Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris by A.J. Liebling

Everyone is a snob about something. You might not think it that way about yourself - you just have a refined palate, and a deep appreciation of whatever-it-is, and long experience in knowing what the good and the bad of that thing is - but it is snobbery, no matter how it manifests itself.

And that's OK. It can be entertaining when it's not too heavy-handed, and at least half of the time the snobbery is actually grounded in some actual knowledge. (I may be being optimistic here; don't contradict me.)

A.J. Liebling was a newspaperman, which means he was a snob about a lot of things. Once you get out of the immediate job of who-what-where-when reportage, what being "a newspaperman" means is having strong opinions on the things you write about, and applying those opinions entertainingly to the news of the day in your area of expertise. At least, that was the classic form, in Liebling's era: lately, the opinionators are all talkers in various video formats, and couldn't write their way out of a paper bag.

I've been reading books by Liebling in the Library of America Liebling omnibus The Sweet Science & Other Writings in a semi-random order. It's probably not the best order - I started with The Jollity Building because I liked the opening of that book, and now just read Between Meals because it was the shortest - but if we all always did everything for the best what kind of a world would we have anyway?

Between Meals - subtitled An Appetite for Paris and mostly made up of memoirish pieces from The New Yorker from the late '50s up to the book's publication in 1962 - is very much a snobbish book, from an older man who is going to explain in detail The Trouble With Nowadays.

Luckily, Liebling is a lively, entertaining writer - that's the other side of being a newspaperman; when your copy appears in a gigantic daily collection of other writings, you need to be compelling or the readers will just flip to something else. And it's an old enough book that the snobbery is quaint: Liebling's position is that French cooking had then been in decline since just before The Great War, and was in the process of being destroyed by healthy eating and by children having better job opportunities and similar massive societal changes that he mildly deplored. He doesn't claim that French cooking is the only great cuisine, or the greatest - there's a sideswipe random appreciation of Chinese food that I found very in character for a New York Jewish guy - but it is his particular area of study and of appreciation, so it's the one he knows well enough to construct a "everything is getting worse" polemic.

Not that this is a polemic. Liebling is more interested in talking about the good times than in lamenting the current fallen state of the world, and gets into the latter mostly to contrast with the former - the days when he was young and on the make, free and happy in Paris on a large monthly allowance from his rich furrier father, supposedly studying medieval history but really loafing around eating and consorting with the local girls.

Since this is made up of New Yorker pieces, it's not really a single thing - it starts out with an extended appreciation of Yves Mirande, a French restauranteur and food writer of  the generation before Liebling, who had at that point (late '50s) recently died in his eighties. The rest of the book is made up of memoir-ish musings, somewhat anchored by food but not all that closely, of Liebling's days in Paris. He spent a year there as a young man from 1926-27 - that's when he had the allowance and was supposedly studying at the Sorbonne - and he also got back there in 1939, which he goes into in some detail. There's also a couple of childhood anecdotes, but the wartime and just post-war years are entirely missing and "now" (the end of the '50s and beginning of the '60s) is just the "after" comparison for Liebling, showing the world in its current, clearly fallen state.

Like everyone who writes about French food, especially of that era, he uses the French terms and tends not to explain or define them. This presents something of a barrier to a reader sixty years later, who has eaten none of these dishes and doesn't know enough culinary French to even know what they are much of the time. But I can tell that he enjoyed all of this rich food, for many years.

I can also see that he died less than a year after this book came out, at the age of fifty-nine. Caveat Eator, I suppose.

Liebling's prose is fun and energetic - that newspaperman thing again. I still think I haven't yet gotten to his famous/important/major (choose the appropriate adjective) books, so it's a good sign that I'm enjoying the oddball bits I've read so far.