Reading for My Life
Page 44
When did this guy get out—when did he have fun? Fun is what happens to you while you are busy reading other book reviews.
Years later I would have the honor of being the last in a line of John’s television producers, hoping to match picture to the well-structured language John put on the page. My job, as I quickly learned, was to keep the gatekeepers from screwing with the copy. Simple enough. I failed miserably. I gained a friend and a mentor.
John smoked Tareytons—the same brand as my father. I would share hours in his office waiting for our piece to be screened and we would talk, about family, Dennis Potter, Cold War dreams, twelve steps, the long march to freedom, and Dana Delaney. And the seven words you cannot say on television: “Complicated,” “Scruple,” “Grace,” “Wit,” “Truth,” and “Primo Levi.”
John was a small-d democrat—and television long before the Internet was our public square, a place where we could see ourselves, imagine our better selves, our hopes and our dreams. We who labor in this medium on our best days still believe that.
Jennifer Szalai, Harper’s
I remember little about my first encounter with John, though it would mark the start of an almost continuous correspondence over the sixty-nine months that we would work together on his New Books column for Harper’s magazine. What I do remember is having an acute awareness of who John Leonard was and trying to mask my nervousness with a timorous kind of high-handedness. I was clinging to the young, inexperienced editor’s fixed idea of her job description. I was an editor, and an editor is supposed to edit, right?
So I would send memos back to John in which I worried over every other sentence, with queries that were sometimes helpful and sometimes not, and I soon learned what was least helpful was the long-winded interrogation into whether he really meant X, when one might also say Y, but if he did mean X it was okay, as long as he really meant it. John would usually respond to such an inquiry with a terse “YES. STET,” a phrase that I will always associate with him. He was the only writer I worked with every single month, and it was from him—with him—that I learned the importance of directness and the art of what another Harper’s editor called “the judo move”: the small change that has a big effect. As an editor he had worked with so many writers, and as a writer he had worked with so many editors, that he would sometimes make reference to the “bullying” that he believed was characteristic of the business, but then I also got the sense that John, who cared so deeply about reading and writing that it was as much a moral and existential activity as it was an intellectual one, wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Mary Gordon, writer
I want to speak to a particular contribution John Leonard made to the world of letters, and that is the unparalleled support he gave to women writers. In this, he did a great deal to create a new breed of critic. If you look at the landscape of American letters before the 1970s when John first made his mark, it is a landscape remarkably short on women. But John Leonard always went out of his way to anoint the women writers who excited his admiration. Among his harem were Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Cynthia Ozick, and Louise Erdrich, to name only a few.
I’ll never forget the day, nearly thirty years ago, when I was read over the phone John’s review of my first novel, Final Payments. John’s was my first national review. I felt like a ship that had been launched by a fragrant spiced breeze gently but forcefully introducing me into the larger sea. And this is what John did for so many of us: He made us believe that the reader of our dreams is out there, waiting for us, listening, supporting, understanding, seeing, hoping always for our best, never relishing our missteps but cheering us on in this ridiculous enterprise in which we are all involved.
John (paraphrasing Virginia Woolf), we thank you for giving us the courage to hold on to our vision, for refusing the headmaster’s job, the measuring rod, the highly ornamental pot in favor of the spiced breeze upon which our visions test their tentative and fragile wings.
Toni Morrison, writer
John,
You were the first—I suspect only—critic/reviewer to read and judge my work without condescension or patronage. You stood out as being a man who cherished books, and whose disappointment was never animosity toward or contempt for an author—but simply your documented yearning for the best the text could have been. You avoided the blatant but easy pride some critics take in verbal toxin.
But more than that, much more, you were, as one of my characters says, “a friend of my mind.”
How did I know? I saw and shared your raucous joy at a party at my house; the delight you took in the goings-on in Stockholm in 1993—its seriousness, its drama, and its fun. And always there were your eager eyes, curiosity, keen intelligence, and laughter.
