Liebling in Uniform

Towards the end of his life, A.J. Liebling (1904-1963), the best of the New Yorker reporters, summed up his experience of war with characteristic incisiveness. “I know that it is socially acceptable to write about war as an unmitigated horror,” he wrote, “but subjectively at least, it was not true, and you can feel its pull on men’s memories at the maudlin reunions of war divisions. They mourn for their dead, but also for war.”

This shows something essential about Liebling: his readiness to trust experience, even when it confounded his suppositions-an indispensable attribute in any good reporter. He also saw a certain comedy in baffled supposition. In 1941 he recounted boarding a train for London:

Earlier, he witnessed an exchange between two Scots-a scene, as he described it, straight out of a Waverly novel-but rather than jump to conclusions, he pondered the episode: “I went to bed .  .  . trying to figure whether they had framed me with some amateur theatricals. But it had all been on the level. The first fact one must accept about Britain is that all British literature, no matter how improbably it reads, is realistic. You meet its most outrageous models everywhere you turn.” Here again Liebling was the consummate reporter, albeit with a twinkle in his eye.

The human aspect of war, not grand strategy, was his forte. Like Robert Graves, Liebling often treated war as though it were the stuff of light comedy. His description of an encounter in an apple orchard riddled with snipers is a good example.

At the same time, Liebling never spared his reader the grislier aspects of war. In Tunisia, he witnessed the ministrations of a roadside field doctor.

Liebling’s masters were the great English journalists Daniel Defoe, William Hazlitt, and William Cobbett. He also admired George Borrow, author of the picaresque Lavengro and The Romany Rye, as well as many paeans to prizefighting. (“Let no one sneer at the bruisers of England,” begins one section of Lavengro.) From these models he took away a respect for exuberance and intellectual honesty, as well as an approach to style that illustrated Swift’s definition of good writing: “proper words in proper places.”

The war writings collected in this Library of America edition-including The Road Back to Paris (1944), Normandy Revisited (1958), Mollie and Other War Pieces (1964), and many uncollected pieces-exhibit Liebling’s strengths on nearly every page. Raymond Sokolov’s lively biography, Wayward Reporter: The Life of A.J. Liebling (1980), makes a good companion to the collection.

Much of Liebling’s war was spent in transit, though he was ringside at a few of the major bouts. In 1939 Harold Ross sent him to Paris, where he covered la drôle de guerre. After Paris fell in June 1940, he had no alternative but to return to New York. In July 1941, he flew to London on an RAF bomber and later wrote about an extraordinary Irish pilot-“Paddy of the RAF”-“who does everything exactly right .  .  . a fraction of a second before his opponent.”

In December 1941, after returning to the United States on a Norwegian ship, Liebling wrote “Westbound Tanker,” which Joseph Mitchell considered his best war piece. In 1942, he sailed back to England and reported on the Allied troops in London. In 1943, he accompanied U.S. fighter squadrons in Algeria and Tunisia. In April 1943 he traveled to Tripoli and in May he sailed from Casablanca to New York. In 1944, he returned to England and accompanied a B-26 bombing mission over France.

In that same year, he published “Notes from the Kidnap House,” a three-part story on the press in occupied France, in which he dryly observed: “The treason of a writer is explicit, because he puts it in words”-something not all of our own correspondents sufficiently grasp. On D-Day he crossed the English Channel in a large landing craft transporting troops to Omaha Beach. In “Cross-Channel Trip” he recalled looking towards the stern and seeing “a tableau that was like a recruiting poster”: guns blazing, Old Glory “brilliant in the sun,” and the men of the beach battalion disembarking into the water “without a sign of flinching.”

Liebling went ashore on June 9 and spent two months with American troops in Normandy and Brittany. By September he could write from Paris that “for the first time in my life and probably the last, I have lived for a week in a great city where everybody is happy.” In December he returned to New York, where he took rooms in the Fifth Avenue Hotel and drafted “Mollie,” perhaps his best-known war piece.

Before and after the war, Liebling wrote brilliantly about low life, the press, boxing, and his two favorite subjects, food and drink. In Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris (1959), he vividly described the year he spent at the Sorbonne after he was thrown out of Dartmouth for refusing to attend chapel. In one passage he recalled Yves Mirande, a farceur who was also one of the great gourmands.

Liebling admired gourmands partly as the result of upbringing: His father, a successful furrier, took his family on frequent trips to Europe, where his insatiable son, familiar only with the beer gardens of New York, reveled in the gastronomic abundance of the old world. Yet Liebling also admired gourmands because they had something heroic about them. What ruined the old gargantuan appetites was a preoccupation with the liver, and for Liebling, “the liver was the seat of the Maginot mentality.”

