Reading for My Life

by John Leonard

  Sports—he would have loved to have been the new Red Smith. The Times gave him a sports column for a while, until he brought the CIA into a piece on a strike by the NFL (which they wouldn’t print) or the time he planned to cover a baseball game and a tennis tournament on the same afternoon but couldn’t find his limo at Forest Hills when he was ready to go over to Shea Stadium (not sure if they ran that story).

  Actresses with smoky voices—Blythe Danner, Susan Saint James, Dana Delany, Lauren Bacall. And a very few heroes: Adlai Stevenson, Murray Kempton, Joan Baez, and Bobby Kennedy are the only ones that come to mind.

  As anyone who knew him will attest, his tastes were catholic—Mozart, to Candide, to Evita, to Fats Domino, to Springsteen, to “Suds in a Bucket.” He knew everything and forgot nothing from Sufi lapwings to parodies of Swinburne; he was a living database.

  John worked in many venues, saying yes to every publication that asked him to write (including Penthouse and Playboy, although not Hustler), but, with the exception of First Edition (WGBH) and his sixteen-year stint on CBS Sunday Morning, resisted invitations to speak on television—to the consternation of program coordinators.

  He was loyal and forgiving of his friends although he never called or wrote. He refused to write e-mails, let alone letters, to his mother, whom he dearly loved. As I loved him; John was one of my passions.

  Okay, he wasn’t perfect: He loved gossip (reading Page Six and Liz Smith every morning) and could not be trusted with secrets; John was a blurter. He was stubborn and he ignored his health. He consumed nothing but coffee until dinnertime and smoked at least a pack and a half of cigarettes until the day they cut away 40 percent of his lung. It took three times in rehab and the destruction of more than one marriage to end his drinking. And he wouldn’t share the remote.

  But he was a man of deep integrity and faithful his entire life to his one true religion: Never cross a picket line.

  John is no longer here to tell his stories, so we must tell them for him. Let us begin.

  —Sue Leonard

  New York City, 2011

  Andrew Leonard

  A computer analysis of my father’s collected works reveals: 97.4 percent of everything he wrote can be safely ignored. All that verbiage is utilitarian scaffolding, employed to hold up just ten critical words. They are:

  Tantrum

  Cathedral

  Linoleum

  Moxie

  Thug

  Dialectic

  Splendid

  Brood

  Libidinal

  and Qualm

  Those familiar with my father’s tendencies might quibble: Where are the mystagogues and omophagous worms? He was famous for his erudition. You give us “moxie” and “thug”?

  But as exciting as the fancy-pants words may be, they are not essential to understanding the John Leonard Project. They are baroque ornamentation.

  I also excised all words my father delighted in simply because they pleased his ear. Words such as “kayak” and “rutabaga.” It would be a mistake to hope for revelatory insight into the essence of my father from these words. Quite the opposite: I am unaware of any physical evidence proving John Leonard was ever within fifty yards of a kayak, and I am skeptical about whether he could have told the difference between a rutabaga and a Brussels sprout.

  Freud, I’m sure, would caution against the perils involved in posthumously editing one’s father, but in one of my father’s columns, the word “rutabaga” appears five times. That is excessive.

  Even more problematic is a third category I have chosen to skip: recurring compound phrases of two or more words that do hint at murkier depths. Categorical imperatives, imperialist lackeys, internal contradictions, and unindicted co-conspirators, all of which have a habit of showing up in the unlikeliest of places, such as snuggling up next to Blythe Danner in a Lifetime TV movie review.

  But what self-respecting critic does not seize the chance to weave Hegel, Kant, Mao, and Watergate into an appreciation of CSI Miami? My father was more industrious than most in his high-culture infiltrations, but this does not, I think, fundamentally distinguish his cathedrals from those built by others.

  So on with it!

  My father cherished tantrums and hated thugs. Cathedrals he built, admired, and sang the praises of. But he was suspicious of linoleum. Moxie, he adored. The dialectic, always present. Brooding, whenever possible. “Splendid,” a word of highest praise, although easy to confuse with “dazzling,” the last word in his review of One Hundred Years of Solitude—or “triumph,” the last word in his review of Song of Solomon.

