Customer Reviews

Just Enough Liebling: Classic Work by the Legendary New Yorker Writer

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A.J. Liebling is a quirky, funny, one-of-a-kind writer whom I adore. He's often mentioned in the same breath with Damon Runyon, and they both profile similar obscure wise guys in a clever offhanded idiom. (Runyon's prose is more caustic, and practically a new language.) But I found myself thinking of Mark Twain, too, and even the television program Seinfeld. Liebling will come up with something absolutely hilarious or some wonderfully turned phrase in the midst of a lot of pleasant-enough "nothing." He has the same way of deflating the grand and inflating the trivial that Jerry, Elaine, Kramer, and George have.

But even I couldn't finish one of these essays, and he's not going to be everybody's cup of tea. I almost bailed on the initial outpouring on the subject of food, but I'm glad I persevered. (I had recently read The Sweet Science and knew this would get better!) He does an extended riff on the idea that to really enjoy food one must have "just enough" money. With too much or too little money you won't be properly adventurous. Nice image, and unless I'm mistaken it applies to just about everything in life.

There is a great range of topics Liebling writes about. Food is one, and be forewarned that his approach is artistic rather than scientific. But also Paris, World War II, boxing, New York, the press, William Randolph Hearst, General Patton, Theodore Dreiser, Sugar Ray Robinson, Stalin, the Louisiana politician Earl Long. My favorite pieces are "Quest for Mollie," about a remarkable soldier in the North African theater, and "Ahab and Nemesis," about Rocky Marciano and Archie Moore.

These stories and many others are simply transcendant, they are so good. Excerpting him is like excerpting a couple of bars of a Brandenburg Concerto, but I'll run the risk. After he decides that Marciano and Moore match up fairly well with the greats of the past, he ends this particular story with a wonderful, lucid image: "...it proved that world isn't going backward, if you can just stay young enough to remember what it was really like when you were really young."

Is there ever enough Liebling? One of the classic observers of American life. If you have never read him, be prepared for a realy good time. A. J. Liebling was basically a reporter with a sense of observation that can only be called vibrant.

This book is a collection of some of his better work. About a third of the book covers World War II where he becan in France in 1939 and continued through a visit made after the war. This is reporting from the field, not to say anything about this unit doing this and that unit doing that, but about people. People not so different than you and I or out soldiers in Iraq.

The only reason I pick this nice volume over the LOA duo is for those who still do not know his work and do not want to plunk down more than the nice low price for this "tasting flight". Once you satisfyingly pat your mouth with the back cover, you will be reaching for the LOA volumes pretty quick, if not individual copies of the whole slate of individual volumes appearing at the very beginning of this happy volume.

Joe Liebling is the other bookend of the matched set of great New Yorker journalists with Joe Mitchell. They were as different in origin as could be, except in character, skill and sensibility. Could be non-identical twins separated at birth otherwise. Liebling was a war reporter, but no blood or guts, all GI. He grasped the war as few others could, but in a way nobody else did. "Westbound Tanker" finds him on the Norwegian "Regenbue", or Rainbow, obvious from "Her lead-gray hull...streaked with rust, and her masts and funnel and deckhouses showed only a trace of paint" He was going on December 1, 1941 to visit home for the holidays as a neutral. While at sea, he was transformed into a co-belligerent on the 7th.

A gourmet of food and drink of the highest order, he made a natural Francophile. Those of you reading his "Between Meals" know of his young introduction to pre-war Paris. He grasped the French as deTocqueville had only aspired in his three month American visit. All the French I read him to for years now are astounded and warmly pleased, even at their own occasional expense. So we begin this tour with a few stories of drink, food and France -- "The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite ... Each day brings only two opportunities for field work".

His sporting nature had two foci, the horse track (as opposed to horse races) and boxing. If you hate boxing, the section on "Boxiana" is for you. If you are a fan, so much the better. My now pugnacious daughter read his work on boxing as a high school sophomore for a book report. Her teacher was impressed; worried, but impressed. She became a monster La Crosse player. Liebling coined "The Sweet Science". In the piece included here, "The University of Eighth Avenue" he writes, "Forty-seventh Street between Sixth and Fifth ...is devoted to polishing and trading diamonds...The block on the west side of Eighth Avenue between Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth Streets is given over to the polishing of prizefighters. It has a quiet academic charm" As with war, Liebling is nosing behind and scouting beyond the violence for other verities. And he always delivers.

