I was ruminating on the Dave Barry "On Hallowed Ground" essay, wondering if there was another example of great war or crisis writing I could link to, when I thought about A. J. Liebling's WWII work for The New Yorker.
Liebling was an unlikely choice for war correspondent, and he had to battle Harold Ross to get the assignment, but his writing was the exact opposite of the Hemingway school of macho front line reporting. For one thing, you were never in doubt that Liebling did not want to be there—which is something he had in common with the soldiers and civilians he wrote about. Liebling was self-effacing about his different take of war reporting—although one can see a touch of swagger in his comment, "There is an old proverb that a girl may sleep with one man without being a trollop, but let a man cover one little war and he is a war correspondent."
And what a figure he must have cut! Here's how First Infantry Division officer Gardner Botsford described him in A Life of Privilege, Mostly: "The only Army pants big enough to button around the magisterial paunch left him with a vast, drooping seat behind, a flapping void big enough to hold a beach umbrella. The legs of the pants were tucked into knee-high gaiters left over from the Spanish-American War, leading to a pair of thin-soled lounge-lizard civilian shoes. Other correspondents generally tried to look more military and more warlike than any soldier—parachutists’ boots, aviators’ scarves, tankers’ jackets—but Liebling was not one to pretend. He was a correspondent, not a soldier, and he looked it."
Best of all his war writing, I think, was "Quest for Mollie," which is collected in Mollie and Other War Stories. Mollie (Karl Warner) was a private Liebling met in Tunisia—well, met posthumously, since Liebling saw him as a roadside corpse on Good Friday, 1943. But Mollie's friends regaled him with tales of Mollie's life back in New York City, so upon returning to NYC, Liebling set out to learn more about him.
"When I walk through the West Side borderland between Times Square and the slums, where Mollie once lived, I often think of him and his big talk and his golf-suit grin. It cheers me to think there may be more like him all around me—a notion I would have dismissed as sheer romanticism before World War II. Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience."
See what I mean? The man wrote like a dream. Track down copies of The Road Back to Paris and Mollie and Other War Stories. You'll thank me for it.