  Which brings us to “libidinal.”

  In my interpretation of the lexicon I have relied heavily on Private Lives, the columns he wrote for the New York Times in the late 1970s. There’s a lot of libido in Private Lives. More than I counted on. In two consecutive columns, my father dropped the smart bombs “libidinal cathexis” and “libidinal compost heap.”

  Talk about excessive! In the latter case, the children are playing downstairs, in the libidinal compost heap. We’ll just leave that alone. But, in the case of the former—after some research—I learned that cathexis is a Greek word, employed to translate the German word bestzung, which was itself used by Sigmund Freud to refer to the “concentration of psychic energy on some particular person, thing, idea, or aspect of the self.” An expert in Freudian psychotherapy could probably provide more nuance, but I choose to define libidinal cathexis as the concentration of psychic energy on some person, thing, idea, or aspect of the self, for the purpose of gaining great pleasure.

  That is the John Leonard Project—both his means and his ends. He did not like to pan books or movies or TV shows or children, except when absolutely necessary. Instead, he lived to exalt, to spread the dazzle, and in the process of doing so, make of his own words a libidinal tsunami. When my father was on, and he was almost always on, even to the last, his words incited passion, got the heart racing, stirred the blood and the mind and the soul. In the midst of it all, one unself-consciously gasps. Afterward, even those of us who don’t smoke reach for a cigarette.

  This was true from the beginning. After generating my list, and poring over Private Lives, I opened up my father’s gin-soaked debut novel, The Naked Martini. I was comforted to discover, like old friends, the word “brood” on the first page and “libido” on the second.

  Finally, I will concede that there is one last group of words that transcend the automatically generated lexicon. In one column, my father, who did not particularly care for cats, told of watching a kitten named Gulliver convert an inadvertent fall off a window sill into a perfectly executed double back flip. My father was charmed, despite himself. The kitten imperative cannot be denied. “If there is a chord in us that kittens strike,” he wrote, “maybe there’s one for justice, and for mercy, for sacrifice and reciprocity, kindness and respect.”

  My father believed in all those words and lived up to all those words. And he loved every last one of his words, the fancy and the salt of the earth, the scaffolding and the ornamentation and the raw bones. I have no qualms in suggesting that all of us, in this regard, are his willing and eager, even if unindicted, co-conspirators.

  Amy Leonard

  I inherited many things from my father, some more beneficial than oth-ers. On the positive side, there is my love of the life of the mind and a deep passion for liberal politics. Of more dubious benefit, my fondness for alcohol and anything fried and salty. But there is one gift from Dad that has truly helped define me: a crazy love of sports. My father was a fan, with an emphasis on “fanatic.” As such, my father passed on his Rules of Rooting, based on the premise that one can always find a reason to cheer on a team.

  Rule 1: You support your own team. This may seem obvious, but being a true supporter is not for the faint of heart. Your team represents you and your philosophy. Sure, you root for the hometown team, or where you went to college, but if you have a choice in that, you should pick the team that nee
ds you most (i.e., the losers). Not the perennial winners who are easy to love, but rather the scrappy also-rans. And when your team loses, over and over again, you wear those losses with a badge of honor and a certain amount of pride. Part of rooting for your team entails never giving up on them. You never leave a game early. Dad did not care if it was 20–0 in the bottom of the ninth, you did not leave. Some will say this is because you don’t want to miss that rare but amazing come-from-behind victory, but that is not the reason. You don’t leave because this is your team. They are playing for you and it is dishonorable to give up on them. If you do leave early, you run the risk of the ultimate insult: You are just like those Dodger fans, who leave early to avoid traffic. (Shudder.) If by some stroke of good fortune your team wins it all, you revel in it, but with a certain sense of embarrassment. We are not supposed to win—obviously there has been some mistake.

  Rule 2: You can always root for the underdog. The lowest seed, the poorest team, the ones with no business being there. And if they win, you have the sweet feeling of scoring one for the little guy.

