It’s fitting that So Long, Marianne is one of his most gorgeous songs, with its winsome whistle-while-you-work melody, but there’s conflict, too. He swore she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever met and the pair spent much of the decade bound together.
When Cohen first met Marianne Jensen, on the Greek island of Hydra in 1960, he was smitten. “You touched her perfect body with your mind,” sighs Cohen, and though there’s longing in his voice there’s contentment too – because he knows that consummating the relationship would just stain its purity. And although it’s all a beautiful lie, it’s more beautiful than the truth. Her habit of feeding him “tea and oranges that come all the way from China”, then, is mythologised into a spiritual ritual their strolls near the Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours chapel in Montréal are divine pilgrimages that link them to the old sailors who’d be blessed at the church before braving the sea. It’s a love song, but love with limits: his muse Suzanne Verdal was dating someone else, and so all he has to feed off are platonic scraps. Suzanne was first published as a poem in 1966, but Cohen’s recorded version, with its soft acoustic guitar cushioning his warm, clipped voice, is far more special. His debut LP, Songs of Leonard Cohen, reinvented him as a devilish bard whose modern hymns of love, lust, faith and betrayal had far more life than they’d ever have as just ink on a page. And 1966’s follow-up Beautiful Losers was both puzzling, with its complex symbolism, and shocking, with its lewd depictions of grubby sex. He was already an acclaimed poet, but his first piece of long-form fiction, 1963’s The Favourite Game, made little impact. Too clever for his own good, and certainly far too clever for anybody else’s: that was the sniffy verdict on Leonard Cohen’s brief stint as a highfalutin novelist.
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