http://www.leonardcohenforum.com/
"A Ballet of Lepers collects never-before-seen early works from beloved singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, including short stories, a novel, and a radio play. The titular novel, Cohen believed, was “probably a better novel” than his celebrated book The Favorite Game. These recovered gems traffic in the themes that would always obsess their author, like shame, desire, and longing. Cohen’s life and art have been dissected for years, but as this revealing volume proves, there are still new shades of him to discover."
) know, whether the “Hallelujah”-movie will be shown in Scandinavia (especially Denmark)?I waited until I was certain Polly would be home from school and then I ran up my street toward her house. When I reached her driveway, I could already hear her wooden flute. I could have stayed there and listened to all the music I wanted, but I walked on into her backyard. She was seated deep in a large garden chair, her head back, her eyes closed, and the instrument held high and lightly against her lips. I listened for another moment until she heard me. She opened her eyes and stopped playing, but she didn’t remove the wooden flute from her lips.
“You here again? What for this time?” she buzzed.
“Same as before. To hear your wooden flute.”
“It’s not a wooden flute,” she said, with great contempt. “It’s a recorder. Can’t you remember that? Recorder. I’ve never even heard of a wooden flute.”
“I could have stayed in the driveway without you ever knowing and listened to you play,” I told her, hoping to impress her with my honesty.
“Well then, why didn’t you?”
“I don’t know. I thought it wouldn’t be fair.”
“Well, you know what you have to do if you want to come around here.”
Polly always spoke to me that way, as if she didn’t like me and I bothered her. But I knew that I was practically her only friend. When we went to grade school, we always walked home together. She was three grades ahead of me, and now she attended the junior high and she always walked home alone. She dropped the instrument into her lap and tapped it with her fingers as she spoke.
“Let’s see. What’ll I make you do today for your song? What did I make you do yesterday?”
“I had to find out how many somersaults could be done from one end of the lawn to the other.”
“Yes, I remember. And how many were there?”
“About eighteen. I forget exactly.”
“You forget! Do you think I set these tasks for nothing? You just better find out again how many there were.”
“Now? Right away?”
“Right away, if you ever want to hear another note of music.”
I walked to the garage wall. She didn’t turn around to watch me. I kneeled down and somersaulted past her to the edge of the lawn, and then returned to where she was sitting.
“Eighteen.”
“That’s what you said in the first place,” she reminded me.
“Will you play now?” I asked, brushing my clothes with my hands.
“That was yesterday’s. You’ve still got to do today’s. And I haven’t decided what today’s will be yet.”
“Please decide, Polly,” I said solemnly, wondering if the music was worth the humiliation after all.
“All right,” she said, “I want a bouquet of dandelions. Eighteen dandelions so you won’t forget the somersaults. And the bunch has to be tied up with red string. A bouquet of dandelions, that’s what you have to get for today.”
And she folded her arms on her chest. I remembered seeing a cluster of dandelions when I had kneeled beside the garage. I picked seven there. Across the fence, I saw some yellow flowers among the bushes, but I discovered that they were chrysanthemums.
“Not chrysanthemums,” Polly called at me. “Dandelions. Can’t you remember?”
The sky was getting dark. I knew that soon I could be called for dinner.
“Seven wouldn’t do, just for today?” I asked feebly.
Polly didn’t even answer. I took a shortcut across a few fences to the field beside the Layton’s. Sheila, a girl in my class, was playing there by herself.
“Sheila,” I cried, “help me gather some dandelions.”
“What for?” she asked, following me from flower to flower.
“I’ve got to get a bouquet for something. Hurry, please.”
Sheila was unsatisfied with my answer, but she ran off and returned with a handful of the precious blossoms.
“Here,” she said. “Now tell me, what for?”
“Tomorrow,” I said, snatching them from her and running off.
“Okay for you,” she called after me.
I was halfway back to Polly’s when I remembered the red string. I raced to my own house where I knew there was some on the kitchen table.
“Oh, are those for me? How nice,” my mother said.