  Rule 3 (and most sacrosanct): You always root against the Yankees. This rule may be modified, depending on season and sport, to substitute the Dallas Cowboys, Notre Dame, or Duke. The sad irony now is that my favorite team, the Florida Gators, has joined the pantheon of winning teams people love to hate. But that is the cross the true fan must bear.

  After these rules there is a complicated calculus of rooting that could involve when the team integrated, does it have a black coach, is it owned communally (one can always support the Green Bay Packers). All part of his theory of “sports socialism.”

  Having set up the parameters of fandom, I want to share three sports memories of my father. The first is from my sophomore year in college. This was not a great year for Dad, the last before he stopped drinking. But he was thrilled I was in NYC, and though my college (Barnard) did not have a football team, he was excited to support Columbia’s, so off we went each weekend to watch the Lions play. If you know anything about the years 1984–88 (my college years), you’ll know that Columbia lost ev ery single game it played. In fact, it broke the record for most consecutive losses in college football. This was my dad’s kind of team!

  The second memory is from when he had lung surgery and was recovering in the hospital. It was during the Super Bowl, so Dad and I watched the game together. We ate salty snacks and rooted for the New England Patriots, complete underdogs and supposedly totally outmatched against the powerful St. Louis Rams. New England won, thus beginning a football dynasty we now root against—sports is very complicated.

  The last memory is the Saturday before he died. The big bash for my stepmother’s seventieth birthday was winding down and we were sitting downstairs. I knew he must have been incredibly tired, but he turned to me and said, somewhat imperiously, “Now we will watch the game.” He had taped the Florida-Georgia football game (a huge rivalry) and wanted to share it with me, even though he knew who had won. So I watched the game, and my dad watched me, in my crazy sports-fanatic mode, whoopin’ and hollerin’, as my beloved Gators crushed the Dogs. I left the next day before he woke up; he died three days later.

  So I think of my father now, as I root for the woefully inept Washington Nationals (my new home team), and bask in the glow of the underdog candidate becoming president, and I know he would be exceedingly proud that his legacy continues in me.

  Jen Nessel

  When he wasn’t reading a book, marking it up with exclamation points and dogearing every page while watching a basketball game and eating potato chips, John could be found either in his garden, a hungry solar panel, sun worshipper, urban Druid, Aztec sacrifice of a napping cat, or crouched over his desk, inside a bunker of books, the fastest two-finger typist in the West.

  John had many moving parts, exploding in as many directions as one of his sentences, but he was, above all, an Enthusiast.

  He was, of course, a passionate book booster and consummate stylist, the world’s foremost proponent of the semicolon. He counseled friends; championed young writers and traveled hungrily; feasted on ideas and subsisted on red meat, French fries, and ice cream; and he loved my mother more than I’ve ever seen anyone love another human being in real life.

  John was deeply principled. He was fiercely loyal, never let go of a grudge (he once refused to shake Henry Kissinger’s hand at a party), treated everyone as though they were entitled to dignity and respect, never fawned, never sucked up.

  I always thought of John as a giant head, a benign version of the great and powerful Oz before the curtain’s pulled back. John could barely change a light bulb and once insisted impatiently that he couldn’t fax me a document I needed because the machine was out of paper.

  I knew John my whole life; he became my second father when I was nine years old. He never talked down to us as kids; our opinions and stories mattered in their own right. Of course he had a drink in his hand or a bottle hidden in a closet through much of my childhood, which took its own toll on each of us in different ways, but there was a richness to life in that house on Seventy-eighth Street.

  We read favorite poems to each other in the living room or watched M*A*S*H and Hill Street Blues together as though the characters were important people in our lives. We saved up stories from our days to eat for dinner. My classmates marveled at the range of topics that came up at our dinner table that somehow always, annoyingly, connected to something we were discussing in class: history, politics, literature.

  In the late seventies, our lives were always on the record. Everyone in the family was fodder for his Private Lives columns. He never named anyone, so it seemed people would always attribute to whichever daughter they knew whatever mortifying moment he had revealed in the service of an elegant point. For the record, I was the girl with the galaxy of freckles, and Amy did all the embarrassing things.

