Looking at Leonard Cohen's darkness misses the warmth of his words

Eighty-two seems too soon an age to take a man like Leonard Cohen. In truth I’m not sure that I believed he would ever be taken at all, rather that he might somehow gently ossify, assume the contours of the landscape, and be still.

I don’t know who it was who first called Cohen “the Godfather of Gloom”, nor even “the High Priest of Pathos”; certainly it was easy to cast him as a miserablist, for the half-listener to fall for the droop of the voice and the forlorn flamenco grounding of his music and see only the dirge and the dark. But this would be to miss entirely the warmth of his words.

When I think of Cohen’s use of language it is of how alive it is – which is not to say sprightly or gung-ho, but rather I think of its suppleness and its sensuality, as if his words run at the same temperature as blood.

I’ve written before about the song Chelsea Hotel #2, of how it contains my favourite single word in all of rock’n’roll – the plain, half-muttered “that” of its final line. It’s a short song, famously detailing a brief encounter with Janis Joplin at the Chelsea Hotel in New York – where Cohen lived while trying to make his way first as a writer and then as a musician – and written, he claimed, on a napkin, sitting at the bar of a Polynesian restaurant in Miami Beach. The throwaway nature of their entanglement, even of Cohen’s anecdote about how it came to be written, all seems to me to be undermined by the placing of that “that”. “I remember you well, in the Chelsea Hotel, that’s all, I don’t even think of you that often.”

This is one of the qualities I love about Cohen’s writing – the precision of his words. Whereas Van Morrison, for instance, shares a similarly sensuous approach to language, the two writers’ treatment of words is strikingly different – Morrison seeming to shape them mid-air, Cohen choosing to sit with them a while, making sure they are good and right and worthy over time.

I wrote several years ago about the song Hallelujah – more famous now in the hands of talent-show contestants, or the voice of Jeff Buckley, Bob Dylan or John Cale. It was Cohen who composed it – though “write” seems too flippant a description for the five years he laboured over its lyrics, filling notebooks, banging his head against the floor of his room at the Royalton Hotel in New York out of pure frustration. Eighty drafted verses – and later there would be more, because Cohen chose to change the song for live performance. Years later, he spoke of how “all human activity is flawed” and of his belief that it is “by intimacy with the flaw that we discern our real humanity”, and perhaps this is the quality that makes Cohen’s writing resonate so well – not the cold-eyed precision of lexical choice, so much as intimacy with his words.

A few years ago, I became quite infatuated with Cohen’s song In My Secret Life – one of those moments, perhaps, when the way your life and a song orbit each other leads to a perfect point of eclipse. Musically, it’s not my favourite Cohen style – it’s 2001 by the time it appears on Ten New Songs, and his music is slicker and more synth-led. But I love its sentiment, his exploration of the tension that exists between our inner and outer lives, of how the pleasure of privacy meets the cold of isolation and longing for connection. It is a song, to me, about closeness. And I have thought of it often in the years since, in a world that seems increasingly preoccupied with surfaces, with appearance and aesthetic, and I wonder about all the secret lives beneath.

You Want It Darker was the title of Cohen’s final album, released earlier this year – a wry nod, perhaps, to his reputation. Strange, then, that the most-feted Cohen lyric – the one that has appeared over and over on social media since the announcement of his death, should be about light. “There is a crack in everything,” runs the line from Anthem. “That’s how the light gets in.”

When I think of Cohen it is not as that famed Godfather of Gloom, it is as a man always looking for the light. There was a tremendous New Yorker profile in October that depicted the Cohen of 1960 living in London with an Olivetti typewriter and a blue Burberry raincoat, writing to a publisher of how his work would appeal to “inner-directed adolescents, lovers in all degrees of anguish, disappointed Platonists, pornography-peepers, hair-handed monks and popists”. A man in a grey city, looking inward. But it also showed a man who fled Britain for the sunshine of Greece, who on his new island of Hydra caught a glimpse of a blonde-haired Norwegian woman named Marianne and sought out the brightness of her.

Cohen’s work to me is about light and shade, the perpetual shifting of perspective from inner to outer and back again. It’s there in the crack of a well-placed “that” or a broken hallelujah, in the quiet blaze and shadow of a secret life. These are the songs of a man who, through God and love and sex and music, spent his life seeking illumination.