monday, march 31, 2008
Between Meals - A.J. Liebling
"I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better." – A.J. LieblingDespite his tempered boast concerning his skill as writer, the one thing that always set A.J. Liebling's work apart from everyone else was style. Moreover, it was a style whetted by insight. Reading his work was rarely something you felt obligated to do but rather you welcomed as a delightful journey that would take you somewhere worth going.
Liebling was at his best when writing about his passions and rarely did he give them such full attention as in his 1959 tome, Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris. As an unrepentant Francophile and gastronome Liebling had few peers and this book revels in those passions without apology. In the hands of a lesser writer it’s a recipe for disaster, but Liebling was never a lesser writer, no matter what speed he was working at.
While the author’s family traveled with some regularity to France in his youth – which he studiously recounts – the book doesn’t truly gather steam until he begins his reminisce of the year he studied French medieval literature at the Sorbonne in Paris when he was in his early 20s.
As fantastic as his recollections are of this period in Between Meals it is his return to the continent as a freelance writer that spurs even more incisive observations and finally as a correspondent covering the beginning of World War II. But Liebling persistently keeps to his theme – his love for France and its cuisine – and doesn’t worry overmuch about preserving the chronological rigor of the narrative.
The book overflows with rich and wickedly tempting description of dishes and wines the young and then not-so-young Liebling indulged in while in France. His observations on selecting a proper restaurant, the intricacies of French wines and the proper type of service to expect in the best of locales are an excellent guide even today, although the world they describe is quite gone.
(He also pointed out one of the truest aspects of cooking that I had learned through many years of difficult work on the line; “The good cook, like the good jockey, must have a clock in his head.” And, by happy chance, it turned out that once you had gotten it, it came in right handy when dealing with a brutal deadline on a breaking news story.)
Liebling was unrepentantly dismissive of abstention when it came to the glories of the table and life itself. The relish of his appetite was matched by his infatuation with boxing and, of course, women. The interludes in the book he turns to these other subjects are individually poetic and wonderful in their own right although they merge gracefully and without effort back into the romantic flow of the narrative as a whole.
Liebling’s natural insight was bolstered by his seeming effortless ability to sum up things with a witty turn of a phrase. Nothing as ephemeral as a cynical bon mot but, rather, a sharp passage that cut to the heart of the thing being described. The kinds of observations that impel you do fold down the corner of the page to come back and read the passage again.
The hallmark of Liebling’s writing was humor; a wicked sharp wit that is bolstered by an almost irresistible ability to turn a phrase. Ally the two and you have nothing less than one of the most subversive and persuasive essayists of all time. So much so he almost makes the French seem bearable.
And, for myself, Between Meals turned out to be a rather instructional tome as well, particularly since I happened across it by accident instead of searching it out as I did for the rest of his works.
As a young journalist I had sought out Liebling’s work due to his prominence as a critic of the industry. The collected volume of his work as the media critic for the New Yorker, the Wayward Pressman, taught me a great deal about newspapers I was to find out painfully true a good half-century after its initial publication. The more things have changed, the more they have stayed the same, it seems.
And his brilliant book on the politics of my home state, The Earl of Louisiana, rang viciously true after spending a year there working as a reporter. At that point I was in awe of his work although more from the standpoint of our shared profession rather than shared passions.
In my youth, I often regretted undertaking solitary adventures. It seemed somehow sad and unfulfilling. It was a sensation strong enough to make me curtail my explorations significantly, something I grew to see as rather foolish later on. Eventually I found that heading afield by myself was something I not only had a slight knack for, but I garnered a significant amount of satisfaction from.
Of course, Liebling had summed it up quite succinctly many years before.
- Had I had a companion in my wanderings, his reactions would have differed from mine and perhaps spoiled them. The matter of how much discomfort a man is prepared to undergo for an experience depends on how much it is worth to him. The best of friends can seldom agree on the price.
So when I decided to abandon the rigors of the city desk for something different it was with some surprise I found one of the most instructive guides for my endeavor was, once again, Liebling. I happened to pick up his 1959 book, Between Meals in a bookstore before I headed off to Peru the first time and, in retrospect, the insights he offered within it probably influenced my eventual decision to alight to South America on my own a few months later.
His reasoning for wanting to spend his time living in a foreign country so far from the objects of mundane recognition seemed sensible to me. Eventually, I came to understand their insight, but that was after a great deal of effort.
- 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. I was often alone, but seldom lonely; I enjoyed the newspapers and books that were my usual companions at the table, the exchanges with waiters, barmen, booksellers, street vendors, the old voices of the old professors in the lectures I irregularly attended, the sounds of conversations of others around me, and finally, the talk of the girls I ended some evenings by picking up. This isolation dispensed me from defending my whims.
There is a marked difference between this point of view as an expatriate and the classic ‘ugly American’ style of expatriate who constantly holds the country of residence in sharp relief from their home. There is a different flow, a different manner in another country that can be immensely satisfying in and of itself – even if you are content to behold it from the outside.
While these type of transcendental diversions provided a needed sense of understanding for me while I scrambled to acclimate myself to this new setting, Liebling also had a good bit of practical insight to provide as well.
“The first requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite; the second is to put in your apprenticeship as a feeder when you have enough money to pay the check but not enough to produce indifference to the size of the total.”
The ideal situation to achieve this, in his estimation, is to have “funds in hand for three more days, with a reasonable, but not certain, prospect of reinforcements, thereafter.”
He further posits three particular situations that induce this state of affairs with regularity; students awaiting remittance, newspapermen awaiting salary and freelance writers “waiting on a check [they] have cause to believe is in the mail.”
The argument being that the limitation of options causes the neophyte gourmand to weigh his options carefully and explore diversions he might otherwise overlook – a sort of economic parsing of the tyranny of choice.
While I will certainly agree with the conclusion up to a point, what really cuts to the quick is the observation about the anxiety of economic peril in the world of the freelancer.
His long extrapolation on the agony of awaiting his father’s remittance each month and the grueling process by which he was forced to undergo to receive it hit mighty close to my own experience awaiting payments for work long completed. His quick dénouement to the story is a treat as well, although that also rang true to an almost painful degree.
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