A Multitude of Lieblings

...It is not the best selection possible—it contains nothing from that brilliant book The Telephone Booth Indian—but it is a good sampling of Liebling's amazing variety of specializations...

...Izzy says: "He's a real tummler, that Hymie...

...When Earl passes out coins, "a quarter to the white kids and a nickel to the niggers," the joke sours...

...You're as dead as a doornail...

...He was that, but he was also the best thing that happened to American journalism since John Peter Zenger...

...Another marvelous piece from Back Where I Came From is "'What Do You Expect for Two Dollars?' " It is about a rundown old restaurant at a New York beach, a restaurant that combines superb food with cranky old waiters who try to drive customers away, and a cranky old owner who sits by the bar all day to see that no waiter gets away with a glass of beer...

...My favorite is Liebling the reporter of the raffish and the larcenous...

...Liebling explored it comically, but it is a Chckhovian comedy tinged with melancholy...

...The finest of all of Liebling's raffish pieces, "The Jollity Building" from The Telephone Booth Indian, is not in The Most, perhaps because it has been so much anthologized...

...There are traces in the book of still other Lieblings: the medievalist and scholar (he calls Earl Long "the old vavasor," which means "feudal lord...

...The best of all of Liebling's books, to my taste, is The Honest Rainmaker (1953), in which the perfect scoundrelologist found the perfect subject, the elderly promoter and publicist whose pen name is "Col...

...The moon goes into a cloud abruptly, "like a watch going into a fat man's vest pocket...

...The Colonel is a masterly reshapcr of the language: freely transposing parts of speech ("the old doctor overweened himself") or creating superior back-formations ("they would become reconciliated...

...Opening a nightclub, Hymie Katz "is under a compulsion as strong as the drive of a spawning salmon to swim upstream...

...But the other Lieblings too show great distinction, and each has his devoted following...

...In one of the pieces Liebling describes himself as "a chronic, incurable, recidivist reporter...

...There is also some praise for what Liebling calls "the glorious diversion," sex, but not in the same generous proportions...

...The Colonel may be a scoundrel, but he is a highly moral scoundrel, as when he boasts of taking in a prominent oyster grower: "We beat that squarehead for forty grand, and he had starved hundreds of oyster shuckers to death...

...Then there is Liebling the boxing expert...

...the Philistine who made fun of the literary quarterlies and of such words as "dichotomy...

...Some day he'll fall into the clam chowder...

...Another Liebling is the critic of the press, and The Most includes a dozen pieces and fragments on that subject...

...All Liebling's criticism is informed by his vision of "a great, free, living stream of information, and equal access to it for all...

...In a few pages that are marvels of economy, Liebling gives Hymie's inspiring story, and describes the processes of parlaying a borrowed $50 into a (briefly) going nightclub...

...A chagrin of love never forgets itself," a waitress will tell him...

...Here is a waiter talking: "'The cook is forty-nine million years old,' he said...

...A tribute to Harold Ross has paragraphs of comparisons of Ross to everyone from Beatrice Lillie to Eddie Arcare Liebling's natural trope was the simile...

...He knows to get a dollar...

...And at the beginning of the next season he sends a taxicab for him.' " The mystic affinity between mean old people and fine food has not yet been explored psychoanalytically...

...Hearing the Colonel explain that the brand of ale he favors, Black Wolf, "is brewed in the Yellowknife country, two hundred miles within the Arctic Circle, the home of the world's richest unexploited gold deposits...

...The war pieces are full of his love for France and the French, and his literal translations of French idiom are masterly...

...the political commentator (Liebling could be withering: he remarks of Alva Johnston, who believed "that stupid Presidents were best," "It is a pity he did not live to see Eisenhower...

...The Most has two chapters and a note from The Earl of Louisiana (1961), a less successful recreation of a colorful figure, Governor Earl Long...

...This introduces Liebling the gourmet, or, in his own description, Liebling the glutton...

...In this he was simply the best in the world, the finest scoundrelologist since Mark Twain...

...At the end of every season the old man says to him, "I never want to see you no more...

...The Most includes material from The Road Back to Paris (1944), Normandy Revisited (1958) and a 1956 piece from Algeria...

...One is Liebling the war reporter...

...As critic of the press Liebling stalked through the jungle, armed with blowgun and poisoned darts...

...The Most of A. J. Liebling contains multitudes, but one man embodied them all...

...who opens fraudulent and evanescent nightclubs...

...By the 1960s Liebling was apt to pile four similes on two metaphors...

