He tells his audience a moving story about how he learned to play the guitar in Montreal from a young Spaniard who spoke no English (they communicated in broken French). The revealing speech with which he accepted the Prince of Asturias award in Spain, in 2011, is also included. Cohen ends up in a pretty derelict place of worship with a police helicopter roaring overhead and fluff coming out of a cushion and concludes to his old friend, with what comes across as lugubrious Jewish humour: “…you have a point”. The friend says the virtue of going is cancelled out by bragging about it. Jewishness features in some poems, especially the sympathetic Old Friends in which Cohen tells a friend over the phone he is going to shul. But the captions that go with the pictures vary constantly: sweet’n’sour. One is struck by how little his harrowed face changes: pouchy cheeks, downturned mouth, tragic jowl. The book is illustrated by Cohen’s bold, pen-and-ink self-portraits. Self-portrait, Montreal, taken from The Flame. His songs are also a dance this is the poetry of relationship. “I said I best be moving on / You said, we have all day / You smiled at me like I was young / It took my breath away.” He uses the ballad to make life bearable: discord finds harmony. Some of his late poems (balanced between illusion and disillusion) are about trying to resist erotic temptation, as in the wonderful On the Level, about love’s beckoning ecstasies. Whatever the truth, what is remarkable is that Cohen remained an unreconstructed romantic right to the end (he died in 2016, aged 82). Perhaps there was too much of the old man in the younger poet youthful spark in the older writer is a finer thing.

And as for the depression, it has a heroism now. Cohen’s son, Adam, has been its sensitive custodian. The Flame is also a selection of the Canadian singer-songwriter’s unpublished work. This grand book, The Flame, elegantly and posthumously published by Canongate, includes lyrics of last-gasp beauty from You Want It Darker – his final album with its against-the-odds satisfactions (to do partly with the octogenarian unlikeliness of its existing at all). Now, decades later, I no longer care whether Cohen’s work is literature.

I was drawn to a volume of his poetry in a bookshop but when I got it home dismissed it as a) too depressed and b) – more snootily – as not literature. T he first time I came across Leonard Cohen – before I had ever heard his songs – I was an opinionated 16-year-old.

Cohen the flame