From the start of the American republic, the most tantalizing means of indulging a youthful desire for escape and re-creation has been the sojourn in Paris. It’s a long tradition, amply described. The literature begins with the decorous engagements in the letters of Benjamin Franklin and Abigail Adams and leads soon enough to the earthier liaisons in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and “Tropic of Cancer.” Much is promised to the prospective traveller: if not a passage of enlightenment or erotic adventure, then at least a taste for boiled innards and string beans done right. As Mrs. Adams wrote home, pleasure is the “business of life” in Paris—there is another way to live, in other words—and this is the lasting gift, and illusion, that every visiting American brings home in his bags.
To this day, countless children of American privilege arrive in the Latin Quarter, bent double under their backpacks and concealing a money belt holding a Eurail pass and a freshly squeezed carte orange. One of the pleasures of such an indolent, never-to-be-repeated existence is the liberty it provides the student on leave from academy-drafted reading lists and deadlines that frog-march undergraduates up and down “The Magic Mountain” in the time it took Hans Castorp to catch cold. In the late seventies, while on a sojourn of my own, I bought or borrowed my books at Shakespeare & Company, the destination for English-speaking waywards on the Rue de la Bûcherie near Notre-Dame. One afternoon, while I was browsing in the “used” section, a friend pulled down a paperback by A. J. Liebling for me. I’d heard of Liebling but never read him. He was a hero to some of the “new journalists” of the sixties and seventies, who put him in a nonfiction lineage that begins with Defoe. But Liebling had died fifteen years earlier, in 1963, and almost all of his books were out of print. Sitting on the floor, I started “The Sweet Science,” with its introductory flourish:
I read half the book right there and the rest that night. The Rubens canvases at the Louvre were checked off in my guidebook, but for me Liebling was now the Baroque. His descriptions of the postwar boxing scene at Madison Square Garden, Yankee Stadium, the Polo Grounds, the country training camps, and the midtown gyms constitute a self-enclosed comic universe, and, in the construction and the telling, his pieces are superior even to William Hazlitt’s famous account of the “Gasman” Hickman-Bill Neat bout in Hungerford, Berkshire, in 1821, and Liebling’s own cherished model, “Boxiana,” the multivolume chronicles of the Regency-era fighters, by Pierce Egan. In a style of mock high diction undercut by the homeliness of the subject, of metaphorical flight and eccentric references—a style, in other words, that pays greater homage to the verbal dandyism of Egan (and Mencken and Runyon) than to the hardboiled approach of the tabloids—Liebling made the art of bruising and its practitioners as vivid as any country fair in Dickens. In “The Sweet Science”—in all his books—Liebling himself, the voice and the character, is immensely appealing: he is boundlessly curious, a listener, a boulevardier, a man of appetites and sympathy. He is erudite in an unsystematic, wised-up sort of way. His sentences are snaky and digressive, and thrive on the talk of the Times Square gyms and cigar stores. The boxing pieces are populated by the champions of his time—Ray Robinson, Joe Louis, Archie Moore, Rocky Marciano—but equally present are the artisans and satraps of the ring world, the sparring partners, the cut-and-bucket men and the professorial trainers, like Whitey Bimstein, who presided over Stillman’s Gym, “the university of Eighth Avenue,” as firmly as Robert Maynard Hutchins ran the University of Chicago. Bimstein was a prototypical Liebling cast member, New York to the bone. Asked about his experience outside the city, Bimstein allowed, “I like the country. It’s a great spot.”
Besotted with “The Sweet Science,” I went back to Shakespeare & Company and took the only other Liebling on the shelf, a copy of “The Road Back to Paris,” his first volume of dispatches from France during the Second World War. Combat journalism is prone to some of the same sins as sportswriting—the self-dramatizing narrative voice, the bogus pronouncements. Only the clichés, and the stakes, are different. Liebling, it was obvious, was incapable of cliché, and, if anything, he protested too adamantly his limitations as an observer of the world beyond home. He claimed innocence of high politics and the scale of evil he was about to engage: “Hitler had seemed to me revolting but unimportant, like old Gómez, the dictator of Venezuela.” The only way he was prepared to imagine the German enemy was through homey, ahistorical analogy. “I did not think about Germany,” he wrote. “When I was a small child I had had a succession of German governesses all indistinguishably known to me as Fraülein. They had been servile to my parents and domineering to me, stupid, whining, loud, and forever trying to frighten me with stories of children who had been burned to a crisp or eaten by an ogre because they had disobeyed other Fraüleins. . . . Anybody who had had a German governess could understand Poland.”
