“I’ll Wear a Mask for You”

Leonard Cohen seemed to have remained largely the same throughout his career. This chapter calls that assumption into question by detailing three successive personas that Cohen adopted over the course of his career. The argument is not that Cohen’s persona changed radically, but rather that at different moments, different elements came to the fore. The first persona Boucher identifies, “The Poet of Rock & Roll,” fits nicely with the trajectory Glass describes. The second one, which itself has two aspects, the “Ladies’ Man” or “Depressive Lothario,” is associated with Cohen’s struggles in achieving critical and commercial success in the 1970s. It isn’t so much a rejection of the first persona as it is a specification of it, bringing out elements that had long been lurking. The final mask, the “High Priest of the Heart,” becomes dominant in the 1990s and remains so through the end of Cohen’s life. It relies in part on his becoming a Buddhist monk, a role seemingly at odds with that of a “Lothario,” but which also relies on continuities that go back as far as his early 1960s poetry.