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CHAPTER 1

Liebling and the Lion of Belfort

When the Allied forces entered Paris on August 25, 1944, war correspondent A. J. Liebling (or "Joe") was right there with them. Thanks to his high-level connections in the U.S. Third Army, he had been attached to its First Infantry Division since its campaign in North Africa, filing stories for The New Yorker throughout the war. He had not been allowed to accompany them across the Channel on Dday, but three weeks later, he had been shipped over and given his own jeep and driver to facilitate his reporting on the aftermath of the Allied invasion. It had been a busy couple of months. Then, at summer's end, the Allies had marched on Paris, and five days of heavy fighting brought them to the outskirts of the city. Liebling followed behind, keeping as close to the action as he could, but getting up to Paris was not easy. There was continuing resistance from the Germans. Many bridges, buildings, and roads had been sabotaged along the way, and there had been blockades, traffic jams, and random gun- and artillery fire as well. But at last Liebling's driver reached the southern entry into the capital, the Porte d'Orléans.

Liebling had last seen Paris four years and two months earlier, just hours before the arrival of the Nazis, and now he was one of the first Allied journalists to return. The city had been much on his mind throughout the war: from boyhood onward, it had been his favorite place on earth. His father, a self-made New York furrier, had regularly taken the Liebling family to Europe, ostensibly so that his zaftig wife might lose weight at a German spa. But these health-related journeys had always included a stop or two in Paris, during which time the entire family ate grandly and to their hearts' content. Liebling's earliest memories of the place, which dated from the years before World War I, had been of military parades, fantastically curvaceous, full-figured women of the Lillian Russell type, and a seemingly endless array of elaborate desserts and iced pastries. The elegance of the city, of its residents, and of its restaurants was all so different from anything he had known at home.

Liebling spent most of his boyhood on the outskirts of New York, in the little beach community of Far Rockaway, where he was brought up on the plain, eat-it-it's-good-for-you cooking of the household's equally plain German Fräuleins. As boyhood gave way to adolescence, he developed a passion for military history, a talent for writing, and a predilection for trouble. Though he didn't quite fit in with them, he liked to hang out with tough guys and hoods. And he liked to break rules. After he got booted out of Dartmouth College, he talked his father into sending him to Paris, saying he would spend the academic year of 1926 to 1927 completing his education at the Sorbonne. His father only reluctantly agreed, but he nonetheless provided Liebling with a two-thousand-dollar letter of credit, one that enabled his son to spend the better part of the following school year skipping classes, strolling the boulevards, and eyeing pretty girls, or else whiling away the hours in restaurants and cafés, reading, smoking, and learning hands-on all about French wine and French food.

The Sorbonne may have bored him, but French literature and culture did not: Liebling immersed himself that year in various French novels, histories, and memoirs, and he read all kinds of French newspapers and magazines as well. At one point, his lifelong love for the racier French classics led him to translate the pornography of Nicolas-Edme Rétif, hoping he might use his new French to pick up girls. At the end of that glorious year (having successfully picked up a number of them), he was entirely broke and without prospects, and upon returning to the United States penniless he was forced to take a job as a local news reporter in dreary Providence, Rhode Island. "If I had compared my life to a cake," he later noted, "the sojourns in Paris would have represented the chocolate filling. The intervening layers were plain sponge."

Now, on this day of liberation, as his jeep rumbled into Paris, the most brilliant and widely read bad-boy reporter of his generation was struck yet again by the attractiveness of the Parisian women, who seemed to have grown even more desirable through their years of wartime hardship. They "wore long, simple summer dresses that left their bodies very free ... their bare legs were more smoothly muscled than Frenchwomen's before the war, because they had been riding those bicycles or walking ever since taxis vanished from the streets of Paris, and their figures were better, because the pâtissiers were out of business." He was now thirty-nine years old and desperate for a taste of real female company — not just the pay-and-get-out services of the whores who followed the army. As the beautiful young Parisiennes on their bicycles bore down upon the oncoming jeeps, all smiles and waves, he was overwhelmed by a rush of desire. "I understood how those old Sag Harbor whalers must have felt," he wrote afterward, "when the women of the islands came swimming out to them like a school of beautiful tinker mackerel."

The sight of the beautiful city — and of the beautiful welcoming women on their bicycles, of the jubilant crowds rushing out to meet the advancing Allied troops, some of them offering up fresh fruit and sandwiches and bottles of wine to the liberators — was suddenly more than Liebling could bear, and he wept. "There were thousands of people, tens of thousands, all demonstratively happy," he wrote of the moment. "In any direction we looked, there was an unending vista of cheering people. It was like an entry into Paradise."

*
All summer had been building to this moment. Liebling could not have been more delighted with the location for the D-day landings, for he knew Lower Normandy well: he had taken several long hiking tours there in the fall of 1926, walking an average of fifteen miles a day, quenching his thirst with pint after pint of hard cider as he went, and punctuating each of his daylong rambles with an enormous Norman meal. As a result, he recalled much of the gently rolling landscape from memory — and he recalled the menus too. Most important, he knew that the rich food of Normandy, based on butter and cream, might well have overwhelmed his digestion had he not had easy access to Calvados, taking shots of it not only between courses (as the traditional trou normand), but also at the meal's conclusion, as a hefty, tumbler-size digestif. Eighteen years had passed since those heady student days, but Liebling remembered every detail of the food and drink of la région Basse-Normandie as clearly as if he had eaten there the day before. In fact, the whole place made him feel uncannily at home — as he put it, as if "I had landed on the southern shore of Long Island and drive[n] inland toward Belmont Park."

Since disembarking on June 24, he had been interviewing Frenchmen about their experiences of the German occupation and the D-day landings, composing brilliant and moving stories about the invasion and its aftermath for The New Yorker. Much of what he wrote about was horrible, and even weeks after the invasion the smell of death lay all around — the human corpses and cow carcasses were everywhere. One of his favorite small towns, Vire, in the Calvados, had been virtually obliterated, and Caen, its capital, had been reduced to smoking rubble. Nevertheless, he was used to death and destruction by now, and he was feeling more exhilaration than despair, because the Allies had the Nazis on the run.

Moreover, thanks to the season, Normandy was just then at its most beautiful and welcoming. Summer brought with it sunny afternoons, salt breezes, and the gentle scent of dog roses blooming in the bocages. The fine flat sandy beaches had water warm enough for swimming, and everywhere one looked there were broad open vistas of gray sea, green pasture, and blue sky. So long as Liebling kept filing his stories — and as he liked to boast, he could "write better than anyone who could write faster, and faster than anyone who could write better" — he was free to go anywhere and do anything he liked: tour the local sights, visit with army acquaintances and journalist friends, and seek out the finest available Norman food and drink. Which was, in fact, easy enough to do since, now that the Germans had been routed and all transport lines had been blocked or destroyed, Norman farmers were rich in delectable foodstuffs and eager to turn these perishable goods into cold, hard cash. As a result, Liebling had ready access to more choice produce and top-quality artisanal foods than anyone in the army had seen in four long years.

There was also some great drinking to be done — and not just of the local cidre, pommeau, or Calvados either. During the liberation of Cherbourg, while covering the surrender of Fort de Roule, Liebling and a group of fellow journalists stumbled upon an underground storage room holding a mind-boggling Nazi treasure trove of brandy, Cointreau, Bénédictine, and Champagne. Since the Allied army had not yet secured the place, the journalists quickly trundled all they could out to their waiting jeeps and trucks. "Joe [Liebling] advised us on our choice of liqueurs," one of them later recalled. "We ... stored them in the jeep just before the MPs placed guards at the entrance of the fort [and] that supply of booze liberated at Cherbourg lasted us almost all the way to Paris."

Whether he was interviewing French civilians or American GIs, Liebling always kept a bottle of Calvados handy for sharing, for this fine apple brandy was, he found, a great way to loosen up tongues. And it wasn't difficult to obtain either, since Norman farmers had been selling it on the black market throughout the Occupation — both as a form of organized resistance and as a way of providing for their families. Those Americans and Brits who had the freedom to move about and speak to the locals at will — journalists mostly — were quick to take advantage of this Norman bounty, and those fluent enough in French to parse the Guide Michelin did even better. Ernest Hemingway set up for a while at the Hôtel de la Mère Poulard on Mont-Saint-Michel. The famed inn on the monastery-island was not exactly the most convenient place from which to file a story, but its restaurant was legendary: though specializing in omelets, it was strong on a number of gourmet dishes based on prized local ingredients. Liebling made his way there too, and visited with war photographer Robert Capa over a long and leisurely lunch. The hotel's menu featured not only its famed souffléd omelet cooked over an open fire, but also oysters from Cancale just to the west, lobsters from the English Channel, and delicate salt-marsh-raised lamb from Avranches to the immediate east.

Not long after that meal at La Mère Poulard, Liebling brought two fellow journalists to another fine little restaurant he had found north of the Mont, halfway up the Cotentin peninsula. After a lively negotiation in French with the patron, he had secured his buddies a festive lunch of sole bonne femme and tournedos, sauce Choron. Unfortunately their dessert was cut short by an emergency call, as they were summoned to witness the Eighth Corps cleaning out a pocket of German resistance at La-Haye-du-Puits, twelve miles away. The journalists then came under fire on a roadside strewn with German corpses and rotting cows — a situation that proved highly compromising to their digestions. When the last of the Germans had been wiped out, Liebling recalled, "We stayed around awhile, rather at a loss for conversation, then left, feeling that we had atoned for our good lunch."