Liebling’s subjects in his maturity bloomed from the appetites and interests of his youth. As a reporter, he was both observer and memoirist, seeing and looking within. His love of New York became “Back Where I Came From”; an attention to battle and a passion for France led to “The Road to Paris,” “Mollie and Other War Pieces,” and “Normandy Revisited”; a romance with newspapers led to the criticism of “The Press” and “The Wayward Pressman”; his taste for rogues of all varieties became “The Telephone Booth Indian,” “The Honest Rainmaker,” and “The Earl of Louisiana.” The early passions are always present. His last book, “Between Meals,” is as much about the memory of exultant living as it is about the gigot d’agneau on his plate.
Abbott Joseph Liebling was not born to the demimonde. His father was a penniless Jewish immigrant from Austria who had become prosperous as a furrier. His mother was from a well-to-do Jewish family in San Francisco. By the time of Liebling’s birth, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a century ago—on October 18, 1904—there was no taste for religion in the house; any trace of the shtetl or the Lower East Side had been fairly expunged. The aspiration was toward comfort and a variety of Americanness. The Lieblings lived first in apartments in Manhattan and then in an oak-shaded house near the beaches of Far Rockaway. They were attended by a string of fräuleins, German maids, cooks, and family attendants, along with a “houseman” named Louis, “a Tyrolese from Meran.” There were trips to Europe beginning when our hero was three, and, always, dinners at good restaurants in town.
Liebling, who started out “Abbott” and eventually insisted on “Joe,” was the sort of brainy child who did not seem to mind that he was neither handsome nor athletic. He was plump and pigeon-toed, and had tiny, delicate hands, but he also had a certain confidence. (In middle age, he crowned his avoirdupois with thick-lensed, wire-rimmed spectacles and a bowler—gestures of the selfassured.) He did well in school in a happily random sort of way. With equal enthusiasm he memorized the names of Napoleon’s marshals, the cast of “The Pickwick Papers,” and the characters in the Sunday funnies. His guide to the greater world and to his own future was contained in the armload of papers his father brought home from work every day: “It is impossible for me to estimate how many of my early impressions of the world, correct and the opposite, came to me through newspapers. Homicide, adultery, no-hit pitching, and Balkanism were concepts that, left to my own devices, I would have encountered much later in life.”
Following a semi-successful run at Dartmouth (from which he was booted for missing chapel once too often), Liebling attended Columbia’s journalism school. Indifferent to the curriculum and its modest expectations, he studied French and translated the erotica of Restif de la Bretonne on the side. Otherwise, he wrote later in “The Wayward Pressman,” the program had “all the intellectual status of a training school for future employees of the A & P.” Like many novice reporters, he had literary ambitions, which at first he took to be the province of fiction. Over the years, he began and abandoned many short stories and longer pieces, including a novel called “The Girl with the Cauliflower Ear: A Romance,” about a female boxer named Eula who, after plunging into an aquarium tank in a moment of suicidal doubt, falls in love with an ichthyologist.
After finishing at Columbia, Liebling had a brief apprenticeship on the Evening World, which opened up a gaudy landscape of police shacks, curbside tragedies, and late-night card games. Liebling took to it. A press pass for a child of the Rockaway bourgeoisie was a ticket to experience, without experience’s costs. “I liked to pound up tenement stairs and burst in on families disarranged by sudden misfortune,” he wrote about his first assignments as a reporter. “It gave me a chance to make contact with people I would never otherwise have met, and I learned almost immediately what every reporter knows, that most people are eager to talk about their troubles and are rather flattered by the arrival of the World or the Journal.” He went on to a beginner’s job in the Times sports department, where he was charged with writing up basketball box scores, a chore that bored him to such a degree that he occasionally wrote Ignoto—“Unknown,” in Italian—in the space reserved for the name of the referee. Some nights, according to Liebling, Ignoto officiated games throughout the city. Liebling claimed that when this crime was discovered his boss fired him for being irresponsible. He told the story repeatedly, and with relish, and it may even have been true. What is surely the case, his biographer Raymond Sokolov makes plain, is that Liebling was an indifferent stenographer. He had no future at the Times.
