Leonard also believes that young reviewers aren’t encouraged to diversify their knowledge base. In one journalism class he taught, students told him they didn’t want to read some of the critics and novelists on the assigned reading list because “they didn’t want to be influenced.” Influence, in Leonard’s mind, is an asset — the way we become versed in the language of criticism. “I think a young critic has to find a situation, paying or not, where they can expand, not specialize. But you’ve got to throw yourself into deep water. You’ve got to review a writer whose other books you have to read and that means you have to find a comfortable place with an editor who is elastic enough … . You only find your voice by using it on a variety of subjects, not just repeating the same tune.”

The poet William Wordsworth once wrote of “The marble index of a mind forever/voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone” — lines that Leonard recently quoted in an essay on the book Herman Melville, by Elizabeth Hardwick. One can see why these lines might appeal to a literary critic. It is not quite apt, though. John Leonard’s mind is not a marble index, but three-dimensional, contoured, and warm with the palpable energy of a life lived in the strange and complicating literary seas of ambivalence.