The Classic

Between Meals

An Appetite for Paris

by A.J. Liebling

North Point, 167 pp., $13

The Sweet Science

by A.J. Liebling

North Point, 267 pp., $15

SOMETIMES I WONDER whether those who subscribed to the New Yorker in its halcyon days, the 1930s and 1940s, complained as much about it as their children and grandchildren do. Probably not–it wasn’t an institution then, just a magazine. Yet there were already those who bristled at its way of looking at the world. In 1947, for example, Robert Warshow wrote a withering essay for Partisan Review about The Wild Flag, a collection of E.B. White’s pollyannish New Yorker editorials on world government.

In the process Warshow contrived to pepper the whole magazine with hot shot: “The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it. This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with it adequately. . . . History may kill you, it is true, but you have taken the right attitude, you will have been intelligent and humane and suitably melancholy to the end.”

Warshow was a man on whom little was lost, and his complaint, though it rings truer now than it did then, nonetheless had a certain validity in the old days. Once you got past White’s introductory “Notes and Comment,” though, I can’t see that there was really all that much worth griping about. Under Harold Ross, the New Yorker boasted a team of in-house writers who were nothing if not individual in style and approach. Most of their names are forgotten today save by connoisseurs of American journalism, but anyone who leafs through a random issue of the New Yorker from Ross’s later years is likely to want to read much more of such half-remembered New Yorker standbys as Wolcott Gibbs, Philip Hamburger, St. Clair McKelway, and Berton Roueché.

As for the magazine’s better-known outside contributors, I can only boggle at the thought that it published the wildly dissimilar likes of John Cheever, H.L. Mencken, Vladimir Nabokov, John O’Hara, S.J. Perelman, J.D. Salinger, Rebecca West, and Edmund Wilson on a regular basis. It may well be that the New Yorker‘s short stories were cut too closely to measure, as its critics always claimed, but when you consider the magazine as a whole, you have to ask yourself: Has any editor put together so varied a group of authors?

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. 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. The new volume 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 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:

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 fifty-nine), 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), the first chapter of which is called “A Good Appetite” and is reprinted in Just Enough Liebling.

ALONG WITH FOOD and crooked politicians, 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 who dote on his kneejerk liberalism. (A lifelong man of the left, Liebling secretly worked as a legman for Alger Hiss’s defense team while simultaneously criticizing press coverage of the Hiss trial in the New Yorker, an offense he would have lampooned mercilessly had he caught a right-wing journalist doing the same thing for Whittaker Chambers.)

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,” 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. 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 America 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 dispatch about the Allied desert campaign. Rarely had he injected himself into his early 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.

For the rest of his life Liebling would continue to write in the conversational style he perfected in his wartime dispatches, though his prose became more ornate and frankly reminiscent as he grew older. Even when he slipped out of sight for a moment or two, as in this passage from Between Meals, you always knew where he was:

The postwar Liebling was to wield considerable influence on the “new journalists” of the 1960s, 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 work had been spun into a dozen books, but none of them sold well or stayed in print.

Not until 1980, when Raymond Sokolov published a biography, Wayward Reporter, and edited Liebling Abroad, an omnibus volume of four of his best collections, did his work become readily available outside of well-stocked libraries and start to win him acclaim. Since then he has been hailed as a key figure in American literary journalism, the missing link between Mencken and Tom Wolfe, and paperback editions of most of his pieces have come and–alas–mostly gone. 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’s 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 credited, and Isuspect that anonymity disguises the input of 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 seventy-page excerpt from his weakest book, The Honest Rainmaker, an endless profile of Colonel John R. Stingo, a racetrack tout for whose wheezy monologues Liebling had an inexplicable fondness. What’s more, the editor or editors of Just Enough Liebling have neglected to indicate which of his books served as the sources for their selections, an inexcusable oversight.

Fortunately, North Point has also brought out attractive paperbacks of Between Meals and the collection of boxing essays Liebling published in 1956, The Sweet Science. 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. Interested readers, then, would probably do better to pass up Just Enough Liebling and go straight to the originals.

BUT WILL THEY? Liebling was, after all, a short hitter, and though Between Meals and The Earl of Louisiana are good, the rest of his vast output is best savored one piece at a time, not least because it is so rich a dish. It’s no accident that most of Mencken’s admirers have come to him not through his own books but by way of the many Mencken anthologies that have been published over the years, among them his A Mencken Chrestomathy, perhaps the finest self-anthology ever published. Had A.J. Liebling put together a similar volume with equal care, he might be better known today. I doubt that Just Enough Liebling, though it contains many good things, will prove an adequate substitute.

Is it too much to hope that the Library of America might be persuaded to give us a Liebling volume? 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.

Terry Teachout is the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and the music critic of Commentary. His latest book, All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, will be published in November by Harcourt.