By Bryan Zandberg
Professor Ira Nadel says one of the trickiest parts about writing a person’s biography is deciding where to start. “Do you begin with the birth, the grandparents?” he asks.
Professor Ira Nadel, who teaches in the Department of English Language and Literatures, says one of the trickiest parts about writing a person’s biography is deciding where to start. “Do you begin with the birth, the grandparents?” he asks from his orderly office in the Buchanan Tower, where he works as both biographer and English professor.
When that same question surfaced as Nadel was preparing to draft Leonard Cohen’s biography, Various Positions (Random House Canada: 1996), he found a unique way to frame a recurring emblem in the poet’s life — his search for a father. That is how Nadel settled upon the idea of beginning his account with something that the nine-year-old Cohen did the morning his father Nathan was to be buried in Montreal in 1943. “On the day of the funeral, he went up to his father’s room, found a bow-tie, cut it open, wrote his first poem, stuck it inside the bow-tie, and buried it in the back yard,” relates Nadel, whose biography, now in its second edition, has become one of the definitive accounts of Cohen’s life. “Now if that isn’t both a dramatic and revealing moment about his relationship to what he thought art might be able to do — poetry in particular — and his relationship to his father, I don’t know what is.”
To Nadel — who has spent years researching and teaching how narrative shapes in storytelling — that moment became a skeleton key for understanding Cohen’s life. It unlocked answers to relationships he formed with certain powerful male figures in his life, including Louis Dudek, an early professor at McGill University, poet Irving Layton, and Kyozan Joshu Sasaki, his Zen teacher.
Nadel’s uncanny ability to uncover patterns in the lives of others — including in his accounts of celebrated playwright Tom Stoppard and playwright-director David Mamet — has guided much of his academic career. It’s also earned him numerous awards: he’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a UBC Distinguished University Scholar and recipient of the 1996 Medal for Canadian Biography.
Yet his work encompasses more than the biographical genre; he’s also very interested in Victorian literature, and believes being deeply immersed in a subject is the source to being a great teacher. “I think someone must be engaged in their field. They have to be active. And by that I mean they are writing and they are researching and writing.”
Not to mention resorting to remarkable methods to get students forging new connections with the material at hand, which is something Nadel is known to do. He remembers the time he taught a course called “The Body in Literature,” which focused how the human body had been represented in a selection of English texts. “Coincidentally, I had a friend at the med school who was a professor of anatomy,” recalled Nadel, who arranged for interested students to observe a computerized dissection. “And we watched it — male body, female body, every angle, every part of the human body: dissected. Fantastic.” Then, students were toured through the museum of anatomy normally reserved for medical students. “Here you had body parts in formaldehyde, and it was astonishing,” he recalls. “When we finished and we met again — I don’t know how many days later — we approached the material differently.”
In addition to books on the art of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge and a biography of American novelist Leon Uris, Nadel is wrote an article entitled Count Me In: Comedy in Dracula.
“I don’t sit still,” he admits. “That’s one of my secrets.”
