By Eileen Grant
TW: This essay contains a mention of suicide.
“He invokes The Other with a confession of impotence, exile, and separation.”
— Leonard Cohen, “Orion,” 1979
“I said this can’t be me / Must be my double”
— Leonard Cohen, “I Can’t Forget,” 1992
Throughout his career as a poet-musician, Leonard Cohen led multiple lives. He existed as a romantic troubadour in the public eye, a spiritual teacher in the realm of literature, and an introverted artist in his private life. Christophe Lebold claims that “even as a biographer, you cannot escape Leonard Cohen’s masks” (44); these multiplicities permeate Cohen’s acclaimed œuvre of ten poetry collections, two novels, and fifteen studio albums. Although contemporary criticism is wont to treat the now-deceased Cohen like a prophet, whose most famous piece “Hallelujah” (1984) remains as revelatory for the field of music as its title suggests, in 1977 Cohen released an album that appeared to signal the downfall of his career to critics and fans alike.
Upon its release, Rolling Stone described Leonard Cohen’s Death of a Ladies’ Man as a “doo-wop nightmare” (Nelson 94). The album, which was produced by Phil “Wall-of-Sound” Spector decades before his murder arrest, arguably remains Cohen’s most overlooked and underrated record to date. Throughout the tracklist, Cohen’s intimate lyricism is incongruously accompanied by horns, percussion, and somewhat pervasive background vocals provided by a chorus of women and on one occasion, Bob Dylan (Lebold 295). This multi-vocal project culminates in a title track that effectively kills the Casanova character Cohen embodied in his celebrity. The song, written and recorded while Cohen’s marriage was deteriorating, follows the rise and fall of a romantic relationship; in the narrative, a sensuous female figure gains dominance over her male lover who is characterized by religious authority and self-destructive tendencies. Cohen croons from an uncharacteristic third-person perspective which provides a sense of distance between the singer and his highly autobiographical narrative. This vocal space establishes that despite Cohen’s metaphysical death as a lover, his existence as a storyteller continues.
Themes of fragmented identity persist in Cohen’s 1979 publication Death of a Lady’s Man, which Ken Norris describes as “a text that is at war and at peace with itself” (53). The title of the book suggests psychological doubling—in his conspicuous reframing of “Ladies’” to the possessive “Lady’s,” Cohen continues his project of killing alternate versions of himself, burying the husband figure alongside the dead womanizer without waiting for the dirt to dry. The desire to destroy one’s double, a common literary motif defined by Sigmund Freud in his essay “The Uncanny,” appears prominently in Cohen’s self-elegy “Death of a Lady’s Man.” In this poem, Cohen arranges the lyrics of his song “Death of a Ladies’ Man” to mimic the rhythm and rhyme scheme of a traditional poetic ballad. I contend that the representation of multiple selves and the blending of poetic forms in “Death of a Lady’s Man” both illustrate a sense of psychological doubling; Cohen simultaneously assumes the role of the titular divorced corpse and exists as the detached balladeer, paradoxically narrating his own demise from a quasi-external point of view.
The project that would eventually become Death of a Lady’s Man took on many identities from its inception in 1976 until its publication in 1979; the book, originally named My Life in Art, was also dubbed The Woman Being Born before Cohen settled on a title which mirrored that of his most recent record. In his critique of the poetry collection, Norris claims that “Death of a Lady’s Man is haunted by the ghosts of these two unpublished manuscripts” (51). Cohen significantly delayed production of the book, withdrawing his manuscript shortly before publication and fundamentally transforming the collection by adding commentaries after nearly every poem which “interrogate, elucidate and undermine the original text” (Norris 51). These commentaries illustrate Cohen’s lack of clarity surrounding his identity and portray a sense of vocal doubling that he might typically achieve by recording harmonies in the studio. Robert De Young aptly compares the commentaries to “Spector’s wall-of-sound arrangements for Death of a Ladies’ Man,” as each of these idiosyncratic techniques “render it almost impossible to discern a single voice” (137). Cohen effectively suffocates his poetic speaker by refusing to let his words stand alone.