“No, no,” I spluttered, “but I’ll get you a bouquet soon, I will.”
“That’s all right. What do you want? A glass to put them in?”
“Just a piece of red string to tie them up with,” I said, getting what I wanted from the kitchen drawer.
Polly smiled when I approached.
“Eighteen,” she said, after counting them. “Very good. All right, what do you want to hear?”
“’Alas, my love’. . . . Same as yesterday.”
“You mean ’Greensleeves.’ ’Lady Greensleeves.’ Can’t you remember anything?”
Polly adjusted her position so that she couldn’t see me. I lay on my back, looking up at the darkening sky. Then the music began. Sky, leaves, garage, grass, everything seemed to lean on us as if the music were a thin powerful wire, pulling everything together. I closed my eyes. Polly played the song through a few times and then started to play her own song. She entered into her own tune, so softly that I hardly realized she was no longer playing “Greensleeves.” Yes, the somersaults and flowers meant nothing, and Polly was right in asking for them. No, I just couldn’t sit by her anytime and have her play for me. Some gift had to be made. Raindrops fell on my face, but I waited until I could feel them through my shirt before opening my eyes. Polly stopped playing and looked at me as if I were responsible for the rain.
“We could go into the garage,” I suggested quietly.
Polly got up and opened the small garage door and disappeared inside without motioning me to follow. I heard the music start again. “Lady Greensleeves.” I entered and closed the small door behind me. It was very dark and smelled of oil and last year’s leaves, some of which I crushed underfoot. I could barely make out Polly, who was sitting on some old crates and leaning against the damp wall. I sat down a few feet from her. The music was much louder in the garage. It filled up the stone room like a flood. I could hear nothing but the song and the rain against the small high windows of the sliding door. After a very few minutes, she stopped playing and announced that I’d better go home now because she was putting the recorder away and because she’d had enough of me anyway. I opened the door for her, and we both went out into the yard. It was raining very lightly. She put the instrument under her blouse to protect it.
“Will the rain hurt it?” I asked, trying to show interest and gratitude.
“’Will the rain hurt it, will the rain hurt it?’” she mocked. “What do you think the rain will do? Help it? Turn it into gold?”
“I guess not,” I said, and she began to mount the stairs into her house.
“Thank you, Polly,” I called after her. “Can I come tomorrow?”
“Aren’t you ever going to leave me alone?”
The next day she wouldn’t see me at all. As soon as I came into the yard, she went into her house. I went over to the field beside Layton’s. Sheila was there, playing with her skipping rope.
“More dandelions?” she sang out.
“Nope,” I said, as she came over to me.
“You promised me you’d tell me what they were for.”
“I didn’t promise, but I’ll tell you anyhow,” I said, happy to recount the experience. “It was so Polly would play the wooden flute to me.” And I told her about the dandelions and the rain and the garage.
“Well, if that’s the way she treats people, it’s no wonder she doesn’t have any friends.” Still, Sheila was interested, and she asked if maybe she couldn’t come along one afternoon.
“We can try tomorrow,” I said, immediately sorry for my words because I knew it wasn’t a thing that should be shared. Besides, I thought that Polly would be angry.
The following afternoon, we presented ourselves to Polly. As we were turning into the driveway, we could hear the music and Sheila wanted to stay right there and listen to it without any trouble, but I would hear nothing of this. Polly was seated as usual in her wooden chair. She stopped playing as I approached.
“I brought a friend. This is Sheila,” I said to Polly.
“Hello, Polly,” Sheila said.
“I hope you didn’t bring her here for me to entertain the both of you. I’m not an organ-grinder. You alone are bad enough,” she said to me, ignoring Sheila altogether.
But I could see that Polly was actually flattered that I had brought her another spectator. I wondered what she would make the both of us do.
“Do you like music, Sheila?” Polly asked, lightly prodding her in the stomach with the instrument.
“Well, yes, I like it, I guess.”
“You guess. Did he tell you what he had to do?”
“You mean about the somersaults and the dandelions? Yes, he told me. I helped him pick some of them.”
“You helped him pick some?”
