The very sad news has circulated of the passing of John Leonard earlier today. The word of his death sent me back immediately to an essay he contributed to The Nation about the strange corporate thickets the contemporary cultural critic had to inhabit. I still remember the sense of frightened awe the article left on me. He began by ticking off his publication CV:
“I was a Wunderkind. Now I’m an Old Fart. In between I’ve done time at National Review, Pacifica Radio and The Nation; the New York Times and Condé Nast; New York magazine during and after Rupert Murdoch; National Public Radio and the Columbia Broadcasting System. I was a columnist for Esquire, whenever Dwight Macdonald failed to turn in his ’Politics’ essay; at the old weekly Life before it died for People’s sins; at Newsweek before the Times made me stop contributing to a wholly owned subsidiary of its principal competitor; at Ms. during its Australian walkabout interim; and at New York Newsday before it was so rudely ‘disappeared’ by a Times-Mirror CEO fresh to journalism from the Hobbesian underworlds of microwave popcorn and breakfast-cereal sugar-bombs. And I have written for anyone who ever asked me at newspapers like the Washington Post, the LA Times and the Boston Globe, at magazines like Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, Vogue and Playboy, and at dot-coms like Salon. I like to think of myself as having published in the New York Review, The New Statesman, the Yale Review and Tikkun. But there was also TV Guide.”
Even at the time — the year 2000 — Leonard’s witty review of his resume felt like an archeological dig through the crumbling media landscape; rereading it now, you wonder if there will ever be another critic to walk so many beats in so many neighborhoods that have already disappeared.
It’s been said that if you assembled a list of books that Leonard wrote about over the course of the last four decades, it would pretty neatly provide an ideal syllabus of literature in post-Vietnam America. That is an honor of critical acuity, one virtually without parallel. You probably have to turn your dial all the way back to Edmund Wilson to find a writer possessing not just the discriminating sensibilities of Leonard but also the vibrant, restless inability to sit on a set of certainties. The latter, populist in nature and as such at odds with the power that strong critics wield, is an achievement that might go undersung, but it shouldn’t, and I imagine that is why Leonard became such a strong father figure for so many younger critics like Meghan O’Rourke. (Here I have to thank Meghan not just for her wonderful profile of Leonard last year for the Columbia Journalism Review but also for a terrific article on Slate about his remarkable reign at the New York Times Sunday Book Review.) If you read like Leonard, you read because you were curious. As opposed to, say, the notion of the critic as public guardian over what was good, bad, and downright ugly, in Leonard’s world of books an openness to the world was the mark of the engaged critic — it was what got the critic out of bed in the morning.
What left me in awe about Leonard’s curiosity, though, clearly registered in that crazy quilt of the publications, and bosses, he’d worked for, by how many critical hats he’d donned over time. Part of that is explained, as he humbly put it, by the need to make a living. But more than that, he wrote about whatever aroused his interest — and that includes his writing on popular culture, in particular his columns for _New York – as a television critic. Any number of younger writers have emulated the jack-of-all-critical-trades performance that Leonard, like Macdonald, took on. If they frequently seem like cock-sure understudies to his fluid leading role, that doesn’t negate the example he set.
For all those many turns on the stage, though, Leonard is best remembered for his remarkable run as editor in chief of the New York Times Sunday Book Review, from 1971 to 1975. He transformed the NYTBR into necessary reading delivered without apologies to a mass readership. His championship of authors like Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon and Toni Morrison is well known, but more than that, the NYTBR urgently presented to its audience an urbane, critical view of the books that mattered as the ugly decade of the ’70s unfolded — on Vietnam, on integration, on economics and foreign policy. Looked at in hindsight, Leonard’s NYTBR is a source of envy — would that a newspaper today felt so high a purpose! That nostalgic reaction may be too easy — Leonard’s achievement with the NYTBR is as much a matter of measuring up to his coeval competition, especially The Village Voice, Harper’s, and The New York Review of Books, and his time at the helm coincided with a moment in American publishing (and reading) that was as vibrant as any before. Admitting as much doesn’t tarnish in the slightest, though, the gold standard that Leonard’s NYTBR established. Whether it is in his work as an editor or a critic or simply (!) a writer who always made whatever book or issue or film or TV show he addressed that much more interesting to ponder after reading him, John Leonard made a lot of us happiest when we could stoke our own curiosity, to see it as a spark to reading, writing, and thinking.
I never had the honor of working with Leonard; he once graciously accepted a proposed assignment to write for Bookforum on a number of titles dealing with the history of New Journalism, much to our excitement, but his illness intervened. As the personal recollections by those who learned so much from working with him begin to appear (from Scott McLemee to Hillary Frey), it only amplifies my sense of remorse that I only got to know his work as a civilian.
