Reading for My Life

by John Leonard

  He didn’t give off that distinctly New York odor, slightly electrical and slightly rancid, of ambition. Perhaps I am fooling myself about his confidence, but in my memory, he managed to allow me to take my own talent for granted, for a while, and how I wish he were here right now so we could talk about how remarkable it all, in fact, was.

  Victor Navasky, The Nation

  I first met John in the summer of 1958. I was editing and publishing a tall, thin journal of political satire named Monocle. One day I saw in the Harvard Crimson a 750-word take-no-prisoners assault on our magazine. The byline: John Leonard, who turned out to be a Harvard sophomore. The review, which was packed with the dazzling literary-political-cultural-sociological allusions that in later years came to be recognized as Leonard’s signature, attacked Monocle for its provenance (Yale), its shape (phallic), its style (insufficiently funny), and its content. (McCarthyism was yesterday’s target—enough already.) Other than that…

  I have now had a chance to refresh my recollection and pulled the original review from the Crimson’s archive. I realize I did not begin to do it justice. Here is Leonard’s lede:

  In this somber age of Nixon, Nikes, and Maidenform bras, we make very few demands on anyone with the courage to be funny. But even within this abysmal temperance, we look at the latest issue of Monocle (a magazine of political satire) much like the young man watching his mother-in-law plunge over a cliff in his brand new Cadillac—with mixed emotions.

  Naturally I sent Leonard a note, congratulating him on his parody of a book review and inviting him to write for us, and mirabile dictu, as William F. Buckley, Jr., his subsequent employer, might have said, five years later, he finally got around to it—in the form of a brilliant parody of a letter from Whittaker Chambers to his grandchildren.

  And what with one thing and another, when in 1967 Christopher Lehman-Haupt called to say that the New York Times Book Review was looking to hire a young editor and I threw Leonard’s name into the pot, all I knew was that he was hired and fifteen minutes later he had risen from subeditor to books columnist, to editor in chief. Among his references for the job, one William F. Buckley, Jr., had submitted to the powers that be at the Times the definitive proof that Leonard was not a secret National Review conservative—his Monocle essay parodying Buckley and Co.

  Gloria Steinem, feminist

  John entered my life in 1967. We were a few writers and editors who met in each other’s living rooms to plot what we were sure was a daring action: refusing to pay the part of our income tax that went to the Vietnam War. Eventually, four hundred people signed the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest, thus tempting the ire of the IRS.

  John had much better ideas for a title than such a lumpy and literal one. As it turned out, we could have risked one of John’s catchier titles. Not only did the New York Times refuse to publish this ad, but our radical action turned out to be like punching a pillow. The IRS took no legal measures against us, just took the money out of our bank accounts.

  It’s hard to feel rebellious if no one notices. John came to our rescue. He pointed out that going through a long legal process to attach each of our bank accounts had cost the government more than it collected, and also that we had invented a new way of voting.

  This is what I remember most: John’s kindness. His intelligence and enthusiasm and sense of humor and sense of justice are all super-clear from his writing, but it’s possible that, to know the depth of his kindness, you had to be there.

  No matter what grandiose or smartass or scared thing one of us came up with in those months of meetings, John somehow managed to appreciate it and also transform it into something better. He made us feel smarter than we were. Because he was also fearless in attacking any person or event that was unkind, we knew he had high standards, yet he also helped us believe we could meet them.

  It is not easy to be outraged and to be kind at the same time, but John was. He had the courage to go out on a limb, to care, to praise, to fall in love with creations and minds not his own.

  The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, when he accepted the Jerusalem Prize, and was worried that he might seem to be on one side or the other, said, “Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.”

  John, too, was always on the side of the egg.

  Esther Broner, writer

  It was 1977, winter in Peterborough, New Hampshire. We had to walk the icy grounds of the MacDowell Colony with cleats clipped onto our shoes. A group of us colonists were seated together over dinner each night discussing John Leonard’s Private Lives in the New York Times. We had a right to the column for we were the John Leonard Fan Club.

  Leonard, our mentor, was in love: in love with literature, his children, the teacher—“the woman in the house”—with community, friendship, baseball. He spoke of friends, some “halfway through the novels of their lives and worried about the next couple of chapters.” Or friends “who burn holes in your patience.” He wrote of what he dared not tell his son: “that sacrifice was reciprocity; grace and mercy, love and justice are more than just ideas.”

  “We need T-shirts to formalize this loose group,” said the printmaker Judith Plotnick. She had to go to the city on business and promised to stop off at the Times for a photograph. “What’s it for?” asked the picture editor. “T-shirts.” No one at the Times ever had T-shirts made for them.

  We did not have a means of transferring photo to T-shirt in Peterborough, so Judith painstakingly drew the picture by hand for each club member; the lines became indistinct with repetition. His features began to vanish; he had the vagueness, the aura of a choirboy.

  We didn’t know in life if he was ever a choirboy, but to us his words were holy writ.