Big love,
Toni
Maureen Howard, writer
In the kindest way, not a touch of condescension, John Leonard instructed me on bloggers. That would have been 2003. He had edited These United States, a collection of essays. I had conjured the history of my beloved Connecticut from “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” to the showmanship of P. T. Barnum, the Colt repeating rifle, and Clare Boothe Luce, but I was clearly behind the Internet times. John, with energy, and often urgency, connected us to the current scene of where we were, the then and now in our U.S.A., the unsocial network of the homeless and privileged, the idiot box running on empty, the many things we may not need yet buy at discount including, lest we forget, a war in Vietnam.
There was that heartrending apologia to many of his complaints, the hope that turning back for an instant might alleviate his painful view of the moral scene. The other side of his despair was the joy that John gave his readers, his pleasure in pop culture; and then again his admiration for that comic spirit from on high, Beckett. He was, don’t you know, very smart and ever so learned. Dante to Derrida with only a touch of the professorial when he wished to step up to the podium. Performative yes, Leonard’s side glance and/or exuberant display at “gaudy false bottom narratives and its dreamy disinformation, spooking has been postmodern long before there ever was a Jaguar, a Jacuzzi, or a Sorbonne. Counterintelligent!”
That night when we were about to drive home after celebrating the mapping of Alaska to Wisconsin, Sue Leonard; my husband, Mark Probst; Richard Lingeman; and John were stuffed in our Subaru Legend. I tried, but could not get my seat belt hitched. Leaning from the backseat John tugged until, safe at last, we took off for uptown. Seat belt frayed but still sturdy. It was then that I asked about blogs and don’t I wish I had said: Please just keep the pages coming, hard copy your lifeline of words—wise, witty, deeply spelled out—thrown out to us, to me if you will, a girl from a factory town in Connecticut come to the Imperial City. Blog from the beyond if you will. We are in need of a reality check in These United States, of your honesty, anger, and wit to tell us who we are, who we may be.
Eduardo Galeano, on learning of John’s death
i am drunk, or trying to be,
i am crying, like a baby would be,
i knew it would happen
but it doesn’t help,
and i ask why,
why,
why,
and i perfectly know why
but it doesn’t help.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following selections (some of which have been edited for this book):
Fresh Air, National Public Radio: “Peggy Noonan’s What I Saw at the Revolution” (1990); “No Turning Back, Barbara Ferraro and Patricia Hussey, with Jane O’Reilly” (1990); “Philip Roth’s Patrimony” (1991). Fresh Air with Terry Gross is produced by WHYY in Philadelphia, and distributed by NPR.
Harper’s Magazine: “Richard Powers’s The Time of Our Singing.” Copyright © 2003 by Harper’s Magazine. All rights reserved. Reproduced from the January issue by special permission.
The Harvard Crimson: “The Cambridge Scene” (1958); “Pasternak’s Hero: Man Against the Monoliths” (1959). © 2012 The H
arvard Crimson, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
The Nation: “Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfires of the Vanities and Jim Sleeper’s In Search of New York” (issue of November 28, 1987); “Don DeLillo’s Libra” (September 19, 1988); “Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses” (March 13, 1989); “Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland” (February 26, 1990); “Günter Grass: Bad Boys and Fairy Tales” (December 24, 1990); “Milan Kundera’s Immortality” (June 10, 1991); “Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost” (November 18, 1991); “Dear Bill” (November 18, 1991); “Meeting David Grossman” (October 17, 1994); “Eduardo Galeano Walks Some Words” (June 26, 1995); “Amos Oz in the Desert” (November 11, 1996); “Morrison’s Paradise Lost” (January 26, 1998); “Ralph Ellison, Sort Of (Plus Hemingway and Salinger)” (June 14, 1999); “Bill Ayers’s Fugitive Days” (October 15, 2001); “Jacobo Timerman, Renaissance Troublemaker” (December 6, 1999; revised 2004). Reprinted with permission from The Nation magazine.