She leaned towards me. “You little cheat. You didn’t tell me anybody helped you.” I said that I didn’t think it mattered. “Of course it matters, you’re just a cheat. Well, you’re not going to get away with anything this time if you want to hear me play.”
“What do you want us to do?” I said, looking at Sheila, who, I thought, must be sorry she had come in the first place.
“Let me see,” Polly said, sinking back into her chair and looking at the two of us.
“Here, Sheila, let me see that skipping rope.”
Sheila handed it to her. Polly got up and tied one end around my waist and the other end around Sheila’s waist so that we were bound about a foot from one another. We were both too curious to protest.
“Now just wait a second,” Polly said, and ran up the stairs into her house. She returned with some newspaper which she began to roll up. “Have you a handkerchief?” she asked me.
I gave her my handkerchief and she blindfolded Sheila. “Hey, what is this?” Sheila cried.
I assured her that nothing bad would happen and she submitted. The fact is we were both fascinated by the whole ritual.
“Now the idea is,” Polly said, placing a roll of newspaper in each of Sheila’s hands, “the idea is that when I start blowing, you start bashing him with the newspaper and you don’t stop until I stop blowing.” And she said to me, “You must keep your hands in your pockets.”
I watched Polly. She looked at me as she removed the mouthpiece from the instrument and put it to her lips. She blew hard and it sounded high and harsh. Sheila brought one roll lightly down on my shoulder. Polly stepped very close to Sheila and blew the mouthpiece right beside her ear. She began to squeal and rain blows down on my head and shoulders. Polly never took her eyes off me during the whole thing. Then the whistle stopped, but Sheila didn’t, and I had to catch hold of both her hands. I seemed to be the only one at all upset. Sheila was grinning, and Polly seemed satisfied.
“Will you play for us now, Polly?” I asked.
“The garage. In the garage,” Sheila whispered to me. Polly heard.
“So, you told her about that too? You don’t know anything about secrets, do you?” Polly strode to the garage door and pushed it open. “All right, you two. Get in, if you want to.”
We followed her, and I closed the door behind us. There was the same damp autumn smell and it brought back to me the afternoon two days past. I could hardly wait for the music to begin. I wondered if it would be the same with Sheila there. Polly took her old seat and Sheila and I settled ourselves a little distance away. The music began and soon it filled the whole garage, overwhelming me. It called into our stone room the vast night from the other side of the world. I reached for Sheila’s hand. As soon as my fingers touched hers, she took my hand between both her hands and pressed it against her mouth. Then she leaned against my shoulder and kissed my cheek. I wanted to join my voice with the flute’s. I held her close against me. I knew no afternoon we would ever spend would be as beautiful as this. In the week that followed, we visited Polly almost every day. And every day, we submitted ourselves to the humiliations Polly had prepared. Soon, I hardly knew whether I came for the music or the secret embrace which the music and the darkness allowed. There was no such division on Sheila’s mind.
“Why do we want to put up with all her nonsense for?” she said. “We could meet without her, in your garage or mine?”
But I wasn’t at all ready to give up the music and Sheila knew it was no use arguing with me. So, we continued to visit Polly, always careful to show her the greatest respect. She suspected nothing. She thrived on us. She never spoke except to give us a command or call us down. Although she knew nothing of our movements in the dark, she seemed to sense how much we needed her, or at any rate, how much I needed her. Arrogant as she became, I was ready to do whatever she willed. One afternoon, our task involved finding a broken yo-yo, which Polly had hidden at the bottom of one of the garbage cans underneath her back steps. Sheila refused to assist me as I removed each soaked, smelling package. Polly didn’t seem to mind. I had to turn away from the search several times to prevent myself from retching. I finally found the toy.
“It’s about time,” Polly said.
Sheila was disgusted with me, and I felt terribly degraded myself. I didn’t know what to say.
“You’d better wash your hands before we begin,” Polly ordered me.
