Like when he writes about France’s military and political establishments.
How they and the great industrialists sold France out, along with their right-wing propagandists, who prepared the way beforehand. The pieces he wrote after the war analyzing how the French right-wing press and its party connections contributed to the fall of France. This is just one of the ways he does what any great war correspondent does: he doesn’t publish the government handout, he takes us past the cartoon version of events.
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What about his writing grabbed you?
He did it in his own way and it was beyond imitation. Nobody could imitate what he did because it came too much from the personality and life of the guy himself and everything he knew, from the history of Arab philosophy to the best food in the worst towns in France. What I loved especially about his war correspondence was that he was a kind of anti-Hemingway; he could make fun of himself, right down to how he looked, show himself as antiheroic. He didn’t wave flags, and yet he never surrendered his love for the United States and, of course, for France. He was a true New Yorker: we don’t wear our hearts on our sleeves. We can’t stand people who do. Some guy comes into the bar and tells you how much he loves his wife, you know he’s cheating, right? Liebling personified that in the best possible way. It was always clear he despised Nazis and fascists; it was also clear he was a New York liberal.
Do you have favorites in this edition?
The uncollected pieces, the deadline pieces, where he’s writing for that week’s magazine. You can see that he could stay leaner than he’d become later, when he got more baroque. One piece I really love is about Phil Cochran, the ace pilot who could predict exactly when the Luftwaffe would attack his base. Milt Caniff based his character Flip Corkin in the comic strip Terry and the Pirates on Cochran, who he sought out when he started the strip. And Terry and the Pirates was how I was following the war. Remember, I was ten when it ended. So you could say I was getting the cartoon version, but that strip was so well done. It had the weight of a good movie: yes, it’s entertainment, but it’s also something else. Gasoline Alley was the other comic strip, also in the Daily News, which had a war in which people died; there were unacceptable losses. Those strips were less cartoonish about the war than many newspapers.
That brings us back to Liebling. He was a skeptic.
You see that in what he wrote when Ernie Pyle died. He liked Pyle and acknowledges the man’s courage but he kind of picks at the image, because that’s not what he thinks a reporter should become. Liebling was the antimythic character: pudgy, wearing glasses, dressed in mufti, always losing things, never posing heroically as he went off to find wherever the hell the front was. That’s especially true, I think, of his writing about North Africa, which I find extremely valuable. His knowledge of Arab literature and philosophy gave him a deeper sense of whom he was bumping into at the marketplace. And his sense of being a permanent enlisted man, which of course he wasn’t, enabled him to see events through enlisted men’s eyes.
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