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I meet Ash and Terri again at home two weeks later. Ash is just back from school, quiet and hungry. She desultorily kicks a football about in her uniform (T-shirt, short grey skirt) and disappears to her bedroom (cluttered, shocking pink). Make no mistake, she looks like a girl. I catch myself staring at her, searching for clues to her biology. Ash is one of the main characters in the first episode of an ambitious and revealing new Channel 4 documentary series — three years in the making — about the Tavistock. It’s directed by Peter Beard, who won awards for his last documentary, My Son, the Jihadi. The first episode focuses on GIDS. It’s the first time they have allowed cameras inside.
We sit in the back garden and her mother explains why she’s decided to let Ash appear on television. “I wanted people to see that my kid is not a freak,” she says. Terri has wholly taken on board Ash’s feminine identity: she lets her wear nail varnish and crimp her hair, although she draws the line at lipstick on school days. “She is not a boy in the wrong clothes; she is actually a girl in the wrong skin. I wanted people to see how hard this is — this is a massive thing for a little kid.”
Ask Ash about being born a boy and she makes sense of it by splitting off her masculinity. She says the male part of herself was an older brother “that died or fell off a cliff”.
“From the moment Ash could talk, she has been like this,” Terri says. “She wanted to have dolls and wear princess dresses.” At first she was not concerned. She had other children and they’d wanted to dress up. “It wasn’t an issue.”
At nursery Ash wore dresses. “I’ve never seen her play with a boy,” her mum tells me. She sat down to pee despite having brothers. When her father, a scaffolder — Ash’s parents split up when she was two — gave her trains for Christmas she refused to play with them. (Recently he has begun to accept Ash’s trans status, to the point of accompanying her to a meeting at the Tavistock. “I wouldn’t have her any other way,” he says in the documentary.)
Did Terri ever think, maybe my son is simply a girlie boy? Yes, she tells me. Her hunch was that Ash would grow up to be gay. “She just seemed to be an extremely camp gay man. And that was fine. We’re an open family. We have a lot of gay friends. It wasn’t an issue.”
Then, when Ash was four, she said: “Why do you keep calling me a boy? Why do you keep saying he? I am a girl. I am a she.” Terri remembers the moment vividly. Her distressed son was sitting on her lap in the living room, dressed in a Rapunzel dress with a wig. “She asked me, ‘Who is going to take my willy off?’ She wanted to know if I would take her to the doctors or would it fall off? That’s when I thought, this is a bit more than dressing up.”
Might Ash’s behaviour just be a phase? It’s common for children to experiment with gender roles. Terri explains that she has never once wavered. When school started, every morning was a battlefield. (Start talking about gender and you realise how traditional schools still are about the sexes: boys told to go on one side, girls on the other, unisex school uniforms uncommon.) “For the first year I tried to get her into the boy’s uniform, but she hated it. She’d be punching me, biting me, scratching me.” In the end, Terri asked the head teacher if Ash could wear a skirt and he agreed.
Any ambivalence has been around whether to tell strangers. Is it better to be taken for a girl and carry the burden of the secret, or to be open about what is happening, with all its complexities? But what Terri would like are answers. “I’d really like to know why,” she tells the consultant at the Tavistock. “Where did this come from? She can’t have made it up, because she was too small. We didn’t know anyone who was trans. She’d never even heard of it. I know it’s normal for little boys to play with dolls but to never be interested in one car? To never be interested in Spider-Man? I’d like a reason. But it looks like I’m never going to get one.”
There is just one photograph left of Ash as a boy. It’s on Terri’s phone. All the others have been deleted or shredded. “We did it together,” Terri tells me.
What would Freud make of Ash, born Ashton Andrew, name changed by deed poll this year to Ashley Julianne? In a very short space of time the idea that someone can be born into the wrong body has become mainstream. The word “trans” — short for transgender — has become part of our language. So much so in the LGBT world (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender), it can seem as though it’s the T that’s taking up all the oxygen. And now it’s trans children who are making the headlines. The award-winning US drama series Modern Family has introduced an eight-year-old trans character. Last month CBBC aired an online drama about a boy who wants to be a girl. Tumblr and Reddit have become a virtual space where children share their treatment options.
