Nobody could write a book review like John Leonard. I don’t know if anybody ever will. His writing on literature, most of which appeared in the New York Review of Books, The Nation and Harper’s were unlike anything else you’d find in a book review section. Leonard really loved things. He also really hated things. He wrote about both brilliantly.
I fell in love with his writing in college, after reading a New York Review essay in which he lambasted Bob Dylan for his treatment of Joan Baez in an unrelentingly intelligent attack. The prose sizzled like a branding iron, but Leonard’s sophistication prevented him from getting overheated.
This was how one ought to write about books, I thought: with naked passion, unabashed intellectualism and, above all, that elusive, unteachable quality called grace.
I continued to follow Leonard until 2008, when he succumbed to lung cancer (he was a smoker and perfectly looked the part of the New York literateur with a cigarette between his slim fingers) at the age of 69.
I won’t go into an elegy here. But I will urge everyone who cares about literature to read “Reading for My Life: Writings, 1958-2008,” just published by Viking. The essays collected here will rekindle your love of the book review – and of books themselves, if need be.
I especially recommend this collection to anyone contemplating a career in writing about books. Sure, starting out as a book reviewer in the 21 century may be a futile proposition, but recent years have seen the rise of digital book sections (like this one, for example) – and a slew of younger reviewers eager to write for them.
It would be a disservice to reduce Leonard to a few bullet points, but there are some trenchant lessons that pervade his oeuvre and are evident in “Reading for My Life.” I’ve condensed them below.
Have convictions, even political ones. Especially political ones.
On Richard Nixon’s “Six Crises”:
“Let me make it clear at the outset that I am not going to be objective. I am one of those people who are called ‘Nixon-haters’; somewhere along the line we feel that we personally have been soiled by this man, and we become strident on
the subject…Nixon has nothing to offer this nation but the cheap sort of sainthood he is here busy trying to manufacture.”
Let your guard down. The best critics happen to be human.
On being invited to the literature Nobel Prize ceremony for Toni Morrison in 1993:
“Never mind that I am pale and I am male. She’d taught me to imagine the lost history of her people, to read the signs of love and work and nightmare passage and redemptive music, to hear the deepest chords of exile. I was proud to be a citizen of whatever country Toni Morrison came from.”
Learn to love.
On Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”:
“You emerge from this marvelous novel as it from a dream, the mind on fire. A dark, ageless figure at the hearth, part historian, part haruspex, in a voice by turns angelic and maniacal, first lulls you to sleep your grip on a manageable reality, then locks you into legend and myth.” (Photo of John Leonard by Rodney Brooks)
Learn to hate.
On Bob Dylan:
“I am not surprised he found God in 1979. It was a very seventies thing to do, like Rolfing, Arica, acupuncture, and biofeedback. Like tantric yoga and the hot tubs of Esalen. Or Jonestown and est. Like pet rocks, WIN buttons, smiley faces, and swine-flu vaccine shots. It led directly to power ballads and Ronald Reagan and Mr. Sammler’s Planet. Meanwhile, some of the rest of us were required to think about the women’s movement, and read Toni Morrison, and poke at the meaning of a James Baldwin sentence: ‘If I am not who you said I am, then you are not who you think you are.'”
To summarize “Reading for My Life” in a few paragraphs would be criminal – Leonard has such a capacious mind that it could leap from television to books to the theater to the movie screen without ever so much as slipping. Above all, he endowed his words with vitality – that is the greatest lesson one can learn from his work.
In one of the several sweet remembrances at the end of this necessary volume, Gloria Steinem remembers, “It was 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.”
That’s a fine definition not only of a critic, but an entire man.
