A Cross Between Dickens and Runyon

...Whatever the accuracy of this leap into absentee Freudianism, Liebling did extend the horizons of journalistic practice by reminding the press of the rich broth of newsworthy material to be found among the poor and forgotten...

...In the combat zones of North Africa and Normandy, Liebling left the big picture to the war correspondents and searched out the GI counterparts of the crowd at the I. & Y. The inspiration for a particularly moving example of Liebling's artistry was a faceless corpse he had come upon nicknamed "Mollie," whose real name no one seemed to know...

...He took refuge from that bowdlerization in the straightforwardness of his middle name, "Joe...

...The American press," he said, "reminds me of a gigantic, supermodern fish cannery, a hundred floors high, capitalized at $11,000,000,000, and with tens of thousands of workers standing ready at the canning machines, but relying for its raw material on an inadequate number of handline fishermen in leaky row-boats...

...He was expelled for cutting chapel too often...

...Short men peer up from between the wideflung shoulders of these coats as if they had been lowered into the garments on a rope and were now trying to climb out...

...a man what knows to get a dollar...

...Liebling's distaste for the bourgeois pretensions of the assimilationist "all rightniks" in his family's social set was reflected in his lifelong aversion to the name of "Abbott" his parents had given him in lieu of "Abraham...

...At the age of 8 he was laying the groundwork for that career by reading newspapers with an addict's compul-siveness...

...Liebling was an odd one...

...But his reaction to the suspicion that the values of the rich and powerful everywhere were as bogus as those he had found so offensive as a pampered youth in Far Rockaway was more idiosyncratic...

...Suppose," hewrote, "that the corpse with the face shot away that I saw by La Piste was not Mollie at all, but that Mollie had put his uniform and dog tags on a dead goumier and gone over the hill wearing a Moroccan djellabah to wage a less restricted kind of war, accumulating swag as he went...

...He found his metier during a brief stint as a student reporter in the press "shack" at the old police headquarters in lower Manhattan...

...You will find Liebling as weird a character as any he wrote about, and you will find some stunning examples of reportorial imagery that make Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe look like amateurs...

...Though it was eventually discovered by Liebling that Mollie was one Petuskia, and that in civilian life he had been a busboy in a Greenwich Village bar, the writer had moved so deep into the skin and soul of this dead bandit-hero that he fantasized him back to life in a variety of picaresque guises...

...Soon their son was proclaiming his abhorrence of the grossness of "the lewd, overdressed band" of money-obsessed Jews whom he saw as his neighbors, and his vast preference for the earthy virtues of the Irish working poor who made up most of the rest of the community...

...Sokolov, however, underestimates the love for good reporting carried to the level of literature that underlay even Liebling's most derogatory comments on malpractice of the craft...

...Another regular wanderer through Liebling's columns was Whitey Bimstein, who practiced the healing arts at ringside as a prizefight second with a passion for hot dogs and charlotte russes...

...He was a precocious student...

...I would spread them on the floor and lie down on my belly on them, or take them to bed with me, or into the bathroom...

...In his book, it had "all the intellectual status of a training school for future employees of the A&P...

...As the New Yorker's press critic, Liebling shunned the thunderbolts of Upton Sinclair's "The Brass Check" in favor of a much more incisive—and devastating—ridicule of the inadequacy and bias that outraged him in most American newspapers...

...I like the country, it's a great spot," was among Whitey's deathless comments, but all his own roadwork was done at a walk, selling boxing tickets to his neighbors...

...The blend of wit, insight, erudition and occasional malice that gave zest to his own pieces showed to even greater advantage in the role he is best remembered for—that of press critic, which he took on in 1945 when he persuaded the magazine to revive "The Wayward Press" department that Robert Benchley had conducted during the Great Depression...

...And suppose he was living in Morocco now with a harem, a racing stable and a couple of Saharan oil wells...

...Born in 1904, the son of apros-perous furrier who had fought his way up from poverty after landing at Ellis Island from Austria 20 years before, Liebling learned early how to be miserable amid luxury and privilege...

...Pounding up tenement stairs with the scruffy veterans of the police beat and bursting in on families disarranged by sudden misfortune brought him for the first time into juicy contact with the jungle where Gotham's little people live, love, laugh, and fleece one another...

...His personal life, as detailed in this intriguing biography by Raymond Sokolov, was an almost undiluted mess...

...Or suppose he had switched uniforms with a dead German, and thereafter, as a secret agent confounded all the Wehrmacht's plans...

