John Leonard, 1939 - 2008.

With sadness we learn of the passing of John Leonard, incomparable critic and mentor to many, supporter of books and writers new and not so new, long time New York Times Book Review editor and critic, and a founding member of the National Book Critics Circle.

Jane Ciabattari at the Circle's Critical Mass, where she collects Leonard's thoughts on "a lifetime of reading and reviewing" and archives of his reviews.

Updated through 11/11.

When John had edited the Nation's books section, with his wife Sue, from 1995-1998, it was a haven for young writers: New Yorker editor Emily Eakin, New York Times film critic AO Scott, London Review of Books editor Adam Shatz (who also edited the Nation books section for a time) were all published by John Leonard. He was a rare champion of the untested and new; he encouraged where others might have scoffed.

Hillary Frey, New York Observer.

More from Ed Champion, Emily Gordon, Scott McLemee and New York, where Leonard reviewed television.

Updates, 11/7: "Leonard was famous for putting Don DeLillo's second novel, End Zone, on the cover of the Book Review, for running a long, multi-title review essay of books on Vietnam by Neil Sheehan that was the first salvo of the newspaper's increasing criticism of that war, for championing the work of African-American, Asian and women novelists like Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston." Laura Miller in Salon: "He helped give Pauline Kael her start at Pacifica Radio in Berkeley. He won the National Book Critics Circle lifetime achievement award in 2006. He was one of the few critics whose essays merited publication in several hardcover collections. And he was also the guy whose TV column you'd turn to in the back of New York magazine every week, wondering if that new one-hour drama on Fox had anything to recommend it. To say John Leonard was a reviewer at heart is to pay a great compliment to a profession that currently seems to be limping toward an undeserved obsolescence."

"As a critic, Mr Leonard was far less interested in saying yea or nay about a work of art than he was in scrutinizing the who, the what and the why of it," writes Margalit Fox in the NYT. "His writing opened a window onto the contemporary American scene, examining a book or film or television show as it was shaped by the cultural winds of the day." And she samples a "single sweeping paragraph" from a 2005 piece on James Agee:

Not every photograph ever snapped of James Agee caught him between pulls on a bottle or puffs on a cigarette. It only seems that way because the journalist/critic/novelist/screenwriter drank and smoked himself to death at 45, in 1955, at a time when postwar American culture conflated art with martyrdom and manhood with excess. Think of the poets lost to lithium, loony bins and suicide, the jazz musicians strung up and out on heroin, the abstract expressionists who slashed and burned themselves. Delmore Schwartz, Charlie Parker and Jackson Pollock pointed the way for Jack Kerouac, James Dean, Truman Capote, John Berryman, Elvis, Janis and Jimi. Like the Greek warrior Philoctetes, hadn't they been allowed to play so brilliantly with their bows and arrows because they suffered suppurating wounds? So the iconic image, emblematic and self-destructive, was the Shadow Man - a Humphrey Bogart, a JD Salinger, an Edward R Murrow, maybe even an Albert Camus. Agee, with his cold blue eyes, his thick dark hair and his handsome hillbilly Huguenot hatchet face, belonged on this wall of tragic-hero masks, at least till he inflated like a frog, from drinking alone in a Hollywood bungalow, and got kicked out of the 20th Century Fox studio commissary because he smelled so bad from never taking a bath.

Slate runs Meghan O'Rourke's 2003 assessment of Leonard's editorship of the NYT Book Review.

"Leonard, as good as he could be as a writer, was much, much greater as an appreciator - a genuine talent that too often goes underappreciated and unfulfilled." So argues Phil Nugent.

Updates, 11/8: "I keep John's books close at hand because they teach me how to read other books, and also because they remind me why I write." AO Scott in the NYT: "'I'd say we either relate our profession to the world we live in or we have no more ethics than a can of Spam,' he declared in the introduction to This Pen for Hire, his first collection of reviews and essays. He was referring specifically to those of us who make our livings at criticism, but for John criticism was only secondarily a career. It was a vocation, a passion, an ecstasy, a way of life."

"[H]e remained not merely sensible and passionate but revelatory," writes Ken Tucker at Best American Poetry:

No one else could review a travel documentary with a sentence like this, a glorious example of one of Leonard's signature devices - the list-sentence that becomes in itself a form of criticism: "We wandered with a shopping list - Greek light, German sausage, Russian soul, French sauce, Spanish bull, Zen koans, hearts of darkness, the blood of the lamb, and a double-knuckled antelope humerus from Oolduvai Gorge. We'd rub our fuzzy heads against the strange, and see if something kindled." We'd rub our fuzzy heads against the strange - that is poetry as much as it is criticism, and Leonard spun it out without warning, without ostentation, but like a newspaperman on deadline delivering a staggering gift.

"You can hear Leonard's voice rippling through Emily Nussbaum's e-mailed reminiscence," notes David Edelstein:

"John's signature move was what my friend Laura Miller called 'the cascade,' a wild, ramshackle, electrical spill-off of references to everything on earth, from Freud to Darwin to literary allusions to political idioms - a poetic and outrageous technique that imbued a Whitmanesque enormity to any art he was exploring."

For New York, from 1984 until two weeks ago, that art was television, and if he saw it too often as a piece of 'furniture we look to as a cure for loneliness,' as something that 'ambushed [us] into sentience,' if he didn't approach it with the same headlong passion as, say, the novels of Don DeLillo or Toni Morrison (whom he accompanied to Sweden when she picked up her Nobel), he was wired to experience its possibilities. He could sing the tube electric.

"This weekend, I propose you spend some time with three reviews by Leonard." Wyatt Mason has links to the first two, and then: "For Harper's, Leonard mastered the form that Guy Davenport had made seem inimitable, the short essay that could cover a range of seemingly heterogeneous New Books and make of them a single, insightful whole. There are 71 of Leonard's monthly columns freely available to you, but his editor at Harper's for the past six years suggests you begin with his September 2008 column. What Leonard wrote of the last Michael Chabon novel applies equally to what he wrote below: 'it works so well we want it to go on forever.'"

Update, 11/11: Salon's Andrew Leonard:

Writers write, he told me, when I was pondering my own career choices as a wayward youth. Writers write. If you don't have a passion for the act of writing, if you don't resonate to the chimes of words banging about in your head or on the page, you might as well not bother. In his opinion.

All this past weekend, in the shower, on airplanes, watching college football with my sister (my father was a fan), making small talk with New Yorkers come to honor his memory, that invocation, writers write, has tolled in my own head. The clangor intimidates. As has been noted many times in the outburst of obituaries and memorials that my father's death incited, my father treated words as if they were gems in the hands of a crazed master jeweler. Every noun, verb and semicolon fit into place with absolute precision and sparkled immaculately in the light, but there were so many and they were all so excited! A baroque profusion; a tsunami without a ripple gone awry; a memory palace and a labyrinth.

Posted by dwhudson at November 6, 2008 2:01 PM