Sometimes, There Are Happy Endings – Sylvie Simmons' I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

A very happy Leonard Cohen performing on stage in 2009

The news that novelist Philip Roth has retired seems to have shocked everyone. Late last fall, in the French culture magazine Inrockuptibles, he said he’d had enough of reading and writing fiction and felt he’d said everything he had to say within the pages of a book. Thus, Nemesis, his fifth novella in an unofficial series looking back at various aspects of American society, was, Roth insisted, his last book – ever! The problem with this is not Roth’s decision – why can’t he retire at nearly 80 years of age? – but the assumption that artists, unlike regular folk, don’t ever retire from their professions. Of course many don’t. The majority of writers seem to write until the end and many filmmakers, from Robert Altman to Sidney Lumet, Satyajit Ray to Eric Rohmer, regularly made movies until their deaths. But others do hang up their cameras. The great Italian filmmaker Francesco Rosi (Christ Stopped at Eboli, Three Brothers) hasn’t shot a movie since 1997’s (underwhelming) The Truce and he’s still alive at age 90. And talented Richard Lester (A Hard Day’s Night, Robin and Marion) stopped making films in 1991. And let’s not forget actor Gene Hackman (The French Connection, Under Fire) who, citing the strains of getting up really early for film shoots, decided to chuck it all in 2004 only to change careers and become a writer.

And then there’s the great singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, who as Sylvie Simmons makes evident in her entertaining, breezy and very comprehensive Cohen biography, I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen (McClelland & Stewart), not only didn’t retire but upped the ante, going out on tour from 2008-2010 and keeping to a lengthy, rigorous schedule far more onerous than the tours he had done in his relative youth in the late 80s and early 90s. Not only that but he seems to have found only joy in writing songs and performing very late in life, beginning in his late sixties after a nearly six-year continuous stint in a Buddhist monastery (1993-99). Simmons’ very well written book covers the gamut, from Cohen’s birth in 1934 in the milieu of upper class Montreal through to his youthful Greek years of creativity on the island of Hydra to his sojourns in New York and L.A. Though Simmons answers pretty much any question you’ve ever had about the man, she could probably have delved into Leonard Cohen a little more vigorously and probingly than she actually does.

Everybody Knows: The Ubiquitous Leonard Cohen in the Movies

A young Leonard Cohen, in Donald Brittain's 1965 documentary Ladies and Gentlemen...Mr. Leonard Cohen.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Leonard Cohen since his passing earlier this month, unexpectedly but at the ripe old age of 82 – remembering the great concert of his I attended in Toronto in 2008, the humbleness he displayed on stage, and the sheer joy he felt in being so loved so late in his life. You just know he could not have imagined this highly positive outcome of his career trajectory. My good friend Bram Eisenthal, who worked then at Congregation Shaar Hashomayim, the synagogue that Cohen attended in Montreal, and whose cantor and choir are featured in several of the songs in Cohen’s poignant last album You Want it Darker (2016), sent him my concert review – and while I have no idea if he actually saw it, much less read it, I was thrilled to know that he might have. And as a Montrealer, I've visited where he lived and can recall sitting in Ben’s Delicatessen, a while before it permanently closed, not really enjoying the food (the quality of its fare had declined) but still content to know I was eating in one of Leonard’s hangouts.

A couple of days after the announcement of Leonard Cohen’s death, I was watching a fine 2016 French movie, Irreplaceable (Médecin de champagne), part of the lineup at Toronto’s edition of the European Union Film Festival, about a country doctor (François Cluzet) whose life is upended when he develops a tumour and has to allow a female medical practitioner (Marianne Denicourt) to help him in his duties. Late in the movie, both doctors attend a village dance where a country band slides into a decent rendition of Cohen’s classic “Hallelujah,” a moment which prompted a bit of a murmur from the audience as it seemed so particularly apt to pay tribute to Leonard in this way so soon after the shocking news of his death. (The moment was entirely serendipitous, of course, but still…) But it also struck me as nothing new, as I can’t think of any artist who has been featured the way he has in movies. It’s not simply that his songs or covers of them have graced so many movies and TV shows over the years (more than 50 at least), but the diversity of the filmmakers who have utilized his songs in their works has intrigued me and made me ponder on why he, of all singers-songwriters out there, has struck such a chord with so many of them.

