REPRINTS AND NEW EDITIONS

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32566, 27 March 1971, Page 10

REPRINTS AND NEW EDITIONS

The Favourite Game. By Leonard Cohen. Cape. 244 pp. The work of Leonard Cohen —poems, novels, and songs—has been the object of a recent attack in “The Times Literary Supplement,” remarkable for its severity and thoroughness. The fact that such a denunciation was considered necessary testifies to the enormous influence of the Cohen phenomenon among the younger generation. But the review also attempted to save the face of critics who dealt with Cohen before the period of his popularity: it would be easy to label “The Favourite Game” as “the masterpiece that unperceptive critics dismissed.” Their grounds for the dismissal of the whole Cohen corpus, though, are at least suspect: can it really be damned because it is “impact art, of the type a generation falls in love with and then grows out of?”—one can imagine late Jacobean critics saying the same of Shakespeare.

“The Favourite Game” was first issued in 1963. The blurb describes it as “semi-autobiographical,” and yet it is difficult not to credit Cohen with the whole lot—all the exploits of the young Jewish hero seem so much in character. For the first few chapters one imagines that this is just another “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” but one soon becomes aware of sharp differences: what is (fortunately) lacking is that fashionable confessional tone adopted by young artists to relieve them of a somewhat contrived hearths anguish. What conflicts Cohen describes are revealed in concrete terms, and none of these find their origin in the turmoil of creative agony. This is a success story, and the author dwells on the success without probing back into an uncertain formative period. In some ways, “Beautiful Losers” supersedes this novel, and new readers are strongly advised to read them in the order they were published in—that is, beginning with “The Favourite Game.” Those who know Cohen’s other work will find him in this novel experimenting with some of the techniques that distinguished “Beautiful Losers.” But it is, nevertheless, a mature work which will delight most readers, especially students. And above all it is typical Cohen —who else would write an autobiography without exposing an inch of himself.