Just Enough Liebling: Classic Work by the Legendary New Yorker Writer

Table of Contents

Title Page

Introduction: Reporting It All

At Table in Paris

A Good Appetite

Paris the First

Just Enough Money

The War and After

Letter from Paris, December 22,1939

Letter from Paris, June 1, 1940

Westbound Tanker

The Foamy Fields

Quest for Mollie

Days with the Daydaybay

The Hounds with Sad Voices

City Life

The Jollity Building

1. INDIANS, HEELS, AND TENANTS

2. FROM HUNGER.

3. A SOFT DOLLAR

from The Honest Rainmaker - The Life and Times of Colonel John R. Stingo

1. THE PLUG IN THE DOOR

2. THE PASHA STRIKES OUT

3. TOAD IN SPRING

4. THE THIRD PALACE

5. BAPTISM OF FIRE

6. A DAY WITH DOMINICK O’MALLEY

7. REUNION AT BELMONT

8. LONG, LISSOME, LUCREFEROUS

9. THE DETONATORY COMPOUND

10. LA GRANDE SEMAINE

11. THE LIFE SPIRITUAL

Boxiana

Sugar Ray and the Milling Cove

Ahab and Nemesis

The University of Eighth Avenue

I

II

Poet and Pedagogue

The Press

The World of Sport

My Name in Big Letters

Obits

The Man Who Changed the Rules

Death on the One Hand

Harold Ross—The Impresario

The Earl of Louisiana

Joe Sims, Where the Hell?

Nothing but a Little Pissant

Blam-Blam-Blam

Epilogue - Paysage de Crépuscule

BY A. J. LIEBLING

Notes

Copyright Page

Introduction: Reporting It All

BY DAVID REMNICK

From the start of the American republic, the most tantalizing means of indulging a youthful desire for escape and recreation has been the sojourn in Paris. It’s a long tradition, amply described. The literature begins with the decorous engagements in the letters of Benjamin Franklin and Abigail Adams and leads soon enough to the earthier liaisons in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Tropic of Cancer. Much is promised to the prospective traveler: if not a passage of enlightenment or erotic adventure, then at least a taste for boiled innards and string beans done right. As Mrs. Adams wrote home, pleasure is the business of life in Paris—there is another way to live, in other words—and this is the lasting gift, and illusion, that every visiting American brings home in his bags.

To this day, countless children of American privilege arrive in the Latin Quarter, bent double under their backpacks and concealing a money belt holding a Eurail pass and a freshly squeezed carte orange. One of the pleasures of such an indolent, never-to-be-repeated existence is the liberty it provides the student on leave from academy-drafted reading lists and deadlines that frog-march undergraduates up and down The Magic Mountain in the time it took Hans Castorp to catch cold. In the late seventies, while on a sojourn of my own, I bought or borrowed my books at Shakespeare & Company, the destination for English-speaking waywards on the Rue de la Bûcherie near Notre-Dame. One afternoon, while I was browsing in the used section, a friend pulled down a paperback by A. J. Liebling for me. I’d heard of Liebling but never read him. He was a hero to some of the new journalists of the sixties and seventies, who put him in a nonfiction lineage that begins with Defoe. But Liebling had died fifteen years earlier, in 1963, and almost all of his books were out of print. Sitting on the floor, I started The Sweet Science, with its introductory flourish:

It is through Jack O’Brien, the Arbiter Elegantiarum Philadelphiae, that I trace my rapport with the historic past through the laying-on of hands. He hit me, for pedagogical example, and he had been hit by the great Bob Fitzsimmons, from whom he won the light-heavyweight title in 1906. Jack had a scar to show for it. Fitzsimmons had been hit by Corbett, Corbett by John L. Sullivan, he by Paddy Ryan, with the bare knuckles, and Ryan by Joe Goss, his predecessor, who as a young man had felt the fist of the great Jem Mace. It is a great thrill to feel that all that separates you from the early Victorians is a series of punches on the nose. I wonder if Professor Toynbee is as intimately attuned to his sources. The Sweet Science is joined onto the past like a man’s arm to his shoulder.

I read half the book right there and the rest that night. The Rubens canvases at the Louvre were checked off in my guidebook, but for me Liebling was now the Baroque. His descriptions of the postwar boxing scene at Madison Square Garden, Yankee Stadium, the Polo Grounds, the country training camps, and the midtown gyms constitute a self-enclosed comic universe, and, in the construction and the telling, his pieces are superior even to William Hazlitt’s famous account of the Gasman Hickman—Bill Neat bout in Hungerford, Berkshire, in 1821, and Liebling’s own cherished model, Boxiana, the multivolume chronicles of the Regency-era fighters, by Pierce Egan. In a style of mock high diction undercut by the homeliness of the subject, of metaphorical flight and eccentric references—a style, in other words, that pays greater homage to the verbal dandyism of Egan (and Mencken and Runyon) than to the hard-boiled approach of the tabloids—Liebling made the art of bruising and its practitioners as vivid as any country fair in Dickens. In The Sweet Science—in all his books—Liebling himself, the voice and the character, is immensely appealing: he is boundlessly curious, a listener, a boulevardier, a man of appetites and sympathy. He is erudite in an unsystematic, wised-up sort of way. His sentences are snaky and digressive, and thrive on the talk of the Times Square gyms and cigar stores. The boxing pieces are populated by the champions of his time—Ray Robinson, Joe Louis, Archie Moore, Rocky Marciano—but equally present are the artisans and satraps of the ring world, the sparring partners, the cut-and-bucket men and the professorial trainers, like Whitey Bimstein, who presided over Stillman’s Gym, the university of Eighth Avenue, as firmly as Robert Maynard Hutchins ran the University of Chicago. Bimstein was a prototypical Liebling cast member, New York to the bone. Asked about his experience outside the city, Bimstein allowed, I like the country. It’s a great spot.