Yet I’d suggest that Dr Polly Carmichael, the consultant clinical psychologist who leads the GIDS unit, has one of the most challenging jobs in the NHS. Until now she has turned down media requests, concerned that their work will be misrepresented. (The most common misconception, she says, is that the service’s main job is to prescribe hormone drugs.)
Carmichael is a softly spoken, cheerful woman, who laughs easily. Watch her in the consulting room and she has a stillness about her that is calming. She also chooses her words carefully. This is an area where even the language used is hotly debated. (For instance, a trans teenager who was born a boy is referred to as a “natally assigned male”. An outsider can start to tie themselves up in verbal knots.)
On the day we meet Carmichael has to choose the new colour scheme for the department’s revamp. Much trickier is the task of negotiating the demands of a vocal trans community together with meeting the needs of children with complex emotional lives. Not to mention parents coming to terms, or not, with a child who says they are trans.
At the same time there is another group gaining ground: people who argue that we are at “peak trans”, that we’re living in a sexualised culture within which there is enormous pressure on children to fit gender stereotypes and where being trans has become a glamorous “lifestyle choice”. There is a view that this is a generation for whom, unconsciously perhaps, becoming the opposite sex is actually more acceptable than being gay, or not fitting clichéd ideas of what it means to be male or female.
No one can agree on what causes gender dysphoria. And why so many children now say they are experiencing it, or even what it is exactly. Is it a biological condition? A psychological one? Is it genetic or learnt behaviour? Is it nature or nurture? Nor is there one reason why there has been such a dramatic rise in cases — a 100 per cent increase in the past 12 months in Britain. Research is patchy.
What is indisputable is that this is an area that is moving faster than anyone might have imagined, even two years ago. “We are all learning,” says Carmichael. “There is no certainty in this area. Certainty is about being closed, which is unhelpful. It’s all about being thoughtful, and careful, and treating everyone individually. We don’t take a view on the outcome of a young person’s gender identification. Our job is not to presuppose anything about what they are going through.”
She goes on: “Some adolescents come here who are very troubled. They have only just told their parents.” There are a few who contact the unit directly, without having told their parents or their GP. “There is a feeling that you have to act as quickly as possible, often because of fears of self-harm.” According to a survey by the trans charity Mermaids 48 per cent of trans people under 26 say they have attempted suicide. “But on the other hand,” she says, “there are many young people we see who are doing really well. It’s all about promoting resilience in these young people.”
The difficulty is that building emotional confidence takes time and for some young people whose bodies are developing — and their parents who may just want this “sorted” — time feels like the enemy. “For families it can be very difficult because they are seeking certainty, but the reality is that we don’t have certainty.”
The explosion in the figures has led to the impression in the media that there are swathes of children gaily changing gender. The reality is more complicated. About 80 per cent of the children who come to the service before adolescence eventually change their minds. Most decide that they are gay, or bisexual. Conversely, for those who come during adolescence, the figures are reversed and about 80 per cent do pursue sex reassignment.
I’m allowed to sit in on a staff meeting where therapists bring along cases they want to discuss. Young children like Ash may be unusual, but they are not rare. Some have been coming to the unit for 12 years. Many of them, like Ash, will have been living as the opposite gender since they were at nursery and have built up long-standing relationships with their case workers. But one of the therapists mentions the case of a “natally assigned girl” who has been taken by his parents to America for a mastectomy. Children in a hurry to change gender — and parents who fear for their psychological wellbeing — are making potentially traumatic life-changing decisions that cannot easily be reversed.
