Not quite enough A.J. Liebling

The man who brought journalism into the modern age enjoys another revival. But why is some of his best writing buried, while his worst writing is celebrated?

By Allen Barra

Sep 23, 2004 | If, as Octavio Paz once said, literature is journalism that stays journalism, is it time to acknowledge that A.J. Liebling made literature?

The titles of Liebling's many classics -- "The Sweet Science," his collected boxing pieces from the New Yorker; "Chicago: The Second City"; "The Press," his collected press columns in the New Yorker; "The Earl of Louisiana," his fan's note to Louisiana Gov. Earl Long; his collected food writing pieces, "Between Meals"; his war correspondence, "Mollie and Other War Pieces" and "The Road Back to Paris"; and at least half a dozen others -- are all familiar to writers and journalists of my generation, the generation that came of age influenced by the writers Liebling influenced. Tom Wolfe, for instance, who famously and generously credited Liebling with kicking off what came to be known as "new journalism."

Unfortunately, you need a bigger audience than writers and journalists to stay in print, and Liebling, in all his reincarnations, has never truly found one. His audience at his peak in the mid- to late 1950s was fairly big for a journalist, but most of his readers had already read his stuff in the New Yorker by the time the collections were published between covers, with the result that most of Liebling's books were destined for secondhand bookstores -- which is where I and my friends found them -- even before they arrived in retail bookstores.

Happily, though, every decade or so somebody thinks to reprint a handful of his titles and kick off another Liebling revival. The latest includes "Chicago: The Second City," with the original New Yorker drawings by Saul Steinberg, and "Mollie and Other War Pieces," both from Bison Books (University of Nebraska Press), "The Telephone Booth Indian" from Broadway Books, and "Between Meals" and "The Sweet Science," both from North Point Press.

The book that will probably get more attention than any of these is "Just Enough Liebling: Classic Work by the Legendary New Yorker Writer," which describes itself as being "more like a capacious single work than an anthology," though the distinction between what North Point Press has done, taking long sections from books and grouping them under various subjects (food, boxing, war, press, etc.), and an anthology escapes me.

Capacious or anthology, "Just Enough Liebling" is a bit of a disappointment -- it's actually less Liebling than we were offered in the last Liebling comeback 20 years ago. Is the title meant to be ironic? If so, then why not take the volume's 536 pages and do what Playboy Press did back in 1982 and '83 in two volumes, "Liebling at Home" and "Liebling Abroad" -- simply reprint several of the unavailable books in their entirety? One I'd especially like to see is the nearly forgotten "Where I Came From," about growing up in pre-World War I New York. What reader would want as much Liebling as "Just Enough Liebling" offers and not want more? David Remnick's introduction, too, is a bit of a letdown -- high on the How I Discovered Liebling and How He Influenced Me side, short on the How Liebling Influenced Modern American Journalism side.

Next Page: The world Liebling wrote about is gone -- would he be covering NASCAR and Thai food today?

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