Still Alive and Well: Leonard Cohen's Old Ideas

One warm evening in the spring of 2008, I filed into the Sony Centre in downtown Toronto where you could feel in this company of strangers a communal certainty that what we were about to witness was something captivating. Moments later, garbed in a grey suit and fedora, a Canadian legend took the stage. The applause only ceased when the opening chords of “Dance Me To The End of Love” wafted over us. So began our intimate three-hour encounter with the Canadian icon Leonard Cohen. Like many of his recordings, the performance was simple but urbane; humble but iconic; mournful but beautiful; thus making each detail unforgettable.

Several years after that epic world tour, in his 77th year, Cohen returned to the studio. The result is Old Ideas (Sony Music Canada., 2012) the twelfth studio album in his 44 year career and the first since Dear Heather in 2004. Living off of the vivid memory of that evening almost four years ago, the announcement of Old Ideas was a warm welcome. The album itself proof that Cohen’s artistic crux is still aglow in his twilight years. A Montreal native, Cohen was a published poet before his twentieth birthday. His poetic and literary accomplishments, which also include two novels that capture the quintessential melancholy of CanLit, might have established his foundation, but it is through song, however, that he became immortalized.

Psychiatric Help: Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker

Leonard Cohen's new album, You Want It Darker, was released on October 21st. (Photo: Luke Macgregor/Reuters)

Since its release a couple of weeks ago, Leonard Cohen’s latest album has been getting a lot of attention. You Want It Darker (Columbia) is Cohen’s 14th studio album. But rather than write an essay with syrupy accolades and explanatory impressions of the record, I’d rather not compete with the beautiful superlatives of Sylvie Simmons in the November issue of MOJO magazine. Nor try to unfurl the historical and spiritual connection of Cohen to Montreal, his birthplace, as Robert Everett-Green did so nicely in The Globe and Mail on October 22.

Similarly, I have no notion of adding anything more to David Remnick’s excellent profile in the October 17 issue of The New Yorker since I didn’t request an interview in the first place. I want to discuss Cohen’s remarkable timing with this record and the context, at least to me, of his profound ability of holding up a mirror to our world. With the clusterf#%& of the Presidential election campaign to the south, the Syrian Refugee crisis and, as recently reported by the WWF, a shrinking wildlife, Cohen’s poetry and songs are like a cold slap in the face to me. A shake-up of my ego and the ridiculous speed at which the world is cruising along without taking notice of the damage humanity is incurring upon itself. Of course we want it darker and we need a poet, perhaps this poet, to point it out. Finger-wagging won’t do; we’ll tune out. But as emotionally instructive opinion surrounded by the company of music, Cohen hits the proverbial spot as only he can, and for that I’m grateful.

Covered Up: Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah"

Steven Page at Jack Layton's state funeral

While listening to Steven Page sing Leonard Cohen's now iconic "Hallelujah," during the largely moving televised funeral last weekend for NDP leader Jack Layton, I began to recognize just how much this song has lost its meaning and much of its sting. Sung now with a solemn reverence, as Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released" often is, "Hallelujah" is about as misunderstood as Randy Newman's "Sail Away." Written in 1984, Cohen conceived the song as one that combined invective with elegiac and religious meditation. "You're not on the stand when you're praying," he told me in an interview months before the song was released. "You can't come with any excuses. You don't have a deep belief in your opinion any longer, or your own construction of how things are. That's why you pray because you haven't got a prayer." You don't hear in these famous cover versions by Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright, kd lang, or in Steven Page's recent rendition, any of that sense of doubt, the struggle between the profane and sacred, or even the naked fear of the singer being aware that despite being armed with prayer the world still remains the same.

Talking Out of Turn #29: Leonard Cohen (1984)

Leonard Cohen

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show, On the Arts, at CJRT-FM in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the Eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

Tom Fulton, the host of On the Arts at CJRT-FM

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

When we spoke to poet and singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen, he had just come out of a relatively long period of contemplation that dated back to 1979. The culmination of that hermitage was a collection of prayers, psalms, meditations, and contemplative texts he wrote called Book of Mercy (McClelland & Stewart, 1984). Little did any of us know, perhaps not even Cohen himself, that shortly after the publication of this book, his music career would once again catapult him back into the larger public arena.