  Jill Krementz, photographer

  My husband, Kurt Vonnegut, and I joined Sue and John for regular Sunday dinners throughout the many years of our friendship. Sometimes we would meet up in their neighborhood, sometimes in ours. It was always more about conversation than food, though we all liked Italian the best. John loved to have a medium-rare pork chop, Kurt went with the linguini and clam sauce… and a Manhattan, which I would share. Sue was mostly vegetarian and I liked the veal piccata. Sometimes John’s mother would join us and when she did, she and Kurt could find themselves conspiratorially aligned in making periodic breaks for the bar where they could have a cigarette. Mostly we talked about politics and books. Kurt thought John was the smartest man he knew. We all did.

  Eden Ross Lipson, The New York Times Book Review

  What is remarkable about the golden era of the Times Book Review, from the time John took charge at the end of 1970, until well after he left it to become a cultural critic in 1975, is that there was only one new person on the staff, me. The change—and it was immediate, explosive, and thrilling—was made by the same staff of veteran editors that had put out the polite and predictable Book Review before.

  John was the conductor, the ringmaster, the soloist leading an increasingly professionally merry, daring band. As before, the books poured in; previewing editors went through stacks of galleys. The oldest convention prevailed: You can tell great books and terrible books pretty quickly, so you spend most of your time trying to be fair and supportive to what lies in the middle. The physical Book Review—a big, high-ceilinged room with large steel desks, grimy linoleum floors, pigeons on the windowsills, clacking typewriters—belonged to a once-upon-a-time era of newspapers. The work, making sense of never-ending stacks of books, was familiar. It was the permission, John’s encouragement, that made it new and fun.

  No review could or can stop a big commercial title, but it was giddying to see how an intelligent, enthusiastic review could start a national conversation about a book. Dig, look, see what you can find. Have fun.

  “John, I found a book at the bottom of the stack. Just a quarter page in the back of the publisher’s catalogue, but not like anything I’ve ever read. Take a look, we should do something with i
t.” The Woman Warrior.

  The Book Review was a kind of catbird seat, spotting issues forming on the horizon of the nation’s consciousness, calling attention to what was coming, not just what was past.

  It was thrilling. And it was fun. Oh, but it was fun.

  Letty Cottin Pogrebin, writer

  In an Either/Or world, John Leonard lived a Both/And life.

  He was both a fair-minded journalist and an unreconstructed leftie, a formidable intellect and a regular guy, a deeply contemplative man and a person who, when pleased, absolutely twinkled. His voice was distinctive and engaging, consistent and true, both in print and broadcast media, highbrow periodicals and pop culture venues, editorial meetings and his friends’ living rooms.

  Most people remember John for his Brobdingagian literary talents, the copious Leonardian essays whose spiraling sentences, coruscating images, and stunning metaphors dazzled as they edified and whose criticism managed to be both trenchant and generous.

  I remember him for all of that but also for the way he treated women. At a time when most men boxed us into simplistic bifurcated stereotypes—either we were smart or pretty, pussycats or ball-breakers, Eve Harrington or June Cleaver—John saw us in full. He never prejudged or pigeonholed us, our prose, our minds. He took women seriously.

  I met him in 1967 when he first joined the New York Times Book Review. At the time, I was the director of publicity for Bernard Geis Associates, a small publishing house that specialized in what used to be called “nonbooks”—tomes by boldfaced names like TV host Art Linkletter or heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson.

  Though it was obvious that few of the titles on Geis’s lists merited notice in the TBR, John always let me do my job, which was to pitch my company’s books with the strongest arguments I could muster. Once that pro forma exercise was out of the way, however, John and I would talk about real books and real writers, about radical politics, the Vietnam War, how much we loathed Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

  Doubleday published my own first book, How To Make It in a Man’s World, in 1970. I didn’t pitch it to John, who by then was a powerful daily book critic for the Times, but somehow he took notice of it and gave me a rave review. Instantly, astonishingly, his review brought assignments to my doorstep, and within weeks of its publication, I was able to quit my job at Geis and write full-time.

  From 1971 to 1975, when he was editor of the Sunday Times Book Review, I wrote reviews for him after receiving his standard advice: Don’t pan a book unless absolutely necessary. Don’t flex your writerly muscles, show off your superior knowledge, or trot out your bitingly clever ripostes at the expense of another writer’s dignity. Be true to your critical assessment of the book but never forget that behind the author’s name on the title page stands a person who is feeling exposed and vulnerable right now and who may have spent years of his or her life trying to make that book the best it could be. Don’t cut your career teeth on the flesh of a fellow or sister writer.

  I’ve known dozens of editors over the last forty-odd years but never one quite like John Leonard who was both a brilliant cultural arbiter and a spectacularly decent human being.

  Celia McGee, critic

  At the summit of summonses I haven’t been able to refuse, I would put the offer of a job in the mideighties editing four of New York magazine’s cultural critics, John Leonard included.

  But John wasn’t someone you just included. Certainly not I. He was the Zeus of the Mt. Olympus of writing I aspired someday to climb—and also, since John had long been washed in the waters of feminism, its Hera and Athena.

