The Telephone Booth Indian and A Neutral Corner

...Yet Liebling is so free of condescension that he can treat them as he would friends, i.e., make fun of them: "The promoter has been celebrated for years as the most unrelenting foe of the English language in the sports business...

...For most of the people in both books led Hobbesian lives and held terrible jobs...

...The one on hat-check girls gives a history of tipping in New York...

...of the London Prize Ring...

...What stands out about his relationship to his characters is how apolitically he treats them...

...Throughout a career spent mostly at the New Yorker, Liebling was a literary reviewer, food writer, war correspondent, fabulist, sports columnist, and social critic, writing always with unbounded bravura and gusto and an outof-nowhere erudition that has been matched since only by Tom Wolfe...

...Liebling fans will greet this new one as if it were the Dead Sea Scrolls...

...19.95 Christopher Caldwell In his introduction to The Telephone I Booth Indian, Roy Blount describes returning from graduate school one summer to Mississippi and his "teetotaling" parents (I mention the adjective as it seems to imply sins beyond that of abstinence...

...Leapfrogging Disraeli, Liebling ventures that the Jewish boxers "Daniel Mendoza and Dutch Sam, whose exploits filled the years between 1788 and 1814 . . . did more to establish the Jew on the English scene than any other two historical figures...

...Liebling is content to call them "low-life...

...Unlike baseball players and jockeys, fighters seldom have noisy arguments...

...When con artists got clout to go along with their "angle," Liebling seemed to lose his appetite for them...

...sorry, Arthur Jr...

...Liebling wrote brilliantly in what he called the "blinded-withblood-he-swung-again school of fight writing," particularly in his account of the 1959 bout between Floyd Patterson and Ingemar Johansson, which left the bloated Swede "spread out like a wall-to-wall carpet...

...His 15,000-word hatchet job on news mogul Roy Howard, tacked onto The Telephone Booth Indian, shows Liebling at his vitriolic zenith...

...Because it had low life in an abundance unavailable elsewhere, Liebling loved New York to the exclusion of the rest of the country, which he took a rather dim view of...

...One of Liebling's favorite bantamweights was born on Gay Street 52 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1991 in Greenwich Village, a neighborhood not now famous for producing prizefighters...

...if there had been such a thing as work-satisfaction surveys in those days, these guys would have fit in somewhere between the circulation department of the New York Daily News and the people who clean the seats between screenings of Henry and June...

...When Count de Pennies, a bigamist who wears cinnamon-colored suits with trousers up to his breastbone, actually begins to thrive in a perfectly legal Christopher Caldwell is assistant managing editor of The American Spectatot tour company, he spoils it by writing a bad check to the railroad, just for the hell of it...

...As a union-basher basher, an FDR idolater, and charter member of the Alger Hiss Dupe Club, Liebling was a liberal of high principle and rare mirth, capable of floating free of the party line on most anything (his support for FDR rested largely on the President's anti-isolationism...

...Worse, he saw Howard as responsible for poisoning the New York Telegraph with hicks who wrote in a style he called "Oklahoma Byzantine": It was steadily losing readers, too, many of them people who had developed hallucinations from reading its prose and were dragged from subway trains slapping at adjectives they said they saw crawling over them...

...Parker is not considered much of a fighter here—a good banger, but slow of intellection...

...But he is better at evoking the trainers, managers, and hangers-on who made up the fight world and congregated in places like The Neutral Corner, and that gift remained as strong in Cassius Clay's era as it was in Joe Louis's...

...In another, George Nicholson, a former law student and Joe Louis's sparring partner, says, "I got out of the habit of trying to study law, on account of I saw I couldn't talk fast enough...

...Six decades on, it appears that numerous newspapers died in the twenties and thirties due to tightening credit and corn-petition from radio and newsreels...

...It is uncanny, in fact, how much the piece resembles the anti-takeover screeds of recent years...

...The upper classes are my museum, the lower classes my bordello," as English novelist Ronald Firbank put it, and Liebling was a sort of cross between Firbank and Henry Mayhew, between the finicky observer of folkways and the libertineat-large...

...The chapter on Tim Mara, bookmaker extraordinaire, explains his accounting procedures...

...Worst of all was the tiny man's political opportunism, his pathetic dreams of being a kingmaker: The publisher showed no warmth for Roosevelt until the summer after the inauguration, when "New Deal" had become a password to popularity...

...Clearly, he has read far more than Nat Fleischer's Ring Record Book, and the collection is peppered with homages to great boxing writers of the past, not only Hazlitt but even Pierce Egan, author of the early-nineteenth-century Box-Lana, whom Liebling describes variously as "the Polybius," "the Thucydides," "the Juvaini," "the Ibn Khaldun," "the Sainte-Beuve," and "the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr...

...Where the Indians veer into pathology, however, is in their absolute preference for "soft money" over the hard-earned variety...

...Telephone Booth Indians were the sleazy entrepreneurs who used the phone booths in a handful of Broadway office buildings to launch elaborate scams...

...It must have been a terrible temptation to him to stay honest,' Morty says, 'but he resisted it.' ") The other pieces in the collection are eight-million-stories-in-the-naked-city writing, tales of scraping by, of living on one's wits...

...Most every journalist would...

...New Yorkers of Mayor Dinkins's stripe, who cherish their city's "beautiful mosaic," could learn a lot from Liebling—perhaps even Liebling's keen sense of what it feels like to be an individual tile...

...His parents having expressed concern about Roy's career, he retrieved his copy of The Most of A. J. Liebling and said—bravely, as I do not suppose Ole Miss' in the early sixties to have been the most Semitophilic corner of the globe—that he wanted to be like the boozy, grotesquely corpulent Jew in the back-jacket photo...

...H e is less enamored of scrappers in the business ring, the "fellows who know to get a dollar...

...These included selling non-existent lots in the swamps of New Jersey (ten or twelve times), selling hat-check concessions for non-existent restaurants, and booking tours for a troupe of non-existent female boxers...

...He then threw himself on the President's neck with all the shyness of a hostess in a navy cafe...

...It's easy to see how such tales appealed to Depression-era readers: with its elaborate description of confidence tricks the book must have seemed like a How to Make Money in Stocks for the down-and-out...

...Still, no amount of demographic or architectural change will stale his work...

...A Neutral Corner—which takes its name from an Eighth Avenue boxers' barroom—contains all of the boxing writing Liebling did between the 1955 publication of his first boxing volume, The Sweet Science, and his death in 1963...

...Not fighting is their avocation...

...There are no longer boarding houses half a block from Central Park West or working tugboats at the South Street Seaport, and "pastrami" is no longer a word exotic enough to italicize...

...In one of the best pieces, a profile of a Swiss woman who runs a boardinghouse for wayward pugilists, Liebling speaks lovingly of boxers and boxing: "Prize fighters . . . are the most tranquil of athletes...

...But, to Liebling, capitalists like Howard were throwing people out of work to merge and consolidate enterprises that were perfectly viable, lining their own pockets and threatening free competition...

...Liebling's description of a fight between the Italian lightweight champion and a Casablancan welterweight is framed by an informative history of boxing in—of course—Tunisia...

...A Neutral Corner is not as good asits predecessor, but only because professional boxing in the fifties and sixties was not as good as it was in the thirties and forties...

...He was both an urban historian and an ethnographer, and it's curious to see how the city has shifted its axis in the three to five decades since he wrote...

...The account of a match in Shoreditch Town Hall veers off into a discussion of betting as a pathology...

...The earlier collection is considered by many the best boxing book ever written, the kind of book that develops waiting lists in used book stores and gets stolen from libraries...