In 1944, when the poet-musician and global icon Leonard Cohen was nine years old, his father died. Leonard wrote a poem, sliced open his father’s favorite bowtie, inserted his elegy, and buried it in the family garden in Montreal. That was his first artistic expression. He would echo it again and again during his six-decade, Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award–winning career, penning hundreds of verses on heartache, longing, and love.
Cohen was famously sensual, romantic, a ladies’ man; Joni Mitchell once called him a “boudoir poet.” He had a hypnotic baritone, a shy charisma. But none of his love affairs lasted; as an artist he “existed best in a state of longing,” as his biographer Sylvie Simmons put it.
Perhaps his greatest love was a Norwegian beauty named Marianne Ihlen. He met her on the Greek island of Hydra in 1960, where a free-spirited international arts community had formed. Cohen was a writer then; it wouldn’t occur to him to set his poetry to music for another six years. Every morning he worked on a novel, and in the evenings, he played lullabies for Marianne’s son by another man. They lived in domestic harmony. “It was as if everyone was young and beautiful and full of talent—covered with a kind of gold dust,” he said later of his time on Hydra. “Everybody had special and unique qualities. This is, of course, the feeling of youth, but in the glorious setting of Hydra, all these qualities were magnified.”
But eventually Leonard and Marianne had to leave the island, he to earn a living in Canada, she to Norway for family reasons. They tried to stay together but couldn’t make it last. He moved to New York City, became a musician, was swept up in a scene that never really suited him. “When you’ve lived on Hydra,” he said later, “you can’t live anywhere else, including Hydra.”
He moved on with his life, Marianne with hers. But she inspired some of his most iconic songs—about leave-taking. They had titles like “So Long, Marianne” and “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.” “There are some people that have a tendency towards saying hello,” Cohen said of his music, “but I’m rather more valedictory.” His last great hit, released three weeks before his death at age eighty-two, was called “You Want It Darker.”
https://lithub.com/is-there-an-inherent-connection-between-sadness-and-art-making