Besotted with The Sweet Science, I went back to Shakespeare & Company and took the only other Liebling on the shelf, a copy of The Road Back to Paris, his first volume of dispatches from France during the Second World War. Combat journalism is prone to some of the same sins as sportswriting—the self-dramatizing narrative voice, the bogus pronouncements. Only the clichés, and the stakes, are different. Liebling, it was obvious, was incapable of cliché, and, if anything, he protested too adamantly his limitations as an observer of the world beyond home. He claimed innocence of high politics and the scale of evil he was about to engage: Hitler had seemed to me revolting but unimportant, like old Gómez, the dictator of Venezuela. The only way he was prepared to imagine the German enemy was through homey, ahistorical analogy. I did not think about Germany, he wrote. When I was a small child I had had a succession of German governesses all indistinguishably known to me as Fräulein. They had been servile to my parents and domineering to me, 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 … . Anybody who had had a German governess could understand Poland.

Liebling’s subjects in his maturity bloomed from the appetites and interests of his youth. As a reporter, he was both observer and memoirist, seeing and looking within. His love of New York became Back Where I Came From; an attention to battle and a passion for France led to The Road to Paris, Mollie and Other War Pieces, and Normandy Revisited; a romance with newspapers led to the criticism of The Press and The Wayward Pressman; his taste for rogues of all varieties became The Telephone Booth Indian, The Honest Rainmaker, and The Earl of Louisiana. The early passions are always present. His last book, Between Meals, is as much about the memory of exultant living as it is about the gigot d’agneau on his plate.

Abbott Joseph Liebling was not born to the demimonde. His father was a penniless Jewish immigrant from Austria who had become prosperous as a furrier. His mother was from a well-to-do Jewish family in San Francisco. By the time of Liebling’s birth, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, on October 18, 1904, there was no taste for religion in the house; any trace of the shtetl or the Lower East Side had been fairly expunged. The aspiration was toward comfort and a variety of Americanness. The Lieblings lived first in apartments in Manhattan and then in an oak-shaded house near the beaches of Far Rockaway. They were attended by a string of fräuleins, German maids, cooks, and family attendants, along with a houseman named Louis, a Tyrolese from Meran. There were trips to Europe beginning when our hero was three, and, always, dinners at good restaurants in town.

Liebling, who started out Abbott and eventually insisted on Joe, was the sort of brainy child who did not seem to mind that he was neither handsome nor athletic. He was plump and pigeon-toed, and had tiny, delicate hands, but he also had a certain confidence. (In middle age, he crowned his avoirdupois with thick-lensed, wire-rimmed spectacles and a bowler—gestures of the self-assured.) He did well in school in a happily random sort of way. With equal enthusiasm he memorized the names of Napoleon’s marshals, the cast of The Pickwick Papers, and the characters in the Sunday funnies. His guide to the greater world and to his own future was contained in the armload of papers his father brought home from work every day: It is impossible for me to estimate how many of my early impressions of the world, correct and the opposite, came to me through newspapers. Homicide, adultery, no-hit pitching, and Balkanism were concepts that, left to my own devices, I would have encountered much later in life.

Following a semi-successful run at Dartmouth (from which he was booted for missing chapel once too often), Liebling attended Columbia’s journalism school. Indifferent to the curriculum and its modest expectations, he studied French and translated the erotica of Restif de la Bretonne on the side. Otherwise, he wrote later in The Wayward Pressman, the program had all the intellectual status of a training school for future employees of the A & P. Like many novice reporters, he had literary ambitions, which at first he took to be the province of fiction. Over the years, he began and abandoned many short stories and longer pieces, including a novel called The Girl with the Cauliflower Ear: A Romance, about a female boxer named Eula who, after plunging into an aquarium tank in a moment of suicidal doubt, falls in love with an ichthyologist.

After finishing at Columbia, Liebling had a brief apprenticeship on the Evening World, which opened up a gaudy landscape of police shacks, curbside tragedies, and late-night card games. Liebling took to it. A press pass for a child of the Rockaway bourgeoisie was a ticket to experience, without experience’s costs. I liked to pound up tenement stairs and burst in on families disarranged by sudden misfortune, he wrote about his first assignments as a reporter. "It gave me a chance to make contact with people I would never otherwise have met, and I learned almost immediately what every reporter knows, that most people are eager to talk about their troubles and are rather flattered by the arrival of the World or the Journal." He went on to a beginner’s job in the Times sports department, where he was charged with writing up basketball box scores, a chore that bored him to such a degree that he occasionally wrote Ignoto—Unknown, in Italian—in the space reserved for the name of the referee. Some nights, according to Liebling, Ignoto officiated games throughout the city. Liebling claimed that when this crime was discovered his boss fired him for being irresponsible. He told the story repeatedly, and with relish, and it may even have been true. What is surely the case, his biographer Raymond Sokolov makes plain, is that Liebling was an indifferent stenographer. He had no future at the Times.

In 1926, Liebling’s father came to the rescue by asking him if he might like to suspend his career (he was now starting work at the Journal in Providence) and take a year to study in Paris. Never has a son been in such ready agreement with his protector:

I sensed my father’s generous intention, and, fearing that he might change his mind, I told him that I didn’t feel I should go, since I was indeed thinking of getting married. The girl is ten years older than I am, I said, and Mother might think she is kind of fast, because she is being kept by a cotton broker from Memphis, Tennessee, who only comes North once in a while. But you are a man of the world, and you understand that a woman can’t always help herself. Basically … Within the week, I had a letter of credit on the Irving Trust for two thousand dollars, and a reservation on the old Caronia for late in the summer, when the off-season rates would be in effect.