  Assigned to edit John’s weekly television column, that’s exactly not what I did. Oh, sure, I might fine-tune the punctuation in some of his gorgeously concatenatious sentences, or make sure he didn’t repeat a phrase from columns gone by. Occasionally one of his pitch-perfect historical references would draw us down lanes of intellectual memories, or make us laughingly speculate about which political firecracker he had planted in his prose might incense the magazine’s higher-ups. He avoided those in authority like a plague of neocons—his old habit had been to sneak in early and drop off his copy while the office was still empty—but with me he was a softie, and would actually come in late enough for a chat.

  One of my proudest moments came in 2006, when the National Book Critics Circle board, of which I was a member, took my suggestion (and Linda Wolfe’s and Art Winslow’s) that John receive its Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.

  John already had the most brilliant daughter, son, and stepdaughter, yet he made room for the acolyte I had wanted to be since I first read his essays in college, a place where he was mythic as the genius who had had the good sense (and sense of humor) there to drop out. He used to tell me stories about how he headed back home to California, and UC Berkeley, and Pacifica Radio, where he brought on Pauline Kael. That staffing account always conjured for me a vision of John and the tiny, pugnacious, bescarved Kael drifting offshore on a broadcast schooner, yucking it up about Godard, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marx.

  John taught me, above all, how to be: to stick to my love of a particular kind of writing and thinking, to my principles, to my ideals, to my moral guns. He was a sharpshooter at that, John Leonard, a pacifist straight-shooter if ever there was one.

  Maureen Corrigan, critic

  I always tell people who ask how I became the book critic on Fresh Air that I owe my job to two lucky breaks—one of them being John Leonard.

  Back in 1988, Fresh Air contacted me and asked if I would whittle down and record a first-person exposé I’d written for the Village Voice about the loony way AP English exams were being graded. Of course, I jumped at the chance. I eventually recorded the commentary, and, since the folks at Fresh Air liked it, they asked if I would be interested in doing occasional book reviews. But, first, they had to check with John Leonard, the show’s weekly book reviewer. His response was: “Sure, bring her on. There are plenty of good books to go around.”

  Think about that response and ask yourself how many people you know (including yourself) would be so generous.

  I only met John once—on a picket line (of course!) for striking Daily News writers. But I owe my over-twenty-year career in what has to be one of the best jobs in literary journalism to him. I took over as weekly book reviewer after John left Fresh Air, but he has never been replaced.

  That’s because—as I always make sure to tell those people who ask how I got my job at Fresh Air—John Leonard was the best all-round culture critic of our time.

  Gene Seymour, New York Newsday

  The late New York Newsday fused broadsheet intelligence with tabloid sass—a combination that worked well enough for the paper’s Long Island parent company, but drew the dismissive “tabloid-in-a-tutu” tagline, mostly from proprietors of competing metropolitan dailies. Nevertheless, those of us lucky to have worked there loitered long enough in higher and lower precincts of the profession to know a noble experiment when we saw one.

  Certainly John did. To tease at one of his favorite analogies, he liked to imagine himself as an itinerant honky-tonk singer roaming the back roads and lower-profile interstates in search of any venue where he could sing his songs as he wished. And when Newsday gave John his own column to rhapsodize about all things cultural and/or political, he made himself comfortable enough to tell his readers why S. J. Perlman looked less silly in retrospect than Hunter S. Thompson or what Michael Dukakis should have said in the 1988 presidential debate when asked whether he’d change his mind about capital punishment if his wife were raped and murdered. John hand-delivered these glittering missives to Newsday’s Manhattan newsroom each week and, because he was our emissary to the upper reaches of the literary world, some of us idling between our own daily assignments would try to catch him on the way in (or out) in search of anecdotes, quips, and bon mots about books and the people who wrote them.

  He seemed, however, far less interested in lit-chat than in whatever we reporters, reviewer
s, and editors happened to be working on or talking about. What did we think about last night’s candidates’ debate or Knicks game? What about Al Sharpton’s latest rhetorical heave into the power structure’s end zone? These discussions would veer seamlessly and blithely into other, less lofty areas of mutual concern; for instance, the TV series La Femme Nikita. He pledged allegiance to the title character while I confessed to an unhealthy fascination with her darkly enigmatic boss, Madeleine. I knew he was gathering intelligence for future installments of his weekly reports from the cultural fronts. But who wouldn’t be honored to have one’s brain picked by John Leonard, for whom no genre, no endeavor, no person was alien or bereft of interest?

  Ramon Parkins, CBS Sunday Morning

  Many, many years ago I read a John Leonard review, in the New York Review of Books—it took a month. It sent me running to the nearest bookstore for material evidence and supporting tools, collections of short stories, photocopied pages of obscure long-lost periodicals, and a pound of coffee. Lord, I decided… life is too short. I don’t know why I didn’t put it together—that the guy who made me question the very worth of my college degree was the same guy now on my television set on Sunday Morning, talking about television, and movies, and yes, books.