The friction plaguing Cohen’s voice in Death of a Lady’s Man throughout his continuous conflict between poetry and commentary can be understood through Freud, whose theorization of the psychological double in literature corresponds with Cohen’s fragmented artistic identity. Freud frames the double as “an insurance against the extinction of the self” (298). In Cohen’s life, this figure appears as his brooding ladykiller media persona, which he “created as a vehicle to live his life with greater acuity” (Lebold 44). By attaching a larger-than-life personality to his name, Cohen ensures his immortality and thus allows his double to subsume his entire existence in the public eye. The sudden murderous impulse that Cohen expresses toward the ‘ladies’ man’ through the title of his 1977 album serves as an inevitable consequence of this double gaining authority. After Cohen overcomes the “primordial narcissism that dominates the mental life of…the primitive man…the meaning of the ‘double’ …becomes the uncanny harbinger of death” (Freud 299). Cohen’s decision to substantiate the death of the ladies’ man through his music is therefore an act of self-defense, out of fear that his domineering media persona may eliminate his sense of self.
At the stage in Cohen’s life when he decided to create this album, the frustration of existing in multiple contexts—he has been a famous musician for a decade, a poet for two—has resulted in an utter loss of control over his identity. Cohen stated of the album’s gestation: “Fundamentally my sense of who I was was undergoing a complete revision but I was still putting on the mask and walking out of the door every morning trying to be Leonard Cohen, the poet who makes records” (Jones). His double, or the version of Leonard Cohen that exists in the cultural consciousness, has an unprecedented level of autonomy, so much so that Lebold suggests that “this persona, this double was more real than the man himself” (44). While Cohen writes and records the songs on this album, this alternate identity looms unrelentingly overhead, threatening to subsume his artistic existence. In response, Cohen adopts a Freudian approach and decides to murder his double with a song, an album, a poem, and a book.
There is, of course, a distinction between the double Cohen kills with the album and especially the song “Death of a Ladies’ Man,” and the Cohen who subsequently dies through the publication of Death of a Lady’s Man. The difference is that the latter project was released around the time he and his longtime partner/mother of his children, Suzanne Elrod, officially separated. The possessively titled book therefore marks the end of Cohen’s time spent as a husband, or the man belonging to the lady. While the album demonstrates Cohen’s desire to destroy a falsified version of himself in a self-effacing manner, to clarify his unmasculine lack of dominance over himself and his female lover, in the book he can only proclaim his own death as a husband with help (or lack thereof) from his wife. In the song “Death of a Ladies’ Man,” and in its poetic rendering “Death of a Lady’s Man,” Cohen the lover is deceased, yet Cohen the singer enigmatically facilitates this death, which Cohen the writer contradicts through his existence within the song/poem. For clarity’s sake, although I will be drawing quotes from “Death of a Lady’s Man” as it appears in the collection Death of a Lady’s Man, the lyrics to the song “Death of a Ladies’ Man” are identical to the poem aside from two minor inconsistencies.
In “Death of a Lady’s Man,” Cohen immediately represents the Freudian desire to kill one’s double through a suicide by hanging:
The man she wanted all her life
was hanging by a thread
“I never even knew how much
I wanted you,” she said.
His muscles they were numbered
and his style was obsolete.
“O baby, I have come too late.”
She knelt beside his feet. (Death of a Lady’s Man 30)
There is some ironic resentment present in Cohen’s narrative treatment of the ladies’ man, whose numbered muscles and obsolete style suggest his demise was timely, and whose method of suicide is darkly comedic as it suggests he is ‘well-hung,’ even in death. Through a narrator’s voice, Cohen frames this suicide as a necessary sacrifice, or “holocaust” (DLM 30) which allows for the ambiguous female character to gain power; she takes “unto herself most everything her lover lost” (30) in preparation to seduce another Cohenian figure, introduced in the song after a postmortem musical break. Although the lover persona has died, a double consciousness remains in the narrative, rendered through two remaining versions of Cohen. There is Cohen the singer, who relays the narrative to us, the listeners, and there is “the master of this landscape” (30), a religious figure within the song who represents Cohen as a poet. Doubling is also present within the poem’s form, as it displays distinct conventions of both the ballad and the elegy. A balladic rhythm illustrates Cohen’s role as a songwriter and storyteller, while a modern elegiac tone serves to mourn the lover, and highlights Cohen’s inadvertent status as a religious figure. His fascination with spirituality and frequent religious allusions in his work have contributed toward the general public associating Cohen with theology; he plays with this thematic connection by implementing elegiac conventions in ballad form.
