He worked on this song harder than on any other, running through more than 80 drafts, literally banging his head on the floor of a hotel room when the words would not come. "Hallelujah" traces a Freudian line of guilt between the psalmist King David and his sin with Bathsheba, whose husband he sent off to be killed. The questions that run beneath the song are whether great invention can stem from terrible transgression, whether forgiveness is ever granted by achievement. Cohen calls "Hallelujah" "a desire to affirm my faith in life". It cuts very close to the source of creation and it restored Cohen to a place in the pantheon.
Until, once more, he was beset by disaster. Early in the new century, he discovered that his bookkeeper and part-time lover had been quietly stripping him of his assets, leaving him to face a penniless old age. Cohen sued her (he never got a dollar back but she was eventually jailed for harassing him) and, in his seventies, he went back on the road with "Hallelujah".
Whispering into a close-lipped microphone, he confronted each audience with its own questions, offering by way of consolation a rough truth bred of tough experience. Into the "Hallelujah" lyrics at every station he interjected the line, "I didn't come to Helsinki (Hamburg, wherever) to fool you," and the public bowed its head as if to a blessing.
After the 9/11 attacks Cohen warned that "in the Jewish tradition, one is cautioned against trying to comfort the comfortless". In "Going Home", the signature song of Old Ideas, released in January 2012, "He wants to write a love song/An anthem of forgiving/A manual for living with defeat . . ." No one knows better the limits of human life.
He has hardly enough voice left to rise above sotto, or end a line without drawing breath, but the consistency of purpose is astonishing and the fundamental faith is unchanged. He wears the hat and the suit of a regular shul-goer. He is a Jew, first and last, a traveller, a seeker, eternally homeless. "I just move from hotel to hotel and by the grace of the One above sometimes a song comes," he said.
At 80, Leonard Cohen stands above his generation as a seer of lasting things, of values received and passed on. Other musicians have emerged richer, more famous. Some still twist and shout on stage, escorting their mob of semi-retired fans into a seventh age of twilight care. Cohen stands up there unchanged, addressing his audience with unfailing courtesy and curiosity, with a sense of continued discovery. At that desperate end-of-tour concert in 1972, having wept into the shoulder of every member of his entourage, he blew his nose, wiped his eyes and walked guitarless out onto the dark stage. "I just want to tell you, thank you and good night," he said. Along with all that he had said and sung, it sounded like a blessing.
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