An Interview with Irving A. Leonard

Abstract

O VER thirty years ago, struggling desperately wvith my first seminar paper as a history graduate student, frustrated, in fact, almost demoralized by my first encouniter with writing history, I trudged up four flights of stairs to John Tate Lanning's office in the gothic tower of the Duke University Library. Sensing my frustration, Lanning somehow forsook his normal role as the stern, demanding Puritanical father, heard me out patiently and sympathetically, arched his eyebrows, and said finally: Why don't you read Books of the Brave. Irving Leonard works hard at his writing and knows how to write; I can't think of a better model. That was my first introduction to Irving Leonard and the beginning of an intellectual tie that has lasted ever since. His host of achievements-dispelling the myth of Spanish obscurantism in the Indies, analysis of the book trade, contributions to the cultural history of colonial Hispanic America, filling the large gap in seventeenth-century Latin American historiography wvith his prize-winning Baroque Times in Old Mexico, and the fine translation of Mariano Picon-Salas's Cultural History, which has served us so well in the classroom-has only strengthened the bond that Lanning initiated in 1951. Born on December 1, 1896, Irving A. Leonard grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, and was always singularly proud to be a yanqui. In fact, commented one of his students later: If Quixote returned as a Yankee, without doubt he would be called Irving A. Leonard. After attending New Haven schools, he matriculated at nearby Yale University, where he pursued a degree in the natural sciences, something akin to forestry today. At graduation, however, as a result of an overweaning desire to go abroad to use a developing expertise in Spanish, a language that had fascinated him from his youth, he took a position with a business firm in the Philippines. He spent three years in the islands, working, teaching, and also marrying there. Returning to the United States, he taught high school for a year in California before entering the University of California at Berke-