People other than his devoted fans know Leonard Cohen primarily thru a few of his songs that became major hits, prominent among them "Suzanne", "Bird On The Wire", "Marianne" and "Hallelujah". Many others, including some recorded by other artists, such as Judy Collins and James Taylor, were also quite popular.
Most people are unaware that Cohen began his career as a poet. He published two books of poems while quite young, and also two novels, The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966). I read the latter, and was much impressed (it's still on my shelves). Here, I thought then, is a very fine new writer who's going to become rich, famous, and win lots of prizes. I looked forward with great anticipation to his next novel. I would have had a long wait. Apparently he never wrote another.
I was partially right, though. Leonard Cohen did become rich and famous. But he did it by turning away from writing. Both Beautiful Losers and Parasites Of Heaven, another poetry collection published in the same year, received mixed reviews and sold poorly. The novel gained nowhere near the recognition and sales it deserved.
In the early 1960s Cohen left his native Canada and moved to the Greek island of Hydra, where he lived a rather reclusive life while writing poetry and novels. The path his career took later seems to indicate that, sometime after the reviews and sales figures were in on Beautiful Losers, Cohen made a conscious decision to turn away from writing fiction.
Cohen had from his youth been interested in music -- having his own 'boy band' while still in his teens -- and become an accomplished guitar player. He moved to New York in the later 1960s and began singing some of his own songs in various folk venues. He came to the attention of an executive at Columbia Records, who signed him. His first album, "Songs of Leonard Cohen", appeared in 1967. And, apparently, he never looked back.
Shedding the 'reclusive' persona he had adopted as a poet/writer, Cohen began performing at concerts and on various other stages. In 1970 he went on his first tour, and while he couldn't fill football stadiums, as did The Rolling Stones, or Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street band, he did fill concert halls and auditoriums. He continued to tour intermittently, sometimes with other singers, until 2013.
If Leonard Cohen doesn't write another song, or sing it, he's had a very successful career as a singer/songwriter. Which is interesting it itself, since he has a voice that sounds like a foghorn coming from the bottom of a well, with a range about equal to that of a pond frog on a lily pad. Yet he has millions of devoted fans (me definitely included; I have almost all of his commercially produced albums, or access to them thru Google Play). It's the beauty of his compositions, the marvelous prose poems set to music, that entice and compel. They may sound better when sung by artists with great voices, like Judy Collins, but nevertheless Cohen has his own charm as a singer.
Leonard Cohen, as a very young man, demonstrated major talent as a poet, fiction writer and songwriter. Apparently he made the choice to abandon fiction writing for poetry and a career as a performing singer/songwriter.
If you, dear reader, are young, your final career choice not yet made, and you have more than one talent -- don't choose fiction writing. It's a work-filled life, pays poorly, and for the vast majority of us, brings neither fame nor fortune. The appeal of fiction (not including the A/V format) is slowly but steadily fading, losing ground to numerous other entertainment options. My advice, as someone whose writing career now exceeds fifty years since first commercial publication: Don't fade with fiction.
Photo Credit: Leonard Cohen @ Coachella 2009 by Redfishingboat (Mick O) is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
(...continued from Part 1)
I met Elwood a couple of times at Cons, and in person he was a perfectly congenial chap. Other writers have spoken of difficulties with Elwood, some regarding story content and a few of payment problems. I encountered neither, though of course, as with all publishers, I had to accept on faith that the account statements were accurate.
When Harlequin authorized the new SF line I received a call from Elwood wanting a novel, and soon. I had one in work and agreed to send it to him, via my agent, when finished. I had started this, my fifth SF novel, as a work of some ambition. I wanted to explore, in fictional form, the consequences of having a very strong sex drive, one built into each individual and an important factor in any species chances of long-term survival. My approach was to contrast homo sapiens with an equally intelligent species that reproduced without sex, hence had no such drives or resultant passions (and/or pathologies and psychological problems traceable to the sex drive). Such a species obviously must have drives that provide reproduction and a desire for individual survival, or they wouldn't' have lasted long enough to become intelligent.
Of course the novel had to be structured as an adventure story, to keep readers interested enough to turn pages. But as a part-time free-lancer, writing at night and on weekends, it took me a long time to produce a novel. This one, as planned, would take at least a year. And Elwood wanted it like now. So I changed my approach, and wrote the novel as a straight adventure story. I preserved the sexless intelligent aliens, but did not explore any of the ancillary deeper questions.
The resultant novel was a perfectly decent SF adventure story. The one I had planned could, I believe, have been an outstanding SF novel. Hopefully, a work at least somewhat comparable as a trailblazer to Le Guins' The Left Hand Of Darkness, or Phil Farmer's The Lovers and Night Of Light. Now that novel will never be written, at least not by me. (And it makes me wonder how many other novels got 'dumbed down' to fulfill Elwood's needs. He wanted 60,000 words maximum; not that much room to explore complex themes without becoming didactic.)
Roger Elwood served only as acquisitions editor for the new line; Harlequin staffers did the actual editing. The Laser Books were designed to look alike, with great covers by Kelly Freas usually featuring an inset profile of a major character. (My novel The Horde, Laser Book 27, has a head view of me, somewhat glorified [Kelly was painting from memory], as the major human character.)
I ran into Ray Nelson, author of Laser Book 13, Blake's Progress, at a Con a few months after my novel appeared. Ray mentioned that his book, mine, and one other had earned good reviews. But I never saw these.
By the time the series ended (57 published, at a rate of three a month) the overall line had not fared well with the critics. Despite this, I was told later that Harlequin made a profit, but a much lower one than from their romances. So they killed Laser Books.
Several authors did more than one Laser novel, but I didn't. I had been too traumatized, by the worst experience in my life as a writer, to even consider it. When the editor in charge of the Laser line at Harlequin received my mss., he turned it over to his assistant to copy-edit. She started rewriting instead; and let's just say she knew nothing of science and little of fiction writing. Never before or since have I seen such butchery. About three-quarters through she realized she had gotten completely lost; starting new plotlines and then dropping them, cutting sections vitally needed for the main story, etc. So she stopped copy-editing at that point and just sent me the marked- up mss.
To say that I blew my top would be to understate my rage. I wrote a letter to the head editor at Harlequin that really should have been printed on asbestos. I demanded that my novel be restored to its original version, that the editors be reprimanded, etc. And it was! All her copy-edits were removed, and the novel printed just as I had written it.
Not long after this contretemps, I met the Laser editor and his assistant (a young woman so lovely it took will power not to drop chin and just gape) when they attended a writers' workshop in Tampa, where I was a guest lecturer. Despite my letter (or perhaps because of it), when meeting me in person she was very nice, as was the male editor. (Apologies, hope feelings not hurt, etc.) But next year at that same workshop they were missing, and their boss to whom I had complained came instead. He told me Harlequin had fired both. (I doubt the young lovely chose me alone for slaughter; other writers must have complained as well. But the boss editor said my letter had been the tipping point.) So I was instrumental, for the first and only time in my life, in getting an editor (plus lovely assistant) fired. She, I am sure, had no trouble finding another job.
I note that Harlequin is trying again, with their Carina Press imprint publishing both science fiction and fantasy as e-books. I wish them luck. Harlequin/Laser had at least one virtue, in addition to the great Kelly Freas covers. They paid promptly, and well.