Thus began what surely must be recorded as the most salubrious year abroad since Flaubert left for Egypt. France was, for yet another American, a sentimental education. I liked the sensation of immersion in a foreign element, as if floating in a summer sea, only my face out of water, and a pleasant buzzing in my ears, Liebling later wrote. I was often alone, but seldom lonely. His monthly drawing account was sufficient to bankroll the young man’s desire to study (lightly) at the Sorbonne and to dine (with relish) at the best of Paris’s lower-priced restaurants. Liebling began to eat, and eat, as if his life, and his eventual livelihood, depended on it. It was soon his contention that, just as a fighter must put in his roadwork to extend his stamina for the later rounds, so, too, must a true eater (and fledgling food writer) consume enormously if he is to have a range of dietary experience worth sharing. What would he have to say, after all, on a diet of soda water and scrambled eggs? Proust’s madeleine was a mere tea biscuit and a barrier to greater literary achievement: 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 sautéed 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.

It was under the instruction of Yves Mirande, a Parisian legend of both the stage and the plate, that Liebling learned to eat with ambition. In a typical meal, he followed the order of Darwinian evolution, beginning with the bivalves and halting only at the primates. As he writes in Between Meals, Mirande was for him a tutor of the heart and the body:

In the restaurant on the Rue Saint-Augustin, M. Mirande would dazzle his juniors, French and American, by dispatching a lunch of raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Bordeaux and one of champagne, after which he would call for the Armagnac and remind Madame to have ready for dinner the larks and ortolans she had promised him, with a few langoustes and a turbot—and, of course, a fine civet made from the marcassin, or young wild boar, that the lover of the leading lady in his current production had sent up from his estate in the Sologne. And while I think of it, I once heard him say, we haven’t had any woodcock for days, or truffles baked in the ashes, and the cellar is becoming a disgrace—no more ’thirty-fours and hardly any ’thirty-sevens. Last week, I had to offer my publisher a bottle that was far too good for him, simply because there was nothing between the insulting and the superlative.

When Liebling came home to New York, he proceeded to campaign for a job on Joseph Pulitzer’s World, which carried the work of James M. Cain and Walter Lippmann and was known at the time as the writer’s paper. In order to attract the attention of the city editor, James W Barrett, Liebling hired an out-of-work Norwegian seaman to walk for three days outside the Pulitzer Building, on Park Row, wearing sandwich boards that read, HIRE JOE LIEBLING. Barrett took no notice of the sandwich boards, but another editor hired Liebling as a freelance feature writer after reading one of his pieces. Now Liebling could begin hanging out at the saloons and night clubs, the racetracks and corner stores, where he met the harmless parliament of monsters who eventually appeared in Back Where I Came From and The Honest Rainmaker. The World was an all-access ticket for Liebling, then in his late twenties. He felt tickled to call it a job.

"The pattern of a newspaperman’s life is like the plot of Black Beauty," he wrote. "Sometimes he finds a kind master who gives him a dry stall and an occasional bran mash in the form of a Christmas bonus, sometimes he falls into the hands of a mean owner who drives him in spite of spavins and expects him to live on potato peelings. The Sunday World was a dry-stall interlude in my wanderings."

Things turned chilly and damp after 1931, when the perfidious Roy Howard bought the World and merged it with his Evening Telegram to form the World-Telegram; but, in the meantime, Liebling, working alongside his new colleague and friend Joseph Mitchell, was set free to interview the likes of Casey Stengel and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, cover pinochle tournaments, and make heroes of the self-appointed mayors of various city neighborhoods. One of the commonplaces of feature writing at the time was a tendency to embroider. That is, there was a lot of making things up or, at the very least, helping things along. What is now a hanging offense was then a risible misdemeanor. Details were embellished, colors heightened, dialogue faked. Liebling was a superior reporter and writer, but he also availed himself of the era’s advantages. At this point, there is no telling precisely what his characters said and what Liebling supplied. Without making excuses for him, one can say that he did seem to make genre distinctions: his work on more serious matters—the war, the press—was factual. The rules have changed radically, and Liebling’s gifts and reporting energies were such that he would surely have had little trouble adjusting to them, in a poolroom or on a battlefield.

Liebling joined Harold Ross’s New Yorker in 1935, when he was thirty. He was informed that five stories were reserved for him, including Africa, Big Game, Hunting In and Billiardists, Finger-Technique, Exploits. Nothing much came of that. But, after an awkward year in which he stuck too closely to the conventions of newspaper feature writing, Liebling had his first triumph at the magazine, doing all the reporting for a three-part profile of a preacher and mountebank named Father Divine. The piece, which was written mainly by St. Clair McKelway and was published under the title Who Is This King of Glory?, helped Liebling get accustomed to the time and the space that no newspaper could afford him. He also perfected a singular interviewing style; according to Brendan Gill, he would sit facing the person from whom he intended to elicit information; and then sit there and sit there, silently … . Liebling’s method left the interviewee unnerved and at a loss as to what he was expected to defend himself against; by the time Liebling had put the first question to him, he was ready to babble almost any indiscretion.

Along with Mitchell, who fled the World-Telegram and joined the New Yorker staff in 1938, Liebling soon transformed the magazine. In voice and carriage, the two men complemented each other. They walked the city together and ate lunch together at the Red Devil and Villa Nova and drank at Bleeck’s and Costello’s, and, on weekends, they went to the Rockaway beaches together to wade in the ocean and listen to the crowds. Mitchell was a courtly North Carolinian; unlike Liebling, he came at the city from the outside in, though his sympathy for its characters was no less absolute. The temperaments of the two men, especially on the page, diverged. In person, Liebling could be unnervingly quiet, but in print he was an ebullient Falstaff to Mitchell’s Feste, the melancholic clown in Twelfth Night. Liebling was ribaldly comic, prolific, a writer of big effects, while Mitchell could be as spare in his line as he was in his output. (Mitchell died in 1996, outliving Liebling by thirty-three years, but he stopped publishing after his masterpiece, Joe Gould’s Secret, ran in the magazine, in 1964—just eight months after Liebling’s valedictory essay, Paysage de Crépuscule.)

