This article is taken from the August/September 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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In 1973, Leonard Cohen was on the Greek island of Hydra with his partner, Suzanne Elrod, and their newborn son. The poet and novelist had found fame as a singer-songwriter in the late 1960s, casting a brooding shadow over the Summer of Love. By now, though, he was depressed; almost 40, unhappy in quiet domesticity and in the midst of a creative malaise. “I feel like I want to shut up,” he told an interviewer.

Across the Mediterranean, an Arab coalition, led by Egypt and Syria, swept into Israel. It was Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, and the country was taken by surprise. The defence minister, Moshe Dayan, full of hubris after Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six Day War, warned his generals of the imminent fall of the Third Temple, by which he meant the state of Israel itself.

Moved to action, like so many sympathetic Jews, Cohen resolved to “stop Egypt’s bullet”. It’s not clear how he intended to do it. Arriving in what he called his “myth-home”, he couldn’t speak the language, let alone fire a gun. A group of musicians, bound for the frontline, spotted him in a Tel Aviv café and suggested he join their troupe. Cohen, bereft of a guitar, reluctantly agreed.

Within days, he was writing new songs

They arrived in the Sinai desert, land of the biblical book of Exodus, where the fighting was fierce. There, Cohen, dressed in military fatigues, sang his desperate, melancholic songs, under the glow of headlights, to soldiers returned from, or headed to, battle. Some of them would recall it as a “foundational event”, like “Moses hearing the voice”. For Cohen, it was a foundational event, too. Within days, he was writing new songs. By the time he returned home, he was ready to record an album.

Still, in the years since, he was reluctant to speak about the experience. He later claimed songs written for his Israeli “brothers” were, in fact, written for both sides. In Israel, however, the story continues to be repeated each year, like a folk myth.

Matti Friedman has written a number of books weaving together little-known stories in Israeli history. Who By Fire is his latest addition to the tapestry. It relies on a half finished Cohen manuscript, and the accounts of Israeli soldiers, to tell the story. In doing so, he broadens both our understanding of Leonard Cohen the artist and the Yom Kippur War itself.

His protagonists are worthy of any great tale: the leader of an elite unit named the Almon Reconnaissance, “The Lion of the Desert” General Ariel Sharon, Hercules transport planes and a warship named Bathsheba. Cohen drifts through the narrative, like a mirage. He appears to soldiers in moments of despair. He becomes a talismanic figure, his voice transmuted, as he sings in “Lover, Lover, Lover” into a “shield against the enemy”.

Friedman believes this story can tell us something about the nature of artistic inspiration. That it so often asserts itself in the face of “inhuman events”. War is, after all, the inspiration for some of the earliest works of literature, such as the Iliad. It inspired Goya’s Disasters of War and Picasso’s Guernica. And it launched the careers of Ernest Hemingway and Ernst Jünger. No doubt the war in Ukraine will one day inspire artists of its own.

That war should inspire art is a contradiction in terms. In its destructiveness, war is the opposite of creation. But it is perhaps this contradiction that makes war, for so many artists, a source of creativity. Just as knowing sadness means we can know joy, a proximity to death gives the artist a better understanding of what it means to be alive. This heightening of experience leads to an altered state of consciousness, which is the wellspring of inspiration.

Cohen was explicit. “War is wonderful,” he said. He compared the experience to what a friend told him about LSD: “They’ll never stamp it out.” There was a meditative, religious quality to the experience, too. “[In war] every single gesture is precise, every effort is at its maximum,” he says. While among fellow soldiers there is a feeling of “kinship” and “devotion”.

Cohen would later reflect that he went to Israel hoping to find a “contradiction” about his own beliefs. Drinking cognac with Ariel Sharon, he confides to his journal that he wants the general’s job. He is horrified by his relief when he is told a group of dying soldiers are, in fact, Egyptians, not Israelis. “There is blood on your hands,” he writes.

Cohen discovered something in the desert

Cohen certainly discovered something in the desert. He left Israel with the illumination that the “contradiction” within himself was, in fact, there all along. As he sings in “There is a War,” recorded in 1974, the human psyche is engaged in an unremitting war of contradictory forces, like “man and woman”, “left and right”, “odd and even”. The only solution is to “get in it” and “pick up your tiny burden”.

So, Cohen returned to Hydra, to his partner and child and resolved to “tend his little garden” again.