Status Updates From A.J. Liebling: The Sweet Sc...

That is one of the drawbacks of having reporters on the scene in foreign countries. Other reporters can think up more fascinating stories sitting right here at home.

The formulas most newspapers have fallen back on for foreign news are few. One is, ‘Man go to church, good man, no lie. Man not go to church, bad, lie.’ Ergo, ‘Franco, Salazar, Adenauer, Christian Democrats, good, truthful. Communists, bad, whatever they say lie.’ In handling any story outside the United States, then, it is necessarily true, and you have solved your problem without trouble or expense.

The American press makes me think of a gigantic, super-modern fish cannery, a hundred floors high, capitalized at eleven billion dollars, and with tens of thousands of workers standing ready at the canning machines, but relying for its raw material on an inadequate number of handline fishermen in leaky rowboats.

The ugly man is the object of a special cult among women, but it is relatively small. He runs well only in limited areas, like a Mormon candidate in Utah.

In the morning I telephoned Mirande. He confirmed the disaster. Mme. G., ill, had closed the restaurant. Worse, she had sold the lease and the good will, and had definitely retired.

“What is the matter with her?” I asked in a tone appropriate to fatal disease.

“I think it was trying to read Simone de Beauvoir,” he said. “A syncope.”

Despite the distinctive quality of his prose, the Colonel had never thought of literature as a highroad to fortune. ‘It is always well to maintain a medium of personal articulation,’ he once said to in explanation of his creative persistence, ‘but its potential importance is one of leverage, not direct salariat.’…One of his favorite apothegms is “Never work a day, and never, never take an honest dollar.’

Colonel John R. Stingo, the subject of the new study, is the best curveball writer since Anatomy Burton and Sir Thomas Browne, and like those Baroque stars can make his longest sentences break over the plate.

Morrison…suffers under the disadvantage of living in the contemporary world, while the Perezes and Rainachs remain in the Jurassic. It was the gift of the Longs that they could straddle the intervening million years.

Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly. They lose flavor with every hundred yards away from the patch. By the time they reach New York, they are like Golden Bantam that has been trucked up from Texas—stale and unprofitable. The consumer forgets that the corn tastes different where it grows.

I gathered from the two of them that Jackson won his fights by inducing exhaustion in his opponents, who collapsed like men worn out from slapping at horseflies. He stopped them without knocking them down.

Some of the fans would cry that Robinson wasn’t hurting Maxim as all in these interludes, others that Maxim wasn’t hurting Robinson at all. There seemed to be some correlation between their eyesight and where they had placed their money.