AJ Liebling (1904-1963) was a journalist. This homage to France and French cooking is both an autobiography and a history of his times. It was published posthumously in 1959 by his Estate based on his articles for the New Yorker, which recalled his life in Paris in the 1920s. He was married three times, the first two unsuccessfully, the last briefly, but happily until he died aged only 59. He could turn out articles of 4,000 to 5,000 words in an afternoon or evening. I wish I could.
His father, who was originally from Germany and of Jewish descent, made his fortune as a furrier. The family visited Europe before the First World War, Liebling disliking the Frauleins, into whose care he & his sister were placed. Back in the neutral US, surrounded by “rooters for Germany”, he describes 1914, as his year of transition from Germanophobe to Francophile.
In 1927 he spent a year supposedly at the Sorbonne, but enjoying bars, girls & food, writing, “What I had taken to be a Golden Age was in fact Late Silver. My lamented mentor Mirande could remember the full glory of the sun, the grande êpoque, it was the age not only of dazzling public suppers, but of the cabinet particulier, when even a bourgeois seduction was preceded by an eleven-course meal.” His humour is both sardonic and tinged with regret, some of it, if written now, likely to be cancelled.
I understand his taste for boudin, andouillette & pot au feu. He describes the decline of French regional cooking and the forgetting, with their local specialties, of the pays, which were at the heart of regional geography.
He became a renowned writer about boxing, which I dislike. Therefore, I have no wish to read his articles about it. In 1939 he returned to Paris as a war correspondent during the phoney war. Several of the restauranteurs he describes were blaming everything on the British. Entranced by his writing, I intend reading the collection of his war time articles for the New Yorker, “The Road Back to Paris”.
Of Books, Bikes & Islands 