When, in 1935, Joe Liebling took a job as reporter at The New Yorker, he was weary from fighting with newspaper prose-butchers and eager to start his real life as a writer. The New Yorker was then only ten years old, and Liebling had just turned thirty: the two would, in effect, grow up together. The New Yorker would give Liebling the freedom to become Liebling, and Liebling, almost singlehandedly, would give The New Yorker its reputation as the place where journalism could sometimes also be literature.

That first year, though, as he later recalled it, was a rough one—he had perfected “a successful newspaper short-feature method that was not directly transferable to a magazine, especially in long pieces. It would have been like running a mile in a series of hundred-yard dashes.” But once he hit his stride, he never stumbled: he could turn out copy, as he himself liked to brag, faster than anyone who could write better, and better than anyone who could write faster. Over the next twenty-seven years, until his death in 1963, he would publish hundreds of first-rate pieces in the magazine, stories long and short, signed and unsigned, on boxers and bookies, food and wine, the Second World War and Chicago, the Second City—on anything and everything that caught his singular fancy. A lot of these pieces later made it into his books: The Honest Rainmaker, The Road Back to Paris, The Press, Between Meals, and a dozen or so others. But, then again, a lot of them didn’t: with a deadline writer so wayward and prolific, there were bound to be plenty of fugitives.

The earliest item, a profile of the odds-maker at a Long Island horsetrack, is dated 1937.

James Barbour and Fred Warner, both of the English Department at the University of New Mexico, have made a hobby of collecting the uncollected Liebling: in 1990 they gave us A Neutral Corner, which brought together the boxing stories Liebling wrote after The Sweet Science (1955); now they have given us Liebling at “The New Yorker, their choice of the best of the rest. If A Neutral Corner was a one-dish meal, this new book is a smorgasbord: the thirty-three items gathered here make for a tasting of many different Lieblings. The earliest item, a profile of the odds-maker at a Long Island horsetrack, is dated 1937; the latest, a reverie on the twilight cityscape seen looking west from the author’s office window, is the last thing of Liebling’s that The New Yorker published, in January 1964. Between them lie an account of the U.S. Navy’s only mutiny, in 1842; reviews of biographies of Ernie Pyle and Stephen Crane; a short history of bouillabaisse; and a look into the complete transcripts of the HUAC hearings (“a sequence of dramas that are Shakespearean except for the poverty of the idiom”). There’s more, and it’s equally various, the only really coherent grouping being a dozen wartime letters from France, 1939–44.

Any lover of Liebling will be happy to have this book, for it augments the author’s short bookshelf by another volume, and it rescues from oblivion such tidbits as the following, a mini-masterpiece of on-the-fly sociology concerning “clockers”—the guys at the track who time horses in their trials, in this case for the odds-maker Tex Grenet:

[Ollie Thomas] carries a $450 Tiffany stopwatch in his right vest pocket. In his left hand he holds a $45 steel watch with which he does his work. He doesn’t want to “wear out the works” of his expensive watch.
Each of his co-workers, like Ollie, carries a good watch, which he rests, and a comparatively cheap one with which he earns his living. The good watch is for prestige, occasional collateral, and insurance. The first professional clocker was a colored man named Hoggie Shields. “His was the common end of clockers,” Tex says. “They auctioned his watch to bury him.” Lou Salyers, a white clocker, carries Shields’ watch now. He bought it at the sale.

It also rescues this, a characteristic Liebling romp through English nomenclature, combined with a sigh for the way things used to be:

Not long ago, when I was in London, I bought myself a derby or dicer, a bowler or tifter or chapeau melon—in other words, a billycock or hard hat, although the shop where I bought it prefers to call it a coke. It was the first I had ever owned, and made me feel full-grown for the first time in fifty-one years, because my father, like every other New Yorker of his day, always wore one when I was a boy. All I have to do now is learn to shave with a straight razor on a moving railroad train and I will satisfy my own time-obscured image of adulthood.

But to be happy to have this book is not the same thing as to be happy with it. It may contain some wonderful prose, but as a piece of anthology-making, Liebling at “The New Yorker” is a disappointment. From Professor Warner’s fawning introduction to the incomplete source notes and slavishly chronological ordering of contents, it’s an amateur production, an uncritical act of fannish homage, a lining-up of little bones in a cloth-and-cardboard reliquary that asks nothing from the public but the obeisance of the faithful. Poor Liebling! At a time when so much of his work is out of print, and when an entire reading generation has come of age never having heard his name, he deserves better. One hopes that he soon finds a real anthologist, one who can do for him what, for example, Malcolm Cowley did for Faulkner, namely give him back to readers in all his richness and help secure his place in the parade of American letters.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 13 Number 6, on page 73
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