A.J. LIEBLING

Every field of human endeavour has had, at one time or another, its classic historian. To name but three, Warfare has had Thucydides; Empire, Edward Gibbon; Gulag, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. These were not only meticulous chroniclers, but also great writers. Any student of history can profit from reading them. So, equally, can any student of fine prose.

In the history of history, few who essay the art can rank with the geniuses cited above. But one who can, within living memory, was the late A.J. Liebling. In everything he wrote (and he wrote much, on many topics), he comes across as one of the great masters of modern English prose. And when he wrote history, it was with a journalist’s immediacy but an historian’s objectivity. The result was magisterial, yet never solemn: urbane humour was one of his endearing traits.

His non-historical writings, mostly articles for the New Yorker were extremely diverse. He was an expert on French wine and food. He was an aficionado of horse-racing. His insights into the politics of the American South are famous. He was a judicious and generous critic, and a knowledgeable one: he once wrote a long review of a book about Arabic mathematics that showed a thorough grasp of the subject. He served as the regular conscience of the American Press. In all of these articles, readers knew they were in the presence of a highly civilized mind and a warmly attractive heart.

His historical writings are not in the classical mode. That is, he did not sit back in an ivory tower, reflecting on the past with scholarly detachment. Rather, he recorded the present, as eye-witness and chronicler. The two fields he covered were the liberation of France in World War Two and, after his return from Normandy and Paris, the civilian battles of the American prize-ring. He was, if you will, the Carlyle of la France engagée, and the Tacitus of boxing. But where those two masters wrote at a safe remove from events, Liebling, by contrast, plunged right in where the action was, and set down what he saw at first hand.

Personal safety was never a consideration with Liebling, in his work as war correspondent for the New Yorker during the Normandy invasion. Some of his colleagues filed reports from the rear, based in part on press releases handed out at headquarters, and in part on what they found on location after the fighting…

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