Reading John Leonard's Life

John Leonard's posthumously published collection is a remarkable exercise in criticism as biography. The essays in Reading for My Life span fifty years from 1958 to 2008, when Leonard, a critic for Harper's and The New York Times Book Review, among others, died of lung cancer. Reading the fifty pieces compiled in this one volume, I learned just as much about Leonard as I did about his subjects.

One obvious reason that Leonard's biography comes across is because his essays span his entire reviewing career. We see him grow as America grows. In an essay about the Beat Generation, we see him dropping out of Harvard and heading to the West Coast like so many others who came of age in the late 1950s. In another essay, we see Leonard safely within the New York intelligentsia from where he critiques Tom Wolfe's narrow portrayal of New Yorkers in The Bonfire of the Vanities. Leonard's subjects map the tumultuous American-century. Whether discussing the sexual revolution (through the lens of Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife) or Israeli-Palestinian relations (through the lens of an interview with David Grossman), his essays exclaim "I was there."

But the most revealing thing in these essays is Leonard's frankness about his own life. He injects himself into his book reviews as frequently as possible. Though one could mistake this for self-indulgence, Leonard presents himself as a common observer. When condemning Richard Nixon's campaign memoir, Six Crises, Leonard adopts the view of the every day American as opposed to the entrenched intelligentsia. He warns the reader, "Let me make it clear at the outset that I am not going to be objective." Not because he has some secret liberal agenda, but merely because he is "fascinated by the flower of rot, and because ...more interesting and instructive than Richard Nixon the success is Richard Nixon the failure."

Besides, Leonard's disdain for some writers is balanced out by his honest, lavish praise for others. He doesn't have enough good things to say about Doris Lessing's The Four-Gated City, finally going out on "She has done her job, and what a staggering one it is." Later, he dubs The Satanic Verses "infinitely more interesting than those hundreds of neat little novels we have to read between Rushdies." Through these essays, we learn that un-selfconscious praise can be delightful.

We also learn that Leonard was a colorblind feminist before those terms were invented. As one of the first to write about women novelists without condescension, Leonard made bold, unqualified statements about the women he admired. On Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: "It is fierce intelligence, all sinew, prowling among the emotions." Quite a masculine description indeed. We can't blame Leonard for occasionally taking a victory lap for his prescient admiration for women writers by scolding his fellow critics for not recognizing their talents earlier.

One of the most affecting pieces--and the longest--is an essay on television. Leonard was as much a TV critic as he was a book critic. In "Family Values, Like the House of Atreus" Leonard charts a half century of television, demonstrating how the medium simultaneously shapes and reflects American values. The epidemic of single dads on TV in the 1980s could be attributed to our society's reluctance to accept the fact that 89% of single-parent households were headed by women. Leonard surmises why thirtysomething was so popular at a time when "I could leave the house, and go to the corner, and find an overmuch of such people in my own yupscale neighborhood: sun dried as if in extra-virgin olive oil, crouched to consume their minimalist bistro meals of cilantro leaves, medallions of goat cheese, and half a scallop on a bed of money." Perhaps it reflected yuppie navel-gazing at its worst.

Reading for My Life is an absolute must read for any aspiring critic. In a world of cold, academic criticism, Leonard shows us what it means to have a personal connection with culture.

Avant-Garde Opera at NYCO

Trying to be more sophisticated this year, my friends and I have taken advantage of the Metropolitan Opera's terrific student program to see some universally lauded works like Carmen and Tosca. Feeling adventurous, I went to the Met's next door neighbor, New York City Opera this week. It turns out that seeing Carmen at the Met is about as sophisticated as seeing The Lion King on Broadway when compared to New York City Opera's productions. If opera can be described at avant-garde, such opera is most likely to be found at NYCO. Originally founded in 1948 as "the people's opera" with an aim of making opera more affordable to a wider audience, it seems to be a home for displaying a wide range of opera these days. Its current season features old classics by famous composers (Donizetti's Elixir of Love and Strauss's Intermezzo), unknown operas by beloved American composers (Bernstein's A Quiet Place and Schwartz's Seance on a Wet Afternoon), and unconventional operas that are more performance art than anything else. Monodramas, in the latter category, is what I saw this week.

According to a recent Harper's article about the triumphs and tribulations of the NYCO, the organization has adamantly supported its unique mission in the face of economic decline. Even though it had to close for a year following Wall Street's collapse in 2008, the company chose to open its 2009-2010 season with the unknown Esther rather than a more conventional piece. Though that season also included Don Giovanni and Madama Butterfly, they were balanced by a baroque opera and a "rarely performed" French opera. The Harper's article also describes the effects of being cash-strapped on the company. People seem to be more careful with props and there is little full rehearsal time before opening. After all, orchestras are expensive. New York City Opera has also had to "sell out" to David Koch, the conservative billionaire after whom the theatre is now named.

Is the end result worth it? After sitting through two hours of something I barely understood, I'd still venture a "yes." Everyone has described Monodramas as vastly different from any conception of "opera' you've ever had before. Consisting of three different short pieces, Monodramas is more like a staged classical vocal Twentieth Century concert with occasional dance components than a traditional opera. The first piece, "La Machine de L'Etre" by John Zorn (2009), is the shortest, weirdest, and most recent. The stage opens onto what looks like many people dressed in hijabs. Two people dressed in suits go around an undress a few of the hijabs to reveal people in more modern clothing. One (Anu Komsi) begins to sing to a very contemporary, jarring score. Two wooden thought bubbles arise, which start to show projected images of random things from canons to people. Are these the woman's thoughts? Do they upset her? We don't know because the entire piece is wordless, only narrated by the woman's haunting scales.

The second piece, "Erwartung" by Arnold Schoenberg, is the most accessible and narrative. It's about a woman (Kara Shay Thompson) who goes searching for her lover only to find that he is either dead, or in her imagination. She narrates the whole time as she travels through woods. Rose petals float down for the entire 30 minutes, bathing the stage in a sea of red that starts to resemble blood. I enjoyed the use of the ensemble. They truly accompany the soloist by dancing without overshadowing her.

Finally, the last act, "Neither" by Morton Feldman, brought out the alleged theme of the entire production: the fuzzy boundary of self and unself (whatever that means). Feldman writes music for a Beckett monologue. The text speaks for itself: to and fro in shadow from inner to out shadow/from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither, etc. At first, this piece gives off the sense of being at a parody of a performance art piece in Brooklyn. The stage is covered in a shiny metallic material. Shiny boxes rotate down from the ceiling like fifty disco balls. The two suits from the beginning of the performance are walking around, as if they are indeed at a museum. A wooden figure in the center of the stage (Cyndia Seiden) comes to life to sing Beckett's words. Feldman's score puts the soloist in her upper range for the entire piece so even though the words are in English, they would have been impossible to understand without supertitles. But after a few minutes, I became entranced by the performance. No, I wasn't reaching into the dark recesses of my mind to contemplate self versus unself, but I was thinking that I liked this dramatization of the song. This work would probably never have been performed in concert. Though there are lyrics, so many wordless expanses would have left the soloist with nothing to do in a concert. Here, dancing nicely fills the space. As bodies move around the mirrored boxes on stage, a sense of disorientation is created, achieving the precise effect that Feldman wanted to have on mid-Twentieth Century audiences.