Joe is always most critical of politicians and other reporters. Two more sections follow on his prime targets, but always with the Liebling twist, which, oddly enough allows us to see straight. Sort of undoing the spin. He felt these two occupations require (but seldom achieve) a higher moral standard than, say, a school teacher. And Joe treated them with requisite scrutiny. "Our idea of a great liberal statesman was Al Smith, because he came right out and told the farmers (who in New York are good socialist Republicans), knowing in advance they were not going to vote for him anyway, exactly where he stood. He stood on the same side of the bar we did."

On the New York Times: "The very existence of the Times sports section marked a concession to frivolity on the part of Adolph Ochs, the great Merchandiser of stodginess, but the old man determined that if he had to have a sports stage at all, it would be as uninteresting as possible." Joe could afford to sneer at the Times; the New Yorker had the premiere baseball writer, Roger Angell. And Liebling could even hold his own when writing about his native city in the company of his emigre brother, Joe Mitchell. Drink deeply here, smile and discover.

I've heard one fair charge leveled against this book, that it's insufficient. The fact that it is becomes immediately clear once you begin reading the array of A.J. Liebling's appetites. From war reporting to food to politics to boxing to the newspaper business, Liebling approaches each with immediate gusto and irresistible humor. And though his picture on the dust jacket wouldn't seem to show it, for style and predilections, he was the consummate mid-century man's man.

The criticism is merited only because combining all of Liebling's writing into a neat introduction would be impossible. A whole encyclopedia is needed, while this collection presents measured and sensible courses, like a well-planned dinner. Personally, having never heard of the man, I discovered my copy in a superb used bookstore in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I opened it, hopped around, laughed my way through roguish accounts of bachelors and fighters. Almost before I put it down, I had already gone out and purchased Liebling's unsurpassed The Earl of Louisiana (Southern Biography Series).

This is, in fact, just enough Liebling, but barely.

It's really not "just enough" Liebling. But at the price it's certainly a fair sampling and maybe enough to show younger readers just what great reporting and great writing is all about.

Liebling is one of the most "American" of writers, and in this collection we can see why. I was familiar with his food writings and his sports reporting, for which he is well known. There is in fact an annual conference (The A. J. Liebling Invitational in Boston) for writers inspired by his musing on Proust's appetite! I knew about his New York "characters" and his love for Paris, but the war reporting was an eye-opener. No wonder he was decorated by the French government.

Just Enough Liebling, A.J. Liebling (collected TNY pieces); North Point Press [Farrar, Straus & Giroux] (2004)


"Just Enough" is as brilliant & rewarding as "Fierce Pajamas" - TNY's ill-advised recycled collection of humor - was a vexing disappointment. The publisher's statement that this is the "classic work by the Legendary New Yorker writer" does not exaggerate; if a used-book store today had the nerve to ask for JEL's original retail price - knowing what I know now - I'd pay it.

A perfect rating went by the boards when the republication editors failed to recognize the liabilities of the windy speeches & lugubrious clichés of the frisky scam artist, Col. John R. Stingo, Liebling's admired protagonist in "from The Honest Rainmaker." Very few readers today should have to - and are not going to - waste their time slogging through dated, turgid oratory that was already dead as a door nail in 1925.

And since most of what's in JEL is factual in nature, the lack of an index is practically an insult - as is also, once again, the senseless practice of placing some dates of original publication at story-end (a blunder perpetuated throughout FP - where original print dates should have been stationed on the first page below the story titles, providing an indispensable historical context).

It's a shame that Ted Kunkel didn't (or couldn't) include the "Harold Ross - The Impresario" eulogy in his five-star Ross biography - & that AJL's brilliant "The Jollity Building" wasn't also featured in "Fierce Pajamas" (the reading of which, mostly, gave me Geng Green).

"The Jollity Building" is by far the star of the show in "Just Enough." It is so superb both in its own right & in comparison to the work of the past pretenders of comedy (Alan King died - did anyone notice?), I'm somewhat saddened.

Uncorruptable odds are telling me that it is doubtful that I'll ever again read anything else quite this funny.

I read the review in the New York Review of Books and bought the book. I'm not disappointed. A. J. Liebling was just a wonderful writer!