Despite Cohen’s efforts to murder his double, his elegiac ballad displays multiple artistic identities. Norris’s assertion that “in Death of a Lady’s Man the erosion of particular self only leads to the establishment of particular selves, not to a revelation of the absolute” (53), illustrates the persistence of Cohen’s fragmented poetic voice. He plays the role of storyteller of his own life by explicating an autobiographical narrative from a third-person perspective. In “Death of a Lady’s Man,” Cohen configures the lyrics of “Death of a Ladies’ Man” in alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and trimeter with an ABCB rhyme scheme characteristic of the poetic ballad. His decision to split the poem’s stanzas into octaves rather than standard balladic quatrains further demonstrates the sense of doubling which pervades the poem. These long stanzas also slow down the ballad’s typical “aggressive, galloping meter” (Caplan 110) to fit the somber tone that Cohen immediately establishes with suicidal imagery. Cohen loosely adheres to iambic meter—shown in lines such as “And all his virtues burning / in this smoky holocaust,” (DLM 30) where the second syllable in burning is unstressed and should therefore begin the next line to continue his established pattern of iambs. Yet, the poem’s origin as a song proves its connection to balladic tradition.
In opposition to “all other of Western culture’s older verse forms, which more aggressively developed away from their origins in song” (Caplan 111), the musical nature of the ballad endures in modern poetry such as Cohen’s. The reader, who has likely been acquainted with the song and its melody before coming into contact with the poem, can hear a distinct rhythm upon reading Cohen’s words. The largely impersonal tone of the balladeer who grandly mythologizes the life and death of the ladies’/lady’s man may cause confusion surrounding whether or not this narrator is a distinct character or another fragment of Cohen’s multiplicitous self. Cohen himself lamented the narrative style’s unspecific nature, stating in an interview that although Death of a Ladies’ Man was “the most autobiographical album of my career…I wish at times there was a little more space for the personality of the story-teller to emerge” (Kubernick). Indeed, the anonymous poetic speaker only adopts the personal “I” pronoun for the ballad’s final two octaves, in order to address his audience directly and echo the historical “local ballad-singer” who served as an “integral part of the community,” and whose tales “were made to be used, to be handed on” (Bold 64). Cohen’s identity as a singer is congruent with the ballad form and is inherently present in the voice of his storytelling poetic speaker. He uses a poetic form that has “long explored the connections between written and oral methods of transmission” (Caplan 110) to dissect the relationship between his identity on the page and stage. As these methods of performance allow for multiple selves to be created, they have a doubling effect.
The ballad complements Cohen’s penchant for romance and tragedy, as the form’s generational transcendence relies on its ability to elicit an emotional response from any audience. “Death of a Lady’s Man” subverts received balladic tropes, however, through Cohen’s relentless emphasis on the unhealthy, unusual nature of the romantic relationship that sustains the text. As most ballads conclude with a hero’s death, the balladic narrative often features a “nuncupative testament,” wherein the “dying or departing protagonist is asked to dispose of his or her possessions and does so in a particularly telling fashion” (Bold 31). Cohen implements an inversion of this nuncupative testament by emphasizing his female character’s habit of claiming things that belong to the autobiographical male protagonist. She takes “his much-admired / oriental frame of mind…his blonde madonna / and his monastery wine” before triumphantly claiming: “This mental space is occupied / and everything is mine” (DLM 31). Cohen illustrates her power over the male character through moments of quoted speech which are not afforded to the dead “man she wanted all her life” or the suicidal “master of this landscape” who attempts to “make a final stand / beside the railway track” (31) before she stops him by further emasculating him. She takes “his tavern parliament, / his cap, his cocky dance,” (31)—respectively articles associated with authoritative masculinity, and male genitalia—to disempower him as their relationship comes to an end. The desire to eliminate one’s double remains omnipresent in the narrative through the aforementioned imagery of the male figure threatening to hurl himself in front of a train. Cohen exercises excess authority from the storyteller’s privileged position, however, as he markedly refuses to kill his protagonist at the ballad’s conclusion. The poem remains purposefully unresolved by its end, and the only true tragedy notably occurs before the narrative begins—we are introduced to the lover after he has already hung himself. Consequently, the rest of the narrative must develop in response to this tragic event; death necessitates mourning, and poetic mourning necessitates elegiac form.
