A.J. Liebling. Liebling Abroad

The worst thing an interviewer can do is talk a lot himself. Just listening to reporters in a barroom, you can tell the ones who go out and impress their powerful personalities on their subject and then come back and make up what they think he would have said if he had had a chance to say anything. One of the best preps I ever did was for a profile of Eddie Arcaro, the jockey. When I interviewed him the first question I asked was, "How many holes longer do you keep your left stirrup than your right?" Most jockeys on American tracks ride longer on their left side. That started him talking easily, and after an hour, during which I had put in about twelve words, he said, "I can see you've been around riders a lot." I had, but only during the week before I was to meet him ([The Road Back to Paris, "My Generals, My Generalissimo"] p. 29).

On the day after I checked into my hotel I went down to the beach to swim. After swimming I sat on the terrace of the bathing pavilion, drinking vermouth and eating remarkably good olives. The vermouth was called the Vermouth of the Good Jesus. (There is a bank in Lisbon called the Bank of the Holy Ghost and of Commerce.) The pavilion people gave you a whole tumblerful of olives with each drink. There were a few German refugee families about, sitting at little tables under beach umbrellas and tremulous with masochistic fear as usual, happily certain that everything was going to turn out for the worst. An Englishman whom I had met at the bar of my hotel sat down next to me, already tight as a tick although it was just midmorning, and began telling me how he personally had piloted the plane that brought Franco from the Canaries to Spain.... There was a public-address system at the bathing pavilion, and the management played phonograph records over it, usually Carmen Miranda. But just as I was sipping the Vermouth of the Good Jesus and wondering whether I ought to knock out the Englishman's brain with an olive pit, adapting the size of the missile to the importance of the target, the phonograph soloist put on a record of Charles Trenet singing "Boum!" The salt water and the sun and the vermouth had put me in a good frame of mind; the happy Parisian tune and the crazy lyric had an exaggerated effect upon me. I looked at the sadist and the masochists and said to myself, "They will both be disappointed." And I remembered something said to me by an old man who had been the last bare-knuckle lightweight champion of the world and had retired undefeated. This old boy was named Jack McAuliffe, and he had told me, "In Cork, where I was born, there was an old saying: "'Once down is no battle'" ([The Road Back to Paris, "Once Down is No Battle] p. 91).

When we were at Gafsa, we slept on the concrete floor of a small French barracks, which was used as a catch-all hostel for transient officers. In one corner of the barracks, a captain from an American armored-infantry regiment had spread his bedding roll. His outfit had not been involved in the day's action and he had been out in the field in a jeep as an observer of fighting methods. He was a florid, pleasant-faced blond of twenty-seven, and he was reading by the light of a candle he had placed next to one elbow on the floor. We said hello and walked over to talk to him. He was reading Douglas Southall Freeman's "Lee's Lieutenants," which Norgaard had also read, and they got to talking about it. The captain told us that he came from the battlefield region of Virginia, where children save Minie balls instead of Indian arrowheads, and that he knew old Dr. Freeman well. "I own a house at Yellow Tavern, where Jeb Stuart was killed," he said, "and there are some Yankee musket balls in the stair rail. When I was a boy, I used to walk over the battlefields with Dr. Freeman, and he would tell me where the different regiments had stood and where they had charged or retreated and who had been killed and where. I often used to dream of battles when I was a boy. I thought of them like an illustration in a book, all blue and gray and orange and blood-red, and not very noisy." He closed his book and lay down, ready to go to sleep. "My God!" he said. "If I had known they were like this!" I thought of a line in Stendhal's diary: "All my life I have longed to be loved by a woman who was melancholy, thin, and an actress. Now I have been, and I am not happy" [Mollie & Other War Pieces, "For Boots Norgaard"] p. 306).

The Proust madeleine phenomenon is now as firmly established in folklore as Newton's apple or Watt's steam kettle. The man ate a tea biscuit, the taste evoked memories, he wrote a book. This is capable of expression by the formula TMB for Taste > Memory > Book. Some time ago, when I began to read a book called The Food of France, by Waverly Root, I had an inverse experience: BMT, for Book > Memory > Taste. Happily, the tastes that The Food of France re-created for me -- small birds, stewed rabbit, stuffed tripe, Cote Rotie, and Tavel -- were more robust than that of the madeleine, which Larousse defines as "a light cake made with sugar, flour, lemon juice, brandy, and eggs." (The quantity of brandy in a madeleine 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 a dozen Gardiners Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of steamers, some bay scallops, three sauteed soft-shelled crabs, a few ears of fresh-picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of lobsters, and a Long Island duck, he might have written a masterpiece ([Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris, "A Good Appetite"] p. 581). (Liebling Abroad, intro. by Raymond Sokolov. Playboy Press, 1981.)

A writer for The New Yorker and other publications for 40 years, A. J. Liebling's skeptical ear, keen eye, and elegant, jazzy improvs on the English language introduced us to the new journalism while Tom Wolfe was still in diapers. Having lived in Paris in his youth, he finagled an assignment to Paris at the outset of WWII, and from there he spent time with the troops in Northern Africa. Equally mad about food, wine, women, boxing, and the English language -- he pretty much ate himself to death -- his collection of essays from the 40s and 50s eschews the overblown rhetoric of his predecessors and has a heart for the common man, for the diversity of human experience. (In this respect, he reminds me of Joseph Mitchell, his companion at The New Yorker, whose Up in the Old Hotel and Joe Gould's Secret are among the most compassionate, intelligent, readable pieces of non fiction I know of.) I think Liebling is a terrific writer -- his dazzling linguistic pirouettes always leave me dizzy with pleasure and the indignation that rumbles just beneath his lines provide his essays with a kind of moral weight. David Remnick has recently edited another collection of his essays, called Just Enough Liebling -- but it's not enough. Liebling died on December 30, 1963, and Joseph Mitchell delivered the eulogy.