'How Is Your Own Business'

If I could be reborn as any writer my choice would be the man who once used a strip of bacon as a bookmark, A.J. Liebling. It’s a gesture I understand and admire, and it says something about the centrality of food and books in his life and about his Jewishness. I have marked my spot in books with less inspired objects -- toilet paper, orange peel, pocket comb – but never pork. Liebling’s friend Joseph Mitchell, who inherited his library, made no further comment on the bacon incident.

No writer, not even Shakespeare, do I so look forward to rereading. I love that Liebling was an alchemist who made literature out of journalism without resorting to pretentiousness (something Mailer and Capote could never do). His prose is better than Twain’s best (the middle parts of Life on the Mississippi). He is the wittiest of American writers, funnier than his fellow New Yorker staffers Thurber, Benchley and Perelman. I love that Philip Hamburger remembered Liebling laughing as he typed. He wrote quickly, eschewed “inspiration,” never posed as an aesthete and was proud of his prolificacy. He is still best known for his least interesting work, his writings on the press. Even his weaker books – The Second City, The Honest Rainmaker – are worth rereading. I love that he loved life, was loyal to the memory of his first wife and proud of his third, Jean Stafford. I admire him for giving up fiction and acknowledging his true gift, which, in his final years, resulted in his best books: The Sweet Science (1956), Normandy Revisited (1958), The Earl of Louisiana (1961) and Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris (1962). In a footnote to The Honest Rainmaker, Liebling formulated the only writer’s credo I could ever endorse: “The way to write is well, and how is your own business. Nothing else on the subject makes sense.”    

Liebling was born on this day, Oct. 18, in 1904, and died Dec. 28, 1963 at the ridiculously young age of fifty-nine.