Glimpse of the artist as a young writer: Leonard Cohen’s posthumous book ‘A Ballet of Lepers’

When faced with a collection of a writer’s early, previously unpublished work, it is natural to have some questions: Is it being released with the author’s consent?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.

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