Although of German Jewish ancestry-his Jewish father arrived in New York from Austria and later married a Jewish woman from San Francisco-Liebling was an unabashed Francophile who downplayed his Jewishness and abominated Germans. As a child he had been entrusted to the care of German governesses, all of whom, he later recalled, were “stupid, whining, loud, and forever trying to frighten me with stories of children who had been burned to a crisp or eaten by an ogre because they had disobeyed other Fräuleins.”

In “Madame Hamel’s Cows” about the Americans’ capture of St. Lô in 1944, Liebling observed of the retreating enemy:

Germans were not the only nationals Liebling skewered. He was particularly withering about the Italian prisoners he encountered on the beach after D-Day. “They were fine, rugged specimens,” he wrote, “as they should have been, because since the Italian surrender they had undoubtedly had plenty of exercise swinging pick-axes for the Todt organization.” Disarmed by the Germans in Greece, they had been given the choice of either fighting with their Axis allies or doing labor service for them. “They had all chosen labor service. .  .  . They seemed to expect to be commended for this choice. .  .  . ‘We wouldn’t fight for Hitler,’ they assured me. I thought that the point had already been pretty well proved. Now they were digging for us.” Liebling’s Francophilia had fully acquainted him with the stratagems of amour-propre.

When Liebling went to war he took his peacetime enthusiasms with him. There was his interest in cookery:

Among troops actively engaged, a K ration beat nothing to eat, but it was a photo finish. These components were a round tin of alleged pork and egg, ground up together and worked to a consistency like the inside of a sick lobster’s claw, and tasting like boardwalk cotton candy without any sugar in it.

These girls show legs of a length and slimness and firmness and brownness never associated with French womanhood. Food restrictions and the amount of bicycling that is necessary in getting around a big city without any other means of transportation have endowed these girls with the best figures in the world, which they will doubtless be glad to trade in for three square meals, plentiful supplies of chocolate, and a seat in the family Citroën.

One reason why Liebling’s marriage to Jean Stafford never went south was that she found the pedestal he put her on an agreeable perch. Robert Lowell never bought her fur coats. She also liked the foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, raffish company he kept.

Liebling also took to war his respect for good reporting, which he exhibited brilliantly in “Mollie,” a piece about a legendary soldier killed in Morocco after taking 600 Italians prisoner. Mollie fascinated Liebling because he was Times Square gone to war, in much the same way as Evelyn Waugh’s Basil Seal, the hero of Put Out More Flags, was Mayfair gone to war. Mollie also fascinated Liebling because he was a dreamer, a proletarian Jay Gatsby.

Liebling was a dreamer himself. He loved dive bars, boxing rings, and racetracks because they were the fastnesses of dreams, where he could cultivate his rakish ideal of the man about town. In these and other louche locales he pursued the regimen of excess that killed him at 59. (Gout was his constant companion.) Mollie was cut out of the same cloth. As one of his company described him, he treated the Army as though it were his own stage set:

Mollie proved to Liebling how a soldier from his own stomping ground, a dime-store dreamer could help preserve the dreams of all free men. This was what gave him his special heroism. He was the common man of uncommon bravery rescuing civilization from Prussian militarism. In Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh might have faulted Hooper for vulgarity and slackness but Liebling had nothing but praise for Mollie and his plebeian derring-do.

When it came to politics, Liebling did not go in for elaborate exegesis: “I think democracy a most precious thing, not because any state is perfect, but because it is perfectible.” If American democracy passed Prohibition, it also passed the repeal of Prohibition. After Germany invaded Russia in 1941, Liebling found himself walking through Union Square, “where all the free-style catch-as-catch-can Marxist arguers hang out, and all the boys who two days earlier had been howling for Churchill’s blood were now screaming for us to get right into the war. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘we are on the same side of a question for once, any way.'”

This was the extent of what Liebling called “my ideology.”

Editors whose ideology compels them to oppose the Iraq war have no qualms running pieces designed to demoralize the home front. They will not see their defeatism in any of Liebling’s pages. He was too intent on victory. As he wrote in The Road Back to Paris: “Some people like to live in a good neighborhood. I like to live in a good age. I am a sucker for a happy ending-the villain kicked in the teeth, the stepchildren released from the dark basement, the hero in bed with the heroine.”

Thanks to the heroism of people like Mollie, Liebling got his happy ending. Here he is on the liberation of France a little over a month after D-Day.

The Fourteenth of July apparently found everybody in the liberated zone happy. Tricolors that had not seen the light since the Pétain armistice fluttered over houses and draped window sills everywhere, usually along with homemade American flags and often with signs saying “Vive l’Amérique” or “Merci à Nos Libérateurs.” .  .  . As one thick-waisted old farmer, an ex-cuirassier said, “An armored formation has cut up my best pasture, a promising heifer has gone up with a mine, and a bomb has removed most of the tiles from the roof of my house, but, Monsieur, I assure you, I was never so happy in my life.”

Edward M. Short is a writer in New York.