NONFICTION - Jan. 1, 1995

LEIBLING AT THE NEW YORKER: Uncollected Essays edited by James Barbour and Fred Warner. (New Mexico: $$29.95; 320 pp.) December 22, 1939 (By cable): “In the absence of major disasters, small annoyances have reassumed peacetime proportions. A few weeks ago, for example, a shortage of lemons happened to coincide with the oyster season, a fact which Parisians found hard to bear, and thus the rigors of war were brought home to the Metropolis.” June 1, 1940 (By Wireless): “The bravest Frenchmen are sometimes dismayed, though, when they think of Paris being bombed from the air, because, they say, there is no city in Germany worthy of reprisal.” September 22, 1940 (By Wireless): “Culturally sterile (the Germans) have left no imprint on thought or manners here, except that people still laugh when they recall how the Germans used to shout at each other in cafes....” These excerpts are from A.J. Liebling’s Letter From Paris, a column written from the Hotel Louvois for The New Yorker between September 1939 and June 1940. They comprise about a third of this collection, the rest being various book reviews and pieces on bookmakers, handicappers, soldiers, reporters, con men and delicious foods (“The Soul of Bouillabaisse”). The editors’ have previously published a volume of uncollected boxing pieces, “A Neutral Corner,” but there is also Liebling’s first book of fight pieces, “The Sweet Science,” for those who love his boxing stories above all else.

Liebling was born in 1904 and died in 1963, both in New York. He was expelled from Dartmouth college for cutting chapel, fired from the New York Times, studied French food and cafe life under the guise of medieval history in Paris, and, in 1935, was hired by Harold Ross at the New Yorker. Warner quotes a passage from Liebling’s “The Road Back to Paris,” which seems to provide one of the themes of this collection while beautifully capturing Liebling’s generous spirit, in which the author describes his disappointment whenever the forces of evil and stupidity and humorlessness triumphed, as in his own lifetime: “But I had wanted to see a win, I had wanted my era to be one of those that read well in the books. Some people like to live in a good neighborhood; I like to live in a good age. I am a sucker for a happy ending--the villain kicked in the teeth, the stepchildren released from the dark basement, the hero in bed with the heroine.”