mumbai to study with another spiritual guide. He took a room in a modest hotel and went to daily satsangs, spiritual discussions, at the apartment of Ramesh Balsekar, a former president of the Bank of India and a teacher of Advaita Vedanta, a Hindu discipline. Cohen read Balsekarâs book âConsciousness Speaks,â which teaches a single universal consciousness, no âyouâ or âme,â and denies a sense of individual free will, any sense that any one person is a âdoer.â
Cohen spent nearly a year in Mumbai, calling on Balsekar in the mornings, and spending the rest of the day swimming, writing, and wandering the city. For reasons that he now says are âimpossible to pe*****te,â his depression lifted. He was ready to come home. The story, and the way Cohen tells it now, full of uncertainty and modesty, reminded me of the chorus of âAnthem,â a song that took him ten years to write and that he recorded just before he first headed up the mountain:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
Thatâs how the light gets in.
Even if he was now freed of depression, the next crisis was not far off. Aside from a few indulgences, Cohen was not obsessed with luxury. âMy project has been completely different than my contemporariesâ,â he says. His circle in Montreal valued modesty. âThe minimum environment that would enable you to do your work with the least distraction and the most aesthetic deliverance came from a modest surrounding. A palace, a yacht would be an enormous distraction from the project. My fantasies went the other way. The way I lived on Mt. Baldy was perfect for me. I liked the communal life, I liked living in a little shack.â
And yet he had made a considerable fortune from album sales, concerts, and the publishing rights to his songs. âHallelujahâ was recorded so often and so widely that Cohen jokingly called a moratorium on it. He certainly had enough money to feel secure about his two children and their mother, and a few other dependents.
Before he left on his spiritual adventures, Cohen had ceded nearly absolute control of his financial affairs to Kelley Lynch, his business manager for seventeen years and, at one time, briefly, his lover. In 2004, however, he discovered that his accounts had been emptied. Millions of dollars were gone. Cohen fired Lynch and sued her. The court ruled in Cohenâs favor, awarding him more than five million dollars.
In Los Angeles County Superior Court, Cohen testified that Lynch had been so outraged by the suit that she started calling him twenty, thirty times a day and inundating him with e-mails, some directly threatening, eventually ignoring a restraining order. âIt makes me feel very conscious about my surroundings,â Cohen said, according to the Guardianâs account of the trial. âEvery time I see a car slow down, I get worried.â Lynch was sentenced to eighteen months in prison and five yearsâ probation.
After thanking the judge and his attorney in his usual high style, Cohen turned to his antagonist. âIt is my prayer,â Cohen told the court, âthat Ms. Lynch will take refuge in the wisdom of her religion, that a spirit of understanding will convert her heart from hatred to remorse, from anger to kindness, from the deadly intoxication of revenge to the lowly practices of self-reform.â
Cohen has never managed to collect the awarded damages, and, because the situation is still a matter of litigation, he does not like to talk about it. But one result was plain: he would need to return to the stage. Even a Zen monk has to earn some coin.
There is something irresistible about Cohenâs charm. For proof, take a look at a YouTube clip called âWhy Itâs Good to Be Leonard Cohenâ: a filmmaker follows Cohen backstage as a beautiful German-accented actress tries to coax him, in front of a full dressing room, to âgo somewhereâ with her as he wryly rebuffs her. He is no less charming with men.
So it was more than a little surprising when Faggen and I returned to the house one afternoon thinking that we were on time and were informed, in the sternest terms imaginable, that we were not. In fact, Cohen, wearing a dark suit and a fedora, settled into his medical chair and gave us the most forbidding talking-to I have experienced since grade school. Iâm one of those tiresome people who are rarely, if ever, late; who show up, old-mannishly, for flights much too early. But there had apparently been a misunderstanding about the time of our visit, and a text to him and his assistant seemed to have gone unseen. Every effort to apologize or explain, mine and Faggenâs, was dismissed as ânot the point.â Cohen reminded us of his poor health. This was an abuse of his time. A violation. Even âa form of elder abuse.â More apologies, more rebuffs. This wasnât about anger or apology, he went on. He felt no rage, no, but we had to understand that we were not âdoers,â none of us have free will. . . . And so on. I recognized the language of his teacher in Mumbai. But that didnât make it sting any less.
The lectureâsteely, ominous, high-flownâwent on quite a long time. I felt humiliated, but also defensive. In the dynamic of people getting something off their chest, the speaker feels cleansed, the listener accused and miserable.
