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October 11, 2004
TT: Once more, with feeling
I urged Lileks the other day not to jump to negative conclusions about A.J. Liebling before reading what I had to say about him in the Weekly Standard. My piece is now out, but the Standard's Web site doesn't offer a free link, so here are some pertinent excerpts. (The "White" in the first sentence is, of course, E.B. White.)* * *
Even now, the two writers most closely identified with The New Yorker under Ross are White and James Thurber. But much of their work has aged poorly (though Thurber's cartoons remain perennially fresh), and a growing share of critical attention is now being paid to a pair of slightly junior staffers who were the cream of Harold Ross' bumper crop. Joseph Mitchell was duly honored with the publication in 1992 of Up in the Old Hotel, a hefty collection of his New Yorker pieces that introduced the author of McSorley's Wonderful Saloon to a new generation of readers. Now it's A.J. Liebling's turn--or should be. Just Enough Liebling is clearly intended to do for him what Up in the Old Hotel did for Mitchell. He deserves it, but whether this book will turn the trick is a different story.
Though Liebling and Mitchell were close friends whose subject matter not infrequently overlapped, their styles were entirely dissimilar. Mitchell wrote about New York's "low life"--saloonkeepers, bearded ladies, Iroquois ironworkers--in a tone of quiet amusement often touched with an elegiac note. Liebling's prose, by contrast, was an exuberant, extroverted alloy of uptown and downtown, more or less what H.L. Mencken might have sounded like had he stuck to reporting instead of switching to the editorial page. Long experience as a feature writer for newspapers had taught him how to write concise, eye-grabbing leads, and when Ross gave him enough elbow room to paint full-length portraits of his subjects, he made the most of every inch. Here is his description of John Baptiste Fournet, former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Louisiana and a minor player in Liebling's masterpiece, The Earl of Louisiana (1961), a book-length profile of Earl Long, Huey's no less flamboyant younger brother:
At sixty-four the Chief Justice, the Honorable John Baptiste Fournet, is still a formidable figure of a man--tall and powerful and presenting what might be considered in another state the outward appearance of a highly successful bookmaker. The suit he had on when I saw him, of rich, snuff-colored silk, was cut with the virtuosity that only subtropical tailors expend on hot-weather clothing. Summer clothes in the North are makeshifts, like seasonal slipcovers on furniture, and look it. The Chief Justice wore a diamond the size of a Colossal ripe olive on the ring finger of his left hand and a triangle of flat diamonds as big as a trowel in his tie. His manner was imbued ith a gracious warmth not commonly associated with the judiciary, and his voice reflected at a distance of three centuries the France from which his ancestors had migrated, although he pronounces his name "Fournett." (The pronunciation of French proper names in Louisiana would make a good monograph. There was, for example, a state senator named DeBlieux who was called simply "W.")
All of Liebling is in that show-stopping description: the weakness for rogues, the razor-sharp eye for detail, the throwaway discursiveness, the gluttonously rich prose that readily spills over into food-based metaphors. Liebling himself was a short, stout trencherman who liked four-star cuisine and lots of it (he ate himself into a coffin at the age of 59), and he wrote about it with respectful glee. The closest he ever came to outright autobiography was a memoir manqué called Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris (1962) whose first chapter, reprinted in Just Enough Liebling, is called "A Good Appetite." Along with food and crooked pols, he wrote about boxing, small-time show business, and his fellow journalists. He is best remembered today for his long run as The New Yorker's press critic, in which capacity he penned the oft-misquoted line "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one," though his uneven "Wayward Press" columns are now praised to excess by modern-day journalists....
Liebling's wartime writing was far more impressive--so much so, in fact, that one might say World War II was the making of him. Before the war he had specialized in memorable tales of low life in Manhattan, including "The Jollity Building" (also in Just Enough Liebling), a three-part study of the Brill Building, a Broadway landmark that long served as headquarters for the lower depths of the pop-music business in New York City. Then Ross sent him to France in 1939 to substitute for Janet Flanner, the magazine's much-admired Paris-based correspondent, who had come back to the U.S. to tend her sick mother. When the war started in September, Flanner was unable to return to Paris, and Liebling found himself transformed willy-nilly into a war correspondent. He approached his new task in much the same way he had written about New York, looking for the little-picture stories he loved best, but with one crucial difference: he now started putting himself into the picture.
