various positions

Cohen’s handwritten lyrics, “Hallelujah”

The story of Leonard Cohen’s most famous song is an interesting one, recently, and perhaps most definitively chronicled in Dan Geller’s and Dayna Goldfine’s 2022 documentary, Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song. Its lovingly composed narrative introduces our hero, Cohen, by way of the creative challenges involved in bringing Hallelujah to life, and of the personal struggles and spiritual lens through which he filtered much of his work. A meticulous writer and reviser under the best circumstances, Hallelujah seemed an especially hard won-number for him. At one point, Cohen recounts banging his head against a hotel room floor in his underwear: “I can’t finish this song.”

It took him five years to piece together and was ultimately recorded for his 1984 album, Various Positions. At that time, Cohen was in a kind of recovery mode; his previous outing, a sonically confused collaboration with Phil Spector, proved a critical and commercial failure. Various Positions, produced by John Lissauer, was meant to break him out stateside. And why shouldn’t it? If Hallelujah wasn’t the revelatory, career-defining track his team believed it should be, songs like Dance Me to the End of Love, Coming Back to You, and If It Be Your Will promised an elevation of, if not return, to form.

Something lovely the Geller/Goldfine film conveys of the album’s development is the lack of pretense and ego involved, of artists humbling themselves before the process, in a real spirit of collaboration, and the resultant creative flow. The viewer can feel their electric optimism and a sense of Cohen’s impending arrival.

All those years of anguished perfectionism finally realized.

The Dark Night of the Soul comes roughly 42 minutes in, when Cohen meets with then-President of Columbia Records, Walter Yetnikoff. If you’ve read any profile on Cohen, you know this story, which, in light of its outcome, is often included as a humorous, revenge-shaded aside.

So: Yetnikoff hates Various Positions, cancels it, and refuses to put it out in America. Hallelujah goes on to become a worldwide phenomenon in spite of it. In fact, by the 48 minute mark, the documentary’s narrative arc is already bending back in Cohen’s favor, paving way for a victorious final act. Over the years, the song is covered by a multitude of artists including Bob Dylan, John Cale, and Jeff Buckley, putting it in front of a wider audience each time. Its inclusion in the movie Shrek is a gamechanger of stratospheric proportions.

Today, Hallelujah is frequently found on ‘Most Covered’ song lists and just about everyone is familiar with one version of it, if not Cohen’s own. (It’s usually not his own.) Even when the song reached, and has arguably maintained, saturation point—Cohen himself once joking “people should stop singing it for a little while”—its emotional resonance, that aspect that calls to and has moved a vast and global audience, feels beyond debate. How rare and wonderful in a culture that often assigns a work with mass appeal as having little to no artistic value.

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To be an artist is not only comprised of the moments a notion becomes an idea, and an idea becomes (in my case) words on the page, which then, eventually, becomes a book. It’s also the moment the art steps outside of you and meets itself through the eyes of others. It’s the moment an artist confronts the industry’s intersection with and impositions on their art, and where it draws its lines. For Cohen, the art was Various Positions and the line was drawn by Yetnikoff, a man who seemed to do so for no other reason than the fact he could. It's here the documentary poses, in my opinion, one of its most interesting questions: what do you do when your work meets the eyes of others, and they decide there’s nothing there to see?

Six of the film’s one hundred and fifteen minutes hold a compelling response. In those six minutes, via archival footage and interviews with friends and colleagues, we follow Cohen in the aftermath of Yetnikoff’s verdict; whatever pains Hallelujah caused him on its path to actualization, Cohen did not anticipate those that followed. If you’ve known a creative life, it’s genuinely difficult to watch.

On a subsequent television appearance, Cohen is asked after Various Position’s unavailability in the US. The acidity in his tone belies his straightforward response: “Columbia Records didn’t want to put it out.” The host makes light of the situation at Columbia’s expense, and the audience laughs. Cut to: Cohen. He’s not laughing.

In the next sequence, Cohen seems to have reached, for him, a boiling point. Lacking some of his usual composure, he tells Canadian journalist Adrienne Clarkson, “[Yetnikoff] said, ‘I don’t like the mix. I said, ‘You mix it, Mr. Yetnikoff. If that’s what’s going to stop you putting out the record. You know, you just mix it and put it out.”

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“Leonard, we know you’re great, but we don’t know if you’re any good,” is Yetnikoff’s oft-quoted reason for trashing Cohen’s efforts. This to Cohen after a decorated and still-thriving literary career. This to Cohen after Suzanne, Sisters of Mercy, So Long, Marianne, Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye and Bird on a Wire, among others. An old industry adage goes “you’re only as good as what you do next,” but how could the whole count for so little? Imagine Cohen, so sure he was about to embark on some shared, glorious vision, and being told, at that point in his career, it was something he’d failed to prove anyone should place their faith in.