Finally, Cohen eased into other matters. And the subject that he was happiest to talk about was the tour that began as a means of restoring what had been stolen from him. In 2007, he started conceiving a tour with a full band: three backup singers, two guitarists, drummer, keyboard player, bassist, and saxophonist (later replaced by a violinist). He rehearsed the band for three months.
âI hadnât played any of these songs for fifteen years,â he said. âMy voice had changed. My range had changed. I didnât know what to do. There was no way I could transpose the positions that I knew.â Instead, Cohen tuned the strings on his guitar down two whole steps, so, for instance, the low E was now a low C. Cohen had always had a deep, intimate voice, but now, with age, and after countless ci******es, it is a fantastical growl, confiding, lordly. In concert, he always got a knowing laugh with this line from âTower of Songâ: âI was born like this, I had no choice / I was born with the gift of a golden voice.â
Neil Larsen, who played keyboards in Cohenâs band, said that the preparation was meticulous. âWe rehearsed very close to the way you would record,â he told me. âWe did one song over and over and made adjustments. He was locking the lyrics into his memory, too. Usually it takes a while before a tour jells. Not this one. We went out ready.â
The tour started in Canada, and then went everywhere during the next five yearsâthree hundred and eighty shows, from New York to Nice, Moscow to Sydney. Cohen began every performance saying that he and the band would give âeverything weâve got,â and they did. âI think he was competing with Springsteen,â Sharon Robinson, a singer and frequent co-writer, joked about the length of the shows. âThey were close to four hours some nights.â
Cohen was in his mid-seventies by this time, and his manager did everything possible for the performer to marshal his energies. It was a first-class operation: a private plane, where Cohen could write and sleep; good hotels, where he could read and compose on a keyboard; a car to take him to the hotel the minute he stepped off the stage. Some of the most memorable musical performances Cohen had ever seen were by Alberta Hunter, the blues singer, who had a long residency in the late seventies at the Cookery, in the Village. Hunter had retired from music for decades and worked as a nurse, and then made a comeback in the last six years of her life. Leonard Cohen was following suit: an elderly man, full of sap, singing his heart out for hours, several nights a week.
âEverybody was rehearsed not only in the notes but also in something unspoken,â Cohen recalled. âYou could feel it in the dressing room as you moved closer to the concert, you could feel the sense of commitment, tangible in the room.â This time, there was no warmup with ChĂąteau Latour. âI didnât drink at all. Occasionally, Iâd have half a Guinness with Neil Larsen, but I had no interest in alcohol.â
The show that I saw, at Radio City, was among the most moving performances Iâve ever experienced. Here was Cohen, an old master of his art, serving up the thick cream of his catalogue with a soulful corps of exacting musicians. Time and again, he would enact the song as well as sing it, taking one knee in gratitude to the object of affection, taking both knees to emphasize his devotion, to the audience, to the musicians, to the song.
The tour not only restored Cohenâs finances (and then some); it also brought a sense of satisfaction rarely associated with him. âOne time I asked him on the bus, âAre you enjoying this?â And he would never really own up to enjoying it,â Sharon Robinson recalled. âBut after we finished I was at his house one day, and he admitted to me that there was something extremely fulfilling about that tour, something that brought his career full circle that he hadnât expected.â
In 2009, Cohen gave his first performance in Israel since 1985, at a stadium in Ramat Gan, donating the proceeds to Israeli-Palestinian peace organizations. He had wanted to perform in Ramallah, in the West Bank, too, but Palestinian groups decided that this was politically untenable. And yet he persisted, dedicating the concert to the cause of âreconciliation, tolerance, and peace,â and the song âAnthemâ to the bereaved. At the end of the show, Cohen raised his hands, rabbinically, and recited in Hebrew the birkat kohanim, the priestly blessing, over the crowd.
