Books in Brief: Liebling at Home

Liebling at Home, by A. J. Liebling (Wideview Books, 532 pp., $12.45, paperback). Last year, in reviewing the Wideview Books omnibus volume Liebling Abroad for NR, I broached the following suggestion: “Wideview Books owes the republic of letters at least one more good omnibus — Liebling at Home, I suppose.” Well, never underestimate the inherent clout of Ronald Reagan’s favorite magazine, for Wideview has now come across with a new A. J. Liebling collection, right down to the official NR-sanctioned title, containing four of Liebling’s most memorable studies in urban picaresque: The Telephone Booth Indian, Chicago: The Second City, The Honest Rainmaker: The Life and Times of Colonel John R. Stingo, and The Earl of Louisiana. Devotees of Liebling’s ornately tooled Broadway prose (how did The New Yorker ever bring itself to print this stuff?) will find Liebling at Home a veritable bonanza, all four of these books having gone out of print decades ago. Some complaints: Herbert Mitgang’s feeble-minded preface (“One wonders what Liebling would be saying today about the modern Peglers in White House favor writing for The National Review [sic], Commentary, and other neoconservative spear carriers”) can and should be skipped, if not excised from the book with a sharp knife. And there is some deceptive advertising on the cover, which refers to “five complete classics in one volume” and lists The Jollity Building as Classic Number Five. The Jollity Building was a 1962 paperback that contained two short essays taken from Back Where I Came From; a lengthy chapter from The Telephone Booth Indian, and the original New Yorker profile of Colonel Stingo! Now, Liebling at Home has 140 pages less and costs 50 cents more than Liebling Abroad; the entire text of Back Where I Came From would have fit nicely into those 140 missing pages, with room to spare for the autobiographical memoir Liebling included in The Wayward Pressman. Never mind, though. Four classics or five, Liebling at Home still adds up to a must-buy volume.