Arts and Letters

On Missing Murray Kempton

Before Kempton there was Heywood Broun, before Broun, H. L. Mencken. No other columnist's name comes to mind, for these were all subversive of the established order—individualists so deep and inflexible in their own willful ways that pro-German Mencken was not allowed to comment about World War II in the Baltimore Sun, though he was the only writer-employee to be a trustee of the paper. Heywood Broun was fired from the New York World for defending Sacco and Vanzetti. Near the end of his life Broun left his old radical friends aghast that he had joined the Roman Catholic Church. When prompted to explain himself, Broun said that things had come to such a pass that an honest man could find peace only in the Communist Party or the Catholic Church. But why the Church? "That's easy," replied Broun. "The Church is easier on heretics."

That was the style of my much-missed friend, James Murray Kempton, a public radical who had no trouble giving up the Communist Party, and who remained astonishingly charitable to those wistful souls (as he regarded them) who could not face the obvious fact that in Hell Stalin would find only one other tyrant equal to himself, Hitler. Murray was the private churchgoer, the quiet Christian, who would come in the middle of the week to leave his donation at St. Ignatius if he had not been able to attend on Sunday. He was the most acute and cultivated columnist since Mencken, like Mencken in his passion for literature and learning, similar to Mencken in his irony and skepticism about the American scene. But Mencken became such a good German in Baltimore that he declaimed that FDR, whom he insanely hated anyway, was trying to violate Germany's natural Darwinian superiority by giving aid to England before Pearl Harbor.

None of that for Kempton, my only radical friend from the thirties who never sold out. Murray was a radical on Christian not Marxist grounds: he wanted justice for those who could not speak for themselves. In his professionally ironic style—his hallmark—he once said to me, from one corner of his mouth: "What an interesting populace we have. Nobody seems at all worried by the fact that we have the largest prison population and that it consists preponderantly of young blacks, a whole generation in jail."

Only Murray could have said "Communists are wonderful people. Not one of them has been able to produce a satisfactory example of socialism, and yet they waltz through capitalist acquisition." Yet he could say of Lionel Trilling's aversion to the obstinate Stalinism of his friend Tess Slesinger's now forgotten novel The Unpossessed: "The insistence on being correct has had marvelous results for Trilling; I am not sure that its results have been all that appetizing in his inferiors. Stalinism, with all its vulgarity, had a sense of … romantic delusion that does not always suffer in comparison with superior judgment. A great part of its mindlessness was an over-acceptance of America."

A persistent theme in everything Kempton wrote was the moral plight of the radical who, rejecting Communism and all its fanciful blueprints and worship of authority, simply cannot help making fun, day in and day out, of a society moved so much by greed and a politics incapable of minimum sincerity. He was a great fan of those now unappreciated Victorian radicals, Thomas Carlyle and Karl Marx, who may have been bad prophets, but who were not afraid to picture exactly a Britain that had not recovered from the industrial Revolution. (It still hasn't.) Kempton said of the dispatches about Europe and our Civil War sent by Marx and Engels to Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, "They are striking and original, it seems to me, just because they have so little to do with most of the journalism I read, or, for that matter, construct myself. The best of Marx's descendants are no closer to him than collateral. There is a puzzle here rather like that which arises when one confronts the early Carlyle. One sees at once that here is the way to get at the thing, and wonders why, with the sign painted this plain, the road has been so seldom followed."

Of course Kempton knew perfectly well that Victorian Britain was not the America of whose cruel Civil War Lincoln said that the North was fighting for common people everywhere. What he loved in the early Carlyle and Marx was the zeal of the true pamphleteer to awaken the conscience to the suffering that in a great city like New York is never actually seen by middle-class people even when they pass homeless people making a night of it on the steps of a tightly shut Madison Avenue church.

Murray had a quiet even humorous tolerance for people whose self-satisfied looks actually horrified him. So humor as well as religion, religion in the form of humor, was his mainstay. Every journalist in the old personal style of Mencken has to be overcome from time to time by the sheer absurdity of what passes in America for a civilized life and an intellectual culture. Mencken spoke of "the tragic farce of human existence." Murray, bicycling around New York in his pin stripes with some great classical music singing along in his ear phones, was not up to Mencken's savage snooty despair. Murray always knew, as a true journalist, what was going on around him, and that it was all manner of life in the great terrible city, not human existence in general, that stimulated exhilaration as well as horror at so much violence, greed, and dishonesty.

His way of responding to the whole spectrum of this was a famously mannered style, pretending to ironic detachment, that was as far from the screaming of tabloids and the officialese of the Times, as could be imagined. Only Kempton could note of newspaper publishers, stifling his laughter as he wrote, "that theirs was an industry whose institutions seldom have a history that is not commissioned by their publishers." Of Lewis Strauss, the Atomic Energy Committee chairman who vindictively brought down J. Robert Oppenheimer and who pronounced his name "Straws" to make himself sound less Jewish, Murray noted "that for Strauss science had become confused with magic; and since he saw Oppenheimer as the apotheosis of the scientist, he saw him as a species of wizard who would not withhold his powers for good unless he proposed to employ them for evil." Murray said of the unfortunate Oppenheimer that President Eisenhower, the Strategic Air Command, and the Atomic Energy Commission were all fiercely joined in the determination "that there was no remedy for Robert Oppenheimer's mischief except to get him stripped of the security clearance that was his license," adding that Oppenheimer himself "had obeyed the state too conscientiously to afford it an easy excuse to find points where he had strayed."

That was Murray, drawling it out to the very end of the sentence, to make clear the power of personal prejudice to do evil to the victim. Oppenheimer's real "crime" in the eyes of the government was not that he had a brother and a passing girl friend who had belonged to the CP but that he, J. Robert Oppenheimer, had said of the bomb whose creation he had successfully managed, that on seeing it explode, his first conscious thought had become Krishna's "I am become death, the shatterer of worlds." Murray made a point of knowing such things. He always found the public victim of political disgrace more interesting than his pious accuser.