What Liebling and Mitchell shared most intensely was a love for the city and an unpretentious yet serious interest in the higher reaches of journalism. For his part, Liebling admired, and meant to emulate, the British writers of the eighteenth century who observed every corner of society, the Fancy who ruled things and the Poor who feigned to listen; he favored above all the ones who wrote least stingily both in volume and in metaphorical profusion — Defoe, Egan, and Hazlitt. Liebling also called on influences as varied as George Borrow, the British literary adventurer and Bible salesman, and Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth-century Tunisian historian, and commonly quoted them for historical authority and ironic flavoring. Liebling’s office contained just what his readers might have expected: stacks of newspapers, unfinished manuscripts, a three-volume edition of Boxiana, Harold Nicolson’s The Congress of Vienna, the collected Camus, the latest Annual Report of the New-York Historical Society, Stendhal’s Journal, and von Bern-hardi’s Cavalry in War and Peace.

Joy, pure and immediate, is a rare literary experience. Liebling provides it. And, from everything we know, joy is what he felt in the creating. No matter what else he may have been facing in his life—misery in marriage, persistent debt, the obesity and sickness that were the price of his appetites—he reveled in his work. Liebling so enjoyed himself at the offices of The New Yorker, where he worked for twenty-eight years, that he could be heard humming and snorting with laughter as he pulled the sheets from his typewriter and read them over. He knocked himself out, if he did say so himself. Reticence was not his way. Like Trollope polishing off several thousand words before leaving for his day job as surveyor general of Waltham Cross, Liebling wrote at a blinding rate, publishing hundreds of pieces, of all lengths, colors, and moods. He was occasionally seen in the magazine’s bathroom stripped to the waist, washing up after a night’s exertion at his Remington.

Despite Liebling’s prodigious output at the magazine, and the collection of those pieces into books, he never ceased to see himself as a melancholy wage slave, forever in debt. His letters, hundreds of them, are filled with the details of his shortfalls, tax problems, and dunning notices. His first wife, Ann McGinn, whom he married in 1934, had grown up in an orphanage and, as it soon became evident, was schizophrenic; she required long and expensive hospital stays. Even after their separation, Liebling continued to pay most of her bills. She suffered from hallucinations and fugue states; she would sometimes get up from a restaurant table, walk out the door, and disappear for days. Liebling’s second wife, Lucille Spectorsky, was a spendthrift whom one friend, the New Yorker editor Gardner Botsford, recalls as a big blonde from rural Kentucky, amiable if dumb. Liebling’s only moments of conjugal peace came with the writer Jean Stafford, who had been married, unhappily, to Robert Lowell. Their union was hardly a picnic on the lawn—there was a great deal of drinking and decline, and Stafford stopped writing—but the four years they spent together were the least miserable either one had known.

And yet, professionally, Liebling was almost never blocked or unlucky. In 1939, when Harold Ross began to prepare for the coming war, he sent Liebling to Paris, a move that seems perfectly right now but occurred mostly because the magazine’s correspondent in France, Janet Flanner, had to rush home to her ailing mother, and because, as Liebling recalled, I had spent several man-hours of barroom time impressing St. Clair McKelway, then managing editor, with my profound knowledge of France. As Liebling readily admitted, he was not exactly Ernie Pyle but, rather, a New York reporter of a particular kind. There is an old proverb that a girl may sleep with one man without being a trollop, but let a man cover one little war and he is a war correspondent, he wrote in The Road Back to Paris. I belong to the one-war category. I have made no appearances for Mr. Colton Leigh, the lecture agent, either in a gas mask or out of one, and I have no fascinating reminiscences about Addis Ababa or the Cliveden set. Prior to October 1938 my only friends were prize fighters’ seconds, Romance philologists, curators of tropical fish, kept women, promoters of spit-and-toilet-paper night clubs, bail bondsmen, press agents for wrestlers, horse clockers, newspaper reporters, and female psychiatrists. Ross was wary of this experience, and his advice to Liebling was For God’s sake keep away from low-life. Liebling was convinced that Ross was trying to disinfect the magazine and publish only pieces about Supreme Court justices and the Persian Room of the Plaza. Nevertheless, he promised to keep his coverage reasonably clean and high-class and booked a ticket on a Pan American Clipper to Lisbon.

Reading Liebling’s pieces from Paris (and, later, from London and the North African front), you don’t get a coherent idea of the course of the war. There is little talk of high politics or the overall battlefield. But such coherence, the editors must have calculated, was the business of the Times in the short run and the historians in the long. What Liebling in his frequent dispatches provided was a richly textured sense of the day-to-day reality of occupation, invasion, and battle—a foxhole successor of Homage to Catalonia, a forerunner of Dispatches. In Paris, Liebling installed himself at the Hotel Louvois, looked up some old friends, and eventually followed the retreat of the government to Tours and then to Bordeaux.

Gardner Botsford, then an officer in the First Infantry Division, met him in Caumont, France, one afternoon. One’s first view of Liebling dressed for combat was a memorable one, Botsford writes in his memoir, A Life of Privilege, Mostly. He continues:

The only Army pants big enough to button around the magisterial paunch left him with a vast, drooping seat behind, a flapping void big enough to hold a beach umbrella. The legs of the pants were tucked into knee-high gaiters left over from the Spanish-American War, leading to a pair of thin-soled lounge-lizard civilian shoes. Other correspondents generally tried to look more military and more warlike than any soldier—parachutists’ boots, aviators’ scarves, tankers’ jackets—but Liebling was not one to pretend. He was a correspondent, not a soldier, and he looked it.

