Culture Vulture

JOHN LEONARD HAS a great job--chief cultural correspondent of The New York Times, which apparently means that he can write wherever and whenever he wants, as long as it's about something vaguely cultural. Yes, vaguely; his first few articles have been about, on the one hand, Norman Mailer and Irving Howe and starving New York writers, but on the other hand Jerry Rubin and autopsies. He writes long and with a good deal of occasionally abused stylistic freedom, and he has one Cause and one Unfortunate Fixation.

The Cause is government support for the arts, particularly writers. Leonard is too cautious about taking himself with excessive seriousness to come right out and bludgeon the point, but it still crops up now and then. Of the starving New York writers, he says gently that "in some crease of the American cultural flab, they ought to have a home." In discussing the cultural boondocks of Canada, he chides: "four times as much money, not per capita but just plain period, is spent on the care and feeding of literature than Washington has appropriated or could comprehend.

Perhaps because he's so offhand about it, it's hard to imagine exactly what kind of cultural world Leonard would like to create, given the chance. He seems to be more interested in money for the cultured, particularly writers, than culture for the masses. It's a small segment of the cultural world that he's vitally involved in, it's to that segment that he would probably be most interested in seeing the cash flow. Now that wouldn't be a bad thing, and even to imply it is perhaps pinning Leonard down too much. If he stays at it his theory of culture and society will no doubt emerge, as well as a slightly broader perspective on his limitless beat. And Leonard's own writing, in the meantime, is a little culture of its own, enough to make waiting around to see how he develops hardly a painful process.

The Unfortunate Fixation is with New York literati, a fault Leonard would no doubt excuse by asking what other literati are there. Still, he writes overwhelmingly about writers, and does so in a way that somehow seems cozy. He talks mostly about what the writers are like, but he tends toward the aphorism, hanging two-or three-word phrases on major literary endeavors and making lots of off-hand cultural references. He gives the impression of wanting at least in part to be the chronicler of the very circles he travels in, which, given that there must be more to culture than that, is unfortunate.

His writing itself is usually a pleasure. It's done in long, tangled, eclectic sentences; the thoughts come to him in bursts of various length, each one striving for profundity and literary value. This sometimes produces streams of semi-meaningless maxims (of Rubin, "He is Jimmy Connors deciding to be Chrissie Evert, as solemn as an oil rig;" of Canada, "a New Zealand on rubber wheels." Leonard must have some idea what these things mean). It also sometimes produces really good and perceptive lines (writers "will descend into pulpdom, where the libidinal cathexes are so simpleminded it seems that anyone with a grudge against women has a chance to make money.") Maybe Leonard has watched too much TV, or thinks too much about beefing up his chapter in Familiar Quotations, but at least he's in there plugging.