While the balladic rhythm of “Death of a Lady’s Man” poetically represents Cohen’s identity as a singer-songwriter, the elegiac tone of the piece highlights his status as a spiritual figure and serves to mourn his existence as a lover. Born and raised Jewish, Cohen nevertheless “fell in love with Catholicism” (Lebold 52) at an early age, and later practiced Buddhism as a Zen monk. His practiced devotion is unmistakable throughout his music and poetry, as he frequently references religious dogma. In “Death of a Lady’s Man”, we are introduced to the master of the landscape—a narrative double embodying Cohen’s last name which, translated from Hebrew is ‘priest’—while he is “preaching” (DLM 30), an action which immediately establishes his authority. Attaching significance to this meaning throughout his life, Cohen constantly attempts to achieve a connection with God that is typically only available to saints and clergymen (Lebold 39). Cohen’s obsession with religion may be figured as a potential solution to the fractures in his selfhood; Lebold claims that Cohen “longs for the clarity of those close to God and for the state of grace that comes when you stop struggling with the world” (84). This lack of clarity motivates his decision to formally kill the ladies’ man, yet his sense of struggle remains unresolved by the end of his dualistic narrative. He uses the mournful elegy form in combination with the more romantic ballad to emphasize his “high religious mood” (DLM 30) which is inextricable from his spirituality, and ultimately, his sexuality.
The elegy’s form differs from the ballad’s distinct meter and rhyme scheme firmly established by the length of the oral and written tradition. An elegy is most often recognized by its thematic content, rather than any formal specifications. Conventions of the elegy include “a pastoral context; the myth of the vegetation deity;…and the traditional images of resurrection” (Watkin 101). Images of resurrection are prevalent throughout Cohen’s poem and coincide with themes of double consciousness. When the lover turns to ash, “his virtues burning” in a sacrificial “holocaust,” a version of Cohen returns to the dust from whence he came. He is then quickly replaced by an alternate figure who can also be understood as representative of Cohen. Cohen incorporates the “vegetation deity,” who traditionally represents the life cycle from birth to death to rebirth, through the female character; she is reborn after her lover’s death upon finding the master of the landscape “standing at the view / with a sparrow of St. Francis / that he was preaching to” (DLM 30). Aspiring to emulate the religious influence of Saint Francis of Assisi (Lebold 54), Cohen depicts a version of himself as a spiritual master ruling the landscape of the written word. He acknowledges the saint’s habit of preaching to birds (Da Magliano 55), yet fails to vocally render the male figure’s authority, as his narrator privileges the woman’s ability to speak. Moreover, the double emerging after the death of the ladies’ man represents resurrection, as birds and their songs often symbolize rebirth in the elegiac tradition (Ramazani 39). Cohen also fortuitously confronts the notion of fertility associated with the vegetation deity in his rendering of an abortion wherein the female figure moves “her body hard / against a sharpened metal spoon,” and stops “the bloody rituals / of passage to the moon” (DLM 31). He draws upon associations between the menstrual and lunar cycles to suggest the female lover’s power is unearthly. She engineers death inside of her and defies the cosmos in the process, yet she continues to survive and is eventually reborn in the arms of a younger man at the end of the narrative. Although rebirth is typically associated with revelatory clarity, Cohen’s elegy is decidedly inconclusive, as the pervasive theme of fragmented identity results in his simultaneous existence as narrator and character.
