Reading for My Life Read online

  READING

  for

  MY LIFE

  ALSO BY JOHN LEONARD

  Lonesome Rangers: Homeless Minds, Promised Lands, Fugitive Cultures

  When the Kissing Had to Stop

  Smoke and Mirrors: Violence, Television, and Other American Cultures

  The Last Innocent White Man in America

  Private Lives in the Imperial City

  This Pen for Hire

  Black Conceit

  Crybaby of the Western World

  Wyke Regis

  The Naked Martini

  READING

  for

  MY LIFE

  WRITINGS, 1958–2008

  John Leonard

  Edited by Sue Leonard

  VIKING

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2012 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Sue Leonard, 2012

  Introduction copyright © E. L. Doctorow, 2012

  All rights reserved

  Pages 383–84 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Leonard, John, 1939-2008.

  Reading for my life : writings, 1958-2008 / John Leonard; edited by Sue Leonard.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-56100-3

  I. Leonard, Sue, 1938- II. Title.

  PS3562.E56R43 2012

  814’.54—dc23 2011039564

  Printed in the United States of America

  Designed by Nancy Resnick

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  For Oscar, Eli, and Tiana

  to help them remember

  the grandest of all grandpas;

  he loved you very much

  Contents

  Introduction by E. L. Doctorow

  Reading for My Life 1

  1958 The Cambridge Scene

  1958 The Demise of Greenwich Village

  1959 Pasternak’s Hero: Man Against the Monoliths

  1959 Epitaph for the Beat Generation

  1962 Richard Nixon’s Six Crises

  1969 Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City

  1969 Nabokov’s Ada

  1970 Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude

  1970 Arthur Koestler’s Arrow in the Blue and The Invisible Writing

  1970 Supergirl Meets the Sociologist

  1976 Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior

  1978 Edward Said’s Orientalism

  1980 Gay Talese’s Thy Neighbor’s Wife

  1981 Robert Stone’s A Flag for Sunrise

  1987 Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and Jim Sleeper’s In Search of New York

  1988 Don DeLillo’s Libra

  1988 AIDS Is Everywhere

  1988 On the Beat at Ms.

  1988 Nan Robertson’s Getting Better

  1989 Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses

  1990 Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland

  1990 Günter Grass: Bad Boys and Fairy Tales

  1990 Peggy Noonan’s What I Saw at the Revolution

  1990 No Turning Back, Barbara Ferraro and Patricia Hussey, with Jane O’Reilly

  1991 Philip Roth’s Patrimony

  1991 Milan Kundera’s Immortality

  1991 Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost

  1992 Ed Sullivan Died for Our Sins

  1993 Dear Bill (on the Occasion of His Inauguration)

  1994 Meeting David Grossman

  1995 Eduardo Galeano Walks Some Words

  1996 Amos Oz in the Desert

  1997 Family Values, Like the House of Atreus

  1997 When Studs Listens, Everyone Else Talks

  1998 Amazing Grace

  1998 Morrison’s Paradise Lost

  1999 Ralph Ellison, Sort Of (Plus Hemingway and Salinger)

  2000 Why Socialism Never Happened Here

  2001 Maureen Howard’s Big as Life

  2001 Bill Ayers’s Fugitive Days

  2001 Blowing His Nose in the Wind

  2002 Networks of Terror

  2003 Richard Powers’s The Time of Our Singing

  2004 Jacobo Timerman, Renaissance Troublemaker

  2005 Jonathan Lethem’s Men and Cartoons, The Disappointment Artist, and The Fortress of Solitude

  2006 Citizen Doctorow

  2007 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (on Václav Havel)

  2007 The Last Innocent White Man

  2007 Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union

  2005 Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking

  Writing for His Life

  Introduction

  by E. L. Doctorow

  John Leonard started out as a novelist but was diverted, presumably under the exigencies of making a living, his brilliance as a freelance writer being quickly recognized by editors and publishers, so that he found himself at a precocious age writing first for the National Review, then as daily book reviewer of the New York Times and quickly then as editor of the Times Book Review. Perhaps he recognized about himself that his creativity was not of the burrowing kind of the novelist, who lives patiently for years with a set of images and torturously realized intentions in the production of a novel. He was from the beginning a quick study, a wunderkind, writing even as a nineteen-year-old sophomore for the Harvard Crimson these already typically referential Leonardian lines from a piece he called “The Cambridge Scene”: “Did not Eliot return to dead cultures, ancient languages, and the Legend of the Fisher King? Did not Yeats sustain himself on the Irish folklore? Did not Lawrence traipse across continents to Mexico, seeking the meaning of the Aztecs, the wisdom of primitive man? . . . Yours is a motel civilization . . . Your art makes no sense and your music is too loud.” No wonder that he abandoned Harvard for the University of California at Berkeley. But in the Cold War fifties, he was to touch down in New York, and his youthful longing for whatever came before, whether the authenticity of folklore or the romantic radicalism of fin de siècle Greenwich Village (“There used to be a time when John Reed and Lincoln Steffens lived at the same Village address . . . No more. The Village today is populated by the smug, the self-conscious, and the literary sycophants”), was, in a sense, the young man’s common enough generalized anxiety of influence—his fear that he and his era could never match the grand human proportions of what had been previously conceived. Or was it what he imagined
had been conceived—his idealistic sense of a human greatness that he could never attribute to what he found in the world around him? He would all his life be an avowed skeptic but with a religious sensibility that would make of him a celebrant of the moments when he did glimpse something of the full expression of human capacity. And perhaps, in a kind of quest, he was to wade right in, immersing himself totally in what imaginative work his life and times had to offer. He does grow up in the pages of this volume, his idealism reconfigured as a very sharp, keen wit that can with authority assess books and ideas for what they are.