In 1926, Liebling’s father came to the rescue by asking him if he might like to suspend his career (he was now starting work at the Journal in Providence) and take a year to “study” in Paris. Never has a son been in such ready agreement with his protector:
Thus began what surely must be recorded as the most salubrious year abroad since Flaubert left for Egypt. France was, for yet another American, a sentimental education. “I liked the sensation of immersion in a foreign element, as if floating in a summer sea, only my face out of water, and a pleasant buzzing in my ears,” Liebling later wrote. “I was often alone, but seldom lonely.” His monthly drawing account was sufficient to bankroll the young man’s desire to study (lightly) at the Sorbonne and to dine (with relish) at the best of Paris’s lower-priced restaurants. Liebling began to eat, and eat, as if his life, and his eventual livelihood, depended on it. It was soon his contention that, just as a fighter must put in his roadwork to extend his stamina for the later rounds, so, too, must a true eater (and fledgling food writer) consume enormously if he is to have a range of dietary experience worth sharing. What would he have to say, after all, on a diet of soda water and scrambled eggs? Proust’s madeleine was a mere “tea biscuit” and a barrier to greater literary achievement: “In the light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world’s loss that he did not have a heartier appetite. On a dozen Gardiners Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of steamers, some bay scallops, three sautéed soft-shelled crabs, a few ears of fresh-picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of lobsters, and a Long Island duck, he might have written a masterpiece.”
It was under the instruction of Yves Mirande, a Parisian legend of both the stage and the plate, that Liebling learned to eat with ambition. In a typical meal, he followed the order of Darwinian evolution, beginning with the bivalves and halting only at the primates. As he writes in “Between Meals,” Mirande was for him a tutor of the heart and the body:
When Liebling came home to New York, he proceeded to campaign for a job on Joseph Pulitzer’s World, which carried the work of James M. Cain and Walter Lippmann and was known at the time as “the writer’s paper.” In order to attract the attention of the city editor, James W. Barrett, Liebling hired an out-of-work Norwegian seaman to walk for three days outside the Pulitzer Building, on Park Row, wearing sandwich boards that read, “Hire Joe Liebling.” Barrett took no notice of the sandwich boards, but another editor hired Liebling as a freelance feature writer after reading one of his pieces. Now Liebling could begin hanging out at the saloons and night clubs, the racetracks and corner stores, where he met the harmless “parliament of monsters” who eventually appeared in “Back Where I Came From” and “The Honest Rainmaker.” The World was an all-access ticket for Liebling, then in his late twenties. He felt tickled to call it a job.
“The pattern of a newspaperman’s life is like the plot of ‘Black Beauty,’ ” he wrote. “Sometimes he finds a kind master who gives him a dry stall and an occasional bran mash in the form of a Christmas bonus, sometimes he falls into the hands of a mean owner who drives him in spite of spavins and expects him to live on potato peelings. The Sunday World was a dry-stall interlude in my wanderings.”
Things turned chilly and damp after 1931, when the perfidious Roy Howard bought the World and merged it with his Evening Telegram to form the World-Telegram; but, in the meantime, Liebling, working alongside his new colleague and friend Joseph Mitchell, was set free to interview the likes of Casey Stengel and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, cover pinochle tournaments, and make heroes of the self-appointed “mayors” of various city neighborhoods. One of the commonplaces of feature writing at the time was a tendency to embroider. That is, there was a lot of making things up or, at the very least, helping things along. What is now a hanging offense was then a risible misdemeanor. Details were embellished, colors heightened, dialogue faked. Liebling was a superior reporter and writer, but he also availed himself of the era’s advantages. At this point, there is no telling precisely what his characters said and what Liebling supplied. Without making excuses for him, one can say that he did seem to make genre distinctions: his work on more serious matters—the war, the press—was factual. The rules have changed radically, and Liebling’s gifts and reporting energies were such that he would surely have had little trouble adjusting to them, in a poolroom or on a battlefield.