As a correspondent, Liebling took history personally. The collapse of France, in June 1940, was a tragedy not only for the French. France represented for me the historical continuity of intelligence and reasonable living, he wrote. When this continuity is broken, nothing anywhere can have meaning until it is reestablished. After the Munich settlement I began to be anxious. At war, Liebling no longer employs the high-diction, low-reference voice of his city pieces. Though he was a writer of voluble digression and irony, he also knew something about control and modulation. His sentences are tighter, more direct, less jokey. In Quest for Mollie, Liebling tells of traveling during one offensive on La Piste Forestière, a dirt road on the northern coast of Tunisia, where Allied forces had fought Italian and German troops, and coming across the refuse of fighting — bits of the war … like beads on a string. He encountered a lone corpse, a private known as Mollie. A month later, after the Allied victory in North Africa, Liebling heard more about Mollie, evidently a colorful native of Hell’s Kitchen, and so, back in New York, he moves around the city, from bar to union headquarters, reconstructing the often contradictory details of Mollie’s life, and giving an ordinary young man a representative immortality. When I walk through the West Side borderland between Times Square and the slums, where Mollie once lived, I often think of him and his big talk and his golf-suit grin. It cheers me to think there may be more like him all around me—a notion I would have dismissed as sheer romanticism before World War II. Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience.

At all times, Liebling is self-mocking, close to the ground, reminding the reader that the correspondent has only a particular view of the war, that the best he can relay is what he actually sees in a given moment: the fear and the boredom and the discomfort. (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.) Even in Normandy during the D Day invasion, there is no self-admiration or grandeur. His tone is clear and so is his gaze, even when he is swept up by what, for him, was surely the greatest triumph of the war, the liberation of Paris:

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. Moreover, since this city is Paris, everybody makes this euphoria manifest. To drive along the boulevards in a jeep is like walking into some as yet unmade René Clair film, with hundreds of bicyclists coming toward you in a stream that divides before the jeep just when you feel sure that a collision is imminent. Among the bicyclists there are pretty girls, their hair dressed high on their heads in what seems to be the current mode here. 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 in 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 as soon as the situation becomes more normal. There are handsome young matrons with children mounted behind them on their bikes, and there are husky young workmen, stubby little employés de bureau in striped pants, and old professors in wing collars and chin whiskers, all of them smiling and all of them lifting their right hands from the handlebars as they go past. The most frequently repeated phrase of the week is "Enfin on respire." (At last, one breathes!)

Liebling’s sense of civilization was finally righted, and, as ever, he sensed civilization through its pleasures, the anticipation of dessert, the bicyclists speeding through the streets, the careless exposure of a young woman’s legs. Paris was free.

By the end of the war, Liebling’s stature had begun to match his girth. He was a big voice in New York journalism, something new, and he needed a new subject at The New Yorker, beyond the recreations of the sweet science. He found it in the shenanigans and vanities of American newspapers. (Television had not begun in earnest, and radio seemed not to interest him.) Reviving the Wayward Press department, Liebling returned to the comic voice of his New York reporting pieces and retooled it for criticism. His politics leaned left, and he hardly concealed his disdain for most newspaper owners and for the conventions of right-wing journalism. In Horse-feathers Swathed in Mink, he wrote, There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor, and eviscerated even the Times for taking up the nonexistent case of a woman in a mink coat with $60,000 in assets who was said to be receiving welfare checks from the city. He bashed the columnist Joseph Alsop, who orbits the earth like a moon, descending for a day or two now and then to lecture an Arabian King or a Bessarabian prelate on his duties; he did the same to Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune , who made preposterous around-the-world reporting trips in his private plane, putting Liebling in mind of Tom Sawyer and his balloon. He was a critic but not a scold. After Stalin died, in March 1953, and the papers issued endless contradictory reports, all with boundless certainty, about the cause of his death, Liebling seemed a man in bliss as he sorted through the clippings spread across his desk. Inconsiderate to the last, Josef Stalin, a man who never had to meet a deadline, had the bad taste to die in installments, he observed on March 28. In a later column, he wrote:

Within a week after Stalin’s announced demise, the American public knew that he had died of natural causes or had been murdered subtly, either on the date named by Pravda or several weeks earlier; that the people of Moscow had demonstrated grief but (a Journal-American scoop) the demonstration had been a carefully organized fake; that his death portended either a hardening or a softening of policy toward the West, which, in turn, would lessen or increase the chances of open war; and that his death would either precipitate an immediate struggle for power among the surviving leaders or impel them to stand together until they got things running smoothly. It was freely predicted that in the event there was a struggle Malenkov would destroy his associates or his associates would destroy him. The subject permitted a rare blend of invective and speculation—both Hearst papers, as I recall, ran cartoons of Stalin being rebuffed at the gates of Heaven, where Hearst had no correspondents—and I have seldom enjoyed a week of newspaper reading more.

The names of those who came under Liebling’s assault are now mainly forgotten, but their bigotry and jingoism and fakery all have resonant equivalents today. It is usually a tiresome exercise to imagine what some departed luminary would make of present-day follies: What would Mencken have thought about George W. Bush?, and so on. With Liebling, however, the temptation is hard to resist, given the range and big-heartedness of his disapprovals. We miss the ferocity of his attack. What, indeed, would Liebling have made of Geraldo Rivera at war or Ann Coulter’s best-selling charges of treason? What would he have written of the Tyson—Holyfield earbiting fight or a Times Square in which Colonel Stingo and the porn palaces have been replaced by Madame Tussaud’s and Toys R Us? Of the decline of French cooking or the rise of Rupert Murdoch? We imagine him laughing as he yanks a page from his typewriter.