  If you consider this collection of John Leonard’s essays and reviews as a lifelong accounting, you will have a good idea of what went on of significance in the latter half of the American twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first. For though this collection is called Reading for My Life, and though reviewing literary work was John Leonard’s calling, it did not box him in. He was a born freelance, going wherever that tenuous life led him, from the monuments of high culture that he was inspired to celebrate, to the commodities of the low, from which he would take gleanings where most of us would find none. It is difficult to understand how, with his immense reading, and the sustenance his mind sought, he could have sat himself down year after year to examine the products of television. Yet here he is, considering what it meant when sitcom settings moved from the kitchen to the living room, and the family characters sitting on the living room couch, and presumably watching their television, seemed to be watching him. Or here he is, considering what these programs said about fatherhood and motherhood in America. He understood the presumptive sociology in the arrays of sitcoms and to what degree they reflected American domestic reality or in fact helped to shape it.

  But the novel was to John Leonard the presiding art—always in its intentions, if only occasionally in its realization, a major act of the culture. He says in the piece that gives title to this volume, “[P]opular culture is where we go to talk to and agree with one another; to simplify ourselves; to find our herd. . . . Whereas books are where we go alone to complicate ourselves.” He is an excited first responder when the work is García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. “You emerge from this marvelous novel as if from a dream, the mind on fire. . . . So richly realized are the Buendías that they invite comparison with the Karamazovs and Sartorises. . . .” One book reminding him of another is a Leonardian characteristic, as if books are antiphonal calls and responses. It is in his most exultant reviews that his words tumble forth in catalogues of ascription, as he tries to convey as much of the book as he can short of quoting the thing in its entirety: “Family chronicle, then, and political tour de force, and metaphysical romp, and, intentionally, a cathedral of words, perceptions, and details,” he says of the García Márquez, “[amounting] to the declaration of a state of mind: solitude being one’s admission of one’s own mortality and one’s discovery that the terrible apprehension is itself mortal, dies with you, must be rediscovered and forgotten again, endlessly.”

  The great English critic Frank Kermode has said that every piece of literary criticism rewrites the text that it examines. Less dogmatically expressed, this is the idea that a work is not completed until the reader animates the text, as if the lines of a novel are a printed circuit through which the force of the reader’s own life will flow. And so, not just the critic, but every reader rewrites the text, and the rewrite is a measure of the reader’s mind. Leonard with his mind of swift moving synaptically fired thoughts, so that his sentences seem to race along and sometimes pile up in their effort to stay abreast, will usually find the expanded possibilities of a text. But it is not only his capacious mind that distinguishes him, it is the wisdom of his critical decency. When he attends to someone’s work, there is not only illumination but a beneficence of spirit, as if, even when he doesn’t like something and will tell us why, he is still at work championing the literary project.

  Of course some writers do arouse his sporting nature, Norman Mailer for one, a writer for whom he has a considerable, if not blind, regard and whose novel Harlot’s Ghost is examined in the closest thing to a forensic review you ever will read. On another occasion Leonard reviewed a late Mailer work, The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing (not included in this collection), taking it down quietly, gently, and in parentheses.

  MAILER: “That is one of the better tests of the acumen of the writer: How subtle, how full of nuance, how original, is his or her sense of the sinister?”

  LEONARD: (“George Eliot? Chekhov? Stendhal?”)

  MAILER: “Few good writers come out of prison. Incarceration, I think, can destroy a man’s ability to write.”

  LEONARD: (“Cervantes, Dostoyevsky, Rimbaud, Koestler, Genet, Havel, Solzhenitsyn.”)

  MAILER: “It is not only that no other man writes so well about women [as D. H. Lawrence] but indeed is there a woman who can?”

  LEONARD: (“If not Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Grace Paley, Toni Morrison, or Colette, how about Murasaki Shikibu?”)

