Liebling's Earl

Having just finished Michael Gorra's commendable appreciation of the new(ish) Library of America sete of the works of A.J. Liebling,* I'm moved to remark on an unfortunate tendency among Lieblingophiles--the tendency to overlook one of his very best pieces, his account** of Earl Long, the madcap younger brother of Huey Long, and his place in southern politics. I share the general enthusiasm for Liebling--especially the World War II stuff; the boxing stuff never quite got to me (the press criticism is in a class by itself). But I read his little book about Earl Long just after it came out in 1961, while I was desperately trying to get the hang of Southern politics in my then-work as a Kentucky newspaper reporter. For dead-on insight, on the South, I'd say Liebling is at least fit to keep company with Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor; surely in the same class as W. J.Cash the more sobersided insightfulness of V. O. Key.

The miracle here is that Liebling is the outsider--fat, Jewish, the Parisian boulevardaire and sometimes New York underbelly rat, it is hard to think of anybody more unsuited to the task of understanding the South than Liebling. But it is the outsider's touch that gave us de Tocqueville, Gunnar Myrdal, D. W. Brogan. Here's Liebling's opener:

“Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly. They lose flavor with every hundred yards away from the patch. By the time they reach New York, they are like Golden Bantam that has been trucked up from Texas—stale and unprofitable.

He moves back from here to take a panoramic location shot, starting in a Manhattan hotel room with huey long in the 1930s, and moving on down to Baton Rouge in 1959. He next recounts a more-or-less-first-person narrative of Huey's assassination in 1936 and arrives, finally, at Huey's surviving runt of a younger brother, by 1959 ensconced in the governor's chair. Then at last, Liebling undertakes to tell us how his trip changed his view of Huey and Earl and the whole Louisiana/southern political scene.

The fulcrum is race, together with populism: Liebling's point is that the raffish country boys like Earl and Huey were to the Bourbon aristocrats like lance corporals in the Army to the officer corps—they can get underneath the blankets and shoot crap with the enlisted men. This familiarity gives them a freedom of motion that their betters can't achieve. Earl, in short, was an integrationist. He did it in his own way, of course, which sometimes makes you catch your breath, but he did it, and he didn't really give a rat's patootie whether the Yankees understood out not.

The Earl book is as funny as anything Liebling ever wrote (actually, I think it was repeating a joke I picked up from the Long book was what got me my University job, but that's another story). But the fun was also vitality: it gave dimension and sinew to a patch of the human landscape that could often seem dreary and gray. I carried at least a shred of his insight back to Kentucky with me, and it helped me get at least a shred of an insight into the political landscape around me.

Vitality is perhaps the point of connection, an untroubled lust for life. It's probably no action that Liebling begins with a food metaphor (“like sweet corn”). Two or three pages later, he remembers a boxing story. I don't remember any specific reference to Paris or New York, but you can tell that the Liebling we see in Baton Rouge is the Liebling we remember from the the boulevards and from ringside. It's a wonderful book and an important bit of history and it would be a shame to let it be overlooked.

Footnote: The book is not to be confused with the movie, with Paul Newman (again, as so often) wrertchedly miscast.


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*A.J. Liebling: The Sweet Science and Other Writings (2008). But note the pointed review by James H. Mann.

**The Earl of Louisiana, (1961), reprinted in the Library of America collection.