John Leonard, 1939-2008

It's been a rough couple of weeks for losing literary figures (I'm still feeling bad about not getting the chance to write something about Studs Terkel last week, but at least I did get to give him a nod in my Illinois list), but before it got too late I wanted to mention the passing yesterday of John Leonard, one of the great working critics of the past few decades. His legendary tenure at the New York Times Book Review in the early '70s was a little bit before my time, but I got to know his work quite well over the years in The Nation, Harper's, and elsewhere. Despite starting his career at the National Review (with Joan Didion and Garry Wills--that Buckley could pick 'em!), he was an unabashed liberal from the start. I know he managed to get to his polling place to vote in New York on Tuesday, and I hope he was able to appreciate the results of the night.

Leonard was known for a lot of things, but I always think first of what New York magazine, where he was the longtime TV critic, called "The Leonard List," a wildly allusive stream of events and associations from the book in question that I have to confess I sometimes found, well, unhelpful but that always made you want to know all the marvelous things he did. (In her NYT obit, Margalit Fox puts it perfectly: "The comma seemed to have been invented expressly for him." You can get a sense of it from the subtitle of one of his review collections, When the Kissing Had to Stop: Cult Studs, Khmer Newts, Langley Spooks, Techno-Geeks, Video Drones, Author Gods, Serial Killers, Vampire Media, Alien Sperm-Suckers, Satanic Therapists, and Those of Us Who Hold a Left-Wing Grudge in the Post Toasties New World Hip-Hop.) Within those "cascades" (Laura Miller's term), you always knew there was sharp, discerning mind, ready with enthusiasm but not a pushover about it. New York's Vulture blog pays appropriate tribute with a Leonard List of their own, a torrent of many of their favorites of his pieces for them. Among the many more tributes (often to his editorial generosity with young writers) and memorable reviews that are popping up over the past day:

• The Times only archives reviews since 1981, so some of his legendary pieces (like his early championing of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Toni Morrison) aren't online, but here he is on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
• New York has posted his in-the-thick-of-it cover story on Twin Peaks
• His review from The Nation of Terkel's collection of interviews with film and theater people, The Spectator (not the first or last time the two late writers crossed paths)
• Meghan O'Rourke in Slate on the Times Book Review's glory years under Leonard, and her 2007 profile of him from the Columbia Journalism Review
• Hillary Frey in the New York Observer on Leonard's kindness to her as a young writer
• Ditto from Emily Gordon
• Also in the Observer, Mark Lotto's "John Leonard Taught Me to Write," which ends with this lovely quote from Leonard on Elizabeth Hardwick that I too think is a fine way to remember him:

So superior are these sentences to the churlishness that passes for criticism elsewhere in our culture—the exorcism, the vampire bite, the vanity production, the body-snatching and the sperm-sucking by pomo aliens—so generous and wise, that they seem to belong to an entirely different realm of discourse, where the liberal arts meet something like transubstantiation. There will be no dagger at the end of this paragraph. She sends up kites; she catches lightning.

But I'll close with a quote that everyone else is using, from his acceptance of the National Book Critics Circle's lifetime achievement award a few years ago. Jane Ciabattari has a longer excerpt on Critical Mass (where she's also collecting more Leonard links than I have above), but here's a stirring bit, which can sometimes be hard to remember in the daily whirlwind of writing about, talking about, and selling books:

The books we love, love us back. In gratitude, we should promise not to cheat on them -- not to pretend we're better than they are; not to use them as target practice, agit-prop, trampolines, photo ops or stalking horses; not to sell out scruple to that scratch-and-sniff info-tainment racket in which we posture in front of experience instead of engaging it, and fidget in our cynical opportunism for an angle, a spin, or a take, instead of consulting compass points of principle, and strike attitudes like matches, to admire our wiseguy profiles in the mirrors of the slicks. We are reading for our lives, not performing like seals for some fresh fish.

--Tom