  For he can be very funny, his prose skimming along with a breeziness, every page filled with wordplay—cross-cultural allusions, puns, overreaching metaphors, phrases stolen from German metaphysics, lines from movies, double entendres, political riffs, as if to persuade us that, as serious as the critical enterprise might be, we are not to worry, no solemn self-importance is to be found here, that he is of the street, that if he’d been back in Elizabethan times, watching a Shakespeare play at the Globe, he’d be standing in the pit.

  John Leonard was a political animal, and he waded into the social and cultural battles of the day, always pleased to have a forum but never mincing his words by way of holding on to it. He is not kind to the media—People, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, Cosmopolitan—for their buffoon-like coverage of the AIDs epidemic, the racism implicit in their reporting, the prissy misinformation they spread. Speaking of the Iranian fatwa or contract out for Salman Rushdie, author of the The Satanic Verses, he scorns the book chains that won’t sell the book, the Catholic and Jewish religious figures who deplore its publication, and those of Rushdie’s fellow writers who demand that it be pulped. Of Richard Nixon’s Six Crises he says, “Nixon has nothing to offer this nation but the cheap sort of second-rate sainthood he is here busy trying to manufacture.” And he functions as a droll chorus to Bob Dylan’s tactically cunning ascent to musical stardom in the 1960s, titling his review of books about the singer “Blowing His Nose in the Wind.”

  Finally what we realize from the intense life in these pages is that John Leonard held back nothing, neither hiding behind a formal diction, nor modulating the demeanor he carried to every piece in deference to the publication running it. In the realm of cultural journalism there was no one quite like him. He gave everything he was, each time out. That is why in this volume we have his mind still thinking, his voice still alive.

  There was something of a religious about John Leonard, however much of a principled skeptic he may have been. With his pale complexion, his round eyeglasses, there was a translucence to him such as is given to the spiritually employed. It was as if he had been assigned, somewhere off the earth, to take note of writers and to testify to their value and was, willy-nilly, a patron saint of the writing trade, of the story makers, of the grub street international bunch of us. With his love of language and his faith in its relevance to human salvation, our own inadvertent, secular humanist patron saint.

  Reading for My Life

  IN 1947, a young American and a middle-aged Japanese climbed a tower in Tokyo to look at the bombed temple and the burned-out plain of the Asakusa. The twenty-three-year-old American, in U.S. Army PX jacket, was the critic Donald Richie. The forty-eight-year-old Japanese, wearing a kimono and a fedora, was the novelist Kawabata. Kawabata spoke no English; Richie, no Japanese, and their interpreter stayed home, sick in bed with a cold. And so they talked in writers. That is, Richie said, “André Gide.” Kawabata thought about it, then replied, “Thomas Mann.
” They both grinned. And they’d go on grinning the rest of the afternoon, trading names like Flaubert, Edgar Allan Poe, and Stefan Zweig; Colette and Proust.

  It’s a lovely story, isn’t it? Two men on a tower, after a war, waving the names of writers as if they were signal flags or semaphores… I take it personally. It seems to me that my whole life I’ve been standing on some tower or a pillbox or a trampoline, waving the names of writers, as if we needed rescue. And the first person I had to rescue was myself. Back in 1947, I was in California instead of Japan. I would spend the next ten years of my latchkey boyhood in and out of grammar school, junior high, and high school, in the middle of the toadlike politics of the Joe McCarthy era of American history, growing up on a beach. On this beach, nobody understood me. My scars glowed in the dark, or at least my acne. I couldn’t tan, hated cars, refused to surf, and flunked volleyball, grunion-hunting, and puberty rite. Like lonely kids everywhere, I entered into books as if into a conspiracy—for company, of course, and for narrative and romance and advice on how to be decent and brave and sexy. But also for transcendence, a zap to the synaptic cleft; for a slice of the strange, the shock of an Other, a witness not yet heard from, archeologies forgotten, ignored, or despised; that radioactive glow of genius in the dark: grace notes, ghosts, and gods. It’s an old story, and I won’t kid you: I became an intellectual because I couldn’t get a date. But we enter the chambered nautilus of metaphor, and suddenly we hear a different music. As the young brat Jean-Paul Sartre observed, on first entering his grandfather’s library: “I would draw near to observe those boxes which slit open like oysters, and I would see the nudity of their inner organs, pale, fusty leaves, slightly bloated, covered with black veinlets, which drank ink and smelled of mushrooms.” I don’t know what he’d make of us today, crouched at our software consoles, slugabed in our romper rooms, tethered to the all-news War Porn channel, flatlined by the adman/music-video consumer grid, home-shopping for friendship in the beer commercials, reading a Heavy Metal comic, sampling on a CD carousel a customized sequence of Sonic Youth, Pussy Galore, and Tom Petty’s “Jamming Me,” online and downlinked to all the other ghosts in our machines, longing for some digitized Xanadu: “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”