“I remember that he was crushed after that,” photographer Dominique Issermann says. The cruel dismissal of Cohen’s painstakingly crafted album is decried by friends and loved ones as ‘disgusting,’ ‘terrible’ and ‘heartbreaking.’ And it was all of those things, regardless of whatever would happen next. The crossroads it placed Cohen before were not only his own; as producer, John Lissauer was held so responsible for Cohen’s failed attempt to break into the American mainstream music scene, he stopped producing albums and shifted his focus to composing solely for film and TV. That’s not a minor consequence.

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Too often perseverance is defined by its outcome, and less what the act of persevering actually involves. When struggle is rewarded, it is justified, assigned great import and meaning. For that reason Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song is a story of artistic victory, of a work of art’s astounding potential to reach an audience against all odds, and even past the death of its artist. This is tremendously appealing if your own life’s work circles similar interests and stakes; I myself find those possibilities incredibly sexy. (Naturally, the less control you have over such particulars, the more vital and urgently they’re felt.) But as appealing as that takeaway is, I don’t think it’s quite the right one.

I’ve spent most of the last fifteen years on contract and in that time, I did everything asked of me. Now I’m between books for the very same reason. The last decade and change has felt ceaseless, my role in its equation, unswerving. I’ve contended with the standard and not-so-standard heartbreaks and disappointments in my own career and commiserated with colleagues over their own. Lately, it seems everyone is more consistently found in that state of commiseration, burning out navigating an increasingly algorithm-led industry that often tells authors the least impactful thing a book can be is itself. An industry that targets, as one marketing plan I saw so memorably put it, “influencers who treat books like accessories.” Always, always, the ever-pressing concern of our immediate survival in a business built to go on without us. Few artists live out their lives assured their will work will endure in the way Cohen’s has, but one thing all artists have in common is they, themselves, must find a way to endure their work.

In 1986, Various Positions was released in America by a small label, uncelebrated. And Cohen, well—he returned to the song. He gave the lyrics a less religious bent, and performed that version live. And while his long-established reputation came with it considerable advantages, and while Adrienne Clarkson assures us Cohen’s indefatigable belief in his own talent would never let him remain defeated, until Bob Dylan became the first of Hallelujah’s countless cover artists, this was the only part of the process that was truly in Cohen’s control: the work and his own relationship to it.

Cohen chose to meet Hallelujah onstage again and again, regardless of who would meet him there. He could not force others to see what he saw, but it was enough that he, himself, saw it.

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It’s no secret Leonard Cohen has become an important fixture in my creative life—or maybe I should just call it ‘my life’ at this point, because for me there’s little separation between who I am and what I do. His writing came at a time when the push-and-pull of certain personal and professional challenges rendered me past a point of articulation, and when I found something of my struggle expressed in his own, it had the powerful impact of shaking the stranglehold of its loneliness loose, giving me the language to name it. He’s a man we frequently perceive as depressed and at war with himself, but there’s a deep vein of humor and lightness that runs through his work, which was, unquestionably, his purpose. His unabashed commitment to his purpose speaks to me. That he recognized both the absurdity and beauty of a calling that left him at his own mercy a great deal of the time speaks to me. There’s little sympathy to be had for what an artist inevitably admits to putting themselves through, but it’s hard not to take what lives in your heart so seriously. I’ve said before that Cohen showed me if you sit with the anguish of writing, you will only feel its anguish, but if you let yourself sit with the joy of it too, each eventually takes its turn. That the work can be your anchor, if not your reward.

From 2008 to 2022, I wrote a series of novels about a certain type of girl. I can and will tell the stories of that time, but I can no longer tell those exact stories. Recently I’ve been defining my last eight books as an era because in so many words I want you to understand that part of my career is over. This happens, and if I continue to write, it won’t be the last time it does. How to describe occupying a moment so in between everything it can’t be weighed down by the pursuit of any particular, let alone triumphant, outcome?

I think in terms of continuing. Of next eras, emerging. Often, I think of the moment Cohen came back to his song after the mistake of trusting Yetnikoff with it, when it all seemed so over, and how a turn of joy, at that time, might only have been defined by the feel of his newly revised lyrics snapping into place. And when I feel that myself in the forming of my next book’s sentences, I realize those sentences are the only thing I am—and can only ever really be—in pursuit of.

My work, my anchor. My anchor, my reward.

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