'If You Want A Partner, Take My Hand…'

The enduring consolations of Leonard Cohen: Uncut marks the departure of rock’s pre-eminent poet. David Cavanagh examines the life and work of a dapper master of his craft, while Cohen’s closest collaborators share their intimate memories: “When I awoke, there was Leonard, crouching at the foot of my bed, looking directly into my face with the utmost compassion.”

- David Cavanagh

Here’s a scene towards the end of Leonard Cohen’s first novel, The Favourite Game, where he describes a jukebox. His Dedalus-like hero, Lawrence Breavman, haunted by the mental illness of his mother and the death of a young boy in his care, ducks into a restaurant on Saint Catherine Street, a crowded meeting place in 1950s Montreal. He orders a drink and feeds the Wurlitzer with the last of his loose change:

The jukebox wailed. He believed he understood the longing of the cheap tunes better than anyone there. The Wurlitzer was a great beast, blinking in pain. It was everybody’s neon wound. A suffering ventriloquist. It was the kind of pet people wanted. An eternal bear for baiting, with electric blood. Breavman had a quarter to spare. It was fat, it loved its chains, it gobbled and was ready to fester all night.

Published in 1963 when Cohen was 29, The Favourite Game sold a couple of thousand copies but was hard to find in his native Canada. Did the beatniks and intellectuals who read it nod their heads in recognition of the “suffering ventriloquist” that played cheap tunes? Did they, like Breavman, take a curdled view of jukeboxes and the patrons who fed them? Funnily enough, Cohen didn’t. Despite his alter-ego’s disdain for the jukebox in the Montreal restaurant, Cohen evidently never forgot it. “They had good country songs on it,” he reminisced to the Irish radio presenter BP Fallon almost 30 years later. “‘Unchained Melody’ was a song that I used to listen to a lot on that.”