Join us as Christophe Lebold, author of Leonard Cohen: The Man Who Saw the Angels Fall, takes part in our series of quick-fire Q&As!
What is a quick-fire Q&A?
We have our interviewee pick a number at random and we ask them the general question listed next to it.
Shortly after we switch to asking book-specific questions, to give you a brief insight into our wonderful writers and their books.
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What’s your favourite book?
A favourite book of all time? It would have to be, probably,
Shakespeare's Complete Works. Hamlet is very high up there. There's another book which I really like, which is Zen for Cats. It's little cartoons that explain the way of Zen to you, but it's cats speaking.
Has there been any book that has changed your life?
This beautiful loses by Leonard Cohen, his second novel, which is a novel about a mystical cast of crazy characters in 1960s Montreal. And it's formally very inventive and it goes in all directions, has lots of poetry and mysticism in it. And I read that when I was really young, when I was probably 18. And was really like an entry in a universe, but it was both wild and mystical, and it did change me.
Then Dostoyevsky, also – The Demons. The type of book that made me a little less stupid.
Then Zen for Cats, you know, probably.
What music do you listen to?
Oh, well obviously I like Leonard Cohen's songs, but I'm a great fan of British 1960s music. I'm a great fan of The Beatles, The Kinks, Small Faces – mod bands, you know? Pop that’s influenced by soul music and the English music hall, I really like that.
There’s a band by a Welshman who lives in the south of France. It's called Inflatable Dead Horse. They have maybe seven groups, and I'm one of them. They're really good, actually. You can check them out on the internet. They have a great song called ‘Made in the Garden’.
How did Leonard Cohen: The Man Who Saw the Angels Fall come about?
I originally did a PhD on the songs of Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, and after working for years on that PhD I realised I had only scratched the surface. And I thought, ‘Okay, now I'm ready to start thinking about Leonard Cohen and to start getting into that universe’. And I wanted to write a book that was less of an academic exercise and more of a book that was readable. And that would be both a narrative of his life and an entry into his imaginary world. But the incentive, I suppose, was that I couldn't leave the work alone. His lyrics and prose and his personality had ignited such a fire in me that I felt I was burning and I was itching all over, and I needed to write about it, I needed to answer the work.
I felt a calling in there. The calling of a mystery. I wanted to clarify that mystery. I knew I had to write about his life and his work to find out why it moved me so much. So that's that was the incentive. That was before I had a publisher or anything. It was just on random sheets of paper.
Was anything that surprised you when you were researching Leonard Cohen’s life?
I did find some things that I didn't expect.
There are three metaphors in the book.
The first is that he's an alchemist, in the sense that an alchemist is someone who transforms matter. Who takes what is base and turns it into something precious. And this is what he does with his songs and with his poems and with his writing in general, using what is most dark and what is most black in life – depression, melancholy, and the desire not to be in the world, the impossibility of living in this world. And he turns it into object to beauty. He polishes black until black has the properties of light. There’s an old tradition of writing as alchemy
The second, as I also found out, is that he has something of the angels – angels and gravity. this is why I call the book The Man Who Saw the Angels Fall. He teaches us to see that we’re falling, even when we don't think we're falling. We’re constantly falling in life, but that doesn't matter. It's the law of gravity, you know. And there's a way of playing with gravity. You can even have it the fall in a graceful manner and turn gravity into grace.
And when you do that, you become an angel, because you become like a messenger of light. People see that you’re at ease with the human condition. You’re at ease with the flaws. You’re at ease with the cracks in your heart. You ease with the fact that you're constantly burning and that you wish you weren't. I was lucky to see that when I met him. When you see someone who has that grace. You feel ‘Wow, this is a messenger telling me metaphysical and spiritual information that I need about how to conduct my life.
The third would be the answer of why so many people are smoking on the covers of the book. Our lives have the texture of smoke. You kind of hold them in your hands, you try to hold something precious in your hand, it disappears. But they go to heaven, you know, smoke goes up. And the testimony of the fact that we're burning, and burning means we are consuming. We are gradually disappearing. But it also means that we are channelling light. So this is what he called the ‘smokey life’ – to live life as though all life was burning and producing smoke. But we can have the pleasure of a ciggie as we go along.