'Less Neurotic Than the Has-been'

At the bottom of the year, in a dark time, regardless of our latitude, the world can be a cold, uncompanionable place. Some of us will seek succor in books. Among the reliably soothing pleasure-givers is A.J. Liebling. How odd that a writer who earned his living from mass-market journalism, whose copy ran between the ads for Scotch and jewelry in The New Yorker, should be a source of palliation. With P.G. Wodehouse he has this in common, as well as one of the last century’s masterful prose styles. 

If you are new to his work I would suggest you start with Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris (1962) – perhaps the book I have most often reread -- followed by Normandy Revisited (1958), The Sweet Science (1956) and The Earl of Louisiana (1961). The subjects of these books are, respectively, food and France, World War II in Europe, boxing and Louisiana politics, but such capsule descriptions are misleading. Liebling is a journalist in the sense that Laurence Sterne is a writer of prose fiction. Both are utterly idiosyncratic. In “The Dollars Damned Him,” a 1961 review of recent books by and about Stephen Crane, he writes:

 

“The run-of-the-mill critic is a Linnaean; he likes to pop his specimens into plainly labeled phials, and Crane, genus Doomed Genius, went into the one labeled `Edgar Allan Poe.’ Because of the brief span between his late birth, in 1871, and his early death, in 1900, he became the least in focus of American masters, like a man seen through binocular lenses with one set for short distance and the other for long.”

 

Liebling, too, has been badly misclassified by critics and readers. We don’t know how to deal with first-rate writers who are no novelists or poets. For a man burdened by depression, he had a notably exuberant style. His work is celebratory, even when describing soldiers and boxers, because he admired courage and men who shared his gift for cracked eloquence and eccentricity. Here is a sample from The Earl of Louisiana. Liebling describes a bit player, Curley, once a boxer, now a bookmaker in Jefferson Parish:

 

“Curley is a barrel of a man, an old lightweight who never got anywhere and is now unregenerately fat. Men like him are more sentimental about the game than ex-champions, who are often bitter about managers who stole their money. The never-was is less neurotic than the has-been.”

 

Liebling’s work is filled with profiles that feel like miniature self-portraits. When writing about Earl Long, Colonel Stingo, Whitey Bimstein or Izzy Yereshevsky, he is writing about himself. Liebling died on this date, December 28, in 1963, at age fifty-nine – like Crane, far too young.

 

[You’ll find “The Dollars Damned Him” collected in Liebling at The New Yorker: Uncollected Essays (eds. James Barbour and Fred Warner, University of New Mexico Press, 1994).]