This is what Carmichael and her team must grapple with. The increase in demand means that children who used to be seen within 18 weeks currently have to wait nine months (although it is hoped that the recruitment drive will change that). Transgender groups complain about the delay and argue that experts at units like the Tavistock are too cautious. Much of the debate swirls around hormone injections: both hormone blockers — prescribed at puberty to inhibit the development of secondary sexual characteristics such as breasts or facial hair — and cross-sex hormones, which the Tavistock prescribes at 16 to masculinise or feminise the body. Thus, a girl who wants to be a boy (a natally assigned girl) will be given testosterone (or “T”, as it’s known in the chat rooms). It’s after this that, when the person is 18 and goes into the adult service, they can opt for surgery.
Hormone blockers are seen as a chance to put the brakes on development, to pause and think about the future. However, 90 per cent of patients go from hormone blockers to cross-sex hormones, hormones that leave teenagers infertile. And it’s these cross-sex hormones that cause the most controversy. In America they are prescribed at private clinics to patients as young as 12. There are some in the trans community who argue that the age limit is too high in the UK.
Helen Webberley, a GP in Wales, has set up a private gender clinic and recently started treating children, a “handful” of whom, according to news reports, she has started on cross-sex hormones, including a 12-year-old. Meanwhile, the internet means that there is little to stop under 16-year-olds from buying cross-sex hormones online.
“Currently the zeitgeist is that you go with the child, following the child’s lead and wish at every step,” says Carmichael. “There has been a large decrease in the age at which cross-sex hormones are available, particularly in the US.
“The big debate at the moment is the pressure to introduce cross-sex hormones earlier and earlier. We have done so at around 16 and we might introduce some flexibility around that. But 12? That is a big departure. The reality is that for some young people, things change all the time. For example, starting a relationship with someone can be associated with them thinking very differently about their gender. This isn’t straightforward.
“If young people are being given the strong message that it is the end of the world if they don’t get hormones immediately — perhaps the suggestion you should fast-track people who are self-harming — that is potentially damaging.” As she says, with some understatement, “It is tricky, really tricky.”
Matt, born Matilda, is one of the increasing numbers of natally assigned girls who wish to change gender. The trend at the Tavistock used to be more boy to girl by 3:1, but in the past five years the ratio has reversed.
Matt is also on the autistic spectrum, which complicates the issues (according to the documentary, as many as 30 per cent of male-to-female cases are on the spectrum, a link no one can explain). Matt’s diagnosis means that he finds it especially hard to talk about his emotions and the therapists must try to work out if the gender dysphoria is real or an obsessional fantasy. As Carmichael says, “We know he has an incredible imagination. Might it be a story he has created for himself?”
Rachel, Matt’s mother, was clear when she agreed to take part in the Tavistock series that she didn’t want to sugar-coat what Matt and the family has been — and continues to go — through. They live in Wales. It’s fair to say that in their part of the world transgender rights are not on many people’s radar. Sometimes it’s the small things that resonate. Matt, who loves swimming, was recently disqualified from a competition for being in the boys’ team. “I said to my partner, Pete, ‘Don’t flower it up.’ I want it as gritty as it gets so people see what it’s like.”
At the Tavistock, Matt’s caseworker, Dr Charlie Beaumont, encourages him to unpick his feelings, but Matt finds it painfully difficult to talk. His caseworker is concerned there “is a lack of consistency of gender presentation”. On the other hand, if not prescribed blockers, might Matt self-harm? Matt is 12. There are signs that breasts are beginning to develop. It’s not long now before periods will start.
There is a sense that time is running out, but Rachel tells the doctors tearfully: “I’m not quite ready to lose Tills.” She struggles with the impression that has come from Hollywood that being transgender is easy. “I hear all the stuff about people being gender fluid and think, this isn’t a fashion thing. There are people in the media who make this all look easy: a man one day; a woman the next. But the reality is it’s hard work. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. This isn’t left-wing parenting. I’m not somebody going, ‘Look how fluid I am with everything.’”
Matt, who loves writing stories and is a massive fan of David Walliams (who wrote the children’s book The Boy in the Dress), is round-faced, with short hair and expressive big brown eyes. At passport control the authorities often cast around for a girl — “Where’s Mathilda?” — and don’t believe his mum when she points to Matt. So much so, the family has a letter from GIDS for whenever they go abroad.