...The Most contains excerpts from Between Meeds (1962...

...Liebling's mind was naturally comparative, perceiving similarity in dissimilars, which Aristotle called the sign of genius...

...When a Herald Tribune obituary observed that Patton had more flair than any other general since Custer, Liebling commented: "Though what poor Custer had a flair for I wouldn't know—certainly not Indians...

...The problem is that all this, unlike the Colonel's adventures, is a little too close to the real world...

...Around Liebling, Colonel Stingo adopted his sort of simile ("a steak with a coverture of mushrooms like the blanket of roses they put on the winner of the Kentucky Derby") as did Earl Long ("A fourhundred-dollar suit on old Uncle Earl would look like socks on a rooster...

...Tummler" (Yiddish for "bustler") is about Hymie Katz...

...The Most includes one piece from The Sweet Science (1956) along with a later article on Liston, but the most interesting use Liebling makes of boxing is to quote gnomic wisdom from the trainer Whitey Bimstein or the old fighter Sam Langford as metaphors in remote contexts...

...Far from Eighth Avenue and Stillman's Gym, there is Liebling the Francophile...

...One of the things Liebling liked best about France was its food...

...Lest this fact cast doubt on their existence, let me say that I once dined with Liebling and the Colonel, and that for all I know the Governor may have been a real person too...

...These are matchless...

...Back Where I Came From (1938), Liebling's first book, is a collection of World-Telegram and early New Yorker pieces...

...WRITERS & WRITING A Multitude of Lieblings By Stanley Edgar Hyman The Most of A. J. Liebling (edited by William Cole, Simon and Schuster, 322 pp., $5.95) was published in October to compete for a share of the Christmas trade...

...There is a fine comic piece, "French Without Scars," about Liebling getting beat up on his first stay in France in 1926, and learning idiom and argot from the comments on his appearance made by French acquaintances...

...including Liebling's menu for "the ideal light lunch" in Normandy: "a dozen huîtres de Courseulles, an araignée de mer (spider crab) with a half pint of mayonnaise on the side, a dish of tripes à la mode de Caen, a partridge Olivier Basselin, poached in cream and cider and singed in old Calvados, a gigot de présale, a couple of bifteks, and a good Pont l'Evêque...

...The Most is dedicated to the Colonel (using his real name, James A. Macdonald) at the age of 90, and it reprints two chapters and three fragments from his saga...

...We have lost a lot...

...I have frequently seen a bottle sold for one ounce of gold dust," or seeing him drive his way through a crowd of school-children, "making effective though surreptitious use of his pointy shoes," one realizes that with life's usual capacity for imitating art, it has finally thrown up in reality the character that W. C. Fields played in illusion...

...John R. Stingo...

...Hymie Katz and a Norman carp do after all inhabit the same world...

...These pieces are so funny that one tends not to notice the perfection of anthropological observation...

...Like the comparisons and the boxing wisdom, the strata introduce perspectives by incongruity (to borrow a term from Kenneth Burke...

...To make room for this classic ethnography and for more about Colonel Stingo, to my taste the editor could have dispensed with anything else in the book...

...In the 1950s a sentence might combine a metaphor and a simile, as: "The Norman carp is a conservative investor, not to be taken in, like a trout, by the flash of an obviously spurious insect flourished under his nose like a prospectus for Montenegran carbuncle mines...

...In recent years these figures of speech thickened, and Liebling's style became baroque...

...You must not make bile about it...

...The piece concludes with a tribute from Izzy Yereshevsky, the owner of the I. & Y. (for "Izzy" and "Yereshevsky") cigar store that is Hymie's club...

...In these same years, Liebling's articles became complex in structure, shifting back and forth in time: the Normandy Revisited pieces interweave strata from Liebling's experiences in France in 1926, 1944, and 1955...

...Earl is terribly funny, wearing a tie that is "perhaps a souvenir Rorschach test," or announcing that he is in favor of every religion "with the possible exception of snakechunking" (Liebling explains: "The snake-chunkers, a small, fanatic cult, do not believe in voting...

...With Liebling's death last month, the book suddenly becomes a memorial...

...There were, in fact, a multitude of Lieblings...

...As a war reporter Liebling is sometimes quite funny (he explains the secret of successful cursing as "cadence, emphasis, and antiphony") but more often respectful and a little awed (he writes, of the dead cows on the Normandy battlefield, "we lived in the stench of innocent death...

...The Most reprints several gems from it...