Buckley, Berkley and Back

John Leonard is one of the two or three best literary critics in America, a fact that has been plain to New York Times readers since May 1969, when he became one of its book reviewers. To virtually any book, Leonard can apply intellect and language without sacrificing either. Last month, at 31, he was named the new editor of the New York Times Book Review, the paper's Sunday supplement that is the most widely distributed (1,400,000 copies) literary journal in the country.

"I'm nervous," says Leonard. "It will absorb as much energy as I have." He has plenty. Thin, dark blond, wearing horn-rims and rumpled clothes, he walks with a schoolmaster stoop, chain-smokes and has a disarmingly direct way of tackling almost anything. Four years ago, he tutored pupils in an antipoverty program in Roxbury, Mass.; in the same year, he worked with migrant labor gangs in a New England apple orchard.

Leftist Rightist. Child of a broken marriage (he describes his father as "a gentle Irish drunk"), Leonard was raised in Southern California by his mother. He squeezed into Harvard in 1956 mainly because of a geographical quota system, and after spending two dull years doing little but writing captions for the Crimson, he flunked out. He wandered to Greenwich Village and picked up two reputations: one for being leftist, the other for being rightist.

Thinking right, Leonard wrote an anti-Greenwich Village article for a now defunct college-audience magazine called Ivy. William F. Buckley Jr., who had a piece in the same issue, detected conservative views in Leonard's writing. Buckley phoned, and hired him as an editorial apprentice on National Review magazine. Leonard did layout, makeup, a few book reviews. After Buckley sent him to post-revolutionary Cuba, Leonard found his political viewpoint solidifying. "I was always vaguely liberal," he says, "but Buckley taught me to develop my ideas logically. I discovered I was growing more radical, and that made it impossible for me to stay at National Review. Buckley helped radicalize me. made me think about politics."

Thinking left, he said goodbye to Buckley, and moved to the University of California at Berkeley. There he served as director of drama and books for the Pacifica Foundation's FM station KPFA, arranging interviews and producing plays. He got a B.A. in English and published his first novel, The Naked Martini, which Harrison Salisbury described in a review for the Times as possessing "a certain wry wit, but 255 pages seems a long, long journey with no better company than a young adman, his bottles and his babes."

In 1963, the Leonards moved to Peterborough, N.H., home of his wife's family.

In 1967, Leonard got involved in a Cambridge radical movement called Viet Nam Summer. Working with young left-wing professors, the S.D.S. and assorted revolutionaries, he wrote ads, pamphlets and did public relations. But at the end of the summer he left, disillusioned by the "disaster and disgrace" of the New Politics convention in Chicago. He even considered moving to Spain. Instead, Leonard was hired by the Times as one of seven "previewers" who select and recommend books to the Times' critics. Nineteen months later he was promoted to critic--and found his metier.

Fun with Gore. Conversational and complex, witty and precise, to the point and beyond, he probed the heart of matters as disparate as S.J. Perelman's humor in Baby, It's Cold Inside and Rollo May's Love and Will. On the humorist: "The S.J. Perelman story, like the Godard film, is a mode of proof, an assertion of accuracy in the spirit of maximum vehemence." On the effect of Freud on love, via May and Leonard: "So love was made banal, trivialized into proximate spasms, robbed of duration, imagination and even tragic gloss. So, as in all declining cultures. Eros was stripped down into Cupid. All motion, no feeling." On Gore Vidal: "He chooses merely to bite his betters on their kneecaps." On the '50s as recollected in The Great Dethriffe, a new novel by C.D.B. Bryan: "Remember Korea, our first televised war, in black and white, yet oddly out of focus and oddly inconclusive, as though perhaps the horizontal hold had failed and the images spun by too swiftly to perceive their significance?"

Under Editor Francis Brown, who is retiring, the Times Book Review has almost made a credo of the calm, academic approach. Can Leonard the editor transfuse the excitement of Leonard the writer to this journal? If so, the transfusion will be gradual. "I'm not going to make it a flashier magazine," he says. "I worry a lot about science, technology and education. But, dammit, I want the best writers, writing at the top of their form."

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