Assignment to Hell Read Free

at the
Times
, where Liebling was unceremoniously dumped for messing around on the overnight sports desk. Liebling somehow thought it would be clever to list the referees for high school basketball games as
Ignoto
, Italian for “unknown.” 10 Once his recurring gag was uncovered, the
Times
bade him
arrivederci.
    He went on to work at the
New York World
(later the
World-Telegram
) in the early ’30s, where, at least on occasion, he flashed lush writing andreportorial skills. But the daily grind of journalism bored him; in ’35, when the
World-Telly
stiffed him on a raise, he quit.
    Liebling’s cockiness was rooted in a pampered childhood of nannies, private schools, and summering at Lake Como. His father, Joseph, although conspicuously nonobservant, achieved the dream of every Jewish immigrant. While still a young man, the Austrian émigré became
balabos far sich
(Yiddish for “one’s own boss” 11 ), striking it rich in the furrier trade and real estate. In a few short years, Joseph went from living hand to mouth in Manhattan’s Bowery to basking on the Upper West Side. He married a socially prominent San Franciscan named Anna Slone, whose Judaism was almost as indifferent as his own.
    Their first child, Abbott Joseph, born in the fall of 1904, would be raised only nominally Jewish. Abbott, as his parents insisted on calling him, harbored ambivalent feelings about his ancestry, never quite embracing it, but never quite repudiating it, either. “Even Hitler didn’t make [Liebling] an intensely self-conscious Jew,” his third wife, the writer Jean Stafford, remarked. 12
    Liebling was a pudgy kid who never backed down if a playground tough taunted him about his weight, or his girly name, or his thick glasses. Young Abbott was forever losing his specs when he took them off to mix it up in upper Manhattan or later in Far Rockaway on the Queens/western Long Island border, where the family moved in 1913.
    For the rest of his life, Liebling remained an unrepentant New Yorker. Among his first books was a collection of pieces on his passion for life in the Big Apple. The charm of America’s heartland eluded Liebling. “Friends often tell me of their excitement when the train on which they are riding passes from Indiana into Illinois, or back again,” Liebling wrote in
Back Where I Came From
. “I am ashamed to admit that when the Jerome Avenue express rolls into Eighty-sixth Street Station I have absolutely no reaction.” 13
    He almost never got the chance to extol New York’s virtues. As an eleven-year-old, Liebling contracted typhoid fever. For six months he was confined to bed, a condition that left him delirious for a time but fueled a voracious reading habit. The infirm Liebling devoured what he later called the “literature of fact,” developing a lifelong infatuation for the writing of“Stendhal,” Marie-Henri Beyle, the nineteenth-century Frenchman considered the father of literary realism. Liebling’s French was so advanced that, as a teenager, he could appreciate Stendhal in the writer’s native tongue. In his youth Liebling read a lot of fiction, mainly Charles Dickens, but never cared as much for make-believe. Years later, Liebling’s efforts at crafting straight fiction proved frustrating, although he loved the detective stories of Frenchman Guy de Maupassant. Joe proudly became “my own Sherlock Holmes,” he said. 14
    Young Liebling also followed the horrors of the Great War—the sinking of the
Lusitania
, the siege at Gallipoli, the early trench maneuvering at the Somme. By the time the French commander at Verdun issued his gallant vow
“Ils ne passeront pas!”
(“They shall not pass!”), Liebling had become a Francophile. He developed a scorn toward everything Germanic. Since his parents had hired a series of fräuleins, spiteful German nannies, to watch over Liebling and his younger sister, it didn’t take much to persuade young Abbott that there was something inherently defective in