If there is any way you can get colder than you do when you sleep in a bedding roll on the ground in a tent in southern Tunisia two hours before dawn, I don't know about it. The particular tent I remember was at an airfield in a Tunisian valley. The surface of the terrain was mostly limestone. If you put all the blankets on top of you and just slept on the canvas cover of the roll, you ached all over, and if you divided the blankets and put some of them under you, you froze on top.
That's how Liebling led off "The Foamy Fields," a 1943 New Yorker dispatch about the Allied desert campaign. Rarely had he injected himself into his earlier articles, personal though their tone was. (Nowhere in "The Jollity Building," written in 1938, does Liebling refer to himself as "I.") Now he became a character in his reports from the front, the hapless, bemused narrator who described his unlikely-sounding wartime adventures as though he were strolling down Broadway, recounting them without the slightest trace of the strutting self-aggrandizement that afflicted so many other correspondents who wrote in the first person. When it came to conveying the sheer everydayness of war--as well as the occasional moments of terror--Liebling was Ernie Pyle's only peer. Several of his wartime pieces were included in Reporting World War II, the Library of America's invaluable two-volume anthology, and they leave no doubt that of all the specifically literary American journalism to come out of World War II, A.J. Liebling's was by a long shot the very best....
The postwar Liebling was to wield considerable influence on the "new journalists" of the '60s, who used his self-reflexive techniques in a flashier, more overtly virtuosic way (in the process occasionally losing sight of their subject matter, a sin he almost never committed). Meanwhile, their mentor disappeared from view. Years of compulsive overeating and a pair of unhappy marriages had taken their toll on an already depressive temperament, and by the time of his death in 1963 Liebling had all but dried up. Most of his best pieces had been spun into a dozen books, but none of them sold well or stayed in print....
What was needed all along was a wide-ranging, smartly edited collection that made a large chunk of Liebling's best work available in one place. I wish I could say that North Point Press' Just Enough Liebling is it, but it isn't. Though The New Yorker's David Remnick has written an engaging introduction, this five-hundred-page anthology has no editor of record (nobody is credited anywhere in the book), an omission that made me think of those Hollywood films whose directors are so disgusted with the final, studio-mangled product that they bill themselves as "Alan Smithee" in the credits. Certainly Just Enough Liebling bears the signs of group editing by meddlers insufficiently familiar with Liebling's output. The section devoted to his wartime journalism, for example, leaves out "Cross-Channel Trip," his deservedly legendary D-Day report (though it finds room for a pair of untypically flat "letters from Paris"), while the low-life chapter contains only "The Jollity Building" and an overripe 70-page excerpt from his weakest book, The Honest Rainmaker, an endless profile of Col. John R. Stingo, a racetrack tout for whose wheezy monologues Liebling had an inexplicable fondness....
Fortunately, North Point has also brought out attractive paperbacks of two of Liebling's finest books, Between Meals and The Sweet Science, the collection of boxing essays he published in 1956. Presumably additional volumes are in the works--starting, I hope, with The Earl of Louisiana. In the meantime, "Cross-Channel Trip" is available in Reporting World War II, while Broadway Books recently reissued The Telephone Booth Indian (1942), which contains most of Liebling's best-remembered low-life pieces (including "The Jollity Building"). Interested readers, then, would probably do better to pass up Just Enough Liebling and go straight to the originals....
Is it too much to hope that the Library of America might be persuaded to give us a Liebling volume containing The Earl of Louisiana, Between Meals, and an extensive and knowing selection of his shorter pieces and surviving correspondence? Outside of Mencken himself, I can't think of another American journalist more deserving of such deluxe treatment--or one whose posthumous reputation would profit more from getting it.
Posted October 11, 2004 2:33 AM
