Ironist and Iconoclast
MEYER, KARL E.
Ironist and Iconoclast AMERICA COMES OF MIDDLE AGE By Murray Kempten Little, Brown. 385 pp. $6.50. Reviewed by KARL E. MEYER Editorial board member, "Washington Post" From 1948 to 1963,...
...Knock our country, tear it down, call it what you will—and I shall call it worse—but name me one other piece of real estate under the eye of God where a man can be born a Negro in South Carolina and grow up to possess the summit where Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev, after so long a climb, finally pause and wrap their arms around one another...
...To be sure, every gifted journalist can be victimized by his gifts...
...The columns were more than good...
...Castro won't go away...
...It wasn't really a column, but a Chair of Moral Philosophy suspended between Joe Barry and Max Lerner, and decorated by a most implausible thumb-nail cut...
...it is the simple truth...
...Or—a classic of classics—the meeting of Khrushchev and Castro in Love B. Woods' Woodside Hotel in Harlem: "Khrushchev was 40 minutes with the maximum leader of the revolution—the conjunction of the unlikely with the impossible and, of course, in Harlem...
...One suspects that if even Roy Cohn gets scuffed around enough...
...when he was in form, which was often, they were superb...
...But while Mencken was a Tory Shaw, Kempton is a radical Flaubert...
...Mencken laced into the Rotarians in a mood of boisterous frolic...
...I think the better comparison is with H. L. Mencken, whose columns in the Sunpapers of Baltimore (where Kempton grew up) are the authentic ancestors of the columns in this book...
...they do not mourn their dead but greet them with glad cries of recognition...
...Thus, a column on Sonny Liston: "The Russians won't go away...
...his allusions can be mannered and mechanically predictable—someone should borrow his set of Yeats...
...A column on a McCarthy rally: "The McCarthy people are like all sects...
...Every illusion is seen through the prism of disillusion...
...the institution of the direct primary produces results as bad as Ross Barnett and seldom visibly better than Charley Buckley...
...Indeed, the difference between the two is perhaps a measure of the distance we have gone from the '20s to the '60s...
...The only honest pose left for a radical is one of relentless deflation...
...I call that man bourgeois," said Flaubert, "who thinks meanly...
...T.R.B...
...exaggeration was his weapon...
...Reviewed by KARL E. MEYER Editorial board member, "Washington Post" From 1948 to 1963, Murray Kempton's column in the New York Post almost reconciled one to that uneven and fidgety tabloid...
...And this leads to a prose texture in which every affirming statement is followed by a rhetorical flick, like a scorpion's tail, that stings the reader...
...Kempton is the weary ironist who uses laser beams that slice without leaving a visible wound...
...Here is the same pungency, vividness, individuality, and appalling fertility of imagination...
...In our time, the field of the cloth of gold is 125th street and Seventh Avenue...
...The fault is there, but 1 don't give a damn...
...his thumb tacks should be regarded as a prized national resource, a wholesome torment for the rump of a country coming of middle age...
...And (it is the fashionable thing to say) his sentiment can invest abject defeat with a Kemptonesque glamour that makes Westbrook Pegler, Adlai Stevenson and Sal Maglie equal members of the same brotherhood of saints...
...But can't government at least give us a suitable heavyweight champion...
...Murray will detect some obscure virture and erect a cathedral on it...
...Kempton can be so elliptical that his thoughts seem to dissolve in their own acids...
...even Pegler needs a friend...
...Kempten always looked a little tipsy in that odd photograph...
...It is a pleasure to report that in book form they are—as the ad boys say—better than ever...
...Like wine, they have acquired body and bouquet and an even sharper tang...
...By that measure, Kempton is the most anti-bourgeois writer we have...
...That last clause is not meant to be cryptic...
...here is the same relentless iconoclasm...
...Each paragraph is seeded with thumb-tacks, business-end up...
...It is a cultural scandal that this book has been so inadequately reviewed—the New York Times Sunday section dismissed it with a vapid paragraph, and only the New York Review of Books came close to doing it justice...
...the semicolon is his weapon...
...Kempton is a moral philosopher of the post-generation—post-ideological, post-New Deal, post-Freud, post-Joyce, post-coital and now even post-New York Post...
...every passion is felt through rheostats of experience which makes passion itself suspect...
...in the New Republic (where, to that journal's good fortune, Kempten now appears) once compared Murray Kempton to Heywood Broun...
Vol. 47 • June 1964 • No. 12