Liebling finished his life and career with two masterpieces, The Earl of Louisiana, a book-length profile of Huey Long’s half-mad brother Earl, and Between Meals, a memoir of Paris and pleasure itself. At war and at home, Liebling had always feigned a certain indifference to politics—or, rather, he approached the subject with the derision it usually deserves—and yet in his campaign travels through Louisiana with Earl Long he is hilarious and capable of glossing the racial dynamics and Mediterranean spirit of Louisiana, simply because he is a supreme observer. He writes:

Uncle Earl wore a jacket, shirt, and tie, a pattern of statesmanlike conventionality on a night when everybody off the platform was coatless and tieless. The tie itself was a quiet pattern of inkblots against an olive-and-pearl background, perhaps a souvenir Rorschach test from Galveston. The suit, a black job that dated from the days when he was fat and sassy, hung loosely about him as once it had upon a peg in the supermarket where the Governor liked to buy his clothes.

He left the dude role to Morrison. And, in fact, before the night was over, he said:

I see Dellasoups has been elected one of the ten best-dressed men in America. He has fifty-dollar neckties and four-hundred-dollar suits. A four-hundred-dollar suit on old Uncle Earl would look like socks on a rooster.

As a voice in print, Liebling was almost invariably buoyant and alive. As a man, he tended toward diffidence, even periods of melancholy. The trait grew more pronounced as he aged. Money problems and health problems were wearing him down. What had been a torrent of words was, by 1963, a trickle. It took him months to work through a short piece on Camus’s notebooks. Heart and kidney ailments, along with repeated bouts of the flu and the pain of chronic gout, made writing difficult. Soon he was no longer writing at all. For the first time in his life, he developed a real block, Jean Stafford told Sokolov. Depression was new to him. His head filled with Camus, Liebling made a reporting trip to Algeria, but nothing came of it. He visited Paris and Normandy, knowing that it was likely for the last time. A kind of despair was overtaking him. One afternoon, Liebling and his friend and New Yorker colleague Philip Hamburger were returning to the office from lunch. One of those New York grotesques appeared, half crippled, half spastic, Hamburger said later. Joe took one look and began to cry. I could see something was wrong. He was on the edge. Liebling died on December 28. He was fifty-nine. His last words were in French.

At Table in Paris

A Good Appetite

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 Waverley 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 Rôtie, 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 sautéed 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.

The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down. Each day brings only two opportunities for field work, and they are not to be wasted minimizing the intake of cholesterol. They are indispensable, like a prizefighter’s hours on the road. (I have read that the late French professional gourmand Maurice Curnonsky ate but one meal a day—dinner. But that was late in his life, and I have always suspected his attainments anyway; so many mediocre witticisms are attributed to him that he could not have had much time for eating.) A good appetite gives an eater room to turn around in. For example, a nonprofessional eater I know went to the Restaurant Pierre, in the Place Gaillon, a couple of years ago, his mind set on a sensibly light meal: a dozen, or possibly eighteen, oysters, and a thick chunk of steak topped with beef marrow, which M. Pierre calls a Délice de la Villette — the. equivalent of a Stockyards’ Delight. But as he arrived, he heard M. Pierre say to his headwaiter, Here comes Monsieur L. Those two portions of cassoulet that are left—put them aside for him. A cassoulet is a substantial dish, of a complexity precluding its discussion here. (Mr. Root devotes three pages to the great controversy over what it should contain.) M. Pierre is the most amiable of restaurateurs, who prides himself on knowing in advance what his friends will like. A client of limited appetite would be obliged either to forgo his steak or to hurt M. Pierre’s feelings. Monsieur L., however, was in no difficulty. He ate the two cassoulets, as was his normal practice; if he had consumed only one, his host would have feared that it wasn’t up to standard. He then enjoyed his steak. The oysters offered no problem, since they present no bulk.

In the heroic age before the First World War, there were men and women who ate, in addition to a whacking lunch and a glorious dinner, a voluminous souper after the theater or the other amusements of the evening. I have known some of the survivors, octogenarians of unblemished appetite and unfailing good humor—spry, wry, and free of the ulcers that come from worrying about a balanced diet—but they have had no emulators in France since the doctors there discovered the existence of the human liver. From that time on, French life has been built to an increasing extent around that organ, and a niggling caution has replaced the old recklessness; the liver was the seat of the Maginot mentality. One of the last of the great around-the-clock gastronomes of France was Yves Mirande, a small, merry author of farces and musical-comedy books. In 1955, Mirande celebrated his eightieth birthday with a speech before the curtain of the Théâtre Antoine, in the management of which he was associated with Mme B., a protégée of his, forty years younger than himself. But the theater was only half of his life. In addition, M. Mirande was an unofficial director of a restaurant on the Rue Saint-Augustin, which he had founded for another protégée, also forty years younger than himself; this was Mme G., a Gasconne and a magnificent cook. In the restaurant on the Rue Saint-Augustin, M. Mirande would dazzle his juniors, French and American, by dispatching a lunch of raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Bordeaux and one of champagne, after which he would call for the Armagnac and remind Madame to have ready for dinner the larks and ortolans she had promised him, with a few langoustes and a turbot—and, of course, a fine civet made from the marcassin, or young wild boar, that the lover of the leading lady in his current production had sent up from his estate in the Sologne. And while I think of it, I once heard him say, we haven’t had any woodcock for days, or truffles baked in the ashes, and the cellar is becoming a disgrace—no more ’thirty-fours and hardly any ‘thirty-sevens. Last week, I had to offer my publisher a bottle that was far too good for him, simply because there was nothing between the insulting and the superlative.

M. Mirande had to his credit a hundred produced plays, including a number of great Paris hits, but he had just written his first book for print, so he said my publisher in a special mock-impressive tone. An informal sketch for my definitive autobiography, he would say of this production. The informal sketch, which I cherish, begins with the most important decision in Mirande’s life. He was almost seventeen and living in the small Breton port of Lannion—his offstage family name was Le Querrec—when his father, a retired naval officer, said to him, It is time to decide your future career. Which will it be, the Navy or the Church? No other choice was conceivable in Lannion. At dawn, Yves ran away to Paris.