As early as aged two and a half, a health visitor commented that Matt — then known as Matilda, or Tills, which is what Rachel still frequently calls him, perhaps betraying her own bewilderment at the turn of events — had an unusually deep voice. “As she got older I always thought she was just a very strong tomboy,” Rachel says, looking back. “Detested wearing dresses, didn’t want to have her hair combed. I remember buying her knickers and thinking, why on earth does everything have to be covered in princesses? Aged five, she told me she wanted hair that didn’t move. In other words, she wanted me to shave her hair off.
“I wasn’t too bothered. Not until she started telling everyone she was a boy. At that point, I thought I’d better go to the doctor.” Hormone tests were carried out and the assumption was that this was a child who was intersex. When the tests came out negative, Rachel was referred to the GIDS unit.
What was that like? “Oh, they make you question everything,” she says. “I think they are trying to find out if this has been nurtured at all. Is this the child or is this the parent pushing their child to be something they don’t want to be? But I think they identified quickly that I wasn’t happy about it. Why would anybody want their child to face the kind of prejudice that was likely to come her way?”
Matt struggled with his education and being bullied until he got a place at a specialist school where he is accepted as male. “At the old school I’d beg them not to be so gender specific. Now I worry that I sent him to the wolves every day.” Despite his being happier at school, Rachel still checks on Matt through the night because she is worried he might hurt himself. She has got rid of anything that could cause harm — the cords on a blind, dressing-gown ties.
In the documentary we watch Rachel weighing up the pros and cons of hormone blockers. “My concern is that it suppresses things. Maybe if she did go through puberty, she’d click into girl mode and be actually, ‘I want to be a girl now.’ I don’t think that will happen, but my worry is that I really am interfering. Now this isn’t nature, it is nurture. On the other hand being able to press the pause button could be a good thing.”
What does Tills/Matt think? “Tills thinks the rest of the world has gone mad. Just leave me alone. What’s wrong with me? I’m just me.”
Stephanie Davies-Arai is a parent coach behind a website called Transgender Trend, concerned about the rise in the number of children referred to gender clinics. She argues: “We are setting children off on a path towards sterilisation: medicalisation. It is an experiment that has no precedent … Are we really willing to so readily accept that a child is the ‘wrong’ sex at this age rather than address the bullying and the culture that tells him so?” It’s a view, she says, that has lost her friends — “There’s a feeling that if you don’t go along with current trends, you are transphobic.”
At first I presumed Transgender Trend was religiously or politically motivated, but that doesn’t seem to be the case when we meet. Her view, thoughtfully argued, is that when she was a teenager she, too, would have questioned her gender. “I would have been trans. Because I was not only a tomboy; in my head I was a boy. My sister and I went through our pre-pubescence calling each other Mike and Bill. Until my mid twenties, I didn’t want to be a woman. I was a rebel. I look at what is going on and think, I would have gone for this.” She doesn’t think children can make a decision about gender until their mid twenties when the brain has reached maturity, and that living as the opposite sex at a young age means “you are changing that child’s brain, you are building a new identity and by the time you are 12, puberty is the enemy”.
Her concern is that, with the help of social media, there might be more awareness around trans, but we’re ignoring the issue of social contagion. Davies-Arai argues that it’s become cool to be “trans”, more accepted than being a lesbian, for example, which is one possible reason why referrals of teenage girls have increased so dramatically. She has heard of clusters of girls binding their breasts and saying they are boys; that parents complain their children are coming home saying, “I’m not sure if I am a boy or a girl,” after a class talk about transgender. “Any kid who is like I was — outside the crowd, a bit awkward, the ones who don’t fit in — all ‘gender nonconforming’ kids are included under the trans umbrella now and they are being given no alternative way of understanding their feelings of distress.”
But what would she do if her traumatised seven-year-old child announced he/she wanted to change sex? “I would say, be quite casual about it. Don’t make a big fuss. Take it away from gender. Parents are advised now to take it very seriously — and I think that is the last thing you do. Address the bullying instead.”
