Just Enough Liebling
By A.J. Liebling, introduction by David Remnick
North Point Press, 534 pages, $27.50
Abbott Joseph “Joe” (a.k.a A.J.) Liebling is now undergoing his third revival in the last quarter century, the first one kicked off by Raymond Sokolove’s 1980 biography, “The Wayward Reporter,” and the second by the rash of Liebling paperback reprints in the
90s. Now, with the new Liebling anthology, “Just Enough Liebling,” he’s back again.
No one would have found his reincarnations more ironic than Liebling himself, and not simply because his books didn’t sell in his own lifetime. (He was born in 1904, joined The New Yorker in 1935 and died in 1963.) The one great theme of Liebling’s life–whether expressed in his press-critic columns for The New Yorker in the 1950s or in any of his original works–is that the great age of journalism, or at least the great age of newspapers (which, to be fair, he did not always regard as the same thing), was coming to an end.
Why, then, decades after most of the subjects he wrote about–from Chicago press lord Robert McCormick to middle-age light-heavyweight boxing champion Archie Moore–are ancient history, do we still care about A.J. Liebling?
Largely, as “Just Enough Liebling” proves, because he sounds just as fresh and irreverent and relevant today as he did nearly 50 years ago. Liebling is best remembered for a prediction and a quote. The prediction was that all major American cities would eventually be one-newspaper towns–which didn’t quite turn out to be the case but still seems more accurate than not. The quote is, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” which, of course, is as true now as when he wrote it.
Liebling’s place in modern American journalism has been overrated and underrated. He didn’t, as many of his admirers have often claimed, invent press criticism, food (as opposed to mere restaurant) writing, or serious cultural analysis of boxing. On the other hand, by immersing himself in his subjects and ruminating upon them with the precision of a reporter and the enthusiasm of a fan, he staked a claim as the father of the so-called new journalism. How strange that he is seldom given credit as such, though its most famous practitioner, Tom Wolfe, long ago proclaimed it.
“Just Enough Liebling,” with an introduction by New Yorker Editor David Remnick, is appreciated, however mistitled. There are big, thick chunks from several of Liebling’s most famous books: “Back Where I Come From,” about New York; his war correspondent work, “The Road Back to Paris,” “Mollie and Other War Pieces” and “Normandy Revisited”; “The Press,” a collection of his press criticism from The New Yorker; “Between Meals,” his food writing; his studies of Broadway-area rogues, “The Telephone Booth Indian” and “The Honest Rainmaker”; his surprisingly laudatory biography of Gov. Earl Long, “The Earl of Louisiana”; and perhaps his best-known book, his collected boxing pieces, “The Sweet Science.”
A few of these books are available in paper-back reprints, others can be found in second-hand bookstores around the Internet, but “Just Enough Liebling” is enough to get you started and whet your appetite for more. Here are a few hors d’oeuvres:
On food: “The quantity of brandy in a madeleine [Marcel Proust’s tea biscuit] would not furnish a gnat with an alcohol rub. In the light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world’s loss that he did not have a heartier appetite.”
On the battle for France: “The bravest French-men are sometimes dismayed . . . when they think of Paris being bombed from the air, be-cause, they say, there is no city in Germany worthy of reprisal.”
On New York lowlifes: “Morty, the renting agent . . . takes a personal interest in the people who spend much of their lives in the Jollity Building. It is about the same sort of interest that Curator Raymond Ditmars takes in the Bronx Zoo’s vampire bats.”
On Archie Moore’s heavyweight champion-ship fight with Rocky Marciano: “He had hit him right if ever I saw a boxer hit right, with a classic brevity and conciseness. Marciano stayed down for two seconds. I do not know what took place in Mr. Moore’s breast when he saw him get up. He may have felt, for the moment, like Don Giovanni when the Commendatore’s statue grabbed at him–startled because he thought he had killed the guy already.”
On the press: “Great or not, Hearst was the man who changed the rules of American journalism. He made it so expensive to compete that no mere working newspaperman has been able to found an important paper in this country.”
On his grudging admiration for Louisiana politician Huey Long: “Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly. They lose flavor with every hundred yards away from the patch. By the time they reach New York, they are like Golden Bantam [corn] that has been trucked up from Texas–stale and unprofitable. The consumer forgets that the corn tastes different where it grows. That, I suppose, is why for twenty-five years I underrated Huey Pierce Long.”
On Joseph Stalin’s protracted death: “Inconsiderate to the last, Josef Stalin, a man who never had to meet a deadline, had the bad taste to die in installments.”
If one has reservations about “Just Enough Liebling” it is because each sampling ends just as you are ready for more; in some cases, a desire to read more will send you scurrying for books that are hard to find. If, even after you find and read them, you still have a tinge of regret, it’s because reading A.J. Liebling can leave you with the feeling that nearly everything–newspapers, boxers, food, red-neckish Southern governors and even dictators–was better back then.
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Allen Barra is a contributing editor for American Heritage magazine and the author of “Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends” and “Brushbacks and Knockdowns: The Greatest Baseball Debates of Two Centuries.”
