Guest Column
BEICHMAN, ARNOLD
GUEST COLUMN By Arnold Beichman 'More Substance In Our Enmities' It's an odd statement to make today when, from Berlin east to the Yellow Sea, there are so many innocent dead and dying, but it's...
...Nobody, no law, no legislature, no words can rob him of his citizenship nor can heroism in battle restore and maintain it...
...Yet, I would say that Thompson long ago forfeited his citizenship among free men through self-banishment...
...Writing about Thompson as if he were some slightly stained knightly adventurer, Kempton referred to this Soviet agent's hitch in the Spanish Civil War and the wounds he suffered...
...GUEST COLUMN By Arnold Beichman 'More Substance In Our Enmities' It's an odd statement to make today when, from Berlin east to the Yellow Sea, there are so many innocent dead and dying, but it's even odder to feel impelled to make it...
...Let it be as Yeats wrote: "We had fed the heart on fantasies...
...But Kempton knows this each time he chooses among the impossibles seeking to fire evil into virtue and comradeship...
...Do we remember that Kempton once wrote that it is the rule of the reporter's vocation "that nobody is worth kicking unless he is up" and that is why Walter Reuther must deserve Kempton's scorn and Thompson the bittersweet caress...
...Kempton's epilogue anticipated "some nasty letters," which, he says, he will accept only from holders of the Purple Heart...
...more particularly, better men than Robert Thompson, chairman of the New York State Communist party and holder of the Distinguished Service Cross...
...He knows this but can say nothing...
...Orwell, a Kempton idol who was also wounded in Spain, is my authority for recalling the treachery of the Communists and the Soviet Union against the Spanish people...
...And so rarely is good writing to be found in newspapers that Kempton is on the way to canonization as a latter-day Ezra Pound who is to be forgiven everything because he writes so beautifully...
...We have not reached the point, I hope," wrote Kempton, "where people who were civilians by choice through two wars can take away the citizenship of an infantry platoon leader...
...Since, in Kempton's world, all others are now recreant, my words may not be heard by him sympathetically...
...In his column that day, he called the imprisoned Thompson "our enemy, but he is a better man than the Attorney General of the United States and any patriot for hire down to George Sokolsky...
...Since the foregoing sounds like mad irrelevance, let me explain that the necessity for so absurd an avowal arises out of a recent effluvium by Murray Kempton in the New York Post of February 11...
...I, however, propose that we take Kempton seriously, very seriously, mindful of Eliot's description of Hamlet's character as "the buffoonery of an emotion which can find no outlet in action...
...For Kempton took as his lesson for the day the war record of Robert Thompson in order to dispose of Eisenhower's plan...
...For fighting with "utter disregard for his personal safety," he was awarded the DSC...
...Where and how do we begin debate with such mystical froth...
...Yet, for the record, I must say that the Attorney General of the United States and George Sokolsky are better men than any Communist party official...
...In his column, Kempton attacked Eisenhower's proposal that anyone convicted of seeking the overthrow of our Government be deprived of citizenship??a legitimate, arguable thesis which, unfortunately, got lost in a ferment of "arma virumque cano" rhetoric...
...Perhaps it was all said by Julien Benda in his Trahison des Clercs when he mocked "the modern moralists [who] extol the warrior at the expense of the man of justice...
...The heart's grown brutal from the fare...
...So immersed has he been in the Thirties that his February 11 performance validates Orwell's bitter charge that, for the "anti-Fascist" intelligentsia of the period, "history stopped in 1936...
...How argue rationally with a writer who says of Thompson, "he is a Communist and an enemy of our country, but against his life all this is somehow words--waste of breath--between the moments when he stood all alone and was a target...
...There is a precious posture in our suburb that Kempton is a poetic recusant with vast writing talent...
...After the Nazi-Soviet Pact was sundered through an accident of history, Thompson became a hero in a memorable battle at Buna in 1942...
...Kempton recently returned to the Post after taking several months' leave to write a book about the radicalism spawned by the infirm Thirties...
...Do we go back and remember the strange exogamous longing in Kempton which is always reaching out to the Howard Fasts, the Morris Schappeses, the Browders and now the Thompsons to ask forgiveness for his helpless enmity toward them...
...More substance in our enmities Than in our love...
...that his columns are songs of innocence, no word of which is to be taken seriously because he doesn't really mean it...
...This, says Kempton, makes Thompson "an American, and he is our flesh and blood, and all his sins and glories are ours...
...a hero on our side through the same accident of history...
Vol. 37 • March 1954 • No. 9
