Now that so many “war correspondents” tell and explain what they do not see, it is another anniversary of the journalist from The New Yorker who watched the landing in Normandy, entered Paris through the Porte d’Orléans in an American jeep of the First Infantry Division: “It was like entering paradise.”
Since then he said that there were three types of journalists: the reporter who tells what he sees, the one who writes what he sees and explains its meaning (that was Liebling), and the expert who analyzes what he has not seen.
This short, chubby, chubby-cheeked, flat-footed, bald, gourmet and gluttonous Jew, suffered from gout, chain smoker (died of cancer), was married three times, studied journalism at Columbia University, worked 28 years at The New Yorker, he was a prolific writer (he knew both gastronomy and boxing).
At the age of 22, his father paid him a year at the Sorbonne (1926-1927); there he got to know a Paris where many Russian courtiers and aristocrats in exile “worked in brothels or were cabaret taxi drivers”.
An inveterate Francophile who was awarded the Legion of Honor, he always stayed at the Louvois hotel in Paris located in a disreputable neighborhood known as “the national brothel.”
Puritan Harold Ross, founder of The New Yorker, was horrified by the place: “For God’s sake, stay away from the underworld.” But Joe Liebling enjoyed those bohemian dives near good and cheap bistros: “I only trust, he said, in restaurants full of fat people who weigh more than 100 kilos.”
The main requirement for good food writing, he said, is to have a very good appetite. Generous in tips, he never had trouble getting a table in the most famous restaurants; With gout and chronic arthritis, he never forgave the full menu with “apéritif, entrée, plat, vine, dessert” accompanied by coffee, drink and cigar. British cooking seemed pathetic to him: “For an Englishman to teach an American about food is like a blind man leading a one-eyed man.”
The Louvois was also the hotel of the tormented Stefan Zweig, very close to where Stendahl wrote Le Rouge et le Noir. Perhaps that is why Liebling ironized about Eisenhower’s campaign in Europe directed from Claridge’s and Dorchester in London to Raphael in Paris via St. George’s in Algeria.
His book Letters from Paris was divided into three parts using boxing similes: “The world knocked out”, “The world on its knees” and “The world on its feet”. The chronicles of him during the war were not political analysis but rather a narrative similar to George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.
In 1942 he began a chronicle quoting the New Zealand historian Chester Milmot who said that “from the Mediterranean to the Arctic, from the English Channel to the Black Sea, from the Pyrenees to the Ukrainian steppes, there is only one sovereign nation, Switzerland.”
His journalistic chronicles were always “jocular, erudite and irreverent”. He distrusted the supposed heroism of “war correspondents” and remembered the phrase that “a maiden can sleep with a gentleman and not become a whore, while a journalist can cover a small battle and be a war correspondent for life.” ”.
Between 1939 and 1944 Liebling was accredited as a combat correspondent by the United States Ministry of Defense; accreditation that forced him to submit to prior censorship, but allowed him to travel to the front and move in military convoys, with the rank of captain that gave him access to officer clubs and, in the event of prisoner exchange, have priority.
On the day of the “liberation of Paris” he attended the surrender of Hitler’s man and military governor of Paris, Dietrich von Choltitz, at the Montparnasse railway station, and dined with the owner of La Closerie des Lilas, a restaurant famous thanks to Hemingway, Verlaine and Apollinaire. which that night opened only for Joe Liebling.
That August 25, 1944, he was entranced by hundreds of “young French cyclists who exhibit infinite legs, sculpted by the absence of taxis and shaped by so much pedaling.”
“For the first time in my life, he said, and probably for the last, I lived for a week in a big city where everyone was happy.”
A personal friend and great admirer of Albert Camus, he was reticent with Jean Paul Sartre’s “gauche divine” thinking that “cynicism is often the shameful by-product of inexperience.”
His “immersive” style of storytelling was based on the accumulation of “close-ups”. A meticulous observer, he knew how to listen to his interviewees using an infallible technique: sit in front of the character and say nothing until the absence of questions led to indiscretions and substantial revelations. To young reporters he advised: “Write from memory, vomit, and then refer to your notes.”
He died at the age of 59 in a suite at the Algonquin Hotel, paid for by The New Yorker where, already very ill, he continued editing texts for the magazine. They say that his last words were in French, although nobody remembers them, something that for Harold Ross would have been enough to cross out that detail due to lack of factual support.
