Missing the Voice of John Leonard

In these days, in these times, I look around my bookshelves and realize how much I miss certain voices.  One of those is John Leonard, cultural critic extraordinaire.

Leonard spent some of his formative years here in Los Angeles.  Later, as a Harvard dropout, he found his way back to California to finish his education at the University of California at Berkeley.  On that campus of simmering liberal ideas, he became a leftist but graduated to become a protégé of conservative William F. Buckley at the National Review.  It is the rare paradox of a writer on the left encouraged and published by an editor/writer on the right.  This collision of ideas made for a frisson of excitement for readers.  Leonard honed his syntax and vocabulary, becoming a distinctive voice in the wilds of America, a cultural critic of considerable heft and importance.  He died of lung cancer in 2008.

My remembrance of him over the weekend ignited when I looked through my ideas file.  This is a manila folder full of news clippings, articles, pictures and other paraphernalia that I might want to write about in the future.  I fill up these files—maybe four or five a year—and keep them in a file rack near my desk.  Periodically, I glance through the material slow-cooking there and when something seems ready to go, I pull it and have at it.

In this case, I found an article by Meghan O’Rourke from the Columbia Journalism Review dated January/February 2007.  The reporter calls Leonard a literary prodigy.  At 32, he became editor of The New York Times Book Review and went on to write for an incredible range of outlets both on television and in print.  His prolific career is something of a marvel.  O’Rourke writes that Leonard is “the discerning enthusiast, the Saturday reviewer who has read far more than most people and who writes about his discoveries with greater attention, insight, and felicity of self-expression than most of us can muster on any day of the week.”  He is quite simply “our primary progressive, catholic [small c] literary critic,” she concludes.  Never, though, does Leonard dumb down his criticism and writing style.  O’Rourke compares him to the music critic Lester Bangs, another cultural taste-maker of the time.

What makes Leonard’s voice unique is the way he mines the connections among the singular subjects:  books, movies, television, class, politics, history and society.  Everything is everything—the web of human endeavor, the synchronized gears in the oversized pocket watch of us.  Every click and clack for Leonard became his métier as the years ticked on.  He made sense of the world, and that kind of work is so necessary to human beings locked into the gritty reality of everyday living.  His work is nothing short of a gift to the thinking individual who is always on the lookout for enlightenment, wherever he or she might find it.

My favorite John Leonard book is The Last Innocent White Man In America (The New Press, 1993).  I find myself dipping into it occasionally, maybe three or four times a year, to read over the highlighted sentences with reflections in the margins.  Each reading brings new insights, even while the marginalia notates my changing nature as a reader and a human being.  Leonard’s voice is so strong across the years.  “For a living,” he writes, “I chase the ambulances of the culture,” a mission statement of brevity and wit.  How did he start?  “The library is where I’ve always gone—for transcendence, of course, a zap to the synaptic cleft, the radioactive glow of genius in the dark; but also to get more complicated; for advice on how to be decent and brave; for narrative instead of scenarios, discrepancies instead of euphemism.  In the library, that secretariat of dissidents, they don’t lie to me.”  In a culture full of liars and criminals, these are fresh words, a poignant and potent reminder to see, to think.

Leonard is known for trumpeting the work of other writers.  He is almost entirely responsible for the rise of Toni Morrison, a writer he could not praise enough.  A white man who shouted and cajoled until everyone was reading this Black artist and her writing, a gift to the world.  He loved Joan Didion; he wrote the introduction to her Everyman’s Library edition of her collected nonfiction.  “It’s too bad Joan Didion went to press with After Henry [a collection of essays] before the L.A. riots,” he writes.  “She’s just the stylist for them—a seismograph registering every tremor on the culture’s fault line, alert to every paranoid vibration, crouched there in the blank uneasiness like a gryphon, lion colored, eagle eyed, waiting for the Big One:  a Manson or a quake or anything that scourges Malibu.”

He was, without a doubt, not just a literary critic.  His indictments were pointed and pungent.  “Perhaps the child in you recalls cherished teachers in classes that weren’t overcrowded in buildings that weren’t falling down in neighborhoods that didn’t look like Beirut, when education was about distinctions and connections, about surprise, wonder, passion, regret and citizenship, instead of drugs and guns and AIDS, back when the public-school system was a trampoline, from which we bounced into the future, instead of a detention camp for refugees.  In this day and age, another child drops out of the public high school warehouse system every eight seconds.  Of those who stick with it, 700,000 graduate each year unable to read their own diplomas.”

John Leonard:  the age of Trump, of COVID-19, of ignorance, rage, and narcissism needs you now.  But in this silent vacuum, we must all get along as best we can, liars be damned.