Francis-Noël Thomas has written an aces piece on A. J. Liebling’s World War II reporting. It does not happen to include my own passage from Liebling’s army travels, so I reproduce it here:
. . . the instant of that day that recurs to me most often has been that when I sat with roast-beef tin in my hand—the label said it had been packed in Uruguay—and couldn’t eat, a most unusual difficulty for me. The meat in the opened tin had a jellied look, and the stuff sloshing on the forward deck, as the LCI-88 rolled, had a jellied look too—the shell had torn open dozens of the cans of rations the soldiers had left aboard, and the liquid on the deck was a mixture of blood and condensed milk, with Campbell’s soup.Forget that image. I dare you.
I’m happy that Thomas considers Liebling ripe for reconsideration. As I have pointed out elsewhere , the Brooklyn-born and francophilic Liebling’s highly improbable friendship with Louisiana governor Earl Long (when you’re Huey Long’s crazy brother, yikes) gives hope to anyone distressed by the Red State-Blue State divide. As if that weren’t enough, his brief but happy marriage to writer Jean Stafford, which lasted until his death, gives hope to literary women who prefer domestic bliss to either Emily Dickinson celibacy or Plath-Hughes drama.
He enjoyed a friendly rivalry with fellow New Yorker reporter Joseph Mitchell—his line "I’m faster than anyone who’s better and better than anyone faster" was a dig at Mitchell, who could never write faster than paint could dry—but their rivalry worked because they were such kindred spirits. A North Carolina boy in New York City is a lot like a kid who grew up Hitchcock-fat: as outsiders, they both learn very quickly how to watch but have enough general sympathy not to play idiosyncrasies for cheap laughs. Liebling’s profile of New Yorker founder Harold Ross is a good example of his kindness in the face of ridiculous personalities:
Ross liked writers, but he would no more have thought of offering a writer money than of offering a horse an ice-cream soda. "Bad for them, Liebling," he would have said. Ross thought that a healthy writer wouldn’t write unless he had had to emit at least two rubber checks and was going to be evicted after the week end. It was an unselfish conviction, a carry-over from his newspaper days. He reminded me of a showman I knew named Clifford G. Fischer—the impresarial analogy pops up constantly when I think of Ross. Fischer spoke to actors only in a loud scream, and when I asked him why, replied, in a low conversational voice he used on nonactors, "Because they are abnormal people. To abnormal people, you got to talk in an abnormal voice."I disagree with Suderman that modern hostility to The Media stems from a lack of trust. We’re not suspicious of journalists, just bored by them. You don’t trust a reporter like Liebling; you like him, as a person and as a writer. That’s what we need, not a national ropes course retreat.
