Leonard Cohen

Dear Leonard (or should I call you Len?)

Last night I watched a ten year old documentary about you. It touched me more than I would have imagined it would. You are eight days older than I am, like I, you are Jewish, and not only Jewish, but also a Cohen, though you come from a more distinguished learned Jewish family. My roots are pretty humble, a small time country cobbler on one side, a wine wholesaler on the other. No talmudic scholars in the family tree, though there are synagogue office holders. Our early lives were, however, very different. You grew up in peaceful Quebec, while my life was shaped by war-torn Hungary. In the New Zealand where I landed, I was always something of an outsider, tolerated, even respected, but never one of the in crowd. Like you, I had modest literary ambitions, wrote stories for the Teachers College Students/ magazine. I think I might have been its editor, so had the inside running, wrote poetry, a folder of which I gave to a fairly well-known poet for his opinion. He promptly lost it and I kept no copies. Perhaps no great loss, the poems were probably all rubbish, but posterity will never know. I came across you for the first time when my elderly colleague, John Elphick sold your early books of verse in the mid 1960s. John Elphick represented Jonathan Cape, the leading literary publishers. John, a very earnest patriotic Englishman, who was a dedicated fire watcher during the war, had little sympathy for some of the Jonathan Cape authors, Joseph Heller and his anti-war Catch 22, and your books. As everyone knew, books of poetry don't sell, poetry is hard to understand, it is acquired taste for long-haired intellectuals, obscure, like Eliot, Yeats, Auden, Spender, MacNeice. Yours were different, they were personal, easy to read, and unlike other books of poetry, they sold in large numbers much to the amazement of John Elphick. Somehow our interests, yours and mine, went their separate ways. In so far as I continued to take an interest in literature, I leaned towards the heavy end, while you wrote for the common man, and the young common man and woman for that matter, I was dismissive of writing, like that of he beat poets, and the whole bohemian counterculture, that shared personal angst with the rest of the world. And then you took up song writing and singing. When I was young, I frequented a student cafe where people played guitars and sang songs about the working man, or the war, and always the underdog, lovely gentle songs. Although I had a lot of time for the young people around me, tolerant, free thinking, who by and large shared my world view, I was never part of the crowd.

I took no interest in your kind of very personal music,that is easy to listen to. I was strictly classical, the highlight of my musical experiences were the late Beethoven quartets. As an old man now, I am learning from my children, and this is why I took the trouble to watch the programme about you. I have to admit that I was very taken with your music. You were fortunate with your arrangers and the young performers who sang your songs. I don't know whether your songs have deep meanings, in most cases I couldn't follow your words, but they were lovely gentle music. So Len, it was a pleasure to make your acquaintance.