If Davies-Arai does have an agenda, it is a feminist one. Almost 1,000 natal females were referred to the Tavistock last year. Might this be more about girls struggling with puberty and their bodies? “There’s nobody asking, why do so many teenage girls not want to become women? I think that’s what we should be asking, rather than accepting the least likely answer, that they are really boys. It seems a way for us not to seriously look at the culture we are bringing our girls up in.”
To some degree, Carmichael might have sympathy with this last argument. What she and her team try to figure out, over months and years, is, “How far are the physical changes one seeks motivated more around feeling that you fit in and are accepted by others?
“You might think, gosh, what are we doing?” says Carmichael. “But there isn’t a right and a wrong. No one has the answers. It is an evolving picture with many voices contributing. All we can go on is that people who have taken this route feel this was the right thing to do.”
In the documentary, Beard, the director, says to Ash: “Some people change their minds …”
“Some people. Not me,” she responds. Do you think you’ll be a girl for ever, he asks. “Yes,” she replies. And turns a cartwheel.
A BARE-KNUCKLE FIGHTER IN THE BLOODIEST CONTEST EVER (#ulink_519f85f2-7299-5a40-923e-10ef3b4db2d0)
Rhys Blakely (#ulink_519f85f2-7299-5a40-923e-10ef3b4db2d0)
NOVEMBER 8 2016
IT BEGAN WITH a ride down a golden escalator in the marble atrium of a New York skyscraper. It was June 16, last year, and Donald Trump was announcing a run for the White House. America had no idea what was about to hit it.
Some of the crowd had been paid $50 apiece to turn up at that first campaign event and Mr Trump made headlines with a 40-minute speech in which he praised his golf courses, promised to build a “great wall” along the southern border and called Mexican immigrants rapists. The most wildly unpredictable US election in living memory had begun.
In the months to come, Mr Trump would feud with the family of a fallen Muslim soldier, a Hispanic beauty queen, the leadership of his party, and the Pope. Defying the pundits, this former reality TV star, whose divorces and sex life had kept New York’s tabloids entranced for decades, would become the first presidential nominee of a major US party to have no experience in office since Eisenhower and the very first to have boasted about the size of his manhood in a presidential primary debate.
On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton would face another populist. The former secretary of state announced her candidacy in April last year. She set off on an image-softening road trip to Iowa. The path ahead was rockier than she imagined. The rivals she feared most — Joe Biden, the vice-president, and Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator — stayed out of the race. But Bernie Sanders, a septuagenarian socialist senator from Vermont, would electrify Democrats suspicious of Mrs Clinton’s ethics, her ties to big business and her support for free trade.
She endured a bruising primary while the FBI investigated a secret email system she used while leading the State Department. In February Mr Sanders effectively battled her to a tie in the Iowa caucus, the first primary contest, and then trounced her in New Hampshire. Mrs Clinton was running to be the first woman president, but young women shunned her candidacy.
As the primary race headed to the South, black voters saved her campaign. But questions lingered over whether she could animate Obama voters. She emerged as the second most unpopular nominee of a major US party since polling began. The silver lining? She was running against the first.
It was often predicted that Mr Trump’s candidacy would fade. Seventeen Republicans had thrown their hat into the ring: it was a good year to run as a member of the Grand Old Party. A Democrat had occupied the White House for two terms, and rarely has a party kept it for three. Most voters thought the country was on the wrong track. There were six past and current Republican governors and five senators in the race.
Few thought that a brash, twice-divorced celebrity could make a mark. Early on, though, Mr Trump displayed two skills. The first was for attracting media coverage. His mastery of Twitter and of insults bamboozled his rivals. It was estimated that he garnered “free” media coverage worth $2 billion.
The second skill was reaching voters who felt overlooked and left behind, especially white men without a college education. His candidacy coincided with a new scepticism about what he called “the siren song of globalisation”.
