An Appetite for Paris

You know those books you read years ago, loved, and then put back on the shelf? But couldn’t really forget, no matter how many years flew by?

For me anyway, A. (Abbott) J. (Joseph). Liebling’s Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris (1959) counts as one of those books. Mr. Liebling’s writing included a lot more topics than cuisine, though.

But we’ll get to that a little later.

Imagine the opportunity to spend a year in Paris in the 1920s with daddy’s money footing the bill. That’s exactly what Mr. Liebling’s father encouraged him to do.

I sensed my father’s generous intention and, fearing that he might change his mind, I told him that I didn’t feel I should go, since I was indeed thinking of getting married. “The girl is ten years older than I am,” I said, “and Mother might think she is kind of fast, because she is being kept by a cotton broker from Memphis, Tennessee, who only comes North once in a while. But you are a man of the world, and you understand that a woman can’t always help herself…” Within the week, I had a letter of credit on the Irving Trust for two thousand dollars [the equivalent of almost $35, 000 in 2023], and a reservation on the old Caronia for late in the summer, when the off-season rates would be in effect.
The New Yorker, March 29, 2004, p. 54.

He later admitted he’d made up the whole story to ensure that his father would not change his mind! (Liebling did marry three times, having found his soulmate a few years before his death in 1963 at the age of 59 – Jean Stafford – also a writer.)

A.J. Liebling

Liebling’s life itself reads like a well-written novel filled with memorable characters. But what drew me to his writing in the first place was, of course, Between Meals and his love for France.

He wrote primarily for The New Yorker and covered World War II in various places. However, as a Jew, he could not report directly from France until the liberation of Paris in August 1944.

Another of his books about France – The Road Back to Paris – appeared in 1944 and is freely available through the Internet Archive. Along the way, he won the coveted French Cross of the Légion d’honneur for his European war reportage.

But for the food lover, and especially the French food lover, not much beats his writing about all things gustatory, as the following passage suggests.

In the restaurant on the Rue Saint-Augustin, Parisian actor and gourmand Yves Mirande would dazzle his juniors, French and American, by dispatching a lunch of raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Bordeaux and one of champagne, after which he would call for the Armagnac and remind Madame to have ready for dinner the larks and ortolans she had promised him, with a few langoustes and a turbot — and, of course, a fine civet made from the marcassin, or young wild boar, that the lover of the leading lady in his current production had sent up from his estate in the Sologne. “And while I think of it,” I once heard him say, “we haven’t had any woodcock for days, or truffles baked in the ashes, and the cellar is becoming a disgrace — no more ’34s and hardly any ’37s. Last week, I had to offer my publisher a bottle that was far too good for him, simply because there was nothing between the insulting and the superlative.”
“Memoirs of a Feeder in France.” The New Yorker, April 3, 1959.

Liebling wrote many books other than Between Meals. A man with myriad interests, including boxing, his fame and skills as a writer offered him opportunities to write The Sweet Science, an examination of boxing at the height of its popularity.

But he also bit the hand that fed him, so to speak, for he became an outspoken critic of the press. (Just think what he would write about today’s press!). The Wayward Pressman (1947) was the first of several such books.

Like many well-known writers of his day, A.J. Liebling has faded into the archives, except for Between Meals and a few other titles. It’s a great pleasure to read Liebling’s work now, with the distance of time relegating it to history. Long paragraphs and complex sentences remind me of what we’re losing with the current MFAism running amok among writers relying on certain tenets of correctness and Grammerly for style suggestions. Hemingwayists, the lot of them. There’s nothing like a long, quiet, solitary afternoon spent comfortably ensconced beneath a toasty quilt, with Liebling leading my mind across the world and into a different time, long before I was born.

And much of what he says still applies. Take his comments about Adolf Hitler:

No sane man can afford to dispense with with debilitating leasures; no ascetic can be considered reliably sane. Hitler was the archetype of the abstemious man. When the other krauts saw him drink water in the Beer Hall, they should have known he was not to be trusted.
“The Natique,” from Between Meals, p. 81.

An interesting commentary, given our times…

That Liebling passed away at the age of fifty-nine might throw a bit of a damper on living the life of a bon vivant, no holds barred, but still.

Reading of Liebling’s Paris in the Twenties is frankly quite a treat. Some readers today might take offense at some of what he says and how he says it, but never mind. Between Meals still engages all the senses, especially laughter, even though it’s not truly one of the five senses, is it? (But it should be.)