{"id":8273,"date":"2023-06-21T17:52:34","date_gmt":"2023-06-21T17:52:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=8273"},"modified":"2023-06-21T17:52:36","modified_gmt":"2023-06-21T17:52:36","slug":"a-ballet-of-lepers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2023\/06\/21\/a-ballet-of-lepers\/","title":{"rendered":"A Ballet of Lepers"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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The Price of Creation<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Leonard Cohen\u2019s posthumous collection of stories shows an artist wrestling with the pain of creating and considering the consequences of ignoring the artistic calling.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Joseph Collum<\/em><\/p>

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In his 1988 track \u201cA Tower of Song,\u201d 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\u2019s conversant, Hank Williams, death. As dark as his portrait of the creative process in \u201cA Tower of Song\u201d gets, in A Ballet of Lepers<\/em> he shows that the alternative\u2014creators refusing to create\u2014is a much more vicious scene.<\/p>

A Ballet of Lepers<\/em> is composed of a novella and collection of short stories and was published in 2022, though Cohen wrote the stories in the late \u201850s, well before his career as a songwriter took off. He\u2019s 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.<\/p>

A Ballet of Lepers<\/em> follows creatives as they do everything but create. The titular novella plays out as something of a Canadian Taxi Driver<\/em>, 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 \u201cI love you\u201d 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.<\/p>

The clerk, like all of Cohen\u2019s 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\u2019t quite fall for his own trick. He knows that he\u2019s 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\u2019s characters have the dullest possible occupations.) The baggage handler becomes the clerk\u2019s 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.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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A Ballet of Lepers<\/em> shows a master of words in his infancy.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Throughout this collection, Cohen loves characters like the clerk. He creates these lonely men, often artists, often young, who try to remedy their loneliness by every possible means except the few that might cure the feeling once and for all. In \u201cO.K. Herb, O.K. Flo,\u201d a poet and a strung-out, untalented jazz musician meet in the bathroom of a bar and instead of continuing onto the punchline of the joke, they both try to romance a paraplegic\u2019s wife. In \u201cSignals,\u201d another young poet, instead of writing, stands outside the window of an old lover on the eve of her wedding to another man. He longs to see her, but when she emerges, he curses her and leaves.<\/p>

Like the clerk, all the men of these stories find no satisfaction in their activities, but they\u2019re a stubborn breed. They refuse the Marilyns of their lives. They find her poetry of honesty revolting. It requires too few fistfights, too little pain. They belong in Cohen\u2019s \u201cTower of Song,\u201d but even the struggle to create smells too much like good sense to them. Instead, they struggle for no reason at all, refusing their salvations.<\/p>

A Ballet of Lepers<\/em> shows a master of words in his infancy. Cohen depicts the mundane in these stories. There is no Sophoclean war with the gods here. Men are at war with themselves\u2014with their appetites, with their egos, and with their better selves. The war is fought in the battlefield of daily circumstance. In the end, Cohen shows that daily circumstances are the substance of poetry and that this fight with the self is the most honest depiction of the creative process he can muster. Through this battle, the artist creates the nearest depictions of salvation available to them. But if the characters of A Ballet of Lepers<\/em> are any indicator, Cohen seems to think that most poets spend more time running away from their poetry than using it for their own redemption.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Joseph Collum<\/strong> is a 2022 graduate of Dartmouth College with a B.A. in English and Creative Writing. Born in Mississippi and raised in Kentucky, he now lives in Philadelphia where he is teaching high school English. He is also working towards his Master\u2019s of Education as a member of the Alliance for Catholic Education at St. Joseph\u2019s University.<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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A Ballet of Lepers<\/strong> was published by Grove Press on October 11, 2022. You can purchase a copy from the publisher <\/em>here<\/em><\/a>. <\/em><\/p>

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Leonard Cohen\u2019s posthumous collection of stories shows an artist wrestling with the pain of creating and considering the consequences of ignoring the artistic calling. 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