When I returned, we took our places in the garage. Polly began her music, and when I felt that she was caught up with it and knew that her eyes were closed and her heart part of the sound, I drew Sheila towards me. And with the damp bricks ringing, the oil glistening in dark rainbows, and the leaves softly splintering under my tapping shoe, we loved with all our eleven-year-old passion. Sheila was not so affected by the atmosphere. I was her real interest, and this afternoon, she was bolder than she had ever been. She began to tickle me in the ribs.
“Careful, careful,” I barely whispered in her ear.
“’Careful, careful,’” she mocked, brushing my cheek with her lips. Then she kissed me loudly on my nose.
“Sheila, Sheila, she’ll hear us,” I whispered desperately.
And then suddenly, we were both of us laughing out loud, unable to contain ourselves, exhilarated by our impudence. The music stopped abruptly. Polly ran across the garage and switched on an electric light I had never noticed. Sheila and I were still in each other’s arms. In a second, Polly understood the deception we had practiced on her the past week, how we had used her to excuse our embraces and why we had so cunningly endured her insults. And in her deep humiliation and pain, with both hands she pressed the flute across her eyes and sank to a sitting position in the oil and dirt of the floor of the garage, her body trembling.
“You two. You two,” was all she could manage.
“Oh, Polly,” I began, kneeling beside her, not knowing what to say. “Start again, please start again. This time we’ll really listen, won’t we, Sheila?”
Sheila walked to the door of the garage and opened it. With one hand, Polly pushed me away using as much strength as she could muster. I followed Sheila out of the garage.
“You two!” Polly screamed after us.
“No wonder she has no friends,” Sheila said, as she walked down the street. “No wonder she has to walk home alone.”
But I was not prepared to discuss the awful thing that had just happened, and after I had made an appointment to meet her the next day after school, I walked home for dinner. Sheila and I met in my garage, as we had planned the day before. She had arrived before me and had arranged some boxes for us to sit on. I sat down, and she put her head against my shoulder and squeezed my hand.
“Now we’re all by ourselves,” she whispered.
It seemed so pointless, the two of us sitting there in that half-lit garage, our slightest movements and whispers echoing the silence back to us that I could hardly sit still.
“What’s the matter?” she asked. “Don’t you like me still?”
“Course I like you. It’s just that I can’t stay, that’s all. I have to do something for my mother. We’re having company, and I have to go downtown and pick up some flowers for the tables,” I lied.
“Well, why didn’t you tell me yesterday?”
“I didn’t remember yesterday.”
And I fled from the garage, leaving Sheila pouting in the darkness. As I walked up the street, I wondered what I would say to Polly, and what she would say to me. I lingered for a few minutes in the driveway, listening to the music, then I walked to the backyard. She was sitting, as usual, in the wooden chair. She looked up at me and continued playing. I sat down on the grass, not far from her. When she had finished her song, she said, “You know, I had to remove all the garbage and then put it back to hide the yo-yo in the first place.”
“Oh, Polly,” I said, full of compassion. “I never thought of that. Wasn’t it terrible?”
She didn’t answer. She got up from the chair and stood behind me. I didn’t know what she was going to do. She kneeled down behind me, put her arms over my shoulders and held the wooden flute before me. The sun on the varnish made it look like gold.
“Want to learn?” she asked me quietly, guiding my fingers on the instrument.
From A Ballet of Lepers by Leonard Cohen (Grove Hardcover, out October 11, 2022). Copyright © 2021 by Leonard Cohen Family Trust.
A lyrical short story by Leonard Cohen: A Montreal poet goes looking for love in a raincoat
Unread post by Born With The Gift Of A G » Wed Sep 28, 2022 1:01 am
In The Jukebox Heart, this posthumously released work, the great singer-songwriter imagines a young romantic courting a mysterious, beautiful woman. Will it end in Hallelujah – or so long Mariette?
