It is a quirk of personal history that I spent the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, at dinner with John Leonard and his wife, Sue, in a restaurant on New York's Upper East Side, as out the window flatbed trucks bearing earth-moving machines rolled south.
Perhaps the charged atmosphere negated what was said, for I no longer recall our conversation, although John was a talker to his core. Their generosity is what has lingered, their offer of a place to stay if I wished, the same generosity that led them to encourage many young writers in their years as co-editors of the Books & the Arts section of the Nation in the late 1990s.
I had known John for years, through editing his cultural criticism and literary reviews at the Nation, writing that was not only generous of heart but that also regularly left one marveling at its verbal play and conceptual frisson. Much of this work can be found in his books of essays, including "Lonesome Rangers," "The Last Innocent White Man in America" and "When the Kissing Had to Stop."
When John died Wednesday at age 69 after an extended battle with cancer, he had been working on a memoir and was anticipating publication of yet another set of essays, under the provisional title "Swimming With the Snarks."
He leaves behind not just that material but also what was a calling as much as a career. Over time, he served as New York magazine's television critic; as editor of the New York Times Book Review in the early 1970s; as a contributor to "CBS Sunday Morning," where he stretched the vocabulary of television to its very limits; and as a columnist at Newsday, and earlier at Esquire, as a fill-in for Dwight Macdonald.
Through it all, John weighed in as a signal cultural critic, writing for the Nation and in recent years a book column for Harper's while he showcased longer work in the New York Review of Books.
John was a smoker and a laugher and a talker who was given to waving one hand as he spoke. The laughter was infectious and his major chord. If it did not emerge, indignation -- usually politically related -- did.
He felt the tensing of the times more acutely than his peers -- no one could accuse him of lack of affect, as the passion that infuses his writing makes clear. In a literary sense, he took it as his mission to drive the money-changers from the temple and to feed the multitudes, or at least try.
