John Leonard, 1939-2008

It’s a sad day for the semi-colon.

John Leonard passed away last night and I am deeply saddened by the news. I loved reading him. I don’t watch much television, but I always read his column in New York Magazine. The reviews he wrote there and in Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, and elsewhere were simply incredible rides. I always felt a little giddy afterward. What kind of corkscrewing, double-feinting sentence would he try out? What swerve was coming next? And then what unexpected association after that? How to talk about the writing of Joan Didion, his one-time colleague at the National Review? Start with the Cessna.

Years have passed and I’ve since recycled so many of those newspapers and magazines, but I still remember certain passages, rhythms, and revelations. “Mistah Shawn – he dead.” And for all his flair, I never thought of him as grandstanding or showboating at the expense of his subjects. I might have paused at a flourish or two (“let a hundred Harolds Bloom”), but it was more a sense of “Really? You’re going to try that?” I am grateful that he risked so many metaphors, so much appetite, enthusiasm, and feeling, and I am sorry I never got the chance to meet him.

On book reviewing, from “Smash-Mouth Criticism”:

…look with an open heart and mind at every different kind of book with every change of emotional weather because we are reading for our lives and that could be love gone out the window or a horseman on the roof.

Update. Here is a link to the NY Times obituary, which includes this detail:

Although gravely ill near the end, Leonard did make sure to vote Tuesday, for Barack Obama, needing a chair as he waited at his polling place on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.