Though he had excellent formal schooling—Dartmouth and Columbia—Liebling’s real education came from newspapers, first by reading them and later by working on them. He was cynical (i.e., realistic) enough to remark that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one” and “people everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news,” yet his enjoyment of newspapering was Mencken-like—what a feast of folly it placed before him!
However, the publication he is principally associated with is The New Yorker. For 28 years, until his death in 1963, he wrote for it on a broad spectrum of subjects: newspapers, of course, and food, New York City life, and boxing. And, oddly enough, Earl Long of Louisiana, who, though far removed from Liebling’s cement turf was one of those rogues, scalawags, scamps and scoundrels who so delighted his soul.
And World War II. Harold Ross, founding editor of The New Yorker, sent Liebling to France when war broke out in 1939, a move that resulted in the many pieces in Liebling: World War II Writings (Library of America, 1,089 pages). This volume contains three previously published collections—The Road Back to Paris (1944), Mollie and Other War Pieces (1964), and Normandy Revisited (1955)—and Uncollected War Journalism, which is just what it says.
The Liebling aficionado immediately recognizes something different in the war journalism from his writings about the “petty nomads of Broadway.” The brio and self-mockery are still intact, as in this first sentence of “Reflections in a Cul-de-sac”: “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.”
On the other hand, in the war articles his voice changes somewhat. His sentences are tighter, less self-indulgent, more directly informational.
A pitch-perfect example of this is “Quest for Mollie” from 1945. In it he investigates the story of a dead American soldier, known at first only as Mollie, whose endearing eccentricities and amazing feats of soldiering, as recounted by people who knew him, turn out to be largely true.
“It cheers me,” Liebling writes, “to think there may be more like him all around me—a notion I would have dismissed as sheer romanticism before World War II.”
Yet the twinkle implicit in even his most serious essays raises a question that Liebling himself raised in discussing journalism: “A police reporter sees more than he can set down; a feature writer sets down more than he possibly can have seen.” Did Liebling the war correspondent see more than he set down or set down more than he saw?
If the latter, he came by the raw material for any embellishments the hard way. He was a boots-on-the-ground war correspondent, like Ernie Pyle, the man he praises here in “Pyle Set the Style.” Liebling went where the troops were: He was with the 1st Infantry Division when it reoccupied Gafsa, Tunisia; flew on a B-26 bombing mission over France; crossed the English Channel in a landing craft on D-Day.
He understands, he emphasizes, and he captures the banal as well as the terrifying aspects of military life better, I maintain, than even the most graphic film or video. Listen to this opening sentence of “The Shape of War”:
“Two Negro soldiers sat with their legs dangling into two deep parallel slit trenches in the dead-looking land between Gafsa and Sened Station one morning last winter. Each was eating a cold mixture of meat and beans out of a small shiny tin can capable of reflecting the sun’s rays to a distance of several miles in that flat country, and each turned his face upward periodically, with mouth full, to stare into the hot aluminum-colored sky.”
If the pitch, meter and rhythm of that description of a mundane soldierly moment do not make you want to discover what happens next, then you deserve Geraldo Rivera.
In German “Liebling” means “darling” or “favorite.” How apt a moniker for lovers of good writing such as that collected here, as fresh and engaging as the day Liebling set it down on paper, thereby creating journalism that defies dating.
2 comments:
I just discovered AJ Liebling while reading an article from a 1950 edition of the New Yorker in which he pays a visit to Springfield, Illinois (Abe Lincoln's hometown). What a great writer. Here's a tidbit from that article:
“The percentage of visible women who are pretty is higher in Springfield than it is in Chicago; ‘Springfield’s a Southern town,’ the women you meet there say when you mention this fact to them, as if that were sufficient explanation.”
Brian Moore, eh? There was a pretty good novelist by that name, "The Luck of Ginger Coffey," etc. Went to his reward a few years back. Liebling? Oh yes, the very best. Here is what he said in a "Wayward Press" piece about the death of Joe Stalin: “Inconsiderate to the last, Josef Stalin, a man who never had to meet a deadline, had the bad taste to die in installments.”
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