Bookstalling

“Mens sana in corpore sano is a contradiction in terms”, wrote A. J. Liebling (1904-63), “the fantasy of a Mr Have-your-cake-and-eat-it”. (Liebling, the reader soon learns, always chose to eat it rather than have it). “No sane man can afford to dispense with debilitating pleasures; no ascetic can be considered reliably sane.” This is the keynote of Between Meals, the memoirs of a journalist-hedonist known mostly, if known at all, for his columns in the New Yorker.

Liebling’s Eden is 1920s Paris, but as his commentator notes, the usual suspects fail to materialize. There is no carousing with Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald or Joyce. The only wing he is under is that of the playwright Yves Mirande, who (if his modern unrenown is anything to go by) seems to have spent more effort on perfecting the life rather than the work. Liebling knows his mentor as a breezy womanizer, a devout Catholic and a “great round-the-clock gastronome”, but witnesses the sad decline of an eighty-year-old man who has succumbed to the advice of the “psychosomatic quacks” and gone on a diet. The problem is clear. Mirande’s organs clocked no passing of time when they were getting regular sensory nourishment, but now, condemned to the cavernous wastes of self-denial, they have gone the way of any neglected machine. From the stomach, the rot spreads outwards. “The damage was done”, tolls the chapter’s last sentence, “but it could so easily have been avoided had he been warned against the fatal trap of abstinence.”

Liebling, though, is less a priest of excess than a poet of sensual pleasure, a distinction borne out in a prose style that is usually exquisite, rarely extravagant. He is not writing foodporn for plutocrats; in fact, “a man who is rich in his adolescence is almost doomed to be a dilettante at the table”. According to Liebling, those with no economic limits will never discover the joys of offal like beef heart, and will never learn that there are other fish besides sole, turbot, salmon and trout. Liebling learned it, stretching out the two-hundred dollars that his father wired him every month. Until that great day, he would let his eye rove the wine list only as high as the Tavel (“as far as I am concerned, still the only worthy rosé”); that day arrived, he would flirt with ideas of Côte Rôtie and Chateauneuf-du-Pape.

Despite his pejorative use of it, the word “dilettante” could readily describe Liebling. He essentially remained a hack journo, and never wrote the novel that he dreamed of. But then he has a dilettante’s virtues: a skipping prose style and a diverse range of passions. The “small personal Olympus” that he put together as a child includes George Washington (Zeus), Lillian Russell (Aphrodite) and Enrico Caruso (Pan). Unfortunately, Lillian Russell becomes the poster girl for a polemic that we could have done without. Liebling rightly inveighs against the cultural pressures that urge women to thinness, but his call for the “return” of the “Russellinear woman…a form of animal life that no longer exists” leads in to one of the book’s bizarrer outbursts, made all the more uncomfortable by the seductive wit of the coinage.

His chauvinism extends also to nationhood. He is staunch on the primacy of French cooking, a culinary quilt in which he singles out Burgundian food as “a trumpeting perfection” (Lyon, only a hundred miles away, offers only “a honeyed surfeit”); and rarely has a good word to say about what any other country can serve up. As well as a dogmatist, he can also be a bore: two mid-point chapters on boxing and rowing will probably interest the boxer and the rower, but did not interest this non-practitioner of either. This probably counts as a failure for a trained copy-churning journalist, who should be able to grab any lapels, whatever the subject. If not, the dilettante is just that, without the “delight” that lurks in the etymology.

But delight there is in abundance, especially when Liebling farcically caves in and signs up to a Swiss slimming clinic. “The only sane man on the place, aside from us, was the masseur, a big Swiss named Sprüdli”:

   ‘And thou, eat thou this crap?’ I asked him in my imperfect but idiomatic German.  
   ‘No,’ said Sprüdli, as he plucked my biceps like harp strings and made them snap. ‘I need my strength. I eat to home.’  
   ‘And what has thou to home yesterday evening eaten?’
  ‘Blutwurst,’ he said, ‘and Leberwurst.’ 
  I wish I hadn’t asked, but masochism feeds on itself, especially when there is nothing to eat…Once Sprüdli knew my hurt, he made a point of telling me at each visit his menu for the previous day.

After this “temporary insanity”, he goes back to preaching to the unconverted. After all, “the primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite”.

by Harry Cochrane

Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris is published by Penguin and is available here.