The Well-Fed Words of A. J. Liebling

By ROBERT NADEAU

Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris
By A. J. Liebling. Introduction by James Salter.
185 pages. North Point Press. $14.95.

Abbott Joseph Liebling wrote wonderfully on a variety of subjects high and low. He is especially remembered for his writing about food and boxing, but he was also the first (and still unequalled) media critic and he wrote about World War II and about Paris. Liebling had visited Paris as a child before World War I, spent a year there as a student on a generous allowance in the late 1920s, and returned to cover the early years of World War II, and often in the 1950s. This book is a reissue of a reissue of his late-in-life redaction of a number of columns about Paris, and thus is inevitably also about food, women, and World War II, and less inevitably includes some discussions of boxing.

On food and wine, Liebling is very good, but essentially comic. He originated the entire line of humor about the role of base gluttony in the development of a fastidious palate, which has been since perfected by Calvin Trillin. It was Liebling, and not Trillin, who wrote: “The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down. Each day brings only two opportunities for field work, and they are not to be wasted minimizing the intake of cholesterol. They are indispensable, like a prizefighter’s hours upon the road.”

If the New Yorker’s former Paris columnist Adam Gopnik persists in food writing, Liebling to Trillin to Gopnik will make three generations of secular Jews writing humorously about unkosher food in the pages of the same magazine.

Liebling ate most of his French meals in restaurants, and as a restaurant writer, he was no critic. His method was not to check all the restaurants, but to find one good and affordable one and to mine every specialty and food-wine permutation possible, for as long as possible. When one of his restaurants disappears, it is a tragedy, for which there would be little compensation in slamming its successor.

A problem in reading Liebling today on the subject of overeating is that he died in 1963 of complications of obesity. Much comedy has a tinge of melancholy, but with Liebling the melancholy is not about his own self-destruction, but about the decline of French food and wine in his four decades of gastronomical observance. Trillin, with a better history of weight control, is easier to laugh with on the same material, but perhaps does not get the depth Liebling brought to writing about food and wine, such as this passage about the classic rosé of Tavel:

Tavel has a rose-cerise robe, like a number of well-known racing silks, but its taste is not thin or acidulous, as that of most of its mimics is. The taste is warm but dry, like an enthusiasm held under restraint, and there is a tantalizing suspicion of bitterness when the wine hits the top of the palate. With the second glass, the enthusiasm gains; with the third, it is overpowering. The effect is generous and calorific, stimulative of cerebration and the social instincts. ‘An apparently light but treacherous rosé,’ Root calls it, with a nuance of resentment that hints at some old misadventure.

Waverly Root was Liebling’s contemporary in Paris, and a frequent foil here on matters of food and wine. Earlier Liebling finds Root too hard on Champagne. “Because its excellences are not those of Burgundy or Bordeaux, he underrates the peculiar qualities it does not share with them, as one would chide Dickens for not being Stendhal or Marciano for not being Benny Leonard.”

By the way, the mention of Leonard is one of perhaps three references in the entire book to Jews. Another is a negative comment on Proust (fed on something more substantial than madeleines, he might have written something really good). Liebling was a fully assimilated son of German Jews; he attributed his love of things French to his early rejection of German nannies. When he began boxing and following boxing, in the 1920s, it was a Jewish sport. But Liebling was more interested in fistic style than ethnicity, and in this book writes about a French middleweight, Carpentier. What is Jewish in his work is mostly in the style—the comic mix of high and low references—and in the outsider’s sympathy for underdogs and fellow outsiders.

This leads us to another problem in reading Liebling today—he is of the generation of writers who describe their relations with prostitutes. He reports this as a commonplace of expatriate student life in the 1920s, and the best I can say about the matter is that Liebling describes his regular favorite, Angèle, well enough to make plausible the idea of some real relationship: “Her legs, though well-tapered, were a trifle short and her round head a trifle large for good proportion with her torso, in which there was no room for improvement. It was solid Renoir. Her neck was also a bit short and thick—a good point in a prizefighter but not in a swan. She had clear skin and a sweet breath, and she was well-joined—the kind of girl you could rough up without fear of damage. Angèle had a snub nose, broad at the base, like seckel pear tilted on its axis.”

Here we have women, boxing, food, and high art—and, alas, a dash of sexism—all in a few sentences. Angèle was a fine companion for a few months, and then Liebling had run through his year and his allowance, and was called back to work. Angèle died of influenza the following year. She is recalled sentimentally, but not in great detail. Hers is the last chapter in the book, but her epitaph in a conversation 30 years after her death is given by the author’s former landlord, not by the author. C'est la vie, et la mort.