Mr Trump’s diatribes against political correctness, free trade and illegal immigration electrified a section of the right. Supporters quickly forged a consensus on what made him special: his outspokenness, his business acumen, wealth that made him immune to cronyism and his outsider status.
At his first “town hall” event, in the critical early voting state of New Hampshire, Jim Donahue, 65, a maths teacher, thought that Mr Trump could be “America’s Vladimir Putin — a nationalist to make the people think that the country could be great again”.
It was not until the first Republican primary debate, on August 7 last year, that his rivals realised that Mr Trump was a threat. He was leading the polls and placed at the centre of the stage. His demeanour was glowering, his tan a striking shade of orange. In the opening seconds, the moderators asked the ten men who had qualified to participate if any would refuse to rule out running as an independent in the election.
A theatrical pause — then one hand crept up: Mr Trump’s, of course. The crowd booed this challenge to Ronald Reagan’s 11th commandment: thou shalt not turn on a fellow Republican. The atmosphere was somewhere between game show and a bare-knuckle boxing match. It was riveting television. The audience broke records.
That evening, aides of Marco Rubio, the Florida senator whom the Clinton campaign feared the most, realised something: untethered to an ideology, unburdened by a respect for facts, and willing to say things no other candidate would dare, Mr Trump was unmanageable.
But that first debate also highlighted his flaws. Megyn Kelly, a star presenter, confronted him on how he had called women “fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals”. Later that evening he was swarmed by a mob of reporters. Amid the mêlée, Mr Trump fumed. “I think Megyn behaved very nasty to me,” he said. That night he retweeted a message that called her a “bimbo”. He later suggested that she had asked him unfair questions because she had been menstruating.
That pattern would recur: Mr Trump could not let slights slide. Fourteen months later, when they met for three presidential debates, Mrs Clinton, apparently on the advice of psychologists, baited him. In Las Vegas she said he would be a “puppet” of Vladimir Putin. Mr Trump could barely contain his fury. “No puppet. No puppet,” he spluttered. “You’re the puppet.”
Voters were already worried about his temperament. In the final days of the campaign his aides had blocked him from Twitter, to stop the acts of self-sabotage that frequently cost him support. His treatment of women would come back to haunt him, too.
The summer of last year, however, became known as the “summer of Trump”. While the Clinton campaign churned out thousands of words of policy proposals and dodged press conferences, Mr Trump did things no candidate had ever done. At a fair in Iowa he gave children rides on his helicopter. He spent more money on “Make America Great Again” baseball hats than on polling. He demurred when he was asked to denounce a leader of the KKK. He did not release his taxes. He had fun: “We will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with winning,” he said.
Last February a second place in the Iowa caucuses for Mr Trump was followed by a victory in the New Hampshire primary. As the primaries headed first to the conservative Deep South and then north to the rust-belt states of the upper Midwest and the industrial Northeast, Mr Trump kept on winning. May 4 marked the Indiana primary. Mr Trump started his day by alleging without a shred of evidence that the father of Mr Cruz, one of only two rivals still standing, had helped to assassinate President Kennedy. By the end of the day the contest was over: Mr Trump was the Republicans’ presumptive presidential nominee.
Mrs Clinton, meanwhile, was making campaigning look like solemn work. In July the FBI said it would not recommend charges after investigating whether she had broken the law by using a private email server. The revival of that investigation ten days before the election would send Democrats reeling, and the unflattering inner workings of Mrs Clinton’s campaign were revealed when private emails were hacked, probably by Russia.
Time and again, though, Mr Trump defied the laws of political gravity. He won the votes of evangelical Christians despite saying: “I’m not sure I have ever asked God’s forgiveness.” He said: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
He called the voters of Iowa “stupid”. He said that women who had abortions should be punished. The leaders of his own party denounced his attacks on a Hispanic judge as racist. He made remarks some interpreted as promoting violence against Mrs Clinton. He was forced to fire his second campaign manager over alleged links to Kremlin-sponsored strongmen, praised Mr Putin and asked Moscow to hack Mrs Clinton. In the final presidential debate, he suggested he might keep the country “in suspense” and not accept the results of the election.
