Not quite enough A.J. Liebling

Moreover, there was something about Liebling's boxing writing that, however enjoyable it might be, is never entirely satisfying. In 1982, while working for the Village Voice, I interviewed Norman Mailer prior to the Larry Holmes-Gerry Cooney fight, and we touched on the subject of Liebling. "He was wonderful on politicians and many other matters," said Mailer, "but when it came to fighters, he did have a New Yorker attitude that was fatal. A sort of, 'Oh, let's look at these quaint brutes' stance.'" Mailer was exaggerating, I think, but the point survives the exaggeration: Great fighters are thrilling, and Liebling's jaunty, informative prose never truly thrills.

It has often been lamented that Liebling died before he had a chance to write about Muhammad Ali. (He did cover an early Cassius Clay fight, before he became champ.) I'm not so sure this was a tragedy; as much as I enjoy "The Sweet Science," there's nothing in the book that makes me confident that Liebling would have known what to do with a subject larger than boxing itself.

Liebling's much celebrated "Chicago, the Second City" -- he didn't invent the term, but he popularized it -- is one of his most entertaining books, but it's also one of his shallowest and most mean-spirited, an unrelieved diatribe against Chicago, the main and in fact only criticism being that it isn't New York. The book has not dated well, if indeed some of the criticism was valid then. Liebling found so little to enjoy in Chicago, one wonders if his real subject wasn't his inability to find enjoyment anywhere that wasn't New York. God was merciful in taking him before he could see the decline in New York. "Plays at Chicago theatres," he writes, "are always locally assumed to be inferior versions of New York productions." This was before the Goodman and Steppenwolf began staging productions that, when they finally arrived in New York, were seen to be superior to anything New York theater had to offer.

As for "The Earl of Louisiana," that slice of forced folksiness about Huey Long's brother, Gov. Earl Long, the less said the better. No one reading it today would derive a real indication and understanding that the civil rights movement was about to explode in the Deep South in a very ugly way. You get the feeling that Liebling regarded Earl Long as just a corn-pone version of the gregarious, backslapping political bosses he grudgingly admired in New York. So little serious attention is given to the increasingly heated race relations in Louisiana that you get the impression you're reading an account of Southern politics written before World War II, rather than in 1960.

Liebling's press criticism, though, jumps off the page at you with more relevancy than most of this morning's accounts of the news. No one has matched his ability to combine anger and withering irony while avoiding cynicism. Liebling has sometimes been glibly dismissed as an ideological liberal. He was, or at least he was more a Franklin Roosevelt than a Teddy Roosevelt man. But what he really was was a liberal as defined by Webster's, meaning "tolerant of views differing from one's own," "unorthodox" and "favoring reform, specifically political reforms." In a word, he was progressive.

What press critics would be worth reading who were not liberal by such definitions? Liebling was particularly harsh on those who weren't, particularly the pompous Washington Post and, later, New York Journal-American columnist Westbrook Pegler, whom Liebling nailed as "a courageous defender of minorities -- for example, the people who pay large income taxes."

While some of the casts, crews and controversies of Liebling's famous press essays have changed, "The Press" remains gravid with contemporary appeal: "No newspaper, anywhere in the nation, has had a kind word for the working man since about 1936," he writes. "[O]n this point the press is not lopsided, but unilateral, monolithic, solidary, and unanimous." I don't know if "The Press" qualifies as literature, but it sure as hell is journalism that has stayed journalism.

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