Cohen’s poetic speaker’s lack of resolve at the end of the narrative is typical of modern elegies which subvert normative mourning. As the balladeer/storyteller, Cohen performs grief for his double, yet cannot provide closure to the death of the ladies’/lady’s man, because he has facilitated this tragedy. In Jahan Ramazani’s Poetry of Mourning, she clarifies that “the modern elegist tends not to achieve but to resist consolation, not to override but to sustain anger, not to heal but to reopen the wounds of loss” (xi). By reformulating a preexisting song into a poem, Cohen sustains the anger of working with Phil Spector and reopens the wounds of his failed marriage. The sense of loss which pervades “Death of a Lady’s Man” is constant, as the female character strips the religious figure’s identity from him. Cohen’s final assertion that his narrative has left “us all so vacant / and so deeply unimpressed” (DLM 32) emphasizes that the purpose of his speaker’s elegiac tone is not to issue comfort or condolences but to expose the emptiness associated with a fragmentary existence. Ramazani also invokes a Freudian term to describe tendencies of modern elegists as they “enact the work not of normative but of ‘melancholic’ mourning” (4). For Freud, melancholic mourning acts as a response to “the loss of an object that is withdrawn from consciousness, unlike mourning, in which no aspect of the loss is unconscious” (205). By publicly killing his falsified womanizer persona, Cohen necessitates a melancholic tone, as he performs a funeral procession for an unconscious loss. Freud refers to melancholia as “the disorder of self-esteem,” noting that standard mourning is not typically “expressed in self-recrimination and self-directed insults” (204) such as those Cohen frequently directs toward himself from a third-person point of view. He uses the female lover as a mouthpiece to degrade himself, mocking his own “working-class moustache” (DLM 31) by focalizing this derision from her point of view. Cohen’s refusal to provide closure at the narrative’s end stems from self-loathing, as he appears unable to let his alter ego rest without disempowering him.
Through foregrounding the power imbalance of the central relationship in “Death of a Lady’s Man,” Cohen facilitates the process of melancholic mourning; the female lover’s power relies on the weakness of her male counterpart. Cohen self-effacingly demonstrates his insufficiency as a lover not only by narratively murdering the ladies’ man but also by emphasizing the autobiographical religious character’s lack of sexual bravado. Shortly after the female figure seduces the master of the landscape, he “offer[s] her an orgy / in a many-mirrored room” (DLM 30), which suggests a lack of confidence in his sexual abilities and also conjures images of the double, as everyone involved in this orgy exists within his own reflection. The self-loathing associated with a melancholic modern elegy is inextricably linked to Cohen’s fragmented sense of self as it is represented through the literary motif of doubling. He illustrates the male figure’s insecurity through the verb “offered,” which lacks conviction in comparison to the verbs associated with his female lover throughout the narrative (“took”; “said”; “moved”; “mocked”). Freud suggests that the “various self-reproaches of the melancholic” are often misleading, and may be truly construed as “accusations against a love-object” which “emanate from the mental constellation of rejection” (208). Cohen creates a tone of melancholic mourning by fixating on his incompatibility with the ladies’ man trope and emphasizing the female figure’s dominance in the narrative. Cuckolding himself through the distanced position of balladeer, Cohen expresses anger about his divorce; he reveals the woman’s cruelty through his portrayal of the weak master of the landscape. His self-loathing results from a need to humble himself before the powerful woman who appears to promise salvation. Her ultimate authority over the male figure mirrors his subordination before God; she assumes the status of a deity, yet refuses to salvage the man who worships her.
As the ballad typically explicates a romantic narrative, and elegies often take on a religious tone, Cohen combines sexual and spiritual language to demonstrate that he expects to achieve salvation from his relationships with women. The poetic speaker describes the moment of initial contact between the central couple thusly:
She beckoned to the sentry
of his high religious mood.
She said, “I’ll make a space between my legs,
I’ll teach you solitude.”