America has seen populists before. None, though, rose as far or as fast. US politics will never be the same.
LEONARD COHEN (#ulink_1b92ca5a-1e38-5440-96e2-091682554040)
Obituary (#ulink_1b92ca5a-1e38-5440-96e2-091682554040)
NOVEMBER 11 2016
FOR SOMEONE WHOSE songs earned him the epithet “the godfather of gloom”, Leonard Cohen had a highly developed and mischievous sense of humour. “I don’t consider myself a pessimist,” he noted. “I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain — and I feel soaked to the skin.”
The subject of his songs over a career that spanned half a century was the human condition, which inevitably led him into some dark places. He suffered bouts of depression and his mournful voice and the fatalism of his lyrics led his songs to be adopted by the anguished, lovelorn and angst-ridden as a personal liturgy.
However, there were also what Cohen called “the cracks where the light gets in”. Despite his image as a purveyor of gloom and doom, the inherent melancholia of his songs was nuanced not only by deep romanticism but by black humour.
A published poet and novelist who was in his thirties before he turned to music, Cohen was the most literate singer-songwriter of his age. With Bob Dylan, he occupied the penthouse suite of what he called “the tower of song”. Together Cohen and Dylan not only transformed the disposable, sentimental métier of popular music into something more poetic and profound but, for better or worse, made the pop lyric perhaps the defining form of latter 20th-century expression. In an era in which anyone who warbled about “the unicorns of my mind” was liable to be hailed as a poet, Cohen was the genuine article.
Many of his best-known songs — Suzanne, So Long, Marianne and Sisters of Mercy — were romantically inspired by the women in his life. In Chelsea Hotel #2, the theme of longing, love and loss turned to pure lust as he described a liaison with the singer Janis Joplin as she gave him “head on the unmade bed/ While the limousines wait in the street”.
Story of Isaac and The Butcher touched on religious themes, and war and death loomed large, particularly after his experiences during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war when he offered to fight for Israel and ended up performing for Jewish troops in a tank division that was under fire in the Sinai desert.
Depression and suicide also informed several songs, including Seems So Long Ago, Nancy and Dress Rehearsal Rag. This tendency to lapse into morbidity led one critic to wail, “Where does he get the neck to stand before an audience and groan out those monstrous anthems of amorous self-commiseration?” Yet if his writing had a philosophical stock-in-trade, it was more stoical perseverance than the abandonment of hope.
Many of his compositions shared a search for self and meaning and were driven by a restless quest for personal freedom, nowhere more so than on Bird On The Wire, which opened with probably his most quoted lines “Like a bird on the wire/ Like a drunk in a midnight choir/ I have tried in my way to be free”.
The song was covered by dozens of artists, including Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Judy Collins and Joe Cocker, and was once memorably described as a bohemian version of My Way, sans the braggadocio.
Even at his darkest, the prospect of redemption and perhaps even a glimmer of salvation was evident. He described Hallelujah, perhaps his best-known composition — and certainly his most covered, with some 300 versions performed or recorded by other artists — as an affirmation of his “faith in life, not in some formal religious way but with enthusiasm, with emotion”.
The song took him years to write as he pared back 80 draft verses until each line felt right, as with the second verse: “Your faith was strong but you needed proof/ You saw her bathing on the roof/ Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you/ She tied you to a kitchen chair/ She broke your throne, and she cut your hair/ And from your lips she drew the hallelujah.”
It was characteristic of the meticulous way he worked to make every word count and led to a well-documented exchange with Bob Dylan, who expressed his admiration for the song: “He asked me how long it took to write, and I lied and said three or four years when actually it took five. Then we were talking about one of his songs, and he said it took him 15 minutes.”
