In his 1988 track “A Tower of Song,” songwriter and singer-by-necessity Leonard Cohen compares songwriting to a prison. This prison forces its inmates to create their art to the point of madness, illness, and, in the case of Cohen’s conversant, Hank Williams, death. As dark as his portrait of the creative process in “A Tower of Song” gets, in A Ballet of Lepers he shows that the alternative—creators refusing to create—is a much more vicious scene.

A Ballet of Lepers is composed of a novella and collection of short stories and was published in 2022, though Cohen wrote the stories in the late ‘50s, well before his career as a songwriter took off. He’s still learning the ropes of fiction writing in this book, a comforting reminder that even a master storyteller once accidentally left his characters faceless for half a novel. However, these minor mistakes do not significantly detract from the depth of the work as Cohen follows his subjects through everyday yet extraordinary existences.

A Ballet of Lepers follows creatives as they do everything but create. The titular novella plays out as something of a Canadian Taxi Driver, Canadian both in its setting and its milder savagery: a Montrealer cannot believably descend into the same horrific depths of violence as a New Yorker. The main character and narrator of the novel is an unnamed, often unemployed clerical worker, and he is one of the only characters of these stories who does not explicitly call himself a poet. However, Cohen sets the act of creation up as a salvific force throughout these stories, and this clerk is certainly interested in salvation. He looks for it in sex, in violence, in retribution. He briefly finds some version of it in relationship and runs in the opposite direction, terrified. He dates and says “I love you” to a woman named Marylin while confiding to the reader that he hates her. He hates her especially when she launches into monologues of poetry, trying to communicate their love in words instead of in physicality. He claims to find this communication abhorrent, and he eventually finds their physical connections dissatisfying as well.

The clerk, like all of Cohen’s characters, has a profound understanding of his brokenness, but he refuses any culpability in the matter. He sets out to convince himself that this woman must be mad for wanting honest companionship, but he can’t quite fall for his own trick. He knows that he’s the madman, the one going against his better nature. He sets out looking for a distorted penance. He seeks a man more corrupted than himself, and he believes he finds one in a baggage handler at the train station. (When they are not poets, Cohen’s characters have the dullest possible occupations.) The baggage handler becomes the clerk’s new source of employment. He devotes his life to tormenting this poor man for his few, very public disgraces, all the while running from his own sins. He hopes to find some sort of redemption for himself through this harassment.