For a certain kind of New Yorker — an aficionado of the mid-20th-century cultural firmament, a sucker for eccentrics, big lives, mob bosses, criminal trials and especially poetic denunciations of hypocrisy, false piety and artifice of any kind — it has been a slog waiting around for the compiled works of Murray Kempton.
Politically nimble and morally steadfast, Kempton produced 11,000 newspaper columns read by highbrows and lowlifes, from the 1940s through the 1990s, in the process winning a Pulitzer Prize, two George Polk Awards, a National Book Award and, perhaps most enviably, a Grammy for liner notes accompanying a Frank Sinatra album.
“Going Around,” assembled by a young writer named Andrew Holter, arrives now, delivering more than 400 pages of Kempton’s journalism — dozens of pieces from his years at The New York Post and Newsday, his dalliance with The New Republic and his long tenure as a contributor to The New York Review of Books.
Though they were very different platforms — a term he would have surely detested, given his aversions to jargon, cliché and even modern usage itself — he did not recalibrate to fit any single institutional tone. The tabloid reader commuting home on the No. 4 train was given the same all-access pass to his protean intellect and lyrical, digressive sentences as the Park Avenue neighbor of William F. Buckley’s reading him, fireside, in the more rarefied outlets.
Buckley was a fan of Kempton’s. So, too, were Langston Hughes, Richard Nixon and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Kempton brought his erudition with him wherever he went, and he went everywhere — throughout the South covering the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s; to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, where he was arrested; to every corner of New York City, mostly traveling by bicycle and dressed always as if he were on his way to a christening or a deposition.
Paying tribute on the occasion of Kempton’s death in 1997 at the age of 79, David Remnick, who would soon become editor of The New Yorker, remarked that he could “write about the Mafia with such brilliance” because he was as well versed in Dante and Machiavelli as he was in “the collected wiretaps of Simone Rizzo DeCavalcante.”
A career like Kempton’s — though there is really no parallel — is almost impossible to imagine today, in part because of his outsize reach and enormous range but also because of the freedom he enjoyed from the pressure for predictability. Now, no public voice is permitted much equivocation. The reader typically expects to know what is coming. Shifts in viewpoint are often regarded as pollutants of the “brand.” (Another term that would have caused Kempton to convulse.)
Socialism was Kempton’s “high church,” the critic Darryl Pinckney writes in the foreword to “Going Around.” But church — specifically St. Ignatius of Antioch on West End Avenue — was also his church. And Kempton could change his mind. Having initially found Dwight Eisenhower “hopelessly dumb,” he came to recognize his “cunning.” In a 1993 essay relaying his skepticism of Bill Clinton, Kempton called Eisenhower “the last American to arrive at the White House entirely equipped to be the sort of president who does the country the least damage.”
Kempton went to work for The New York Post in the 1940s, when it was owned by the Bryn Mawr socialite Dorothy Schiff, whose roster of columnists included Eleanor Roosevelt. It was, as they say, a different time. Kempton’s focus was labor. He would describe himself as a radical, but over the course of his career, readers might have come to a different conclusion or even no conclusion at all, given his variance.
Kempton stood up for 21 members of the Black Panthers who, in 1969, were charged with planning terrorist attacks against five New York department stores, a police station and the New York Botanical Garden. Among the heroines of his telling was Afeni Shakur, who was pregnant with Tupac at the time of the trial.
In Kempton’s account, the racist repressions of the New York Police Department were the real problem; the cops, the agents of a true conspiracy. “The Panthers are the bull’s-eye, but the black community is the target,” Kempton wrote.
More than a decade later, in the 1980s, Kempton also found it within him to champion Richard Nixon, who was then at the mercy not of special prosecutors but rather the overlords of an Upper East Side co-op bent on rejecting him. Leading the charge was a 90-year-old resident named Jacob Kaplan — “rich,” as Kempton described him, “from the pressings of Welch’s grapes.” He was also, Kempton wrote, “a fervent and pitiless liberal Democrat,” as if that were an unconscionable designation.
Standing outside the building with other journalists on the day when the board was meeting to make a decision, Kempton observed that the superintendent was not wearing a coat and tie, that the canopy of the august building leaked and “that the gilt leaves that form its entrance gates have not lately been polished.”
“Such is the way with fair-housing controversies,” Kempton drolly wrote, that “the object of the prejudice is always neater and better behaved than those who bar his way.” It was the clubinesss and pretense that he could not abide. Greed was always on the contemptible side of the ledger, and Kempton found it offensive if not preposterous that among the “potentially catastrophic consequences” that Kaplan envisioned should Nixon move in was a plunge in sale prices of the apartments at 760 Park Avenue.
Kempton’s own living experiences stretched from a room at the shabby Hotel Gramercy, which he called the Gram, where he planned to spend one night and wound up staying for three years, to the West 67th Street apartment of Barbara Epstein, a founder of the New York Review.
The two were together for more than a decade after Kempton’s two previous marriages, which had resulted in several children — a son who was severely autistic, another who died in a car crash on his honeymoon, and a daughter, Sally Kempton, who wrote a withering essay in the July 1970 issue of Esquire deriding her father for crimes against feminism. It is hard not to wonder whether the furious pace that Kempton kept, often writing four columns a week, was as much a means of emotional retreat as it was the consequence of his insatiable intellectual hunger.
Considered decades after the fact, prescience is often the mark of a journalist’s currency. In 1968, Kempton imagined Columbia University imploding “over the vanity of worldly pride.” In a 1989 column titled “The Proof That Trump Is a Self-Made Man,” he foresaw the dangers of a man who said “I want to hate.” Kempton concluded that the developer demeaned “anything he touches.”
For all that he was praised, Kempton might have developed a Trumpian ego. The notes he set down for his funeral suggest otherwise. “It is my preference,” he wrote, “that there be no reference to my name except in its proper place after ‘for it has pleased to deliver this [name] ….’”
Ginia Bellafante has served as a reporter, critic and, since 2011, as the Big City columnist. She began her career at The Times as a fashion critic, and has also been a television critic. She previously worked at Time magazine.
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