Liebling joined Harold Ross’s New Yorker in 1935, when he was thirty. He was informed that five stories were “reserved” for him, including “Africa, Big Game, Hunting In” and “Billiardists, Finger-Technique, Exploits.” Nothing much came of that. But, after an awkward year in which he stuck too closely to the conventions of newspaper feature writing, Liebling had his first triumph at the magazine, doing all the reporting for a three-part Profile of a preacher and mountebank named Father Divine. The piece, which was written mainly by St. Clair McKelway and was published under the title “Who Is This King of Glory?,” helped Liebling get accustomed to the time and the space that no newspaper could afford him. He also perfected a singular interviewing style; according to Brendan Gill, he would “sit facing the person from whom he intended to elicit information; and then sit there and sit there, silently. . . . Liebling’s method left the interviewee unnerved and at a loss as to what he was expected to defend himself against; by the time Liebling had put the first question to him, he was ready to babble almost any indiscretion.”
Along with Mitchell, who fled the World-Telegram and joined the New Yorker staff in 1938, Liebling soon transformed the magazine. In voice and carriage, the two men complemented each other. They walked the city together and ate lunch together at the Red Devil and Villa Nova and drank at Bleeck’s and Costello’s, and, on weekends, they went to the Rockaway beaches together to wade in the ocean and listen to the crowds. Mitchell was a courtly North Carolinian; unlike Liebling, he came at the city from the outside in, though his sympathy for its characters was no less absolute. The temperaments of the two men, especially on the page, diverged. In person, Liebling could be unnervingly quiet, but in print he was an ebullient Falstaff to Mitchell’s Feste, the melancholic clown in “Twelfth Night.” Liebling was ribaldly comic, prolific, a writer of big effects, while Mitchell could be as spare in his line as he was in his output. (Mitchell died in 1996, outliving Liebling by thirty-three years, but he stopped publishing after his masterpiece, “Joe Gould’s Secret,” ran in the magazine, in 1964—just eight months after Liebling’s valedictory essay, “Paysage de Crépuscule.”)
What Liebling and Mitchell shared most intensely was a love for the city and an unpretentious yet serious interest in the higher reaches of journalism. For his part, Liebling admired, and meant to emulate, the British writers of the eighteenth century who observed every corner of society, the Fancy who ruled things and the Poor who feigned to listen; he favored above all the ones who wrote least stingily both in volume and in metaphorical profusion—Defoe, Egan, and Hazlitt. Liebling also called on influences as varied as George Borrow, the British literary adventurer and Bible salesman, and Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth-century Tunisian historian, and commonly quoted them for historical authority and ironic flavoring. Liebling’s office contained just what his readers might have expected: stacks of newspapers, unfinished manuscripts, a three-volume edition of “Boxiana,” Harold Nicolson’s “The Congress of Vienna,” the collected Camus, the latest Annual Report of the New-York Historical Society, Stendhal’s “Journal,” and von Bernhardi’s “Cavalry in War and Peace.”
Joy, pure and immediate, is a rare literary experience. Liebling provides it. And, from everything we know, joy is what he felt in the creating. No matter what else he may have been facing in his life—misery in marriage, persistent debt, the obesity and sickness that were the price of his appetites—he revelled in his work. Liebling so enjoyed himself at the offices of The New Yorker, where he worked for twenty-eight years, that he could be heard humming and snorting with laughter as he pulled the sheets from his typewriter and read them over. He knocked himself out, if he did say so himself. Reticence was not his way. Like Trollope polishing off several thousand words before leaving for his day job as surveyor general of Waltham Cross, Liebling wrote at a blinding rate, publishing hundreds of pieces, of all lengths, colors, and moods. He was occasionally seen in the magazine’s bathroom stripped to the waist, washing up after a night’s exertion at his Remington.
Despite Liebling’s prodigious output at the magazine, and the collection of those pieces into books, he never ceased to see himself as a melancholy “wage slave,” forever in debt. His letters, hundreds of them, are filled with the details of his shortfalls, tax problems, and dunning notices. His first wife, Ann McGinn, whom he married in 1934, had grown up in an orphanage and, as it soon became evident, was schizophrenic; she required long and expensive hospital stays. Even after their separation, Liebling continued to pay most of her bills. She suffered from hallucinations and “fugue states”; she would sometimes get up from a restaurant table, walk out the door, and disappear for days. Liebling’s second wife, Lucille Spectorsky, was a spendthrift whom one friend, the New Yorker editor Gardner Botsford, recalls as “a big blonde from rural Kentucky, amiable if dumb.” Liebling’s only moments of conjugal peace came with the writer Jean Stafford, who had been married, unhappily, to Robert Lowell. Their union was hardly a picnic on the lawn—there was a great deal of drinking and decline, and Stafford stopped writing—but the four years they spent together were the least miserable either one had known.