Cultural Musings: On Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide, TV Guide magazine, The Maze Runner and the Longevity of Nick Cave

Film critic Leonard Maltin, promoting the now-final edition of his long-published Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide

The rise of the Internet and, in its wake, social media, has meant, I think, that no one bit of entertainment – be it a movie, TV show, record album or book – lasts for very long in the public consciousness. One month Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine will be the film du jour, then Richard Linklater’s Boyhood and then a different movie, which soon makes way for yet another and so on. The same with all other art forms, the result being that very little of anything makes a permanent or lasting impact anymore. Yet, at the same time, one gets used to certain artists, books or publications popping up on an annual basis. So it came as something of a shock when picking up Leonard Maltin’s 2015 Movie Guide to read in his introduction that this is to be the last one of these annual guides.

Critic's Notes & Frames Vol. XXV

There was always a sly self-deprecation and a sweet sensuality in pianist Fats Domino's voice which added great warmth and emotional intensity to his work. After building a solid rapport with black audiences in the early fifties, he infiltrated the white charts later in the decade with a succession of crossover hits including the moody "Blue Monday," the rollicking "Whole Lotta Loving," and the subversive "Blueberry Hill." Since Fats (who went to spirit in 2017) didn't possess in his voice the swagger of Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters, he preferred seduction to aggression and the words would often be couched in innuendo. Randy Newman learned much from Fats Domino in both style and humour. He also did some of the arrangements on Fats is Back!, Domino's 1969 comeback album. Fats returned the favour by covering Newman's Domino-inspired "Have You Seen My Baby?" from 12 Songs. One can't imagine Domino covering, as critic Scott Montgomery once mused, Newman's songs about sex and arson ("Let's Burn Down the Cornfield"), a genteel rapist ("Suzanne"), or suicide by way of a beach cleaning machine ("Lucinda"). But "Have You Seen My Baby," which borrows its opening line from Ernie K-Doe, is right in Fats's wheelhouse. It's a playful romp that easily takes its place in the canon of great New Orleans rhythm and blues – especially with shrewd Newman lines like "I say, 'Please don't talk to strangers, baby' / But she always do / She say, 'I'll talk to strangers if I want to / 'Cause I'm a stranger, too.'"

Understatement: Jason Schneider's Whispering Pines

The Band

“There is no music that you can say, ‘Oh, that’s Canadian – know what I mean? It’s North American music – different countries, but you hear the exact same music, from blues to cowboy. So rather than talking about Calgary or Montreal, we talked about places that we played in."
– Robbie Robertson quoted in Whispering Pines: The Northern Roots of American Music.

It’s been commonly held for years that Canadian musical performers only achieve their due recognition when they go south of the border. While that remains something of a simplification, there are still many examples to choose from – Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, just to name a few. Fortunately, in his recent book Whispering Pines: The Northern Roots of American Music…From Hank Snow to The Band (ECW Press, 2009), author Jason Schneider develops a more substantial rendering of this phenomenon. By examining the Canadian songwriting tradition as a national narrative, he’s able to illustrate how our musical artists subtly permeate the American experience rather than seek out our neighbour’s validation. In a series of essays that chart the careers of Hank Snow, Wilf Carter, Ian & Sylvia and Leonard Cohen, Schneider (Have Not Been the Same: The CanRock Renaissance) draws a delicate map of our cultural influence in popular music. He doesn’t so much examine how our identity as Canadians is felt in American music, but rather how American popular music has been enriched by our Canadian sensibilities.

Elvis Costello’s Cultural Boycott of Israel: Rank Hypocrisy and Naiveté

Elvis Costello’s recent decision to cancel his two upcoming shows in Israel because of his concerns about the plight of the Palestinians, and Israeli government policy towards them, is problematic and offensive on so many levels; I scarcely know where to begin. But let’s hear from the man himself, who just recently told The Jerusalem Post, "I know from the experience of a friend who is from Israel and from people who have worked there that there is a difference of opinion there among Israelis regarding their government's policies. It seems to me that dialogue is essential....The people who call for a boycott of Israel own the narrow view that performing there must be about profit and endorsing the hawkish policy of the government. It's like never appearing in the U.S. because you didn't like Bush's policies or boycotting England because of Margaret Thatcher."

