By Jason M. Rubin

Sometimes works that major artists withheld — like songs that are not deemed worthy of release — are best kept in the vaults.

A Ballet of Lepers: A Novel and Stories by Leonard Cohen. Grove Press, 272 pages, $27.

Leonard Cohen’s lyrics read like prose, so one could argue that his prose works should have a lyrical dimension to them. Often they do, but just as often they devolve into a flash flood of intellectual or deviant narrative forces that threaten to obscure the story itself. The tales in this volume, which predate his musical career and are concurrent with his earliest published writings, show Cohen’s literary style already well formed, though the titular novel, written between 1956 and 1957, would cause a furor today given its bare misogyny and brutal ethos. Yes, there is plenty of sex and violence, but the sex is laden with pain and deceit, and the violence takes on an orgasmic intensity. Women are little more than semen receptacles, inconveniently outfitted with thoughts and feelings they are free to express but that men are not bound to consider. Rendered in a semi-hallucinatory narrative style, the book would likely have found favor among fans of the Beat generation, who were chic when it was written. Today, its nonpolitical existential fatalism feels very out of place. The world is as much on the brink of disaster now as then, but the mores today are different, and Cohen’s characters don’t seem to care about what happens to their world; they are too wrapped up in their own narcissism and need for control.

The novel (at 112 pages, it’s really a novella) hasn’t much of a plot. The unnamed first-person protagonist has a girlfriend he is not in love with, though he tells her constantly that he is; and a grandfather whose senseless act of violence nonsensically inspires the narrator to brutalize a facially deformed baggage clerk — not merely once, but throughout the story, for reasons that are never made clear. A landlady and the baggage clerk’s wife also figure in the narrative, which eventually drowns in a sauce of grotesque sex and mindless violence. There’s no hint that anyone is seeking redemption, they’re all simply stuck in a vortex of bad, crude behavior. This is not territory that Cohen turned his back on later, but he was sparer and more self-aware in his subsequent studies of deviance, detachment, and desperation. Though in one scene biblical verses pelt his thoughts like thunderbolts from Zeus, he struggles to cast them out rather than heed their ethical commands. He remains remorseless until he finally gets what’s coming to him. It is indeed a cold and broken Hallelujah.

As for the stories, they are more of the same: people who lead with their libido, who seek to control others for their own amusement, who act badly because they’re old or sick or just bored. One story opens with an old man shitting on the carpet and wiping his ass on the curtains. It’s hard to imagine that an artist who became so beloved for his words started out exploring a literary underbelly of urban depravity. I could be charitable and say that Cohen’s early works are an analog to the Velvet Underground, whose dark music poked holes in the balloon of the Summer of Love. In that band, Lou Reed bluntly wrote about heroin addiction in seedy New York apartments, while in San Francisco people were happily high, dancing naked and letting their freak flags fly. But Cohen, it seems, wanted to provoke rather than polarize. His early writings are excessively bleak and the endings are unsatisfying. There are no lessons learned; one easily imagines that, the next day, the characters are still living gross lives.

Of course, the Leonard Cohen who received his greatest fame late in his life had also by that time become a Buddhist, leaving behind his life as an apparently disaffected Jew (unlike many Jewish authors of the era, he seems to have had no funny bone). Literary historians and Cohen completists may appreciate this new addition to the artist’s oeuvre — if only because  it stands apart from much of his later work. Taken on its own merits in 2022, however, A Ballet of Lepers: A Novel and Stories is an unwelcome anachronism. Sometimes works that major artists withheld — like songs that are not deemed worthy of release — are best kept in the vaults.

Jason M. Rubin has been a professional writer for more than 35 years, the last 20 as senior creative associate at Libretto Inc., a Boston-based strategic communications agency where he has won awards for his copywriting. He has written for Arts Fuse since 2012. Jason’s first novel, The Grave & The Gay, based on a 17th-century English folk ballad, was published in September 2012. His current book, Ancient Tales Newly Told, released in March 2019, includes an updated version of his first novel along with a new work of historical fiction, King of Kings, about King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Jason is a member of the New England Indie Authors Collective and holds a BA in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.