The occasion of Murray Kempton’s centenary—he was born December 16, 1917—has attracted little attention. As a columnist for the New York Post and later Newsday he wrote more about New York than Washington or national politics, but one had a right to expect a biography or maybe a few essays or a short PBS documentary or at least an NPR spot. Nothing so far, except for an appreciation in his hometown Baltimore Sun and the little piece you’re reading.
It’s not that Kempton is forgotten. His brilliant book on the 1930s, Part of Our Time (1955), is still in print, and his name still pops up in the pages of newspapers and intellectual magazines. He wrote somewhere around 10,000 columns and scores of essays for the New Republic and the New York Review of Books. He won a Pulitzer for commentary in 1985, yet somehow his fame didn’t extend far outside New York City. “It required a Pulitzer Prize to alert some editors to the very existence of Murray Kempton,” wrote his vastly more famous friend William F. Buckley in 1986.
Kempton could write perceptively about Machiavelli’s letters and Conrad’s Nostromo but also about the New York mafia and Huey P. Newton and the Marxian assumptions behind the Master of Business Administration degree. His politics were liberal but unpredictable, and he often approached his subjects from some angle that only made sense if you followed him all the way to the end.
In his essay on Alger Hiss in Part of Our Time, for instance, he assumes his subject’s guilt (still widely doubted among Kempton’s left-liberal peers in the 1950s) but interprets Hiss’s decision to engage in espionage for the Soviet Union as an outgrowth of the shabby-genteel hypocrisy of Baltimore in the 1920s. Communism allowed the highly respectable Hiss to steal and malign and destroy in a highly respectable way, Kempton suggests. “The Communists offer one precious, fatal boon: they take away the sense of sin. It may or may not be debatable whether a man can live without God; but, if it were possible, we should pass a law forbidding a man to live without the sense of sin.”
Just as unpredictable was Kempton’s prose. Few accounts of his life fail to use the word “baroque” to describe his style. I am not sure that’s right. The word implies gratuitous ornamentation, frill for no purpose, but his style isn’t ornamented. I would call it relentlessly, sometimes perversely, inventive. His word choice is never quite what you would have predicted; his sentences are like little excursions, sometimes resolving in the ordinary way, sometimes fading into grammatical uncertainty or trailing off into a marathon dependent clause. It doesn’t always work, but it’s evidence of a mind steadfastly refusing to think or express anything in the usual tired old way.
Here is a passage, taken more or less at random from a 1990 column (included in his 1994 collection Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events) about an assault on nine homeless men and the murder of a tenth, Carlos Melendez, by a pack of Halloween revelers on Wards Island.
That is perhaps more complicated than it needs to be, but it has a kind of syncopated lilt to it and it’s memorable in its way. And the thought it expresses is, for an opinion writer anyway, as unorthodox as the style: You can’t explain the pointless murder of a homeless man, Kempton is saying, by some facile reference to ignorance or social pathology; you can’t explain it at all and shouldn’t try to. (He was right, incidentally—five men and boys were later arrested for the crime, aged 23, 22, 18, 15, and 13, all from nearby housing projects.)
When Kempton died in May 1997, his funeral included no eulogies of any kind, at his instruction. His name wasn’t even mentioned. The service, at St. Ignatius of Antioch, an Anglo-Catholic church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, went strictly by the 1559 prayer book. That was tough for the mourners, who included some of New York’s glamorous politicians and intellectuals. They had expected a more social affair with anecdotes and tearful goodbyes, but all they got was a glum rite. Kempton, though far from unsocial, was a humble man and a Christian. Maybe it’s apt that his hundredth birthday has gone mostly unremarked.