Real to Reel: In Conversation with Documentarian Tony Palmer

Filmmaker Tony Palmer is the recipient of the 2017 Outstanding Achievement Award at Toronto's Hot Docs festival.

Legendary British documentarian Tony Palmer is the recipient of the 2017 Outstanding Achievement Award being handed out tomorrow, May 5, at Toronto’s Hot Docs Festival, and for good reason. Born in 1941 and the creator of more than 100 masterfully crafted arts films ranging from The Beatles and Cream to Igor Stravinsky, Richard Wagner and Ralph Vaughan Williams, Palmer is a director/editor as prolific as he is gifted and brazenly insightful. A critic once said of him that he is the poet of documentary filmmaking, and it is an apt description. His work is magnificent, poignant and honest. Through showing and not telling, it preoccupies itself with the stories of individual performing artists and the times in which they lived. Palmer, who has many accolades to his credit, including 12 Gold Medals from the New York Film Festival, draws a direct connection between environment and art making. It is what sets his movies about culture far above the mainstream.

This week, Toronto audiences can see for themselves why he is a giant in the field. Besides honouring his more than fifty years as a celebrated filmmaker, Hot Docs is showcasing a curated retrospective of Palmer’s extraordinary body of work, selected by programmer Michael McNamara and screening at TIFF Bell Lightbox until Sunday. Titles include Margot, Palmer’s 2005 searing analysis of the life of famed English ballerina Margot Fonteyn (Sunday May 7), Bird on a Wire, a behind-the-scenes look at Leonard Cohen on tour in 1973 which only now is getting theatrical release after being lost for more than four decades (Friday May 5 and Saturday May 6) and All My Loving (1968), Palmer’s groundbreaking BBC series on pop music (which John Lennon personally requested he make) featuring Eric Clapton, Eric Burdon, Jimi Hendrix and others against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and other explosive political events rocking the 1960s (Friday May 5).

In Toronto this week, and away from the home he shares in Cornwall with his Italian-born wife, a calligrapher, and their three school-age children, Palmer is introducing his films and, post-screenings, is signing copies of his work on DVD, among them The Beatles and World War II, his brilliant anti-war film, set to iconic Beatles songs as re-recorded by the likes of Tina Turner, Elton John and Jeff Lynne, just released last year after languishing in the vaults since the 1970s (when it was released as All This and World War II). It screened at Hot Docs on Wednesday, for one blistering showing only.

In advance of Wednesday’s screening, Palmer took time out for coffee and a chat touching on his early days as music critic for The Observer, his apprenticeship with Ken Russell and why Frank Zappa remains the bane of his existence. Here’s an edited version of that conversation:

A Game of Chance: The Criterion Blu-ray Release of Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)

Warren Beatty and Julie Christie in McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

Some forty-five years after its initial release, Robert Altman's seductive and allusive 1971 western, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, still has the potency of a dream you don't wish to wake from. And as dreams distort the familiar, Altman's picture also alters our sense of reality and transforms the genre's myths we've come to recognize into a lingering reverie of the past. Despite a script, based on an Edmund Naughton 1959 novel (McCabe), Altman doesn't just tell a story here; he lets one unfold intuitively as our narratives often do in life and from directions we can't predict and with outcomes we can't anticipate. The howling wind that opens the film may push gambler John McCabe (Warren Beatty) towards his fate in the growing town of Presbyterian Church (just as it will later bury him in the snow), but Altman is also playing a game of chance, and destiny is as much a crap shoot as the changing weather. While the camera pans right, the credits move horizontally to the left, turning our field of vision into a peripheral map that's always in search of a focal point. It sets us up beautifully for an elliptical tale where the meanings are delineated from between the lines of the story. Robert Altman might draw from the sources of the western, but he does it as if he were trying to uncork an old undiscovered bottle that once stored its essence.

All the Criticism That's Fit to Print: Revisiting The Rolling Stone Record Review and The Rolling Stone Record Review II

Led Zeppelin (courtesy of Getty Images).

