AJ Liebling
Reporter, New Yorker
Joe Liebling once said: “I can write
better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than
anybody who can write better.” –
the statement every journalist wishes he’d thought of first. Born the
son of a rich and ruthless fur dealer, he graduated from a youth of
privilege to at first struggle (at one time so desperate for a job he
hired a man to walk up and down outside a paper’s offices with a
sandwich board which read ‘Hire Joe Liebling’ –
it didn’t work) to join the New Yorker and cover low-life as none have
done before or since. There was Hymie Katz, ex-singing waiter and dodgy
nightclub promoter: (“Hymie is unmarried at present. Wives, with Hymie,
are symptoms of prosperity, like tailored shirts.”); circus clown Bluch
Landof (“It is as hard to be an outstanding clown in an American circus
as it is to be a distinguished artisan in an automobile factory.”); and
Izzy Yereshevsky’s famous Broadway cigar store:
“Most of Izzy’s evening guests –
their purchases are so infrequent it would be misleading to call them
customers – wear white
felt hats and overcoats of a style known to them as English Drape. Short
men peer up from between the wide-flung shoulders of these coats as if
they had been lowered into the garments on a rope and were now trying to
climb out.…
His pen was also deployed as the best
ever press critic (he once skewered the New York World-Telegram’s purple
writing style by writing that it’s readers: “…had developed
hallucinations from reading its prose and were dragged from subway trains
slapping at adjectives they said they saw crawling over them.”).
Liebling also covered wars, food, sport, and brought to all his stories an
obsession with research and above all, unusually for the most quotable wit
ever by-lined, he listened –
a much underestimated reporting virtue.