...The worst thing about the school, he complained, was that it took as its model the "colorless, odorless and especially tasteless Times of 1923, a political hermaphrodite capable of intercourse with conservatives of both parties at the same time...

...Although not much for taking notes, he had a marvelous ear...

...His father monopolized the Times, which was just fine with young Joe...

...He was no Walter Lippmann as a political analyst, nor did he aspire to be...

...They are not pioneers in the fictionalizing of fact or, as they prefer to put it, uncovering the truth that transcends the truth...

...Since his weak eyes and clumsiness made him poor at sports, he took out his frustration by becoming a nuisance in the classroom, palling around with the school athletic heroes and writing vaguely anti-Semitic love poems to the Irish girls who entranced him...

...If all these cavalier judgments, reached before his 21 st birthday, leave you in some doubt that Liebling ever was to attain towering astuteness in assessing larger issues, you are right...

...It led him into his career as a cross between Charles Dickens and Damon Runyon, the chronicler of a world populated by "the weight-lifters, yodelers, tugboat captains and sideshow barkers," plus a thousand other classes of demimondaines...

...His writings in the New Yorker over the nearly three decades prior to his death in 1963 were reportorial classics, elegant examples of how much of substance and illumination could be extracted from concentrating on the mean, the trivial and the tragic...

...He loathed publishers and delighted to stick pins into their pomposity...

...It was too bland for his sensationalist appetite...

...He liked to operate in disguise, as he proved when he fooled the French officers at Casablanca, and superior officers of foreign powers confided in him on sight...

...He never could come to terms with his Jew-ishness...

...Sokolov explains this phase of Liebling's emergence as a return to his roots, a reaching out for the side of his father he always found most appealing, the years when "Pop" Liebling was pulling dirty tricks to build up his fortune before settling into sissified respectability...

...A Liebling darling among the habitues of the I. & Y. was Hymie Katz, a sharpie night-club promoter whose cronies summed him up with this accolade: "a tummeler...

...Mollie had crawled up to an Italian position with an Italian-speaking buddy and conned 147 enemy troops into surrendering...

...He hated the place...

...His special favorite was the New York Journal, then the yellowest of all Hearst papers, so dreadful that he had to sneak it into the house because his mother forbade it inside the door...

...His impatience with campus routine finally undid him...

...He returned to New York prepared to take up the life of a boulevardier, but his father's indulgence came to an abrupt halt and Liebling entered the Pulitzer School of Journalism at Columbia as a shield against going to work straightaway...

...But he was a magician with words, a journalist of colossal capacity, both in the sensitivity of his perceptions and the felicity of their expression...

...Don't let that myopia of judgment deter you from reading Wayward Reporter...

...For all his cantankerousness, Liebling forged ahead so rapidly in school that he qualified for admission to Dartmouth at 15...

...Raskin Associate Director, National News Council Even in New York, where the bizarre is the only commonplace, A.J...

...They are just imitators of a master...

...Liebling's interest was in the offbeats of society—the lowlifes of the Broadway sporting scene, the con men and the chippies, the mavericks among the generals and the dogfaces on the battlefields of World War II...

...What the biographer misses, in his own condescension toward journalism as art, is how completely the intertwining of the two represented his subject's special gift...

...Not long after 537 more followed suit, persuaded by Mol-Iie's wildly valorous harangue...

...He had the look of a gargoyle, alternately benign and belligerent, with a great moon of a face, dark bowler perched atop his bald pate, eyes squinting through glasses of incredible thickness, belly swollen by his exaltation of gluttony to a high art...

...He tuned in often on the talk at Izzy Yereshevsky's I. & Y. Cigar Store, an all-night emporium frequented by a distinctive Broadway clientele: "Most of [Izzy's] evening guests—their purchases are so infrequent that it would be misleading to call them customers?wear white felt hats and overcoats of a style known to them as English Drape...

...I could not believe," he wrote afterward, "that the college could be serious about maintaining such an absurd vestige of its missionary days...

...The Lieblings were early suburbanites, having moved in 1913 from West End Avenue to what was then the rural village of Far Rockaway...

...Once again he shone academically, though his most prized companions were jocks and toughs of the kind he had sought out at high school...

...To Sokolov, the zenith of Liebling's ambition was to cast off the demeaning roleof reporter and become a serious writer of memorable books...

...Their smell and texture had the same sensual immediacy for me as the taste of the cookies I ate while reading them," was the way he described this much later...