I'm Your Man by Sylvie Simmons Page B

was. Their images and themes—war and betrayal, longing and despair, sexual and spiritual yearning, familiar to readers of his poetry—were in keeping with the rock music zeitgeist, but the words in which they were expressed were dense, serious and enigmatic. There is a hypnotic quality to the album—the cumulative effect of the pace and inflection, the circular guitar, Leonard’s unhurried, authoritative voice—through which the songs are absorbed and trusted as much as understood.
    There are characters in the songs as cryptic as those in Bob Dylan’s, like the man with the sadism of a Nazi and the golden body of a god with whom the singer shares a lover in “Master Song.” Dylan, in fact, was the name that came up most often in the reviews of Songs of Leonard Cohen, particularly in discussions of the lyrics. “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong,” Leonard’s wryly humorous song, inspired by Nico, about a man battered but unbroken by lust, shared a small patch of common ground with Dylan’s “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.” But the poetry of Leonard’s lyrics was more honed and controlled, steeped in literary and rhetorical technique. In liturgy also.
    â€œSuzanne,” the opening song, appears to be a love song, but it is a most mysterious love song, in which the woman inspires a vision of Jesus, first walking on the water, then forsaken by his father, on the Cross. “So Long, Marianne,” likewise, begins as a romance, until we learn that the woman who protects him from loneliness also distracts him from his prayers, thereby robbing him of divine protection. The two women in “Sisters of Mercy,” since they are not his lovers, are portrayed as nuns. (Leonard wrote the song during a blizzard in Edmonton, Canada, after encountering two young girl backpackers in a doorway. He offered them his hotel bed and, when they fell straight to sleep, watched them from an armchair, writing, and played them the song the next morning when they woke.) Yet, however pure and holy, a sense of romantic possibility remains for a man who in The Favorite Game described the woman making up the hotel bed in which they had just made love as having “the hands of a nun.” There are many lovers in these songs, but also teachers, masters and saviors. In the song titled “Teachers,” the initiate is offered a variety to choose from, including a madman and a holy man who talks in riddles.
    Perhaps the most cryptic track on the album is “The Stranger Song,” a masterful, multilayered song about exile and moving on. It was born, Leonard said, “out of a thousand hotel rooms, ten thousand railway stations.” 7 The Stranger might be the Jew, exiled by ancestry, perpetually on the run from his murderers and God; the troubadour, rootless by necessity; or the writer, whom domesticity would sap of his will to create. Here love is once again presented as something dangerous. We have Joseph, the good husband and Jew, searching for a place where his wife can give birth to a child who is not his, and whose existence will come to cause more problems for his people. In the “holy game of poker,” it is of no use to sit around and wait in hope for a good hand of cards. The only way to win is to cheat, or to show no emotion, or to make sure to sit close to the exit door.
    If Leonard had recorded just this one compelling album and disappeared, as Anthony DeCurtis, the American music critic, wrote in his liner notes to the 2003 reissue, “his stature as one of the most gifted songwriters of our time will still be secure.” On its original release, the U.S. press was considerably more lukewarm. Arthur Schmidt in Rolling Stone wrote, “I don’t think I could ever tolerate all of it. There are three brilliant songs, one good one, three qualified bummers, and three are the flaming shits. . . . Whether the man is a poet or not (and he is a brilliant