EASTSIDER JOHN LEONARD
Book critic for the New York Times
3-22-80
"It's as if the job I have were designed for me," says bearded, bespectacled John Leonard, lighting his fifth cigarette of the early afternoon as he sits relaxed at his Eastside brownstone, talking about the pleasures and perils of being one of the New York Times' three daily book critics. Like his colleagues Christopher Lehmann-Haupt and Anatole Broyard, Leonard writes two book reviews for the Times each week, and is syndicated nationally. An avid reader since childhood, he now gets to read anything and everything he desires.
That's the advantage. The disadvantage, explains Leonard, is that "there are 50 thousand books published every year in this country. You can never even pretend to be comprehensive. You can't even pretend to be adequate in your coverage, whereas the Times will review almost any play that opens, on or Off Broadway, and almost every concert and movie. We'll review maybe 400 books a year in the daily paper."
A smallish, balding man of 41 who dresses purely for comfort and has a calm, refined speaking manner, Leonard looks precisely like the bookworm he is. "I'll get here, in this house, probably 5,000 or 6,000 books a year, mailed to me, or brought by messenger. The luxury of this job is that there's so much to choose from that any mood or interest or compulsion or desire to educate oneself or amuse oneself can be matched by some book that has come in."
New books by well-known authors, he says, are the first priority because "they've earned reviews, for service to the literary culture over the years." He and his two fellow critics "divide up the plums and divide up the dogs. Since I did Kissinger's memoirs, the next huge, endless book that has to be reviewed, whether anybody wants to review it or not, will not be reviewed by me."
Somewhere between 100 and 140 serious first novels are published in the U.S. each year, according to Leonard. "This is not pulp paperback westerns. It doesn't even count science fiction or gothic or all that. I think a special effort is made by all of us in the reviewing racket to review first novels."
He reads many authors' first books on the recommendation of trusted agents and publishers. "Over the years you decide who isn't lying to you. … Christopher Lehmann-Haupt was telling someone about that the other day. He said, 'Sure, you can call me as often as you want. But I'll say that you begin with a hundred dollars in you bank account, and if it turns out that you are begging me to review a book that has no other redeeming virtues but the fact that you have invested 50 or 80 thousand dollars' worth of advertising in it and you've got too many copies out in the bookstores that aren't moving, that bank account goes down. When you give me a real surprise and a pleasure which is what makes this job worthwhile, the bank account goes up. But if the bank account goes down to zero, it's closed.'
"And that's right. There are people in this town who I won't take a telephone call from. But that's the exception."
Apart from reading, writing and travel, Leonard has few interests. "By May, I can even look healthy, because I just sit out in the garden, getting paid to read," he says with a grin. He and his wife Sue, a schoolteacher, have three children from previous marriages. His son Andrew will be starting college in the fall.
A book reviewer since 1967, including a five-year stint as editor of the Sunday Times Book Review, Leonard also write a warmly personal, frequently humorous column in the Wednesday Times titled "Private Lives." A collection of 69 of the columns appeared in book form last year under the title Private Lives in the Imperial City (Knopf, $8.95). In addition, he has published four novels and hundreds of free-lance articles for magazines ranging from Playboy to the New Republic. For years he wrote TV reviews for Life magazine under the pseudonym "Cyclops." Recalls Leonard: "It was a good way to turn your brain to Spam."
Born in Washington, D.C., he grew up reading the Congressional Record instead of comics, and initially planned a career in law. Booted out of Harvard for neglecting his studies in favor of the campus newspaper, he sharpened his journalistic skills under William F. Buckley Jr. at the National Review before completing college at the University of California's Berkeley campus. Following graduation, he became the program director of a radio station, wrote his first two novels, and worked in an anti-poverty program in Boston. Then he was invited to join the Times. "I did my Westside and Village stuff when I was first here and broke," comments Leonard. He has owned his four-story Eastside house since 1971.
Among the most memorable books that Leonard has helped to "discover" are Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum. "To be able to sit down one night, as I did, and to realize you're in the presence of an extraordinary talent, with no advance publicity, to be able to have a hole to fill in the paper two days later, to sit down and pull out all your adjectives and get people to buy the book: this is what you live for," he sighs happily. "You only need two or three of those to last a lifetime."