In March 1969, writer John Mendelsohn was given the assignment for Rolling Stone to review the debut album of Led Zeppelin, a high-octane blues-rock outfit that had just emerged out of the ashes of The Yardbirds – a popular British Invasion band with a string of hits behind them including "Heart Full of Soul" and "For Your Love." Although there were no great expectations that this new ensemble would make history, Mendelsohn's words came to suggest that they might just become history. Chalking up their sound to formula, Mendelsohn remarked that Zeppelin "offers little that its twin, the Jeff Beck Group, didn't say as well or better..." Robert Plant's "howled vocals" were described as "prissy" on their cover of Joan Baez's "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You," and Mendelsohn went on to add that "[Plant] may be as foppish as Rod Stewart, but he's nowhere near so exciting." Jimmy Page gets complimented as an "extraordinarily proficient blues guitarist," but he's also singled out as "a very limited producer and a writer of weak, unimaginative songs." Criticizing them as wasting their talent on "unworthy material," Mendelsohn saw little from that first record that suggested that Led Zeppelin would be talked about fifty years later. "It would seem that, if they're there to fill the void created by the demise of Cream," he wrote, "they will have to find a producer (and editor) and some material worthy of their collective attention."

The Art of the Song 2016: The Year’s Best Singles

The members of A Tribe Called Red. (Photo: Falling Tree Photography)

Sometimes a single track can go a long way… to inform, entertain and genuinely change the way we think of ourselves. This past year’s political, environmental and social events were certainly magnified by a U.S. Presidential candidate who raced all the way to the bottom and won. But out of all that muck, these songs in particular cleared the haze and showed us some light. They graced us with humour and passion. They spoke truth to power and put the spotlight on the rich subtleties of life. We’re going to need a lot more of them in the years ahead.

Ohhhh Canada: Critics At Large Celebrates Canada 150

Celebrating birthdays is complicated enough when you're discussing people, let alone when you start talking about a nation. For a few months, the idea of doing a special series of pieces reflecting the complicated and controversial history of our Confederation was kicked around. But these days there is no one person who is a driving force at Critics at Large to bring consensus and focus to these kinds of ambitious plans. So the notion languished passively and died on the vine. We ended up doing an ad hoc number of random pieces that became part of an informal Canada 150 series. Since my turn to write was coming up today, I had to ask myself if I wanted to do something – anything – about why Canada mattered. But I had too many ideas and none that jumped out as inspired. So while recently culling together some of my own Critics at Large writing for a summer project I've been working on, I began reading a number of other critics who said things in the heat of reviewing that touched on some fascinating aspects of what it meant for them being Canadian. In a matter of moments, I began lifting selections from those reviews dating back to our beginnings in 2010. In those works, Canada was a leitmotif that I had the urge to embroider into a motley quilt of cultural discourse. Not all our writers are included here, as some over the years had little to say about Canada, while others make repeat appearances because some idea of Canada predominated in their work in a way that looms larger than it might have when the piece was once a review. As I was the one to do the writing today, I throw down the first gauntlet with a selection from a book review I did back in 2010.

-- Kevin Courrier, July 1/17.    

Cracked Mirrors, Part Two: The Minstrel’s Dilemma

Don van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart. (Photo: Andy Freeberg)

Part One of Cracked Mirrors was published on this site on October 27, 2021.

There should be a kind of periodic table for singer-songwriters, the way there is one for the elements and their interactive relationships. Maybe there is one, and we just haven’t noticed what it looks like. Does the table of their relative values and sonic weights as elements resemble the Grammy Awards? No, it couldn’t be, otherwise Don van Vliet would have won a Grammy years ago for his wonderful portrayal of Captain Beefheart before retiring to return to his first love of painting. If so, he would be Helium.

 

English Canadian Cinema’s Failures Continue: Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz

Luke Kirby and Michelle Williams in Take This Waltz.

I’ve long since given up on English Canadian cinema. Unlike its consistently fine French Canadian counterpart (Les invasions barbares, Incendies, Monsieur Lazhar), movies from English Canada rarely register in terms of quality. Be it the stilted, tone-deaf movies of Atom Egoyan (Exotica, Ararat, Chloe), the one-note (of late) silent film inflected movies of Guy Maddin (The Saddest Music in the World), or the run of the mill, unimpressive films of any number of forgettable filmmakers (too many to list), most English Canadian movies are simply awful. They’re dull, underpopulated (as only Canadian movies made outside of Quebec can be), devoid of personality and rarely believable in terms of plotting or dialogue. In fact, with the exception of the spot-on work of Don McKellar (Last Night, TV’s Twitch City) and Bruce McDonald (Hard Core Logo, This Movie is Broken), and the occasional realistic film (Sabah; Love, Sex and Eating the Bones), most films from Anglo Canada are utterly dispensable. The latest example of our disposable cinema is Sarah Polley’s second feature film, Take This Waltz.