Liebling had truly been in his element in Normandy, for war and gastronomy were the two great loves of his childhood, when he would lie in bed reading biographies of Napoleon while munching candy bars. Covering the invasion of Normandy was therefore a dream come true, not only because it marked a great turning point in the war, but also because Norman cuisine is among the richest and best in all of France. Liebling certainly thought so, for he liked rich food and strong drink, and he liked to eat until it hurt. After so many months in war-ravaged England, where the rations had been meager and the cooking dreary, he was beside himself at being back among people who understood intrinsically what it was to eat richly and well. In fact, he was half-convinced he had a Norman soul. As he later explained to his readers, "The Norman takes his vegetables in the form of animals — herbivores eat grass [and the Norman] Man, a carnivore, eats herbivores. ... [Likewise] the Norman takes his fruit in the form of cider and its distillate, Calvados."

Liebling loved all Norman food, but he particularly adored the region's rich, ripened, full-fat cheeses: Pont l'Évêque, Neufchâtel, Camembert, and the pungent Livarot, to name just a few. A fellow journalist later recalled coming upon him in their shared tent one very warm afternoon in late June, to find Liebling lying on his cot in his undershorts, a classic French novel propped up on his hairy chest, "and on his rounded belly ... an open box of ripe Camembert, which he dipped into occasionally with a finger." Open-minded about flavors, textures, and scents, Liebling also went out of his way to secure large quantities of andouillette de Vire, a massive sausage made entirely of smoked pig intestines. Its heavy barnyard odor was enough to send most Americans reeling, but Liebling loved its excremental funk. He had always been the most fearless of eaters. Even after contracting typhoid from sewage-contaminated oysters in childhood, no food had ever scared him or put him off. Split sheepsheads, tête de veau, tripe, brains, chitterlings — nothing could deter this gastronomic commando.

But during the summer of 1944, Liebling was eating only the finest — having waited four long years to return to France, he was now ready to lay down any cash necessary for the best French food that money could buy. "I am still of the opinion that Lower Normandy has the best sea food, the best mutton (from the salt meadows of the Avranches region), the best beef, the best butter, the best cream, and the best cheese in Europe," he later wrote in his masterpiece, Normandy Revisited. His idea of a good Norman lunch, he continued, was "a dozen huîtres de Courseulles, an araignée de mer ... with a half pint of mayonnaise on the side, a dish of tripes à la mode de Caen, a partridge Olivier Basselin, poached in cream and cider and singed in old Calvados, a gigot de pré-salé, a couple of biftecks, and a good Pont l'Évêque."

*
Liebling's coverage of the war had begun with similarly extravagant restaurant meals taken in Paris during the winter and spring of 1939 to 1940. Like many journalists, he had lived most of his life on the fly, eating irregularly and badly, but covering the outbreak of World War II in Paris had briefly changed all that. He arrived in France to cover the war for The New Yorker in October, at age thirty-five, having lobbied hard with his editors for the coveted spot. (The magazine's well-established Paris correspondent, Janet Flanner — "Genêt" — unexpectedly needed to return to the United States to look after her dying mother.) There was little to keep Liebling in New York: his pretty young Irish-American wife had suffered a mental breakdown shortly after their marriage, and she had been institutionalized ever since, with no hope of recovery. As a result Liebling had no home life, no love life, and no prospect of children. Being a lifelong fan of Frenchwomen, French literature, French military history, and French cuisine, he had pushed hard to be sent back to Paris on assignment, sensing he would surely be happier there, even if the Nazis invaded. "I spent several man-hours of barroom time impressing St. Clair McKelway, then managing editor, with my profound knowledge of France," Liebling later remembered, adding that since McKelway spoke no French he was in no position to judge Liebling's (which was only so-so). McKelway then suggested Liebling's name to the magazine's editor in chief, Harold Ross, proposing that Liebling might cover the war from the human-interest angle. Ross grudgingly agreed, but only on the stipulation that Liebling keep away from stories of Parisian "lowlife"— he knew all too well Liebling's predilection for booze, gambling, and whores, and he was committed to keeping The New Yorker, as he put it, "a family magazine."

Upon arrival, Liebling found the city "looked much as it had [when I was a college student there] in 1927 except for the strips of paper pasted across shop windows to keep the glass from flying in case of a bombardment." He was older now, though, so instead of taking cheap student rooms in the Latin Quarter, he checked into the Hôtel Louvois, "a second-class, comfortable pile favored by traveling salesmen." The Louvois was situated not on the Left Bank but the Right, just up the street from the Palais-Royal, which had been a center of Parisian vice for more than a century. He soon discovered that the hotel had a number of good, expense-account-type restaurants close by, as well as a substantial population of streetwalkers who made a specialty of catering to visiting businessmen. But he had chosen the hotel primarily because it was so close to the government offices in the First Arrondissement, Liebling's new beat.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Gourmands' Way"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Justin Spring.
Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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