  John named his alter ego in Private Lives Dmitri, after the brother Karamazov.

  It always puzzled people, who thought of him surely as an Ivan, the serious intellectual. But Dmitri was the one besotted with love and drink, as John was besotted with my mother and scotch.

  The novel’s central act is patricide, and John thought a lot about fatherhood, about being a father and a stepfather, about the fathers who disappoint and destroy. When he taught criticism at Columbia, his first assignment was to trash a classic, and his last assignment was always for the students to review their fathers. And then they would all go out and get drunk.

  John had his stock stories that we all knew—the time they made him kill a rattlesnake and make it into a belt at a logging camp, turning him into a pacifist forever after, or the time he was a young sophomore putting an issue of the Harvard Crimson to bed in the wee hours of the morning and heard the voice of a young Joan Baez lifting transcendent into the Cambridge night. Right before he dropped out.

  But the story he told more than any other was his Kobo Abe story. Every time he found a fresh audience, he would launch into his Kobo Abe story, and we would get up to clear the dishes. It was a wonderful story: On a trip to Japan in 1982, John met the novelist Kobo Abe. Abe had fallen into a deep depression and writer’s block after reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, certain that he could never hope to write anything as great. Several days later, Gabriel García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize, and John, drawing on his limited knowledge of Japanese culture, honor, and hara-kiri, feared the worst. He raced to Abe’s house, where his wife greeted John at the door and told him that Kobo was happily writing away upstairs. “García Márquez has won the Nobel Prize,” she explained. “Since he is now among the immortals, there is no longer any question of competition.”

  John was in a lot of pain his last year, his lungs being drained and filling up with fluid every day, an infinitely renewable resource no one wanted, but he was never late with his copy. The first regular deadline he missed—I’m fairly certain in his life—was the Harper’s column due two days after he died.


  How do we make sense of the deaths of our loved ones, of their physical absence? Where does that intelligence, that amassing of knowledge, and the thirteen thousand books he famously read, go? We’re a mixed family, both atheists and agnostics, but I know that John has joined the immortals.

  Jane O’Reilly, writer

  I remember meeting John. He and I were walking from separate directions down Plympton Street in Cambridge when we ran into a mutual friend who was an editor at the Harvard Crimson. My friend had once casually remarked that “you can always tell when a woman has written a story,” a remark that pretty much put me off trying out for the Crimson, even though I remained a groupie. It was 1957. John was a freshman and had just successfully gone through a Crimson competition. (Hard to have guessed he would become the only man on the entire staff of the New York Times to join with the women’s suit in 1974.) He was sunny, taller than he looked, slightly owlish, and given to chuckling. He was marked for stardom, in that small Crimson firmament. But then, unaccountably, he never returned after the following summer. Gone back to California. Mysterious.

  I spent many, many happy evenings at what became John’s house on the Upper East Side. Christmas Eve we usually spent at my apartment, for a party that now seems to have been astonishingly lavish and delightful, topped off by gathering around my old pump organ while someone who could actually play it led us in a carol sing. John’s favorite was “We Three Kings.” He would begin chuckling with anticipation as we approached the fourth verse and dolefully belt out

  Myrrh is mine its bitter perfume

  Breathes a life of gathering gloom

  Sorrowing sighing bleeding dying

  Sealed in the stone cold tomb.

  And then, one Christmas in the early eighties, John fell over the piano stool, landed on his back on the floor, and I realized he was almost too drunk to stand up. We both stopped drinking not too long after that, although I think I might have been a year earlier. Sometimes we spoke about going to meetings, having a sponsor, thinking about stupid slogans that worked. But not very much. We were on separate trains, going to the same destination. Oddly, I think his writing flourished in sobriety; he cast his wonderfully intelligent net even wider, and chuckled more. Although, perhaps, he became something more of a hermit, barricaded in his small study behind a wall of new books. My writing career, on the other hand, seemed to dissolve. What interests me at this moment is remembering, with brand-new astonishment, what incredible buoyancy John gave to my life, my career, and our friendship.