NOT ENOUGH LIEBLING: The best American writer you mightn’t've heard about

In early 1964, two weeks after A.J. Liebling died, the New Yorker ran his obituary. William Shawn wrote: “Liebling’s passionate interests [included] New York, Paris, North Africa, boxing, military theory, horseracing, newspapers, labor, food, medieval history, Broadway life, Stendhal, Camus, Colonel Stingo, Pierce Egan, Stephen Crane, and Ibn Khaldun. These were some of his subjects, and he knew them all thoroughly; he was the most protean of scholars.”

Last year I responded to a Craigslist ad seeking boxing writers. I had never written about boxing, and despite following the spectacle of the UFC, I hadn’t paid attention to boxing since Lewis beat Tyson in June of 2002. But having no other journalism prospects, I responded. The editor asked if I would send along a sample of my writing. That afternoon I sat down and wrote a thousand-word piece on a UFC fight I’d seen the weekend before and got hired immediately for an annual salary of $50 and some flattering emails. An editor, I found, can get a lot of free work by praising his writers.

Without any of the requisite experience to cover sports—especially one I did not know intimately—I scrabbled around for someone to model my reporting after. For Christmas I’d been given the Complete New Yorker, and figured somewhere on its seven DVDs of articles, someone had written about pugilism. I searched for Cassius Clay (not yet Muhammad Ali) on the disk cataloguing the 1960s. An article called “Poet and Pedagogue” turned up, and I began to read.

“When Floyd Patterson regained the world heavyweight championship by knocking out Ingemar Johansson in June, 1960,” A.J. Liebling begins the article, “he so excited a teenager named Cassius Marcellus Clay, in Louisville, Kentucky, that Clay, who was a good amateur light heavyweight, made up a ballad in honor of the victory.” Liebling goes on:

At the time, Clay was too busy training for the Olympic boxing tournament in Rome that summer to set his ode down on paper, but he memorized it, as Homer and Gregson must have done with their things, and then polished it up in his head…In between his composition of the poem and his appearance on Twenty-eighth Street [where he was training for his first professional fight], Clay had been to Rome and cleaned up his Olympic competition with aplomb, which is his strongest characteristic. The other finalist had been a Pole with a name that it takes two rounds to pronounce, but Cassius had not tried…He had then turned professional under social and financial auspices sufficient to launch a bank, and had won ten tryout bouts on the road.”

I am a great fan of the Hemingway’s brevity, but I am also a hedonist; lush prose, if it is precise, is as pleasurable to read as a foie gras is to eat. So to come across Liebling, whose subjects ranged from politicians to publishers, but who preferred soldiers and boxers, I felt an instant kinship.

David Remnick, who now edits the New Yorker, provided the forward to a fine collection of Liebling’s essays, entitled Just Enough Liebling. In his introduction Remnick describes going to Shakespeare & Company in Paris, where Hemingway borrowed copies of Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. By the 1970s, those books were available in England and America, too, and Remnick had read them. But he had not read Liebling’s The Sweet Science, which, though never banned, had fallen out of print. “I’d heard of Liebling but never read him,” Remnick writes. “He was a hero to some of the ‘new journalists’ of the sixties and seventies…Sitting on the floor of [Shakespeare & Company], I started The Sweet Science…I read half the book right there and the rest that night.”

Another veteran of the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik, offered this jacket quote to Just Enough Liebling:

Liebling, it’s now apparent, is not just one of the great American reporters but one of the great American writers, whose baroque sentences continue to twist and turn and soar to our delight and instruction, his high and hyperbolic comic constructions glinting in the light of his first-rate and empirical intelligence.

That is just the reaction I had to Liebling, immediately and eventually. He is perhaps the greatest American prose stylist, if we disregard Nabokov for getting born in Russia. In The Sweet Science there is an essay called “Nino and a Nanimal” that concerns a wild, undisciplined young boxer named Tommy Jackson whom his trainers—Whitey and Freddie—had dubbed “The Animal,” and which when preceded by the indefinite article, and pronounced with a healthy Long Island accent, comes out “a nanimal.”

On the night of the fight, I was more excited than I had been before any match for years, and for purely subjective reasons. If the animal won, it meant that the Sweet Science was mere guess work, requiring not even a specialized intelligence…There have been plenty of musicians and painters who didn’t have much sense otherwise, and Dostoevsky was a political imbecile…I wished Whitey and Freddie all kinds of luck with their more conventional clients, but if the animal could beat even a fair fighter, it meant that two hundred and fifty years of painfully acquired experience had been lost to the human race; science was a washout and art a vanity, and Freddie and Whitey had queered their own game.

This is remarkable introductory prose, and I don’t hesitate to say that I could read Liebling writing in the abstract for a hundred pages without blinking. But a great writer handles scenes as well as he handles his exposition. The following I submit as evidence that he could do both with equal humor and style:

Jackson, who had joined us [at the Athletic Commission’s medical office], put his hands on the shoulders of the two quarreling men. “Why can’t you guys get along?” he asked. “I’m the fighter. I’m the one should do the worrying, not you.” He turned to Freddie Brown, who had brought him into town on a bus from his training quarters in Greenwood Lake, New York. “I don’t like it here,” Jackson said. “I want to go back to the mountains, shoot a mouse. No mouses here.”

“You can’t go back now,” Brown said in a soothing voice. Then he turned to me. “Hurricane [Jackson] found a new interest,” he said. “He shoots rats with a twenty-two. He calls them mice.”

“Mouses,” the fighter corrected him. “I shoot them between the eyes.” He seemed depressed.

And a little later on:

When [Jackson’s opponent] Valdes took the pink shirt off in the medical examiner’s office, we could see that he was wearing a gold chain with an amulet around his eighteen-inch neck, which he considers his most impressive feature. He got the neck by carrying three-hundred-and-thirty pound sacks of sugar on his head as a boy. It makes him look slightly pinheaded…The Cuban was six feet three, an inch and a half taller than Jackson, but Jackson had longer arms. Jackson, who continued to look glum, cheered up for a minute when Dr. Nardiello allowed him to listen to his own heart through the stethoscope. “It sounds good!” he shouted. “Solid!” But soon he was pouting again…

Two days later, I heard that Jackson had run away from the mountains [where he was training], because Freddie wouldn’t let him ride a horse.

I feel compelled to remind people of Liebling, or introduce people to him, because I felt embarrassed, when I discovered him, that I’d never heard of his work before. It seems for all its popularity on the bestsellers’ lists, non-fiction rarely attains the plane of art, and so decomposes quickly in our national consciousness. By the time Remnick found Liebling, he was out of print. He’s been revived, but perhaps because he never wrote a great novel he isn’t mentioned in the same breath with our national literary treasures. But he is, without a doubt, a writer every journalist and novelist and short story writer should know intimately. He is a master of balancing intellect, humor, and emotion. Let’s keep him in print this go round.

By James Kaelan