Doctorow on Leonard

The esteemed author E. L. Doctorow (I remember reading his amazing novel “Ragtime” when it came out in the 1970s) has written a fascinating essay about, and lovely tribute to, the late great writer and critic John Leonard; this essay can be found in the 2/27/12 issue of The Nation. What struck me in the essay was Doctorow’s description of Leonard’s great love of the novel. Although he wrote about the arts and popular culture, the novel was to him the pinnacle. In a piece called “Reading for My Life,” he said (as quoted by Doctorow) that “Popular 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.” For example, when he first reads Garcia Marquez’s ”One Hundred Years of Solitude,” he not only feels it is a “marvelous novel” which set his “mind on fire,” but he makes connections between this novel and others; the Buendias “invite comparison with the Karamazovs and the Sartorises.” Doctorow says Leonard saw books “as if [they] are antiphonal calls and responses”; this statement really resonated for me, as I am sure it does for many longtime readers of the great novels of the past and present that speak to each other as they speak to us. Further, the following quote from Doctorow sheds light on some of the reasons Leonard was such a great critic: “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.” Doctorow concludes with the following: “With his love of language and his faith in its relevance to human salvation, [John Leonard was] our own inadvertent, secular humanist patron saint.”