Liebling Abroad
Liebling, A.J.
LIEBLING ABROAD A.J. Liebling / Wideview Books / $11.95 Mitchell S. Ross Thereby propose that the bones of the late A.J. Liebling be transferred to the Pantheon in Paris. There the guides...
...Liebling remembers the summer of liberation, 1944...
...He could render trenchant judgments -consider this one, on the condition of Portugal: "The regime of Senhor Salazar, the university professor of political economy turned plain-clothes dictator, had kept Portugal solvent, with one of the lowest living standards and highest venereal-disease rates in Europe, but virtually without armament...
...Between Meals is filled with other insights, for instance, this one, on the popularity of vodka: "The standard of perfection for vodka (no color, no taste, no smell) was expounded to me long ago by the then Estonian consul-general in New York, and it accounts perfectly for the drink's rising popularity with those who like their alcohol in combination with the reassuring tastes of infancy-tomato juice, orange juice, chicken broth...
...Liebling was a great eater and swell writer, but he was at his absolute best when writing about what he had eaten...
...I had cried over them...
...many women had pleasure of him...
...Even better is the memory recorded in Normandy Revisited: "We decided, therefore, to attend the battle, but Mitchell S. Ross is the author of The Literary Politicians and An Invitation to Our Times...
...When I arrived in London...
...I wish Liebling had given it a more heroic title, as this is truly a heroic book...
...Liebling, gourmand, ecrivain...
...it stands to the sauce of lobster a I'americaine in the same relationship as a soda to Scotch...
...They want to be taken seriously, like fallout...
...All the previous spring, in London, I had been reading clandestine newspapers smuggled out of France...
...Heaped on the plate and receiving the sauce a I'americaine as the waitress serves the lobster, the grains drink it up as avidly as nymphs quenching their thirst...
...I do not regret my sentimentality...
...Between Meals was published in 1962, Betty Friedan was as yet unknown...
...Mirande also gave women pleasure...
...Liebling covered World War II for the New Yorker and did it well, but he did it in the spirit of one who wished that the enemy be vanquished and the fighting cease in order that tables might once again fill with haute cuisine...
...Admirable as Normandy Revisited is, however, it does not epitomize Liebling as does the last of the four books: Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris...
...His was a distinctive point of yiew...
...I wish I had something now that I could be as sentimental about...
...The Road Back to Paris is superbly idiosyncratic war reporting...
...Voila un homme...
...We had three bottles between us-one to our loves, one to our countries, and one for symmetry, the last being on the house...
...I wanted to see General De Gaulle as soon as possible and write a whacking profile about a modern Bertrand du Guesc-lin...
...In Chapter Two we learn more of Mirande: M. Mirande had an equally rich life between meals...
...Like most of my preconceptions, this one was on the romantic side...
...The Spartans on the sea-wet rock sat down and combed their hair before Thermopylae, and Casey, Boyle, and I ate sole bonne femme...
...After venturing into Spain he recalled, "I had had a fairly adequate lunch, soup and veal, at the hotel in the railroad terminus...
...not until after lunch, when we would be in a better frame of mind for it...
...It is the ideal intoxicant for the drinker who wants no reminder of how hurt Mother would be if she knew what he was doing...
...Du Guesclin was the great fourteenth-century guerilla knight who, anxious only to rid France of the invader (in that war the English), fought tirelessly until he had righted what appeared to be a hopeless military situation...
...But a good pilaf-each grain of rice developed separately in broth to the size of a pistachio kernel-is a fine thing in its own right...
...His mind being free of conventional categories, Liebling was able to surrender himself to the excitements and disappointments of experience...
...Four books are collected in this volume, which is itself Lieb-lingesque in its girth...
...Women resent being thought of as enjoyables...
...Written in the mid-fifties it recalls the war years in the light of a later day...
...Normandy Revisited is, accordingly, the most harmonious of the four books here...
...At the same time, in the worthy tradition of Stendhal, he was open to flights of fancy, subject to the ironic wisdom of hindsight...
...There the guides regularly note the names and glories of the dead Frenchmen who lie beneath the Left Bank dome, and there they could give our man his due: Here lies A.J...
...This is no longer considered a fair or honorable exchange...
...Each day," writes the author early in his second paragraph, "brings only two opportunities for field work, and they are not to be wasted minimizing the intake of cholesterol...
...Btead is a good medium for carrying gravy as far as the face, but it is a diluent, not an added magnificence...
...Currently pleasure and women are held matters incompatible, antithetical, and mutually exclusive, like quinine water and Scotch...
...likewise the briefer sketches collected in Mollie and Other War Pieces...
...the fact that it was possible to get such a meal even at a price far beyond people who lived on Spanish wages appeared to me to mark some kind of advance...
...But above all Between Meals is a celebration of life at the table...
...To his credit as a writer Liebling was politically naive...
...We are introduced to Liebling's friend, Mirande, with whom, naturally, he shares a meal...
...Our gourmand was a prophet...
...He had pleasure of women...
...they consider such an attitude as evidence of male chauvinism...
...A year after publishing these lines Liebling died, fat and, in his way, fulfilled, at the age of fifty-nine...
Vol. 14 • October 1981 • No. 10