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/ ... ebox-heart
https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780802160478
Publisher's Weekly
August 8, 2022
A Ballet of Lepers
Leonard Cohen. Grove, $27 (272p) ISBN 978-0-8021-6047-8
The late singer-songwriter and novelist Cohen (Beautiful Losers) leaves readers with an enthralling collection of work written in the 1950s and ’60s, as complex and dark as his lyrics. The unnamed narrator of the title novella is an aimless, solitary 35-year-old Montreal man who leads “an underground existence.” After the narrator learns his grandfather needs a place to live, he takes the older man in. It turns out the grandfather and narrator are ruthlessly violent—in one harrowing scene, the grandfather joins the narrator in beating the narrator’s girlfriend—and the story ends in a stunning reversal. In “O.K. Herb, O.K. Flo,” the narrator muses bitterly on Montreal’s cold surfaces: “All the stone you could want to fool yourself that life is substantial.” The narrator goes to a bar and meets a mediocre jazz player named Herb, who confides he’s going to convince his former lover, Flo, now married, to commit adultery. Herb passes out, leaving the narrator and Flo to discuss the situation. “Polly” follows a junior high girl who orders two younger children to do a variety of demeaning tasks in order for them to hear her play her recorder, such as taking out her trash. Cohen (1934–2016) writes brilliantly of desire and cruelty as his desperate characters yearn for connection. This is magnificent. (Oct.)
Esquire
The Best Books of Fall 2022
This list has Stephen King, Cormac McCarthy, and a cultural history of butts. What more could you want?
By Adrienne Westenfeld
Aug 20, 2022
Welcome back to the biggest season in books, dear readers. Fall is book publishing’s victory lap, when publishers roll out their biggest titles by their biggest literary prize-winners. That explains why this season’s line-up is such a murderer’s row of huge names, like Stephen King, Annie Proulx, and Haruki Murakami. We’ve also got some bona fide literary events in the pipeline, like George Saunders’ first collection of short fiction in nearly a decade, and Cormac McCarthy returning with not one, but two novels after more than fifteen years of trademark seclusion. This season is also full of unexpected delights, like unpublished fiction from Leonard Cohen and a cultural history of the female bottom. (Yes, we’re serious).
Not all of these books have hit shelves yet, so if you see something you like, do yourself a favor and pre-order it now. When you find it on your doorstep amid a scattering of fall leaves, you’ll be thanking Past You.
...
A Ballet of Lepers collects never-before-seen early works from beloved singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, including short stories, a novel, and a radio play. The titular novel, Cohen believed, was “probably a better novel” than his celebrated book The Favorite Game. These recovered gems traffic in the themes that would always obsess their author, like shame, desire, and longing. Cohen’s life and art have been dissected for years, but as this revealing volume proves, there are still new shades of him to discover.
The Guardian
A Ballet of Lepers by Leonard Cohen review – violent literary beginnings
A novella and short stories from the 1950s showcase Cohen’s fascinating self-fashioning, but also a taint of bitterness
Toby Litt
Sat 1 Oct 2022
Long before he wrote Famous Blue Raincoat or Last Year’s Man, Leonard Cohen already knew – with painful exactness – who he wanted to be. In a short story dating from 1957, collected here for the first time, he details his 13-year-old self’s “heroic vision” of a charismatic future persona: “I was a man in the middle-twenties, raincoated, 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.”
Swap in “mid-70s”, take off the raincoat to reveal the natty suit beneath, transport the life-bruised man from wet boulevard to centre stage, and behold the Cohen I saw perform in 2008, everything the 13-year-old Leonard might have wished for.
A Ballet of Lepers is Cohen’s rediscovered first novel (at 112 pages, it’s more a novella), accompanied by 16 short stories. Ranging from an unvarnished journal entry to an intergalactic Twilight Zone episode, they come across as an endearingly ragtag bunch of tryouts. For the Cohen obsessive, there are fascinating glimpses into his self-fashioning. On almost every page, you can find an image that later blossomed in one of his songs. A jazz hipster character remarks: “You’re the one to talk, poet man, with your slim obscure volumes, thick as a forest, with breasts and thighs.”
