A computer analysis of my father’s collected works reveals: 97.4 percent of everything he wrote can be safely ignored. All that verbiage is utilitarian scaffolding, employed to hold up just ten critical words. They are:
Tantrum
Cathedral
Linoleum
Moxie
Thug
Dialectic
Splendid
Brood
Libidinal
and Qualm
Those familiar with my father’s tendencies might quibble: Where are the mystagogues and omophagous worms? He was famous for his erudition. You give us “moxie” and “thug”?
But as exciting as the fancy-pants words may be, they are not essential to understanding the John Leonard Project. They are baroque ornamentation.
I also excised all words my father delighted in simply because they pleased his ear. Words such as “kayak” and “rutabaga.” It would be a mistake to hope for revelatory insight into the essence of my father from these words. Quite the opposite: I am unaware of any physical evidence proving John Leonard was ever within fifty yards of a kayak, and I am skeptical about whether he could have told the difference between a rutabaga and a Brussels sprout.
Freud, I’m sure, would caution against the perils involved in posthumously editing one’s father, but in one of my father’s columns, the word “rutabaga” appears five times. That is excessive.
Even more problematic is a third category I have chosen to skip: recurring compound phrases of two or more words that do hint at murkier depths. Categorical imperatives, imperialist lackeys, internal contradictions, and unindicted co-conspirators, all of which have a habit of showing up in the unlikeliest of places, such as snuggling up next to Blythe Danner in a Lifetime TV movie review.
But what self-respecting critic does not seize the chance to weave Hegel, Kant, Mao, and Watergate into an appreciation of CSI Miami? My father was more industrious than most in his high-culture infiltrations, but this does not, I think, fundamentally distinguish his cathedrals from those built by others.
So on with it!
My father cherished tantrums and hated thugs. Cathedrals he built, admired, and sang the praises of. But he was suspicious of linoleum. Moxie, he adored. The dialectic, always present. Brooding, whenever possible. “Splendid,” a word of highest praise, although easy to confuse with “dazzling,” the last word in his review of One Hundred Years of Solitude—or “triumph,” the last word in his review of Song of Solomon.
Which brings us to “libidinal.”
In my interpretation of the lexicon I have relied heavily on Private Lives, the columns he wrote for the New York Times in the late 1970s. There’s a lot of libido in Private Lives. More than I counted on. In two consecutive columns, my father dropped the smart bombs “libidinal cathexis” and “libidinal compost heap.”
Talk about excessive! In the latter case, the children are playing downstairs, in the libidinal compost heap. We’ll just leave that alone. But, in the case of the former—after some research—I learned that cathexis is a Greek word, employed to translate the German word bestzung, which was itself used by Sigmund Freud to refer to the “concentration of psychic energy on some particular person, thing, idea, or aspect of the self.” An expert in Freudian psychotherapy could probably provide more nuance, but I choose to define libidinal cathexis as the concentration of psychic energy on some person, thing, idea, or aspect of the self, for the purpose of gaining great pleasure.
That is the John Leonard Project—both his means and his ends. He did not like to pan books or movies or TV shows or children, except when absolutely necessary. Instead, he lived to exalt, to spread the dazzle, and in the process of doing so, make of his own words a libidinal tsunami. When my father was on, and he was almost always on, even to the last, his words incited passion, got the heart racing, stirred the blood and the mind and the soul. In the midst of it all, one unself-consciously gasps. Afterward, even those of us who don’t smoke reach for a cigarette.
This was true from the beginning. After generating my list, and poring over Private Lives, I opened up my father’s gin-soaked debut novel, The Naked Martini. I was comforted to discover, like old friends, the word “brood” on the first page and “libido” on the second.
Finally, I will concede that there is one last group of words that transcend the automatically generated lexicon. In one column, my father, who did not particularly care for cats, told of watching a kitten named Gulliver convert an inadvertent fall off a window sill into a perfectly executed double back flip. My father was charmed, despite himself. The kitten imperative cannot be denied. “If there is a chord in us that kittens strike,” he wrote, “maybe there’s one for justice, and for mercy, for sacrifice and reciprocity, kindness and respect.”
My father believed in all those words and lived up to all those words. And he loved every last one of his words, the fancy and the salt of the earth, the scaffolding and the ornamentation and the raw bones. I have no qualms in suggesting that all of us, in this regard, are his willing and eager, even if unindicted, co-conspirators.