The Jollity Building by A.J. Liebling

I wasn't sure that this was actually a real book that existed separately - I read it as a section in the Library of America tome The Sweet Science and Other Writings, since I was looking to read some Liebling and this clump seemed the most appealing at that random moment - but a quick search shows me a 1962 paperback, The Jollity Building, and the cover-copy there exactly describes the thing I just read. So this was a thing in itself, once, if you have any worries on that account.

A.J. Liebling was a journalist of the first half of the last century - first a newspaperman, then a mainstay of the New Yorker, particularly in its early (and possibly slightly less snooty) days. Liebling, as I understand it, had a beat somewhat on the seamy side: boxing, con men, good times and colorful characters.

The larger Library of America book - the parts I didn't read - includes his title book on boxing, one that seems to be mostly about Louisiana governor Huey Long, another book about eating in Paris, and one about the then-poor state of the Press. (I doubt Liebling would believe that state had gotten better in the sixty or so years since then, but it's probably poor in entirely different ways that Liebling would never have expected.)

But this particular book was made up of two clusters of essays, or columns - "The Jollity Building" itself, and "Aye Verily."

"The Jollity Building" is a semi-fictionalized commercial building, in the Broadway district, around about 1940. "Aye Verily" was the name of a column, mostly about betting on racehorses, in the New York Enquirer - that paper later went National, you may know it in its later form - written under the name of "Colonel John R. Stingo," which was not the real name of the man who produced it.

So "Jollity Building" has three essays about various inhabitants of that part of new York in those days, starting from the most specific and honest (the owner/operator of a successful cigar shop) through the still specific but less honest (a profile of a "Tummler," or promoter who stands up night clubs regularly and usually pays his various compatriots more or less what they are promised) on to the larger crowd that are honest at least some of the time (the various inhabitants of that title building, from the small-time agents and bookers and others in offices to the acts that roam through looking for work to the young men on the make who set up in phone booths in the lobby, pretending that is their phone number).

And, in case I wasn't clear, "Aye Verily" is a profile of the man who writes as Stingo, mostly being a collection of the stories he tells, which are probably somewhat true, in some degree, at their core.

My main complaint - and it is a mild one - is that "Aye Verily" is notably longer than "Jollity Building," and that "Aye Verily" is constructed to highlight the writing of Stingo...but I picked up this book to read Liebling, and enjoyed his work better than his extensive quotes of Stingo. Stingo is a character, true - the decayed Southern gentleman of mature years, scion of New Orleans aristocracy according to his own account - but his writing is more clotted, more turf-specific, and just less interesting a century later than Liebling's.

I spent the back half of this book wishing that Liebling was paraphrasing Slingo rather than giving us the man in full, which is not the best way to read a profile. But wishing I was reading Liebling more directly did make me want to read more Liebling, which is what I was hoping for with this tester. So the experiment was a success.