There are characteristic one-liners: “One thing is sure: I know how to relax in a bathtub.” And almost all the stories feature a Cohen alter ego having romantic trouble. In her biography, I’m Your Man, Sylvie Simmons describes these fictions beautifully as “stacked up like mirror-lined Leonard Cohen dolls reflecting, and deflecting, ad infinitum”. The best of them, a trio anatomising the small, perverse life of one Mister Euemer, escapes this hell of self-reflection. Here, the straining after an existential profile lets up and Cohen writes more like a Montréal Maupassant: twisty but deeply affecting.
If there’s a central theme to this period in Cohen’s work, then it’s violence – physical and emotional violence, but more specifically violence against women. And it is the arrival of a master of violence that kicks off the action of A Ballet of Lepers. Like most of the short stories, it’s set in mid-1950s Montréal. The first sentence recalls the opening of Albert Camus’ L’Étranger. Camus has “Today, mother died.” Cohen has “My grandfather came to live with me.” But even more than his existentialist contemporaries, Cohen seems to be riffing on Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (“I am a sick man … I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man”). Ugliness abounds, from the deliberately grotesque title onwards: ugly emotions, ugly actions.
Before the grandfather has even left the train station, he has beaten a policeman to the floor. “He danced around the body, waving his cane like a banner, spitting as he danced on the suffering, speechless man.” Later, mulling this over, the narrator says: “I was not disgusted. Actually, I laughed with a kind of admiration.” And that admiration for violence only grows. But in order to be acted upon, it needs a victim. One is duly located: Cagely, the baggage clerk from whom the narrator tries to reclaim his grandfather’s lost suitcase, whose ugliness marks him as impure. (The narrator quotes biblical precedent in Leviticus: “and the plague in sight be deeper than the skin of his flesh, it is a plague of leprosy: and the priest shall look on him, and pronounce him unclean”.)
Running in parallel to the narrator’s stalking of Cagely, and his aping of his grandfather, is his fraught coupling and uncoupling with his lover, Marylin. Her rhapsodic speeches lift the novel out of realism and into allegory. “Tonight,” she says, “you are my ardent lover … I wouldn’t have traded this for the ravages of the loveliest swan.” In this allegory, Marylin is Beauty, Cagely is Impurity, the grandfather is Violence, and the narrator – a more confused figure – is Love or Art or Postwar Jewish Masculinity.
At its worst, A Ballet of Lepers is bitter and portentous. The desired persona speaks louder than the actual man. “It happened, that is all, it happened just as Buchenwald happened, and Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz, and it will happen again … we will say that it is the plan of a madman … but the madman is ourselves, the violent plans … they are all our own and we are not mad, we are crying for purity and love.”
This is the narrator’s existential justification of the previous scene, in which, while breaking off his engagement to Marylin, he beats her:
I struck her face. Her body began to writhe and tremble in an orgy of pain and sexual intoxication.
“Beat me,” she pleaded.
I beat her, and I beat her, with my fists and my arms, with my head and knees. Suddenly, the door opened and my grandfather was beside me and he was beating her too and she did not resist, I do not think that she resisted, she urged us to continue, pleading with us not to stop …
The novel climaxes with three major plot reversals, all of which serve to destroy the narrator’s trust in violence. In the first, the narrator crashes in on the grandfather as he beats their landlady with his cane. Rather than join in, as invited (“I help you with Marylin, remember?”), the narrator turns his violence on his master. “I threw my fist into his enraged face and then into his stomach.”
In a Cohen song, we would tolerate and perhaps even enjoy this, because there would be a killer tune, and the voice delivering the beating would sound like that of a world expert on compassion. Stripped of the troubadour’s glamour, it appears – as Cohen clearly intended – far more ugly than the hapless Cagely. But it’s the taint of bitterness that is most offputting. In order to become the truly heroic man I saw in 2008, Cohen had first of all to win the love of those countless audiences, and then overcome his need for it. Here are his first, fascinating struggles to repulse and to endear.
