The New Criterion

A. J. Liebling is routinely lauded as one of the premier journalists of the twentieth century, a backhanded compliment that renders him largely obsolete by virtue of its timestamp. The sort of erudite reportage that he perfected—lengthy pieces on everything from a prize fight in Providence to Parisian haute cuisine—has not aged well, especially in the age of blogs and the twenty-four-hour news cycle. And his natural gravitation to the relics of high culture left Liebling on the sidelines of the rapid transformation American society experienced after his death in 1963.

There have been several attempts to resurrect Liebling’s legacy, but none has been more noteworthy than the Library of America’s publication of two volumes devoted to him. The first covered his World War II reporting, most of it done at the behest of The New Yorker—his employer for twenty-eight years—from Paris, London, and North Africa. Now we have a volume on the subjects for which he became famous: boxing, eating, politicking, Broadway, Paris, and the newspaper trade, which—though it may be on its last legs—still has much to learn from Liebling’s expansive intelligence and wit.

The greatest irony of Liebling’s career is that he engendered the very revolution in journalism that would eventually engulf him. In retrospect, he is an obvious precursor to New Journalists like Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson by writing in the first-person, in an impressionistic and digressive style that forcefully injects the reporter into his own story. And the New Journalists paved the way for today’s proliferation of bloggers and do-it-yourself pundits who need only a web address to thrive. This is exactly the kind of democratic press that Liebling would have wanted, even if a computer screen will never compensate for the smoke-filled chambers of Newspaper Row.

If he is still known for anything, it is his writing on boxing, and boxing takes center stage in the Library of America with The Sweet Science. Sports Illustrated has called it the “Best Sports Book of All Time,” and while that honorific may be somewhat hyperbolic, the work is a fitting paean to the bygone age of gloved heroes like Rocky Marciano, Sugar Ray Robinson, and other mid-century prizefighters who made their name in “the great dark prince of sports,” as Pete Hamill, who edited this volume, once called it.

For Hemingway, boxing had been an existential contest of wills; for Liebling, a fussy romantic, rubbing elbows in Madison Square Garden with fast-talking promoters and grizzled connoisseurs reminded him of everything he loved about New York. Fittingly, Liebling is at his best not in the blow-by-blow of a fight but when describing the city, which he had come to know intimately in the early 1930s as a young reporter for the New York World of Joseph Pulitzer and, later, the World-Telegram.In one memorable passage, he wanders through Harlem after a fight won by Sugar Ray Robinson:

Eighth Avenue, from the Polo Grounds south, is Harlem, but it’s poor Harlem, unrelieved by bright lights or jive. I walked past store fronts fetid with the smell of old vegetables, and dismal houses they never were much and now are less, where ill-dressed Negroes sat on the doorsills. All along the way, the people in the doorways knew that Sugar Ray had won, but they didn’t seem excited. Perhaps it was the heat.

Liebling finds a similar New York in The Jollity Building, a collection of New Yorker stories about the confidence men, bookies, and promoters (“Telephone Booth Indians”) who ply their trade on the Great White Way. The city that emerges here is boisterous and glib but also desperate and worn, and a good part of Liebling’s mastery is to commune with these down-and-outers without a trace of condescension. He endlessly mourns the destruction of this particular seedy patch of New York:

When the Jollity Building comes down, the small theatrical agents, the sleazy customers, the band leaders in worn camel’s-hair overcoats, the aged professors of acrobatic dancing … will spill out into the street and join the musicians who are waiting for jobs and the pitchman who sell self-threading needles along the curb.

This same romantic sensibility—democratic in its embrace but conservative in its suspicion of changing tastes—took Liebling to Paris, where he wrote grandly of his love of food. He had fallen hard for Paris as a student at the Sorbonne in the 1920s and had returned there in 1944, covering its liberation for The New Yorker. Between Meals, however, is solely concerned with satisfying an appetite that had grown increasingly large over the years. “No ascetic can be considered reliably sane,” he warns in recounting a harrowing sojourn in a Swiss clinic. “Hitler was the archetype of the abstemious man. When the other krauts saw him drink water in the Beer Hall they should have known he was not to be trusted.” This is perhaps the weakest entry in the volume, as Liebling’s Paris is not quite equal to that of Miller or Hemingway; even his love of traditional French fare seems outdated, given how much Gallic cuisine has changed in the last forty-some years.

The Earl of Louisiana and The Press remain far more relevant. In the former, Liebling travels to Louisiana to witness the 1959 reelection campaign of Earl Long, the gregarious brother of Huey Long, who was seeking his third term as governor of the “Gret Stet of Loosiana.” (Because of term limits, the wily Long planned a tricky maneuver in which he would be elected lieutenant governor and, after his ticket’s certain victory, reclaim the top post.) He found himself beset from all sides, by both the segregationist Willie Rainach and the more liberal mayor of New Orleans, deLesseps Morrison, as well as persistent questions about his own sanity.

Barnstorming the state with Long, Liebling becomes increasingly enamored of his subject, whose victory seems increasingly unlikely. “If a man knows enough to go to the races, he needs no doctor,” he comments after a visit to “Dr. Schizophrenia.” Liebling also revels in the aggressive brand of Louisiana politics that seems to recall elements of the no-holds-barred New York of his youth: “A Louisiana politician can’t afford to let his animosities carry him away, and still less his principles, although there is seldom difficulty in that department.” Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of The Earl of Louisiana is that Liebling remains largely detached from the brewing Civil Rights struggle that was unfolding before his eyes.

The Press is the most durable of Liebling’s works, a product of the longstanding Wayward Press column he published in The New Yorker. Its most famous assertion deserves to be repeated, because it remains true: “Freedom of the press is only guaranteed to those who own one.” Liebling wrote those words in 1960, as the journalistic landscape was rapidly changing with the closing of many smaller newspapers. This dismayed Liebling because he had come to see the press as “the weak slat under the bed of democracy.” He is also an astute and ferocious critic of news reporting, and his analysis of the American coverage of Josef Stalin’s death is itself a masterly dissection of how difficult it is to report a story correctly.

In all, the Library of America makes an excellent case for Liebling. Hamill should be commended for leaving Liebling’s works in their entirety, arranged in a sensible and unobtrusive manner. The ebullient Liebling gets to speak for himself, again, after all this time.