The New Press: “When Studs Listens, Everyone Else Talks” and “The Last Innocent White Man” from The Last Innocent White Man in America by John Leonard (1993); “Ed Sullivan Died for Our Sins” (originally published in A Really Big Show, text by John Leonard, edited by Claudia Falkenburg and Andrew Solt, Viking Studio) and “Family Values, Like the House of Atreus” from Smoke and Mirrors by John Leonard (1997); “Amazing Grace” (speech at the Arts Club) from When the Kissing Had to Stop by John Leonard (1999); and “Why Socialism Never Happened Here” (originally published in Salon) from Lonesome Rangers by John Leonard (2002). Grateful acknowledgment is made to The New Press for permission to reprint these works. Certain pieces appeared under different titles.
The New York Review of Books: “Blowing His Nose in the Wind” (under the title “Liaisons Dangereuses,” issue of July 19, 2001); “Jonathan Lethem’s Men and Cartoons, The Disappointment Artist, and The Fortress of Solitude” (April 7, 2005); “Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking” (October 20, 2005); “Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union” (June 14, 2007). © The New York Review of Books.
The New York Times: “Nabokov’s Ada” (Books of The Times; The Nobel-est Writer of Them All, issue of May 1, 1969); “Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City” (Books of The Times; Another List, December 4, 1969); “Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude” (Books of The Times; Myth Is Alive in Latin America, March 3, 1970); “Supergirl Meets the Sociologist” (Books of The Times; Supergirl Meets the Sociologist, April 15, 1970); “Arthur Koestler’s Arrow in the Blue and The Invisible Writing” (Books of The Times; Teaching the 20th Century, June 23, 1970); “Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior” (In Defiance of 2 Worlds, September 17, 1976); “Edward Said’s Orientalism” (Books of The Times; Reviewing the Specialists Eden and Babylon, December 1, 1978); “Robert Stone’s A Flag for Sunrise” (Books of The Times; October 16, 1981); “Maureen Howard, Big as Life” (Up From Bridgeport, July 1, 2001). © 1969, 1970, 1976, 1978, 2001 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the copyright laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this content without express written permission is prohibited.
Newsday: “Nan Robertson’s Getting Better.” From Newsday © 1988. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the copyright laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of the material without express written permission is prohibited.
Pacifica KPFA: “Richard Nixon’s Six Crises,” © 1962 courtesy of the Pacifica Radio Archives
Playboy: Gay Talese’s “Thy Neighbor’s Wife,” Playboy magazine (May 1980). Copyright © 1980 by Playboy. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.
“A Dance to John” © 2009 by Jules Feiffer. From the collection of Sue Leonard. Reprinted by artist’s permission.
The following works, some in differet form, were previously published:
Ms. Magazine: “AIDS Is Everywhere” (1988); “On the Beat at Ms.” (1988)
The National Review: “The Demise of Greenwich Village” (1958); “The Ivory Tower” (1959)
The following selections, some under different titles, also appeared in John Leonard anthologies published by The New Press:
“Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City”; “Don DeLillo’s Libra”; “Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses”; “Milan Kundera’s Immortality”; “Günter Grass: Bad Boys and Fairy Tales”; and “Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost” in The Last Innocent White Man in America (1993); “Edward Said’s Orientalism”; “Meeting David Grossman”; “Eduardo Galeano Walks Some Words”; “Amos Oz in the Desert”; “Morrison’s Paradise Lost” in When the Kissing Had to Stop (1999); “Ralph Ellison, Sort of (Plus Hemingway and Salinger)”; and “Blowing His Nose in the Wind” in Lonesome Rangers (2002).
The following pieces are published for the first time in this collection:
Speech at Brearley School, New York: “Reading for My Life,” 1996
Speech at the 92nd Street Y, New York: “Citizen Doctorow,” 2006
Speech at the Swedish Embassy of the United Nations: “The Last Innocent White Man,” 2007
“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (on Václav Havel),” 2007