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Liebling abroad
HARDCOVER. Playboy Press, (1981). Intro. by Raymond Sokolov. (4 books in one volume)x, 672 pages, cloth & boards. Text clean and unmarked, former owner's name on front endpaper, in dust jacket, light wear only.
- GenresNonfiction
672 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1981
47 people want to read
About the author
A.J. Liebling
42 books72 followersAbbott Joseph "A. J." Liebling was an American journalist who was closely associated with The New Yorker from 1935 until his death.
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November 7, 2010Harold Ross must have been playing a crazy-ass hunch when he sent A.J. Liebling to cover the Second World War for the New Yorker. To look at him, Liebling wasn’t anyone’s idea of a war correspondent: a fat, four-eyed bon vivant, he was already easing his way into a rumpled middle age when the war came along. More problematically, he wasn’t, shall we say, conspicuous for his physical courage (a fact he was upfront about and, like Falstaff, turned into a joke). On the other hand, he spoke fluent French, wrote with casual grace, and those beady eyes of his didn’t miss much.
Liebling himself viewed his situation with a certain amusement: “There is an old proverb that a girl may sleep with one man without being a trollop, but let a man cover one little war and he is a war correspondent. I belong to the one-war category.”
For someone so intent on staying out of the line of fire, Liebling saw an uncomfortable amount of action: after watching his beloved France implode in the “ghastly spring” of 1940, he hitched a ride back to the States on an oil tanker, re-crossed the Atlantic in a drafty bomber, followed the US First Division across Tunisia, and finally rode a landing craft right up to Omaha Beach on D-Day (where the sight of blood and condensed milk sloshing around the deck left him with a mental image he’d never shake).
Like his colleague Joseph Mitchell, Liebling had a taste for everyday human oddity. Walking down a military road in Tunisia one day, he came across the corpse of an American GI, its face discreetly covered with a cloth. He asks around and discovers it’s the body of a New York kid nicknamed Mollie. Nobody remembers his real name, but Liebling is curious and keeps digging. He discovers a story that gets increasingly weird, poignant and inspiring as he goes along– until he finally returns to New York and starts talking to Mollie’s friends and family, at which point things get even more incredible. The kid was a bona fide hero, but he was also a bona fide fuck-up, and Liebling is equally interested in both sides of the story.
Not a man of action himself, he was generous enough to honour those who were, without abandoning his fundamentally ironic outlook. In a French village under German artillery bombardment, Leibling witnesses this little scene:
The correspondents, flat on their faces like the rest, wondered whether the Pulitzer Prize was worth all this trouble. They were further depressed by the magnificent aplomb of the brigadier general who walked erect down the center of the street, directing troop movements with a cane. When a sniper’s bullet went through his right arm, he transferred the cane to his left hand. That gesture will be hard for us to match in our autobiographies.
Liebling might have been lying face down, but he deserves some credit for raising his head long enough to notice that.
I’ve only read the first two books in this omnibus edition, so I’ll leave the whole thing unrated for now. I just want to add that Mollie & Other War Pieces has one of the most beautiful dedications I’ve ever read. It goes, simply: To many men who would now be in their forties.
Liebling himself viewed his situation with a certain amusement: “There is an old proverb that a girl may sleep with one man without being a trollop, but let a man cover one little war and he is a war correspondent. I belong to the one-war category.”
For someone so intent on staying out of the line of fire, Liebling saw an uncomfortable amount of action: after watching his beloved France implode in the “ghastly spring” of 1940, he hitched a ride back to the States on an oil tanker, re-crossed the Atlantic in a drafty bomber, followed the US First Division across Tunisia, and finally rode a landing craft right up to Omaha Beach on D-Day (where the sight of blood and condensed milk sloshing around the deck left him with a mental image he’d never shake).
Like his colleague Joseph Mitchell, Liebling had a taste for everyday human oddity. Walking down a military road in Tunisia one day, he came across the corpse of an American GI, its face discreetly covered with a cloth. He asks around and discovers it’s the body of a New York kid nicknamed Mollie. Nobody remembers his real name, but Liebling is curious and keeps digging. He discovers a story that gets increasingly weird, poignant and inspiring as he goes along– until he finally returns to New York and starts talking to Mollie’s friends and family, at which point things get even more incredible. The kid was a bona fide hero, but he was also a bona fide fuck-up, and Liebling is equally interested in both sides of the story.
Not a man of action himself, he was generous enough to honour those who were, without abandoning his fundamentally ironic outlook. In a French village under German artillery bombardment, Leibling witnesses this little scene:
The correspondents, flat on their faces like the rest, wondered whether the Pulitzer Prize was worth all this trouble. They were further depressed by the magnificent aplomb of the brigadier general who walked erect down the center of the street, directing troop movements with a cane. When a sniper’s bullet went through his right arm, he transferred the cane to his left hand. That gesture will be hard for us to match in our autobiographies.
Liebling might have been lying face down, but he deserves some credit for raising his head long enough to notice that.
I’ve only read the first two books in this omnibus edition, so I’ll leave the whole thing unrated for now. I just want to add that Mollie & Other War Pieces has one of the most beautiful dedications I’ve ever read. It goes, simply: To many men who would now be in their forties.
March 23, 2020
This was a perfect book to read/browse through in the middle of the virus! It's been on my shelf for years, waiting for this exact moment. A.J.Liebling was a journalist, reporting from France before and during the Second World War. He loved France, and particularly, Paris with a passion second only to his love of good food and good wine. And his love and admiration of the people he met. His reporting of the D-Day invasion, which he witnessed as a reporter, the "phoney" war and the war in Northern Africa, and France is personal, political, astute. Great book.
August 3, 2010
"Four complete classics in one volume:
The Road Back to Paris
Mollie and Other War Pieces
Normandy Revisited
Between Meals
The Road Back to Paris
Mollie and Other War Pieces
Normandy Revisited
Between Meals
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews