A. J. Liebling, Jean Stafford, Walker Percy, and the 1962 National Book Award for The Moviegoer

Jim Santel’s beautiful recent essay in The Millions revisiting how The Moviegoer changed his life “like a slow-release drug” reminds us that Walker Percy’s novel is among several remarkable works of fiction celebrating their fiftieth anniversary this year. The finalists for the 1962 National Book Award for Fiction, all published in 1961, included Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, A New Life by Bernard Malamud, The Château by William Maxwell, Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger, The Spinoza of Market Street and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Pawnbroker by Edward Lewis Wallant, and Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.

What may be less well known is that the publisher of the winning book, a first novel, did not submit it for consideration. The Moviegoer had sold less than 5,000 copies and Knopf had placed its bet on The Château. Jay Tolson tells the story in Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy:

Unlikely as it sounds, The Moviegoer won the National Book Award in large part because of writer A. J. Liebling’s interest in Earl Long and Louisiana politics. Having finished a book on the colorful and corrupt governor [The Earl of Louisiana], Liebling happened to read a review of The Moviegoer that mentioned the book’s New Orleans setting. Liebling bought a copy of the novel, read it, and was so impressed that he recommended it to his wife, Jean Stafford, who was then serving on the NBA fiction panel, along with Herbert Gold and Lewis Gannett. Stafford was equally taken with the novel and thought it far better than anything she had so far read. She asked the National Book Foundation to send copies of the books to the other two judges. When the three judges met in early March, they came swiftly and unanimously to the choice: The Moviegoer.

Percy did not learn of how he came to be nominated until Gay Talese published an account in The New York Times two days after the award ceremony, which prompted Percy to write Stafford:

. . . I will ask you to pass on to Mr. Liebling the gratitude which I am only just now making out the dimensions of. (I’ll call him Joe if you all come to Louisiana—right now the habit of literary respect is too great.) If I understand it correctly, had it not been for Mr. Liebling (and his recent interest in Louisiana) The Moviegoer might never, would never have been considered. To think then, that if it hadn’t been for old Earl, etc. For the first time, I feel kindly to the Longs.

Talese reported that “Apparently [Stafford] convinced the other two fiction judges of the merits of the novel,” which incited an editorial in Show magazine denouncing Stafford and Liebling for cheating “Joseph Heller’s brilliant farce-tragedy” out of the award it deserved. Liebling responded by publishing a letter in Show detailing what happened and noting that the two other judges had been out of the country until they met to make their final decision.

As part of his award-winning ordeal, the reticent Percy had to appear on The Today Show the morning after the awards. Asked by host Hugh Downs why the South produced such good literature, Percy famously answered “Because we lost the war.” Shortly after returning home to Covington Percy received a congratulatory note from a fellow Southern writer whose opinion he highly prized:

Dear Mr. Percy,
I’m glad we lost the War and you won the National Book Award. I didn’t think the judges would have that much sense but they surprized [sic] me.
Regards,
Flannery O’Connor

Previous Reader’s Almanac posts of interest:

• W. H. Auden, A. J. Liebling: September 1 writings frame World War II in Europe
• Flannery O'Connor: the writer vs. the believer
• William Maxwell, novelist, editor, born 102 years ago

Related LOA works: A. J. Liebling: The Sweet Science and Other Writings (includes The Earl of Louisiana); William Maxwell: Later Novels and Stories (includes The Château); Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works

Calvin Trillin, A. J. Liebling, Dorothy Kilgallen on reporters and murders

In his review this week of Janet Malcolm’s new book, Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial, Dwight Garner reminds us that before Calvin Trillin was The Nation’s Deadline Poet or The New Yorker’s “happy eater,” he was famed for his artful murder reportage:

In his best book, the nonfiction collection Killings (1984), Calvin Trillin described what attracts him—and so many other writers—to murder stories. “When someone dies suddenly shades are drawn up,” Mr. Trillin wrote. Lives are laid bare. A murder “gives us an excuse to be there,” he said, “poking around in somebody’s life.”

In New York City at the dawn of the twentieth century, when William Randolph Hearst’s Evening Journal was slugging it out for readers with Joseph Pulitzer’s Evening World—and the morning World’s separate staff battled to find headlines more lurid than the Evening World’s—murder reporting could get dangerously competitive. A. J. Liebling deftly chronicled this blood sport in “The Case of the Scattered Dutchman”:

Reporters developed their own leads in solving crimes, outbidding the police for stool pigeons and at times outbidding the detective branch for details observed by uniformed men. Then they would follow through in person, “arresting” suspects, if the latter didn’t appear dangerous, and extorting confessions from them. These they would publish as scoops. The practice sometimes proved momentarily awkward when it developed that a reporter had abducted an innocent party, but there were few such mistakes a ten-dollar bill wouldn’t square.

Nowadays, Garner writes, “When reporters talk about covering killings, they are really talking, most of the time, about covering trials.” Malcolm’s new book concerns the 2008 Borukhova murder trial in Queens and, Garner notes, Malcolm “writes sourly about journalism” in this context:

Human frailty continues to be the currency in which it trades. Malice remains its animating impulse.... A trial offers unique opportunities for journalistic heartlessness.

The evidence in True Crime: An American Anthology, however, strongly suggests that American murder trials have a long history of bringing out the prurient and cruel in reporters. “Heartless” is certainly an apt description of Dorothy Kilgallen’s 1935 portrait of the lover of murderer Robert Allen Edwards in “Sex and the All-American Boy”:

It was the consensus among my male colleagues, who either saw Margaret Crain in the flesh or studied her photographs, that she had about as much sex appeal as a pound of chopped liver. At twenty-three she was thin, dark-haired, shapeless, with a hawklike nose that seemed always to be sniffing something unpleasant.... If ever a truck driver had whistled at Margaret, his license would have been revoked immediately due to defective vision.

Harold Schechter, editor of True Crime, addressed this aspect of the genre’s writers in his LOA interview (PDF):

I don’t know if true crime writers were more guilty of such cattiness than other journalists of the day. But they certainly were less PC than their counterparts tend to be today—another example of the way true crime writings reflect changing social standards.

Also of interest:

• Read the full LOA interview (PDF) with editor Harold Schechter 
• “A Memorable Murder” by Celia Thaxter, a previous Story of the Week
• Charles Guiteau, James Garfield’s assassin, and the disturbing history of political assassinations, a previous Reader’s Almanac post

Related LOA works: True Crime: An American Anthology (includes Calvin Trillin’s “A Stranger with a Camera,” A. J. Liebling’s “The Case of the Scattered Dutchman,” and Dorothy Kilgallen’s “Sex and the All-American Boy”)

Pete Hamill receives A. J. Liebling Award

Journalist and author Pete Hamill has been selected by the Boxing Writers Association of America as the winner of this year’s A. J. Liebling Award. A masterful sportswriter, Hamill also has a special connection to Liebling: he was the editor of both Library of America volumes of his work, one of which was The Sweet Science and Other Writings. In an exclusive interview conducted shortly after the publication of that volume, Hamill spoke of Liebling’s appeal as a boxing writer:

LOA: In January 2003 Sports Illustrated ranked The Sweet Science as #1 of the 100 best sports books ever, hailing Liebling as “pound for pound the top boxing writer of all time. . . . Liebling’s writing is efficient yet stylish, acerbic yet soft and sympathetic.” What makes Liebling’s writing on boxing so great?

Hamill: Above all, he had sympathy for the fighters, and those rogues and craftsmen who helped shape them. As a young man, Liebling had taken his own lessons as a boxer. He learned the hard way how difficult an apprenticeship each fighter must serve, how much skill was involved, how much discipline and will. He knew that the toughest prizefighters could be the gentlest of men. He knew that the toughness they exemplified was not the same as meanness, nor still another version of the loudmouth with a pea-sized heart. The prizefighter was a living example of the stoic virtues Liebling saw growing up in New York, then during the Depression, and most of all, among those who fought World War II. He expressed that sympathy without ever lapsing into sentimentality.

Read the rest of the interview here (PDF).

Hamill has long been advisor to and supporter of The Library of America and has worked on several LOA projects. In addition to the two volumes of Liebling’s work, Hamill edited James T. Farrell: Studs Lonigan and wrote a foreword for Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing. One of his own pieces on boxing, “Up the Stairs with Cus D’Amato,” appears in the forthcoming LOA boxing anthology At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing.

The author of eighteen books, Hamill recent completed his latest novel, Tabloid City, which will be published on May 5—the day before he receives the Liebling Award at the BWAA’s annual dinner in Las Vegas. He was chosen for the award by a committee of veteran boxing writers that included George Kimball and John Schulian (both co-editors of At the Fights), as well as Pulitzer Prize–winner Dave Anderson, Bernard Fernandez, Richard Hoffer, and Ed Schuyler. Click here for the complete list of past winners.

W. H. Auden, A. J. Liebling: September 1 writings frame World War II in Europe

The nonaggression pact signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939, between Germany and the Soviet Union included a secret clause providing for the partition of Poland between the two signing powers. On September 1, German tanks and planes invaded Poland on three fronts and World War II began. The outbreak stirred W. H. Auden, 32 and newly arrived in the United States in January, to write one of his most anthologized poems, “September 1, 1939,” first published in The New Republic on October 18 of that year.

Set in “one of the dives/On Fifty-Second Street” the 99-line poem attempts to locate the individual’s place in the world historical order. Whether Auden actually wrote it in a Manhattan bar or in the home of the father of his lover Chester Kallman is a matter of some dispute. In later years, as Auden moved away from politics, he came to disown the poem, calling it “the most dishonest poem I have ever written,” especially its most famous stanza:

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

The last line of this stanza—its most quoted line—troubled Auden the most, since we die whether we love one another or not. At one point, in granting permission to Oscar Williams to reprint the poem in an anthology in 1955, Auden changed the line to “We must love one another and die.”

Listen to Dylan Thomas read “September 1, 1939.”
Read the entire poem.

Five years later, on September 1, 1944, A. J. Liebling dispatched one of his most famous “Letters from Paris.” The Allied Forces had liberated Paris on August 25 and Liebling captures the joy and relief of a city transformed: “For the first time in my life and probably the last, I have lived for a week in a great city where everybody is happy. Moreover, since the city is Paris, everybody makes this euphoria manifest.”

As Liebling details how different factions in Paris came together to defeat their occupiers, his account can almost be seen as a response to the charge in Auden’s poem:

Happiest of all . . . are the police, who stand at street intersections with their thumbs in their belts and beam paternally at everybody instead of looking stern and important, as they used to. . . . For Paris, where the street cry has always been “A bas les flics!” (Down with the cops!), this is behavior so unprecedented that the cops sometimes look as though they think it is all a dream. There is good reason for the change of heart; for the first time since Etienne Marcel led a street mob against the royal court in about 1350, the police and the people have been on the same side of the barricades. It was the police who, on August 15th, gave the signal for a mass disregard of the Germans by going on strike. It was also the police who, four days later, began the street fighting by seizing the Prefecture of the Seine, their headquarters. . . . Three thousand of them, in plainclothes and armed with carbines, revolvers, and a few sub-machine guns, took the place over and defended it successfully for six days before being relieved by the arrival of the French armored division of General Leclerc.

Aiding the police were “boys fourteen or fifteen years old” who destroyed tanks by throwing bottles of incendiary fluid through their ports. “The youngsters who did the fighting were not always of the type that is ordinarily on good terms with the police. They included problem children of every neighborhood as well as students and factory workers. So the oldest of all Paris feuds has ended.”

Read the entire “Letter from Paris, September 1, 1944” (PDF).

Related LOA works: Poets of World War II; A. J. Liebling: World War II Writings

Ernie Pyle still sets the style

To think that Ernie Pyle would have turned 110 today is one way of measuring just how far in the past World War II lies—and how enduring Pyle's reporting has proved. Ernie Pyle had already developed a following for his folksy syndicated columns about daily life in America when he began covering the war from London in 1940. Over the next five years his dispatches from Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific would make him the most read—and most imitated—reporter on the war. On April 18, 1945, Pyle was hit in the temple by Japanese machine-gun fire on Ie Shima, an island off Okinawa Honto, and died instantly.

In a 1950 reminiscence in The New Yorker, his colleague, wartime correspondent A. J. Liebling, offered this profile, “Pyle Set the Style”:

The thin old-looking reporter who was killed by a Japanese sniper on Ie Shima in April, 1945 (he was only forty-four, but to enlisted men he seemed as old as a senior admiral), contributed a stock figure to the waxworks gallery of American history as popularly remembered. To a list that includes the frontiersman, the Kentucky colonel, the cowboy, and Babe Ruth, Ernest Taylor Pyle, to give him the full name nobody ever called him by, added G. I. Joe, the suffering but triumphant infantryman. The portrait was sentimentalized but the soldier was pleased to recognize himself in it, and millions of newspaper readers recognized their sons and lovers in Pyle’s soldiers and got some glimmer of the fact that war is a nasty business for the pedestrian combatant. Through millions of letters from home enclosing clippings, the soldiers learned that their folks read Ernie Pyle. He provided an emotional bridge. . . . He was the only American war correspondent who made a large personal impress on the nation in the Second World War.

Pyle’s dispatches focused not on military strategy but on the experiences of the common foot soldier, as in this report, “The God-Damned Infantry,” from Northern Tunisia in May 1943:

The men are walking. They are fifty feet apart, for dispersal. Their walk is slow, for they are dead weary, as you can tell even when looking at them from behind. Every line and sag of their bodies speaks their inhuman exhaustion. On their shoulders and backs they carry heavy steel tripods, machine-gun barrels, leaden boxes of ammunition. Their feet seem to sink into the ground from the overload they are bearing. They don't slouch. It is the terrible deliberation of each step that spells out their appalling tiredness. Their faces are black and unshaven. They are young men, but the grime and whiskers and exhaustion make them look middle-aged. In their eyes as they pass is not hatred, not excitement, not despair, not the tonic of their victory — there is just the simple expression of being here as though they had been here doing this forever, and nothing else. The line moves on, but it never ends. All afternoon men keep coming round the hill and vanishing eventually over the horizon. It is one long tired line of antlike men. There is an agony in your heart and you almost feel ashamed to look at them. They are just guys from Broadway and Main Street, but you wouldn't remember them. They are too far away now. They are too tired. Their world can never be known to you, but if you could see them just once, just for an instant, you would know that no matter how hard people work back home they are not keeping pace with these infantrymen in Tunisia.

The above excerpts are from Reporting World War II: 1938-1946 (two volumes) and A. J. Liebling: World War II Writings.