And yet, professionally, Liebling was almost never blocked or unlucky. In 1939, when Harold Ross began to prepare for the coming war, he sent Liebling to Paris, a move that seems perfectly right now but occurred mostly because the magazine’s correspondent in France, Janet Flanner, had to rush home to her ailing mother, and because, as Liebling recalled, “I had spent several man-hours of barroom time impressing St. Clair McKelway, then managing editor, with my profound knowledge of France.” As Liebling readily admitted, he was not exactly Ernie Pyle but, rather, a New York reporter of a particular kind. “There is an old proverb that a girl may sleep with one man without being a trollop, but let a man cover one little war and he is a war correspondent,” he wrote in “The Road Back to Paris.” “I belong to the one-war category. I have made no appearances for Mr. Colton Leigh, the lecture agent, either in a gas mask or out of one, and I have no fascinating reminiscences about Addis Ababa or the Cliveden set. Prior to October 1938 my only friends were prize fighters’ seconds, Romance philologists, curators of tropical fish, kept women, promoters of spit-and-toilet-paper night clubs, bail bondsmen, press agents for wrestlers, horse clockers, newspaper reporters, and female psychiatrists.” Ross was wary of this experience, and his advice to Liebling was “For God’s sake keep away from low-life.” Liebling was convinced that Ross was trying to “disinfect” the magazine and publish only pieces about “Supreme Court justices and the Persian Room of the Plaza.” Nevertheless, he promised to keep his coverage “reasonably clean and high-class” and booked a ticket on a Pan American Clipper to Lisbon.
Reading Liebling’s pieces from Paris (and, later, from London and the North African front), you don’t get a coherent idea of the course of the war. There is little talk of high politics or the over-all battlefield. But such coherence, the editors must have calculated, was the business of the Times in the short run and the historians in the long. What Liebling in his frequent dispatches provided was a richly textured sense of the day-to-day reality of occupation, invasion, and battle—a foxhole successor of “Homage to Catalonia,” a forerunner of “Dispatches.” In Paris, Liebling installed himself at the Hotel Louvois, looked up some old friends, and eventually followed the retreat of the government to Tours and then to Bordeaux.
Gardner Botsford, then an officer in the First Infantry Division, met him in Caumont, France, one afternoon. “One’s first view of Liebling dressed for combat was a memorable one,” Botsford writes in his memoir, “A Life of Privilege, Mostly.” He continues:
As a correspondent, Liebling took history personally. The collapse of France, in June, 1940, was a tragedy not only for the French. “France represented for me the historical continuity of intelligence and reasonable living,” he wrote. “When this continuity is broken, nothing anywhere can have meaning until it is reëstablished. After the Munich settlement I began to be anxious.” At war, Liebling no longer employs the high-diction, low-reference voice of his city pieces. Though he was a writer of voluble digression and irony, he also knew something about control and modulation. His sentences are tighter, more direct, less jokey. In “Quest for Mollie,” Liebling tells of travelling during one offensive on La Piste Forestière, a dirt road on the northern coast of Tunisia, where Allied forces had fought Italian and German troops, and coming across the refuse of fighting—“bits of the war . . . like beads on a string.” He encountered a lone corpse, “a private known as Mollie.” A month later, after the Allied victory in North Africa, Liebling heard more about “Mollie,” evidently a colorful native of Hell’s Kitchen, and so, back in New York, he moves around the city, from bar to union headquarters, reconstructing the often contradictory details of Mollie’s life, and giving an ordinary young man a representative immortality. “When I walk through the West Side borderland between Times Square and the slums, where Mollie once lived, I often think of him and his big talk and his golf-suit grin. It cheers me to think there may be more like him all around me—a notion I would have dismissed as sheer romanticism before World War II. Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience.”