âItâs not self-consciously religious,â Cohen told me. âI know that itâs been described that way, and I am happy with that. Itâs part of the intentional fallacy. But when I see James Brown it has a religious feel. Anything deep does.â
When I asked him if he intended his performances to reflect a kind of devotion, he hesitated before he answered. âDoes artistic dedication begin to touch on religious devotion?â he said. âI start with artistic dedication. I know that if the spirit is on you it will touch on to the other human receptors. But I dare not begin from the other side. Itâs like pronouncing the holy nameâyou donât do it. But if you are lucky, and you are graced, and the audience is in a particular salutary condition, then these deeper responses will be produced.â
The final night of the tour happened to be in Auckland, in late December, 2013, and the last songs were exit songs: the prayerful âIf It Be Your Will,â and then âClosing Time,â âI Tried to Leave You,â and, finally, a cover of the Drifters song âSave the Last Dance for Me.â
The musicians all knew this was not only the last night of a long voyage but, for Cohen, perhaps the last voyage. âEverybody knows that everything has to end some time,â Sharon Robinson told me. âSo, as we left, there was the thought: This is it.â
There is probably no more touring ahead. What is on Cohenâs mind now is family, friends, and the work at hand. âIâve had a family to support, so thereâs no sense of virtue attached to it,â he said. âIâve never sold widely enough to be able to relax about money. I had two kids and their mother to support and my own life. So there was never an option of cutting out. Now itâs a habit. And thereâs the element of time, which is powerful, with its incentive to finish up. Now I havenât gotten near finishing up. Iâve finished up a few things. I donât know how many other things Iâll be able to get to, because at this particular stage I experience deep fatigue. . . . There are times when I just have to lie down. I canât play anymore, and my back goes fast also. Spiritual things, baruch Hashemââthank Godââhave fallen into place, for which I am deeply grateful.â
Cohen has unpublished poems to arrange, unfinished lyrics to finish and record or publish. Heâs considering doing a book in which poems, like pages of the Talmud, are surrounded by passages of interpretation.
âThe big change is the proximity to death,â he said. âI am a tidy kind of guy. I like to tie up the strings if I can. If I canât, also, thatâs O.K. But my natural thrust is to finish things that Iâve begun.â
Cohen said he had a âsweet little songâ that heâd been working through, one of many, and, suddenly, he closed his eyes and began reciting the lyrics:
Listen to the hummingbird
Whose wings you cannot see
Listen to the hummingbird
Donât listen to me.
Listen to the butterfly
Whose days but number three
Listen to the butterfly
Donât listen to me.
Listen to the mind of God
Which doesnât need to be
Listen to the mind of God
Donât listen to me.
He opened his eyes, paused awhile. Then he said, âI donât think Iâll be able to finish those songs. Maybe, who knows? And maybe Iâll get a second wind, I donât know. But I donât dare attach myself to a spiritual strategy. I donât dare do that. Iâve got some work to do. Take care of business. I am ready to die. I hope itâs not too uncomfortable. Thatâs about it for me.â
Cohenâs hand has been bothering him, so he plays the guitar less than he didââIâve lost my âchopâ ââbut he was eager to show me his synthesizer. He sets a chord progression going with his left hand, flips some switches to one mode or another, and plays a melody with his right. At one point, he flipped on the âGreekâ mode, and suddenly he was singing a Greek fishermanâs song, as if we had suddenly transported ourselves back in time, to Douskoâs Taverna, âin the deep night of fixed and falling starsâ on the island of Hydra.
In his chair, Cohen waved away any sense of what might follow death. That was beyond understanding and language: âI donât ask for information that I probably wouldnât be able to process even if it were granted to me.â Persistence, living to the last, loose ends, workâthat was the thing. A song from four years ago, âGoing Home,â made clear his sense of limits: âHe will speak these words of wisdom / Like a sage, a man of vision / Though he knows heâs really nothing / But the brief elaboration of a tube.â
The new record opens with the title track, âYou Want It Darker,â and in the chorus, the singer declares:
Hineni Hineni
Iâm ready my Lord.
Hineni is Hebrew for âHere I am,â Abrahamâs answer to the summons of God to sacrifice his son Isaac; the song is clearly an announcement of readiness, a man at the end preparing for his service and devotion. Cohen asked Gideon Zelermyer, the cantor at Shaar Hashomayim, the synagogue of his youth in Montreal, to sing the backing vocals. And yet the man sitting in his medical chair was anything but haunted or defeated.
âI know thereâs a spiritual aspect to everybodyâs life, whether they want to cop to it or not,â Cohen said. âItâs there, you can feel it in peopleâthereâs some recognition that there is a reality that they cannot pe*****te but which influences their mood and activity. So thatâs operating. That activity at certain points of your day or night insists on a certain kind of response. Sometimes itâs just like: âYou are losing too much weight, Leonard. Youâre dying, but you donât have to coöperate enthusiastically with the process.â Force yourself to have a sandwich.
âWhat I mean to say is that you hear the Bat Kol.â The divine voice. âYou hear this other deep reality singing to you all the time, and much of the time you canât decipher it. Even when I was healthy, I was sensitive to the process. At this stage of the game, I hear it saying, âLeonard, just get on with the things you have to do.â Itâs very compassionate at this stage. More than at any time of my life, I no longer have that voice that says, âYouâre fu***ng up.â Thatâs a tremendous blessing, really.â âŠ
David Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992.