`A Long Conversation'

Forty-three years ago today, after too many decades of overindulgence in food and drink (I write this not as a disapproving neo-Puritan but as an occasional fellow gourmand who loves great prose), A.J. Liebling, whom Garrison Keillor correctly described as “the wittiest American writer who ever lived,” died at the pitiable age of 59 in the intensive care unit of Mount Sinai Hospital, in his beloved native New York City. According to his biographer, Raymond Sokolov, Liebling’s last words were in French and unintelligible. Sokolov writes:

“Jean Stafford [the short story writer and Liebling’s widow], who was with him in the ambulance, thought that in his delirium he was having an imaginary, impassioned conversation with Camus. It must have been the kind of talk he had in mind when, in the very last sentence he ever wrote, he said that reading Camus’s notebooks was `intensely enjoyable for its own sake -- a long conversation with a companion who does not pall.’”

My own long conversation with Joe Liebling started about 30 years ago and has never palled. On my shelves are 17 of his books, two of which are compendiums (from Playboy Press!) containing nine titles between them, plus Sokolov’s life published in 1980. I’ve been a consistent, soft-spoken, unsuccessful proselytizer for Liebling’s work. It shouldn’t be a tough sell. Liebling is reliably funny, his prose is splendid and his subjects include boxing, the press, France, food, and lowlife on three continents. He covered World War II in North Africa and Europe for The New Yorker, and if I were forced to choose I’d say his finest books were Normandy Revisited and Between Meals.

About 15 years ago, the City of Troy, N.Y., invited me to speak on The Sweet Science, Liebling’s great collection of boxing essays, published in 1956. The city had organized a weekend of events to celebrate its place in boxing history, and I had recently reviewed The Neutral Corner, Liebling’s previously uncollected boxing pieces published by North Point Press. Except for what Liebling has taught me, I know almost nothing about boxing. Some 20 people, mostly young men, showed up for the talk, and none had ever heard of Liebling. By the time I finished speaking, the audience had dwindled to three or four. The idea that I could admire a book on a subject of no interest to me left everyone baffled, but we don’t read Liebling for facts but for raffishly colorful style and storytelling. He is a master raconteur for readers blessed with an ear for such things.

A funeral service was held for Liebling on Dec. 30, 1963, and the eulogy was read by his oldest, dearest friend, the other great Joe at The New Yorker, Mitchell. Sokolov reprints it in toto, but here’s an excerpt:

“Shortly after I heard Joe was dead, I went over and looked at his books in a bookcase at home. There were fifteen of them. I looked through The Road Back to Paris and reread `Westbound Tanker,’ which is one of my favorite stories of his, and when I finished it I suddenly recalled, with great pleasure, a conversation I had had some years ago with the proprietor of one of the biggest and oldest stores in the Fourth Avenue secondhand bookstore district. I had been going to this store for years and occasionally talked to the proprietor, who is a very widely read man. One day I mentioned I worked for The New Yorker, and he asked me if I knew A.J. Liebling. I said that I did, and he said that every few days all through the year someone, sometimes a woman, sometimes a young person, sometimes an old person, came in and asked if he had Back Where I Came From or The Telephone Booth Indian or some other book by A.J. Liebling. At that time all of Joe’s early books were out of print. `The moment one of his books turns up,’ the man said, `it goes out immediately to someone on my waiting list.’ The man went on and said that he and other veteran secondhand bookstore dealers felt that this was a certain sign that a book would endure. `Literary critics don’t know which books will last,’ he said, `and literary historians don’t know, and those nine-day immortals up at the Institute of Arts and Letters don‘t know. We are the ones who know. We know which books can be read only once, if that, and we know the ones that can be read and reread and reread.’”