Cohen suggests that the sentry appointed to protect the man’s commitment to faith is his penis, which likely stands guard upon the woman’s beckoning. The male character’s religion thus encompasses simultaneous worship of God and of women, a theme which recurs in much of Cohen’s work. In his recent monograph which compares Cohen to Paul the Apostle, Matthew Anderson explores the theme of divine sexuality in Cohen’s work, noting that “using the language of prayer or worship for sex allows Leonard to describe in elevated and sacred language what might otherwise sound crass, furtive, illicit, or simply banal” (44). Cohen refuses to forgo his poetic obsession with sex and the female body even when writing in an elevated elegiac voice; he presents the purgatorial “space between” a woman’s legs as a potential locus for enlightenment due to its solitary peacefulness. He implements the verb “teach” in the poem in place of the word “show,” which he sings on the record, to highlight an educative quality of sex while furthering the divine authority of the female character.
The speaker presents sexual union with a woman as a solution to the psychological doubling plaguing him throughout the narrative by associating sex with a sense of peace and wholeness. This notion that sex allows for divine revelation recalls the original cover for Death of a Lady’s Man, “a gold-embossed image of a sixteenth-century symbolic representation of the coniunctio spirituum, or the ‘spiritual union,’ of the male and female” (Nadel 115). In rendering both the male and female characters pseudo-religious beings, him an imitator of Saint Francis and her endowed with a holy vagina, Cohen demonstrates this spiritual union in opposition to the identity crisis at the ballad’s end. He continues to view women as a reprieve from his fragmented existence and remains subservient in his efforts to gain the divine knowledge of femininity. Upon the couple’s separation, the man attempts to receive “a woman’s education,” however, as the narrator informs us, “he’s not a woman yet” (DLM 31), which implies that he fails to claim an identity for himself. Cohen notably inserts a first-person perspective at this juncture in the narrative, distancing his poetic voice from the struggling student of womanhood to suggest he possesses the most clarity as a balladeer.
Cohen’s attempt to achieve clarity through sex and the phenomenon of self-destruction associated with psychological doubling converge at a turning point in the narrative in which the male protagonist threatens suicide. In response to his attempt to jump in front of a train, his lover tells him “The art of longing’s over / and it’s never coming back” (DLM 31). Cohen continues expressing self-loathing through the female figure’s voice, as she dismisses his tendency toward artistry and firmly establishes agency for herself. Intervening in the balladeer’s narration, her constant speech resists Cohen’s tendency to objectify women through deification. Therefore at this moment in the narrative, the term “longing” also refers to the male figure’s drive toward death. Throughout his poetry and lyrics, Cohen frequently prefers the word “longing” in place of “desire” due to its religious connotations; Anderson notes that “the Hebrew Bible contains several Psalms of longing” which Cohen internalizes and reinterprets across his career, frequently construing the concept of longing as “a yearning for transcendence” (45). In this instance, Cohen attempts to transcend social norms surrounding gender and sexuality through the central romantic relationship’s inversion of power dynamics. He also transcends the notion of a singular poetic voice by representing his conflicted sense of identity honestly through multiple renderings of himself in one poem. The suicide attempt Cohen depicts represents an extreme desire for transcendence, as his male protagonist tries to transcend reality through death.
Stephen Scobie adroitly describes Cohen’s multiple identities in his review of Death of a Lady’s Man, which reads: “the speaking voice of ‘Leonard Cohen’ assumes too many contradictory positions ever to be assimilated back into any coherent picture of a unified self” (15). For Scobie, Cohen achieves transcendence by embracing his ambiguous identity. He refuses to conclude his ballad of divorce with distinguishable closure because he continues to exist in other capacities. He embraces his position as a storyteller, narrating his life from a distanced perspective to establish control over his media persona. Cohen’s lack of a singular identity plagued him throughout his artistic career, however in “Death of a Lady’s Man” he offers a satisfying non-solution, expressing himself poetically through a bodiless voice, perpetuating his fragmented existence while controlling the artistic formation of his multiple selves. After all, the reason Freud provides for the creation of a double is to extend one’s existence, ensuring immortality; Cohen engages in the literary traditions of the ballad and elegy to mythologize his life and paradoxically facilitate the survival of his double by killing him and subsequently mourning his death.
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