Unfailingly courteous and possessed of an unfashionably old-world charm, Cohen’s intellectual coming of age predated the advent of rock’n’roll. His early cultural heroes were not Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry but the beat writer Jack Kerouac and the poet Lorca, after whom Cohen named his daughter. His artistic leanings were liberal and bohemian, but he was never a hippy. Dressed in dark, tailored suits and smart fedoras, he had an elegance that was perhaps the legacy of his Jewish father, who owned a clothing shop. Sylvie Simmons, his biographer, reckoned he looked “like a Rat Pack rabbi, God’s chosen mobster”.
He spoke in a sonorous voice that was full of a reassuring calm and yet animated at the same time. If it was a great speaking voice, it was perhaps not a natural vehicle for a singer, although he developed his own idiosyncratic style to overcome its limitations, one which was compared by the critic Maurice Rosenbaum to a strangely appealing buzz-saw: “I knew I was no great shakes as a singer,” Cohen said, “but I always thought I could tell the truth about a song. I liked those singers who would just lay out their predicament and tell their story, and I thought I could be one of those guys.”
He was handsome in a rugged and swarthy way, and women found the combination of his physical attraction and the sensitivity of his poetic mind to be irresistible. In turn he described love as “the most challenging activity humans get into” and took up the gauntlet with prolific enthusiasm. “I don’t think anyone masters the heart. It continues to cook like a shish kebab, bubbling and sizzling in everyone’s breast,” he said.
Yet whether love ever bought him true happiness is debatable, and in his 2006 poetry collection, Book of Longing, he mocked his reputation as a ladies’ man as an ill-fitting joke that “caused me to laugh bitterly through the ten thousand nights I spent alone”.
He never married but perhaps came closest to contentment with Marianne Ihlen, the inspiration behind several of his early songs and with whom he lived on the Greek island of Hydra in the 1960s. Their relationship lasted a decade through numerous infidelities. He also had a long relationship with the artist and photographer Suzanne Elrod, with whom he had two children. His son, Adam Cohen, is a singer-songwriter who produced his father’s 2016 album You Want It Darker. His daughter, Lorca, is a photographer, who gave birth to a surrogate daughter for the singer Rufus Wainwright and Jörn Weisbrodt, his partner.
For all his protests to the contrary, his love life was complicated, almost Byronic in its profligacy. As well as his assignations with Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell, for example, he rested his head on the perfumed pillows of the fashion photographer Dominique Issermann, the actress Rebecca De Mornay and the songwriter Anjani Thomas. Mitchell, who once said the only men to whom she was a groupie were Picasso and Cohen, celebrated their year-long relationship in several songs, including A Case of You, in which her lover declares himself to be as “constant as a northern star”. He certainly was not, and yet she sang that he remains in her blood “like holy wine”.
Summing up Cohen’s lifelong serial inconstancy, his biographer, Simmons, wrote that his “romantic relationships tended to get in the way of the isolation and space, the distance and longing, that his writing required”.
Yet he was as fixated on metaphysical matters as he was on carnal pleasures, and many of his best lyrics fused the erotic and the spiritual. In the 1990s his search for enlightenment resulted in him disappearing from public view to live an ascetic life in a Zen Buddhist monastery on the snow-capped Mount Baldy in California. Although he remained a practising Jew, he was ordained as a Buddhist monk in 1996.
He came down from the mountain three years later and returned to civilian life, only to find that while he was sequestered he had been robbed by his longtime manager (and, perhaps inevitably, former lover), Kelley Lynch. He issued legal proceedings against her for misappropriating millions from his retirement fund and swindling him out of his publishing rights. Left with a huge tax bill and a relatively modest $150,000, he remortgaged his home. He was awarded $9 million by a Los Angeles court in 2006.
When Lynch — who was later jailed after violating a court order to keep away from Cohen — was unable to pay, he undertook his first concert tour in 15 years to replenish his funds. It was estimated by Billboard magazine that he earned almost $10 million from the 2009 leg of the tour alone.
A golden period of late creativity followed. After releasing a parsimonious 11 studio albums in 45 years, he released three in four years between 2012 and 2016, including Old Ideas, which became the highest-charting album of his career, when he was 76.