Toronto Star
Glimpse of the artist as a young writer: Leonard Cohen’s posthumous book ‘A Ballet of Lepers’
Made up of short stories and a novella that carries a flair which, even in a work this early, is recognizably Cohen’s own
By Robert J. Wiersema
Fri., Oct. 7, 2022
When faced with a collection of a writer’s early, previously unpublished work, it is natural to have some questions: Is it being released with the author’s consent? Why is it being published now? And, perhaps, most crucially, what is the value of these works? Are they revelatory in some way, or are they profit-driven barrel scrapings?
When it comes to the new publication of Leonard Cohen’s “A Ballet of Lepers,” a collection of early fiction, including the title novella, more than a dozen short stories and a play script, the answer to the first of these questions seems straightforward enough. According to editor Alexandra Pleshoyano’s Afterword, “we know from Leonard’s letters in the archive that he tried consistently to have these works published.” Despite the fact that “consistently” doesn’t seem to have a time-frame attached, we can be secure in the knowledge that, at some point at least, he intended them for publication (thereby avoiding questions around intent and consent such as those still surrounding the publication of Harper Lee’s “Go Set A Watchman” in 2015).
As to the timing of the publication, the faithful Cohen fan (myself included) will likely answer, why not now? Any time is a good time for more from Leonard Cohen.
The question of value, however, is somewhat harder to answer. “A Ballet of Lepers” isn’t particularly revelatory; nor is it simply an exercise in looting the archives. It is a relatively strong collection of fiction. Uneven in places, and undeniably young (from an artist who always seemed prematurely aged and sagacious), it’s definitely worth reading.
The fiction in “A Ballet of Lepers” was written between 1956 and 1960. Cohen’s shift to music was years away, but he was already in the process of becoming an established poet. As Pleshoyano notes, “his early books of poems, “Let Us Compare Mythologies” (1956) and “The Spice Box of Earth” (1961) … in a sense bookend the works contained in this volume.” The stories were written in Cohen’s childhood home in Montreal and various other addresses there, in New York City (when he was studying at Columbia), and on Hydra, the Greek island to which Cohen decamped in 1960 (courtesy of a Canada Council grant). The fiction all predates Cohen’s two novels, “The Favourite Game” (1963) and “Beautiful Losers” (1966).
“A Ballet of Lepers,” the novella, is the most substantial work in the volume, an existential exploration of violence and beauty, love and cruelty, obsession and renunciation. The piece itself is spare and taut, chronicling the descent of the narrator following the arrival of his grandfather, who comes to live in his room at a boarding house. The grandfather’s scorn for societal taboos and embrace of violence (our first glimpse of the grandfather involves him spitting on, then beating, a police officer in the train station) seems to release something in the narrator, leading to his own violent and obsessive acts. The novella carries a flair which, even in a work this early, is recognizably Cohen’s own.
The stories which follow range from the straightforward (“Saint Jig,” which involves Henry paying a sex worker to take his friend Jig’s virginity, is somewhat one-note, and reads a bit like an extended joke, but one can’t help but fall into the easy cadences of Cohen’s youthful prose) to the stylistically challenging (Pleshoyano points out the “Hebrew style” of the fourteenth story, “without any title, capital letters, punctuation, or accents, just a few spaces in between the end of a sentence and the beginning of the other”).
The volume will be of interest to Cohen fans for how it prefigures his later development: much of what we have come to recognize as his stylistic and thematic approaches (even decades later) is already present in this fiction. Passages in “A Ballet of Lepers” show the writer already jaded beyond his years, with a weariness that time would transmute into wisdom. As he writes in the novella, “Love is constant, only the lovers change. I sometimes picture the whole thing as a great game of musical chairs. When the music stops, a few, very few unfortunate ones, cannot continue in the game; the rest find a place to sit before the music starts again.” Or, as Herb the trumpet player tells the narrator in “O.K Herb, O.K. Flo,” “‘You’re the one to talk, poet man, with your slim obscure volumes, thick as a forest, with breasts and thighs. Yessir, Mister Moral, preach me a little bit.’”
In the end, “A Ballet of Lepers” is a valuable, if relatively minor, addition to the Cohen canon, the traces of a writer in his twenties not discovering his voice so much as affirming it, and in the process creating a blueprint for the decades of work to follow.
