The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [1]
Abbott Joseph Liebling, known to one and all as Joe, was actually born in Manhattan, in 1904, but for him New York City and its inhabitants figured among a vast constellation of interests he returned to episodically over the course of his thirtyoddyear career. Although he was comfortably reared—his father, who had worked his way up from the Lower East Side, was prominent in the fur trade—he maintained an inclination toward lowlife from his youth onward, and he had a knack for finding its traces and effects everywhere, including medieval history and early French literature. After his expulsion from Dartmouth (for repeatedly cutting chapel; he later completed his degree at Columbia), he went to work for the New York World, and then for its successor, the WorldTelegram, where he wrote many of the short features that are collected in his first book, Back Where I Came From (1938). The World was a firstclass paper; the WorldTelegram was decidedly not, and Liebling suffered there (anyone confused as to why a profile of the head of the ScrippsHoward Syndicate should be included in this, a book about riffraff, should know that Roy Howard was the WorldTelegram's founding publisher; both the profile and its placement were acts of revenge).
In 1935 he went to work at The New Yorker, where he first made his name with a profile of the Harlembased deity Father Divine, written in collaboration with St. Clair McKelway. The piece in this book, along with about half the contents of Back Where I Came From, were written in the period immediately thereafter, between 1936 and 1939. The first things that will strike the reader about Liebling upon starting to read The Telephone Booth Indian are his sense of humor, his virtuoso ear, his timing, his sense of style—and his boundless capacity for appreciation. This appreciation was first and foremost linguistic. As his New Yorker colleague Philip Hamburger wrote, “Tinhorn entrepreneurs who called the Club Chez Nous the Club Chestnuts sent him joyously humming, in a state of euphoria, to his typewriter.” Liebling as a reporter was among other things an impresario, with a nose for linguistically gifted civilians, such as Morty Ormont, the renting agent of the Jollity Building (“whose expression has been compared, a little unfairly, to that of a dead robin”), whose phrasings and coinages make him in effect a contributor to the piece in which he figures, not simply a subject. Reflecting a modernist sensibility, Liebling the impresario saw art in outcomes rather than intentions; thus he made no special distinction between epigrammatists who successes resulted from their imperfect command of English idiom (the boys at the I & Y Cigar Store: “Hymie is a man what knows to get a dollar”) and those whose effects were calculated (the great boxing cutman Whitney Bimstein: “I like the country. It's a nice spot”).
Liebling also had an eye for the beauty of a con, and if this book has a hero, it is a man who, lying low somewhere, is present only in conversational reference: Maxwell C. Bimberg, aka Count de Pennies (who, according to Liebling's biographer, Raymond Sokolov, was actually a promoter named Samuel J. Burger). The telephone booth Indians may be gardenvariety schemiels, the cannon fodder of swindling, but the Count is an artist. And if Broadway is a microcosm of the human condition, then the Jollity Building is a thimbletheater representation of Broadway, an entire world contained in a single, squat, shabby office building, whose tenants all have their eyes on the prize while they are struggling to assemble twentyfive cents. Most of the subjects of the other pieces can also be termed promoters, including Roy Howard