Murray Kempton, R. I. P.
Steinfels, Peter
Peter Steinfels MURRAY KEMPTON, R.I.P. The journalist of Original Sin Several lives ago, when I was a graduate student working at Commonweal and living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I...
...He seemed to be having a hard time picking up the thread...
...He cometh up and is cut down like a flower...
...For this obduracy Schuller and Gallup were totally unprepared...
...About this time Kempton shuffled into the session...
...It was a gulf...
...The latecomer replied with a few phrases from the New Testament and, again, with some unpleasant references to sin...
...Schuller and Gallup did their best to relieve this ignorance, plying the newsman with more findings from the poll and more information about the value of self-esteem...
...Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin...
...The Introduction to his last collection of articles, Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events (Times Books, 1994), basks in his more than three-score-and-ten of "life's epiphanies...
...The two were announcing the findings of a recent poll showing, as I recall, that religious faith was good for self-esteem and self-esteem was good for religious faith...
...they seemed as uncomprehending of the puzzled gentleman's difficulties as he was uncomprehending of their enthusiasm...
...So on May 6 there were Anglican chant and Mozart and William Byrd, but no eulogies...
...This was not disagreement...
...If his overall sympathies were liberal, it was a liberalism born out of resistance to prevailing powers, which often meant the prevailing liberalism as well...
...The exchange quickly took on a comic aspect...
...Henry Adams and Horatio Alger...
...He typically sums up his good fortune by recalling a Basin Street conversation with Louis Armstrong about Armstrong's recording of "When You're Smilin...
...What sticks in my mind, however, was a midtown press conference called by the Reverend Robert H. Schuller, pastor of the Crystal Cathedral in Orange County, California, inheritor of the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale's gospel of positive thinking, and the latest accessory of the Clinton White House...
...Richard Severo's superb obituary in the New York Times quoted Walter Goodman: "Whatever the politics of the case, Mr...
...The preacher and the pollster were elated...
...I was left with the glow of an archetypical New York Moment...
...In the years that followed, sightings of Kempton at New York political gatherings or riding his bicycle around the neighborhood were frequent...
...He may even have thrown in some wisdom gleaned from a Jamaican cab driver...
...Peter Steinf els writes the "Beliefs" column in the New York Times and is a visiting professor of history at Georgetown University...
...he fli-eth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay...
...The name of "our dear brother Murray, here departed" was mentioned but twice, only, as he had requested, where the prayers required...
...Resurrection, redemption, and glory...
...I really don't remember what happened after I hand-delivered his copy of Commonweal to his apartment building a few blocks away...
...I should like my burial service," he had petitioned the Episcopal Church of Saint Ignatius of Antioch on Manhattan's Upper West Side, "to follow as closely as its rector deems fit the Order of the Burial of the Dead prescribed by the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, which can be found in my bookcase...
...Kempton can be counted on to choose the victims over their tormentors...
...But Kempton was also a journalist of Wonder, and much of that wonder arose from the improbable signs of redemption that he kept spying in such a sinful world...
...Schuller was accompanied by George H. Gallup, Jr...
...He persisted in using words like pride, meek, guilt and in suspecting out loud that what America needed was not more self-esteem but less...
...He admitted to not knowing much about polls and he made no pretense to piety, but wasn't Christianity supposed to impress us with our status as sinners, from which we had been mercifully redeemed...
...His disgust with the uses of power," Goodman continued, "grows from a conviction that every society is so inherently unjust that all the winners may be suspect...
...I was, of course, thrilled...
...Like many others I was entranced by the serpentine twists and turns of his sentences, the sly comparisons in their coils, the sting in the tail, the play of allusion like the glints of light that those revolving spheres send dancing around a ballroom...
...If his prose savored the deliberately archaic, that too was a happy contrast to the easy populism of his tabloid employer, the New York Post, or the breathless flow of the New Journalists...
...Said Armstrong: "There's kicks everywhere...
...There was Job: "Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery...
...I think I had attached a note and received a gracious thanks in return...
...nothing about self-esteem...
...It was, in fact, two parts of the American soul speaking completely past one another...
...I was a relatively recent admirer of Kempton, won over by views that defied all categories of sixties' politics and a prose style that defied all expectations of any newspaper columnist, let alone one for a tabloid...
...It could be said that Kempton was the journalist of Original Sin, not the half-doctrine that conservatives employ to dismiss the complaints of the dispossessed and their striving for a break, but the two-edged teaching that cuts even more against the established than the Utopian...
...It was a balance that Kempton not only maintained to the last but beyond...
...What was all this about self-esteem...
...And there was "earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust" and the "sure and certain hope of resurrection," through Jesus Christ "who shall change our vile body that it may be like to his glorious body...
...The journalist of Original Sin Several lives ago, when I was a graduate student working at Commonweal and living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I received Murray Kempton's copy of Commonweal, stuck to my own, in the mail...
Vol. 124 • June 1997 • No. 11