NY Times
Sex, Violence and Ecstasy: Leonard Cohen’s Early Fiction
A posthumous release of the songwriter’s unseen novel and stories from the 1950s reveals his nascent fascination with human frailty.
By Nathan Goldman
Oct. 7, 2022
In 1963, four years before his first album, a promising young poet named Leonard Cohen released his debut novel, “The Favorite Game.” Jack McClelland, the Canadian publisher who’d enthusiastically issued Cohen’s second poetry collection, “The Spice-Box of Earth,” initially declined to put out the evocative yet disorderly bildungsroman; he felt it was marred by the egotism of a “first novel.” Cohen responded that the book was actually “a third novel disguised as a first”; though he hadn’t published them, by then he had already begun “Famous Havana Diary,” which he would never finish, and completed “A Ballet of Lepers,” which he once said was “probably a better novel” than “The Favorite Game.” But despite Cohen’s best efforts, it never appeared during his lifetime.
Six years after his death, this work is the centerpiece of a new collection of juvenilia compiled by the scholar Alexandra Pleshoyano, who also co-edited Cohen’s previous posthumous book, “The Flame.” “A Ballet of Lepers” sets the longer title piece alongside 15 short stories and one radio playscript, all written between 1956 and 1960, when Cohen was in his 20s. These early experiments are the most minor of Cohen’s minor fictional oeuvre. Fleetingly brilliant, they find him circling the subjects that would occupy him all his life — sex, violence, sacredness and the ecstatic moments when all of the above become indistinguishable — but struggling to find the fullest expression of his aesthetic.
“A Ballet of Lepers,” a grim fable with shades of Poe and Dostoyevsky, follows a 35-year-old bookkeeper living alone in a rented room in Montreal who is called upon to care for a grandfather he has never met. When the narrator witnesses this feeble newfound patriarch attacking a police officer at a train station, the display unleashes an amorphous, long-harbored fury. Soon the grandson finds himself threatening an irritating co-worker, manipulating his lover and instigating a campaign of cruelty against an unsuspecting baggage clerk. For the narrator, consumed by a desperate sense of destiny, brutality itself becomes a source of meaning. He associates his petty barbarity with world-historical horrors — “it happened,” he muses, “just as Buchenwald happened, and Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz” — even as it fills him with an unsettling affection for humanity. “We will say that it is the plan of a madman, the idea of a madman; but the madman is ourselves.”
While the novel is stirring in its almost mythological simplicity, compelling in its portrait of deranged rapture, intelligently attuned to the seductions and self-delusions of false transcendence, it is also structurally clumsy, hindered by a climactic twist and mechanically staged stock characters. The women, especially — the narrator’s severe landlady, his naïve lover, Marylin, and the baggage clerk’s conniving adulteress wife — are underimagined, often collapsing into tiresome archetypes.
These same flaws afflict the more mature “The Favorite Game” (Cohen’s own ranking notwithstanding) and its 1966 follow-up, “Beautiful Losers,” as well as the short fiction collected in “A Ballet of Lepers.” But unlike the early novel, many of these stories are built around striking images of frailty and desire. In “Polly,” two 11-year-olds rendezvous in a dark garage while a friend plays the recorder, unwittingly providing the soundtrack to their ambling intimacy; in “A Week Is a Very Long Time,” which bears a distinct resemblance to a passage in “The Favorite Game,” two lovers witness the slaying of a cat from a hotel window. These scenes express the same subtle sense for life that animates songs like “Chelsea Hotel #2” or “Hallelujah.” In his lyrics, Cohen took the melodrama and solipsism that plagued his prose and alchemized them into something more moving and mysterious.
Once he turned to songwriting, Cohen set fiction aside. Perhaps it was a purely strategic decision, or maybe he ultimately understood that it was not his form. If the pieces gathered in “A Ballet of Lepers” testify to this, they nonetheless offer nascent glimmers of his inimitable artistic vision: intimate yet aloof, trembling with weakness even as it aches toward wisdom.