At all times, Liebling is self-mocking, close to the ground, reminding the reader that the correspondent has only a particular view of the war, that the best he can relay is what he actually sees in a given moment: the fear and the boredom and the discomfort. (“If there is any way you can get colder than you do when you sleep in a bedding roll on the ground in a tent in southern Tunisia two hours before dawn, I don’t know about it.”) Even in Normandy during the D Day invasion, there is no self-admiration or grandeur. His tone is clear and so is his gaze, even when he is swept up by what, for him, was surely the greatest triumph of the war, the liberation of Paris:
Liebling’s sense of civilization was finally righted, and, as ever, he sensed civilization through its pleasures, the anticipation of dessert, the bicyclists speeding through the streets, the careless exposure of a young woman’s legs. Paris was free.
By the end of the war, Liebling’s stature had begun to match his girth. He was a big voice in New York journalism, something new, and he needed a new subject at The New Yorker, beyond the recreations of the sweet science. He found it in the shenanigans and vanities of American newspapers. (Television had not begun in earnest, and radio seemed not to interest him.) Reviving the Wayward Press department, Liebling returned to the comic voice of his New York reporting pieces and retooled it for criticism. His politics leaned left, and he hardly concealed his disdain for most newspaper owners and for the conventions of right-wing journalism. In “Horsefeathers Swathed in Mink,” he wrote, “There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor,” and eviscerated even the Times for taking up the nonexistent case of a woman in a mink coat “with $60,000” in assets who was said to be receiving welfare checks from the city. He bashed the columnist Joseph Alsop, who “orbits the earth like a moon, descending for a day or two now and then to lecture an Arabian King or a Bessarabian prelate on his duties”; he did the same to Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, who made preposterous around-the-world reporting trips in his private plane, putting Liebling in mind of “Tom Sawyer and his balloon.” He was a critic but not a scold. After Stalin died, in March, 1953, and the papers issued endless contradictory reports, all with boundless certainty, about the cause of his death, Liebling seemed a man in bliss as he sorted through the clippings spread across his desk. “Inconsiderate to the last, Josef Stalin, a man who never had to meet a deadline, had the bad taste to die in installments,” he observed on March 28th. In a later column, he wrote:
The names of those who came under Liebling’s assault are now mainly forgotten, but their bigotry and jingoism and fakery all have resonant equivalents today. It is usually a tiresome exercise to imagine what some departed luminary would make of present-day follies: “What would Mencken have thought about George W. Bush?,” and so on. With Liebling, however, the temptation is hard to resist, given the range and big-heartedness of his disapprovals. We miss the ferocity of his attack. What, indeed, would Liebling have made of Geraldo Rivera at war or Ann Coulter’s best-selling charges of treason? What would he have written of the Tyson-Holyfield ear-biting fight or a Times Square in which Colonel Stingo and the porn palaces have been replaced by Madame Tussaud’s and Toys R Us? Of the decline of French cooking or the rise of Rupert Murdoch? We imagine him laughing as he yanks a page from his typewriter.
Liebling finished his life and career with two masterpieces, “The Earl of Louisiana,” a book-length profile of Huey Long’s half-mad brother Earl, and “Between Meals,” a memoir of Paris and of pleasure itself. At war and at home, Liebling had always feigned a certain indifference to politics—or, rather, he approached the subject with the derision it usually deserves—and yet in his campaign travels through Louisiana with Earl Long he is hilarious and capable of glossing the racial dynamics and Mediterranean spirit of Louisiana, simply because he is a supreme observer. He writes:
As a voice in print, Liebling was almost invariably buoyant and alive. As a man, he tended toward diffidence, even periods of melancholy. The trait grew more pronounced as he aged. Money problems and health problems were wearing him down. What had been a torrent of words was, by 1963, a trickle. It took him months to work through a short piece on Camus’s notebooks. Heart and kidney ailments, along with repeated bouts of the flu and the pain of chronic gout, made writing difficult. Soon he was no longer writing at all. “For the first time in his life, he developed a real block,” Jean Stafford told Sokolov. “Depression was new to him.” His head filled with Camus, Liebling made a reporting trip to Algeria, but nothing came of it. He visited Paris and Normandy, knowing that it was likely for the last time. A kind of despair was overtaking him. One afternoon, Liebling and his friend and New Yorker colleague Philip Hamburger were returning to the office from lunch. “One of those New York grotesques appeared, half crippled, half spastic,” Hamburger said later. “Joe took one look and began to cry. I could see something was wrong. He was on the edge.” Liebling died on December 28th. He was fifty-nine. His last words were in French. ♦