I must admit, I expected better from her since her credits include one superb short (I Shout Love, 2001) and a decent feature debut (Away From Her, 2006), which was marred only by Julie Christie’s mannered, unsubtle performance as an Alzheimer-afflicted woman. Take This Waltz, however, is an utter failure on every level.

New Documentaries: Gordon Lightfoot, The Band, and Flannery O’Connor

Gordon Lightfoot in Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind (2019)

The Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot attained fame in the mid-1960s and in his prime – that is, until 1973 or 1974 – he turned out an album every year. He had a sweet, silver-laced voice and he wrote evocative ballads with understated poetic lyrics (like “The Last Time I Saw Her Face” and “Affair on 8th Avenue”) and big-boned, bardic folk anthems that dramatized small and large historical topics, the most famous – and best – of which was “Canadian Railroad Trilogy.” When I was in high school in Montreal in the early days of his celebrity and the late days of the folk movement, you couldn’t attend a party without someone showing up with a guitar, and you were dead certain to hear the trilogy or “Early Morning Rain,” or both. (The other guaranteed solo was “Suzanne” by that other Canadian musical legend, Leonard Cohen.) Before his writing lost its freshness and his voice wore down to a craggy thinness, I bought everything Lightfoot recorded, and I saw him in concert four times, once at Carnegie Hall.

So Long, Marianne (1946-2025): What Becomes of the Brokenhearted

Marianne Faithfull. (Photo: Peter Seeger.)

“The men and women who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or culture the most extensive, but rather those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their own personality into a sort of mirror.”

Marcel Proust

If there is a sadder singer-songwriter on earth, I’m not sure who it might be. The late Marianne Faithfull was sadder than Neil Young, sadder than Leonard Cohen, sadder than sad. She even exceeds the sorrow and bleakness quotient of one of the great lamenters of all time, Nico, the chanteuse of pain who originally performed with The Velvet Underground but who left them, probably because they were too happy for her. She might be sadder that Amy Winehouse, although she was fortunate enough to live a full half-century longer than the poor lamentable Amy. Marianne Faithfull was the dark side of Joni Mitchell: while it’s true that Mitchell had her own dark side, Faithfull was the dark side of Joni’s dark side. She was an exile who lived in a dream world for so long that her reports from its frontier took on the status of legend. She was also, apart from being a consummate risk-taker, an empath of the highest order, with a remarkable ability for turning sheer survival practically into an authentic religion.

Unexpected Journeys: Bluets and The Secret Garden

Emma D'Arcy in Bluets. (Photo: Camilla Greenwell)

The stage adaptation of Maggie Nelson’s 2009 book Bluets by Margaret Perry, directed by Katie Mitchell at the Royal Court, begins as its source material does: “Suppose I were to begin saying that I had fallen in love with a color . . . in this case the color blue – as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns.” Nelson’s short book is uncategorizable, a series of short paragraphs that function most powerfully as commentary on two melancholy, indelible events, the end of a love affair and the paralysis of a woman, a close friend of the heartbroken lover, after an unexplained accident. But these events, which are poetically linked – the paralysis of the injured friend is a sort of actualization of the writer’s mental paralysis in the wake of her romantic loss – take up less than a third of the text, which imagines the color blue less as a metaphor for the writer’s feelings than as a gathering place for them, an environment in which we grow to comprehend them. Nelson banks a wide range of references that include Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, whose hero’s suicide in the blue coat in which he first danced with the woman he loved spawned hundreds of young men to mimic him; Joni Mitchell’s album Blue and her painting Les Bluets; Leonard Cohen’s song “Famous Blue Raincoat” and Billie Holiday’s recording “Lady Sings the Blues”; Andy Warhol’s Blue Movie; the lapis lazuli in the mines of Sar-e-Sang in Afghanistan; and the male satin bowerbird, which strews his bower with vestiges of blue substances – including the feathers of other birds he has savaged – in order to attract the female of the species. It’s one of the most strangely compelling books I’ve ever come across.