There, he had read a thousand times, all the famous wits and cocottes frequented the tables in front of the Café Napolitain, on the Boulevard des Capucines. He presented himself at the café at nine the next morning—late in the day for Lannion—and found that the place had not yet opened. Soon he became a newspaperman. It was a newspaper era as cynically animated as the corresponding period of the Bennett-Pulitzer-Hearst competition in New York, and in his second or third job he worked for a press lord who was as notional and niggardly as most press lords are; the publisher insisted that his reporters be well turned out, but did not pay them salaries that permitted cab fares when it rained. Mirande lived near the fashionable Montmartre cemetery and solved his rainy-day pants-crease problem by crashing funeral parties as they broke up and riding, gratis, in the carriages returning to the center of town. Early in his career, he became personal secretary to Clemenceau and then to Briand, but the gay theater attracted him more than politics, and he made the second great decision of his life after one of his political patrons had caused him to be appointed sous-préfet in a provincial city. A sous-préfet is the administrator of one of the districts into which each of the ninety départements of France is divided, and a young sous-préfet is often headed for a precocious rise to high positions of state. Mirande, attired in the magnificent uniform that was then de rigueur, went to his capital, spent one night there, and then ran off to Paris again to direct a one-act farce. Nevertheless, his connections with the serious world remained cordial. In the restaurant on the Rue Saint-Augustin, he introduced me to Colette, by that time a national glory of letters.

The regimen fabricated by Mirande’s culinary protégée, Mme. G., maintained him en pleine forme. When I first met him, in the restaurant, during the summer of the Liberation, he was a sprightly sixty-nine. In the spring of 1955, when we renewed a friendship that had begun in admiration of each other’s appetite, he was as good as ever. On the occasion of our reunion, we began with a truite au bleu—a live trout simply done to death in hot water, like a Roman emperor in his bath. It was served up doused with enough melted butter to thrombose a regiment of Paul Dudley Whites, and accompanied, as was right, by an Alsatian wine—a Lacrimae Sanctae Odiliae, which once contributed slightly to my education. Long ago, when I was very young, I took out a woman in Strasbourg and, wishing to impress her with my knowledge of local customs, ordered a bottle of Ste. Odile. I was making the same mistake as if I had taken out a girl in Boston and offered her baked beans. How quaint! the woman in Strasbourg said. I haven’t drunk that for years. She excused herself to go to the telephone, and never came back.

After the trout, Mirande and I had two meat courses, since we could not decide in advance which we preferred. We had a magnificent daube provençale, because we were faithful to la cuisine bourgeoise, and then pintadous—young guinea hens, simply and tenderly roasted—with the first asparagus of the year, to show our fidelity to la cuisine classique. We had clarets with both courses—a Pétrus with the daube, a Cheval Blanc with the guineas. Mirande said that his doctor had discounseled Burgundies. It was the first time in our acquaintance that I had heard him admit he had a doctor, but I was reassured when he drank a bottle and a half of Krug after luncheon. We had three bottles between us—one to our loves, one to our countries, and one for symmetry, the last being on the house.

Mirande was a small, alert man with the face of a Celtic terrier—salient eyebrows and an upturned nose. He looked like an intelligent Lloyd George. That summer, in association with Mme B., his theatrical protégée, he planned to produce a new play of Sartre’s. His mind kept young by the theater of Mme B., his metabolism protected by the restaurant of Mme G., Mirande seemed fortified against all eventualities for at least another twenty years. Then, perhaps, he would have to recruit new protégées. The Sunday following our reunion, I encountered him at Longchamp, a racecourse where the restaurant does not face the horses, and diners can keep first things first. There he sat, radiant, surrounded by celebrities and champagne buckets, sending out a relay team of commissionaires to bet for him on the successive tips that the proprietors of stables were ravished to furnish him between races. He was the embodiment of a happy man. (I myself had a nice thing at 27-1.)

The first alteration in Mirande’s fortunes affected me so directly that I did not at once sense its gravity for him. Six weeks later, I was again in Paris. (That year, I was shuttling frequently between there and London.) I was alone on the evening I arrived, and looked forward to a pleasant dinner at Mme G.’s, which was within two hundred meters of the hotel, in the Square Louvois, where I always stop. Madame’s was more than a place to eat, although one ate superbly there. Arriving, I would have a bit of talk with the proprietress, then with the waitresses—Germaine and Lucienne—who had composed the original staff. Waiters had been added as the house prospered, but they were of less marked personality. Madame was a bosomy woman—voluble, tawny, with a big nose and lank black hair—who made one think of a Saracen. (The Saracens reached Gascony in the eighth century.) Her conversation was a chronicle of letters and the theater—as good as a subscription to Figaro Littéraire, but more advanced. It was somewhere between the avant-garde and the main body, but within hailing distance of both and enriched with the names of the great people who had been in recently—M. Cocteau, Gene Kelly, la Comtesse de Vogue. It was always well to give an appearance of listening, lest she someday fail to save for you the last order of larks en brochette and bestow them on a more attentive customer. With Germaine and Lucienne, whom I had known when we were all younger, in 1939, the year of the drôle de guerre, flirtation was now perfunctory, but the carte du jour was still the serious topic—for example, how the fat Belgian industrialist from Tournai had reacted to the caille vendangeuse, or quail potted with fresh grapes. You know the man, Germaine would say. If it isn’t dazzling, he takes only two portions. But when he has three, then you can say to yourself … She and Lucienne looked alike—compact little women, with high foreheads and cheekbones and solid, muscular legs, who walked like chasseurs à pied, 130 steps to the minute. In 1939, and again in 1944, Germaine had been a brunette and Lucienne a blonde, but in 1955 Germaine had become a blonde, too, and I found it hard to tell them apart.

