Just Enough Liebling – A J Liebling (1)

Morty, the renting agent, is a thin, sallow man of forty whose expression has been compared, a little unfairly, to that of a dead robin. He is not, however, a man without feeling; he takes a personal interest in the people who spend much of their lives in the Jollity Building.

It is about the same sort of interest that Curator Raymond Ditmars takes in the Bronx Zoo’s vampire bats. “I know more heels than any other man in the world,” Morty sometimes says, not without pride. “Everywhere I go around Broadway, I get ‘Hello, how are you?’ Heels that haven’t been with me for years, some of them.” Morty usually reserves the appellation heel for the people who rent the forty-eight cubicles, each furnished with a desk and two chairs, on the third floor of the Jollity Building.

These cubicles are formed by partitions of wood and frosted glass which do not quite reach the ceiling. Sufficient air to maintain human life is supposed to circulate over the partitions. The offices rent for $10.00 and $12.50 a month, payable in advance. “Twelve and a half dollars with air, ten dollars without air,” Morty says facetiously. “Very often the heels who rent them take the air without telling me.” Sometimes a Telephone Booth Indian acquires enough capital to rent a cubicle.

He thus rises in the social scale and becomes a heel. A cubicle has three advantages over a telephone booth. One is that you cannot get a desk into a telephone booth. Another is that you can play pinochle in a cubicle. Another is that a heel gets his name on the directory in the lobby, and the white letters have a bold, legitimate look.

The vertical social structure of the Jollity Building is subject to continual shifts. Not only do Indians become heels, but a heel occasionally accumulates forty or fifty dollars with which to pay a month’s rent on one of the larger offices, all of them unfurnished, on the fourth, fifth, or sixth floor. He then becomes a tenant. Morty always views such progress with suspicion, because it involves signing a lease, and once a heel has signed a lease, you cannot put him out without serving a dispossess notice and waiting ten days.

A tenant, in Morty’s opinion, is just a heel who is planning to get ten days’ free rent.

The War and After Letter from Paris, December 22,1939 Letter from Paris, June 1, 1940 Westbound Tanker The Foamy Fields Quest for Mollie Days with the Daydaybay The Hounds with Sad Voices City Life The Jollity Building 1. INDIANS, HEELS, AND TENANTS 2. FROM HUNGER. 3. A SOFT DOLLAR from The Honest Rainmaker – The Life and Times of Colonel John R.

Stingo 1. THE PLUG IN THE DOOR 2. THE PASHA STRIKES OUT 3. TOAD IN SPRING 4. THE THIRD PALACE 5. BAPTISM OF FIRE 6. A DAY WITH DOMINICK O’MALLEY 7. REUNION AT BELMONT 8. “LONG, LISSOME, LUCREFEROUS” 9. “THE DETONATORY COMPOUND” 10. “LA GRANDE SEMAINE” 11. THE LIFE SPIRITUAL Boxiana Sugar Ray and the Milling Cove Ahab and Nemesis The University of Eighth Avenue I II Poet and Pedagogue The Press The World of Sport My Name in Big Letters Obits The Man Who Changed the Rules Death on the One Hand Harold Ross—The Impresario The Earl of Louisiana “Joe Sims, Where the Hell?”

Nothing but a Little Pissant Blam-Blam-Blam Epilogue – Paysage de Crépuscule BY A. J. LIEBLING Notes Copyright Page OceanofPDF.com Introduction: Reporting It All BY DAVID REMNICK From the start of the American republic, the most tantalizing means of indulging a youthful desire for escape and recreation has been the sojourn in Paris. It’s a long tradition, amply described. The literature begins with the decorous engagements in the letters of Benjamin Franklin and Abigail Adams and leads soon enough to the earthier liaisons in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Tropic of Cancer.

Much is promised to the prospective traveler: if not a passage of enlightenment or erotic adventure, then at least a taste for boiled innards and string beans done right. As Mrs. Adams wrote home, pleasure is the “business of life” in Paris—there is another way to live, in other words—and this is the lasting gift, and illusion, that every visiting American brings home in his bags. To this day, countless children of American privilege arrive in the Latin Quarter, bent double under their backpacks and concealing a money belt holding a Eurail pass and a freshly squeezed carte orange.

One of the pleasures of such an indolent, never-to-be-repeated existence is the liberty it provides the student on leave from academy-drafted reading lists and deadlines that frog-march undergraduates up and down “The Magic Mountain” in the time it took Hans Castorp to catch cold.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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