One of the most alarming inversions of criticism in our time is that even as space for book reviews in print dwindles, and word counts dribble downward, a reviewer for a large newspaper or popular magazine is yet capable of reaching more readers than the book he reviews, especially if the book at hand is a volume of poetry.
In this brief moment of eclipse, a critic holds an enormous, if ephemeral amount of power. Some have used it to grab the sun for themselves, to squash rivals and settle scores; other as a force for good. America lost a great critic of the latter mould last week: John Leonard, the metaphor-mad, unapologetically liberal cultural omnivore, who died at age 69.
For readers and writers alike, Leonard was a beacon in a time when orienting lights were embarrassingly dim. His enthusiasms were vast and million-candled, and in a lean cuisine critical market Leonard always had a buffet table to himself: several thousand words in which to spread out and graze. As television critic for New York magazine, a roving book reviewer and political commentator, he turned week-to-week study of American culture into a dazzling perpetual decathlon.
Yet he never left you feeling like the mirror before which he was flexing his muscles. Leonard spent his talent week in and week out writing up to the level where he could meet novelists on their own playing field and then report back to those of us in the bleachers. He didn't want to merely describe the style of their sentences, or the strategy of their storytelling, but how they attacked the time-old essential questions, the ones all of us face.
"Books are my Rolodex," he wrote in the introduction to The Last Innocent White Man in America, his 1993 collection of essays. "From them I've learned to read everything else. 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."
There will never be another like him, and sadly, the conditions of American culture are working hard to make it doubly so. It's not just the conservative mainstream: this has occurred in the very publications – alternative weeklies – which arose to fight against the institutional complacency of the mainstream press.
Some writers of an independent mind have understandably turned to the internet, with its promise of unlimited word counts. Leonard proved what could be done with such open ranges. It let in the oxygen necessary for art and argument.
The lesson of Leonard's writing is that how you say a thing matters. Independence, in his mind, was a given. If you didn't have it in one publication, work for the next guy. More importantly, however, if you weren't up to the task of embracing a book's challenge, of taking on its most serious concerns in language as carefully tuned as that which you purported to critique, then you might not bother writing at all.
The miniaturisation of American cultural life has made a mockery of this ethic - not just in the space allotted for serious thought, but in the size of audience that enterprise is given. Writers who turn to the web to learn this craft are in a low-stakes game because in all but a few exceptions, they are speaking to the converted: people who care about books and are curious enough about them to get online and google.
Like Randall Jarrell, Leonard's greatness didn't come from his erudition - which was vast – or his experience, which stretched back four decades. It emerged from his aesthetic and philosophical populism. Leonard knew his job was pointless if he was just talking to the preconverted, presorted, presold.
So he worked like a demon to make sure he connected, one sentence at a time, with the great American muchness from where he came. In his example, one sees the magic of great criticism. "Amazing how all these little words of one, two or three syllables strung together beadlike turn into a necklace or a whip," he wrote of Toni Morrison's Beloved. In the cultural realm, it remains to be seen what America will chose.