Among my fellow customers at Mme G.’s I was always likely to see some friend out of the past. It is a risk to make an engagement for an entire evening with somebody you haven’t seen for years. This is particularly true in France now. The almost embarrassingly pro-American acquaintance of the Liberation may be by now a Communist Party-line hack; the idealistic young Resistance journalist may have become an editorial writer for the reactionary newspaper of a textile magnate. The Vichy apologist you met in Washington in 1941, who called de Gaulle a traitor and the creation of the British Intelligence Service, may now tell you that the General is the best thing ever, while the fellow you knew as a de Gaulle aide in London may now compare him to Sulla destroying the Roman Republic. As for the women, who is to say which of them has resisted the years? But in a good restaurant that all have frequented, you are likely to meet any of them again, for good restaurants are not so many nowadays that a Frenchman will permanently desert one—unless, of course, he is broke, and in that case it would depress you to learn of his misfortunes. If you happen to encounter your old friends when they are already established at their tables, you have the opportunity to greet them cordially and to size them up. If you still like them, you can make a further engagement.

On the ghastly evening I speak of—a beautiful one in June—I perceived no change in the undistinguished exterior of Mme G.’s restaurant. The name—something like Prospéria — was the same, and since the plate-glass windows were backed with scrim, it was impossible to see inside. Nor, indeed, did I notice any difference when I first entered. The bar, the tables, the banquettes covered with leatherette, the simple decor of mirrors and pink marble slabs were the same. The premises had been a business employees’ bar-and-café before Mme G., succeeding a long string of obscure proprietors, made it illustrious. She had changed the fare and the clientele but not the cadre. There are hundreds of identical fronts and interiors in Paris, turned out by some mass producer in the late twenties. I might have been warned by the fact that the room was empty, but it was only eight o’clock and still light outdoors. I had come unusually early because I was so hungry. A man whom I did not recognize came to meet me, rubbing his hands and hailing me as an old acquaintance. I thought he might be a waiter who had served me. (The waiters, as I have said, were not the marked personalities of the place.) He had me at a table before I sensed the trap.

Madame goes well? I asked politely.

No, Madame is lightly ill, he said, with what I now realize was a guilty air.

He presented me with a carte du jour written in the familiar purple ink on the familiar wide sheet of paper with the name and telephone number of the restaurant at the top. The content of the menu, however, had become Italianized, the spelling had deteriorated, and the prices had diminished to a point where it would be a miracle if the food continued distinguished.

Madame still conducts the restaurant? I asked sharply.

I could now see that he was a Piedmontese of the most evasive description. From rubbing his hands he had switched to twisting them.

Not exactly, he said, but we make the same cuisine.

I could not descry anything in the smudged ink but misspelled noodles and unorthographical "escaloppinis"; Italians writing French by ear produce a regression to an unknown ancestor of both languages.

Try us, my man pleaded, and, like a fool, I did. I was hungry. Forty minutes later, I stamped out into the street as purple as an aubergine with rage. The minestrone had been cabbage scraps in greasy water. I had chosen côtes d’agneau as the safest item in the mediocre catalog that the Prospéria’s prospectus of bliss had turned into overnight. They had been cut from a tired Alpine billy goat and seared in machine oil, and the haricots verts with which they were served resembled decomposed whiskers from a theatrical-costume beard.

The same cuisine? I thundered as I flung my money on the falsified addition that I was too angry to verify. You take me for a jackass!

I am sure that as soon as I turned my back the scoundrel nodded. The restaurant has changed hands at least once since then.

In the morning, I telephoned Mirande. He confirmed the disaster. Mme G., ill, had closed the restaurant. Worse, she had sold the lease and the good will, and had definitely retired.

What is the matter with her? I asked in a tone appropriate to fatal disease.

I think it was trying to read Simone de Beauvoir, he said. A syncope.

Mme G. still lives, but Mirande is dead. When I met him in Paris the following November, his appearance gave no hint of decline. It was the season for his sable-lined overcoat à l’impresario, and a hat that was a furry cross between a porkpie and a homburg. Since the restaurant on the Rue Saint-Augustin no longer existed, I had invited him to lunch with me at a very small place called the Gratin Dauphinois, on the Rue Chabanais, directly across from the building that once housed the most celebrated sporting house in Paris. The Rue Chabanais is a short street that runs from the Square Louvois to the Rue des Petits Champs—perhaps a hundred yards—but before the reform wave stimulated by a Municipal Councilor named Marthe Richard at the end of the Second World War, the name Chabanais had a cachet all its own. Mme Richard will go down in history as the Carry Nation of sex. Now the house is closed, and the premises are devoted to some low commercial purpose. The walls of the midget Gratin Dauphinois are hung with cartoons that have a nostalgic reference to the past glories of the street.

Mirande, when he arrived, crackled with jokes about the locale. He taunted me with being a criminal who haunts the scene of his misdeeds. The fare at the Gratin is robust, as it is in Dauphiné, but it did not daunt Mirande. The wine card, similarly, is limited to the strong, rough wines of Arbois and the like, with a couple of Burgundies for clients who want to show off. There are no clarets; the proprietor hasn’t heard of them. There are, of course, a few champagnes, for wedding parties or anniversaries, so Mirande, with Burgundies discounseled by his doctor, decided on champagne throughout the meal. This was a drôle combination with the mountain food, but I had forgotten about the lack of claret when I invited him.

We ordered a couple of dozen escargots en pots de chambre to begin with. These are snails baked and served, for the client’s convenience, in individual earthenware crocks, instead of being forced back into shells. The snail, of course, has to be taken out of his shell to be prepared for cooking. The shell he is forced back into may not be his own. There is thus not even a sentimental justification for his reincarceration. The frankness of the service en pot does not improve the preparation of the snail, nor