Archives for October 11, 2004

I didn’t realize that today was a holiday! I got up this morning and started blogging like always, and only a few minutes ago did I notice that our Monday-morning traffic was way below normal. Now I know why.

The good news is that my misguided industry has resulted in a big pile of postings (including new stuff in the right-hand column), ready for all you fortunate holiday-observing folk with five-day-a-week jobs to read on Tuesday.

In the meantime, I think I’ll take a day off. See you around….

I got this e-mail earlier today from my editor at Harcourt, publishers of All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine:

ALL IN THE DANCES gets a starred and large and boxed (jointly
with Bob Gottlieb’s book) review in today’s all-important Publishers
Weekly–congratulations. It really couldn’t be more prominent or positive
and includes a cover shot.

Publishers have been known to put on a happy face when it comes to pre-publication reviews, but I just saw a fax of the Publishers Weekly box, and Harcourt wasn’t kidding:

“Balanchine was every bit as important as Matisse,” says literary critic Teachout (The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken), who writes for the viewer who doesn’t know a pass

I urged Lileks the other day not to jump to negative conclusions about A.J. Liebling before reading what I had to say about him in the Weekly Standard. My piece is now out, but the Standard‘s Web site doesn’t offer a free link, so here are some pertinent excerpts. (The “White” in the first sentence is, of course, E.B. White.)

* * *

Even now, the two writers most closely identified with The New Yorker under Ross are White and James Thurber. But much of their work has aged poorly (though Thurber’s cartoons remain perennially fresh), and a growing share of critical attention is now being paid to a pair of slightly junior staffers who were the cream of Harold Ross’ bumper crop. Joseph Mitchell was duly honored with the publication in 1992 of Up in the Old Hotel, a hefty collection of his New Yorker pieces that introduced the author of McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon to a new generation of readers. Now it’s A.J. Liebling’s turn–or should be. Just Enough Liebling is clearly intended to do for him what Up in the Old Hotel did for Mitchell. He deserves it, but whether this book will turn the trick is a different story.

Though Liebling and Mitchell were close friends whose subject matter not infrequently overlapped, their styles were entirely dissimilar. Mitchell wrote about New York’s “low life”–saloonkeepers, bearded ladies, Iroquois ironworkers–in a tone of quiet amusement often touched with an elegiac note. Liebling’s prose, by contrast, was an exuberant, extroverted alloy of uptown and downtown, more or less what H.L. Mencken might have sounded like had he stuck to reporting instead of switching to the editorial page. Long experience as a feature writer for newspapers had taught him how to write concise, eye-grabbing leads, and when Ross gave him enough elbow room to paint full-length portraits of his subjects, he made the most of every inch. Here is his description of John Baptiste Fournet, former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Louisiana and a minor player in Liebling’s masterpiece, The Earl of Louisiana (1961), a book-length profile of Earl Long, Huey’s no less flamboyant younger brother:

At sixty-four the Chief Justice, the Honorable John Baptiste Fournet, is still a formidable figure of a man–tall and powerful and presenting what might be considered in another state the outward appearance of a highly successful bookmaker. The suit he had on when I saw him, of rich, snuff-colored silk, was cut with the virtuosity that only subtropical tailors expend on hot-weather clothing. Summer clothes in the North are makeshifts, like seasonal slipcovers on furniture, and look it. The Chief Justice wore a diamond the size of a Colossal ripe olive on the ring finger of his left hand and a triangle of flat diamonds as big as a trowel in his tie. His manner was imbued ith a gracious warmth not commonly associated with the judiciary, and his voice reflected at a distance of three centuries the France from which his ancestors had migrated, although he pronounces his name “Fournett.” (The pronunciation of French proper names in Louisiana would make a good monograph. There was, for example, a state senator named DeBlieux who was called simply “W.”)

All of Liebling is in that show-stopping description: the weakness for rogues, the razor-sharp eye for detail, the throwaway discursiveness, the gluttonously rich prose that readily spills over into food-based metaphors. Liebling himself was a short, stout trencherman who liked four-star cuisine and lots of it (he ate himself into a coffin at the age of 59), and he wrote about it with respectful glee. The closest he ever came to outright autobiography was a memoir manqu