Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events. - book reviews

National Review, July 11, 1994 by John Corry

Murray Kempton seldom writes about himself, and he does not often appear on television. Self-effacement is rare among prominent journalists in the media age, but Mr. Kempton has the decency to stay more or less private. This is not to say, however, that he is modest. In Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events, 570 pages of his collected works, he passes judgment on large and small matters with all the assurance and much the same magisterial tone associated with papal encyclicals or columns by the late Arthur Krock. The redemptive factor is that the literary merit of his work extends far beyond either.

Mr. Kempton, of course, is a man of the Left; he is also a New Yorker, and no matter where he has roamed in some fifty years of journalism, he has never strayed far from the one or the other. Most of his work has appeared in the New York Post, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and New York Newsday (where he is currently a columnist), and his political sensibility runs throughout this collection, even if not always in the ways you expect. Mr. Kempton, for example, writes fondly about Westbrook Pegler, and at his death is genuinely grieved, although Pegler's last employer was the Birch Society, which was hardly a leftist bastion. Mr. Kempton, though, admired "Peg" because he worked hard, took risks, and, above all, always despised his bosses. "Here is one of the few American workingmen," Mr. Kempton wrote in 1963, "who has heroically and stubbornly struggled to remain class-conscious."

Perhaps only Murray Kempton could connect Pegler with Marx, and surely no one else on the Left would even want to; but Mr. Kempton is not doctrinaire, and while he can be exceedingly peevish, he has never been much of a hater. In fact, he says, the only thing he has ever truly hated is Time magazine. "My hatred of Time is my one unbridled lust," he wrote in 1966, and went on to declare that "if I were conscripted to execute the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, I would trust myself to do the job with solemnity and sorrow, yet I would machine-gun the entire board of editors of Time in a fit of laughter." He does not say why, exactly, he felt that way, although it seems to have had something to do with what he saw as Time's lack of integrity.

Mr. Kempton does not take the press seriously, but he insists that journalism is a high calling, and he is contemptuous of those who debase it. Pegler would have agreed, but there most likely he and Mr. Kempton would have parted. Mr. Kempton also says Gore Vidal has written fine journalism, and that Mary McCarthy's Viet Nam was an "intelligent" book. Mr. Vidal's journalism, however, is journalism only by sufferance, and Viet Nam was so moonstruck it embarrassed even the Vietnamese. But you will forgive Mr. Kempton for an infrequent howler. His erudition is considerable and his passion real, and it is impossible to read anything he writes without realizing how hard he must have worked when he wrote it.

You imagine him sitting at a typewriter - he must be too cranky to use a word processor - with blood running into his shoes. For Mr. Kempton's style is famous. His long flowing sentences double back on themselves, and then head off in other directions. (Once in a while, they disappear.) They are rich in their use of irony, and in their midst are verbs such as "levanting," "rabbling," and "paltering." He is not showing off, or at least not very much. It is apparent he loves language, and does not want old words to die, even if this means he must then become one of the few writers around who will use them.

But the style is based on more than an artful use of language. Mr. Kempton is a moralist, and moralizing infuses almost everything he writes. Obviously, we are on now to something slippery. Moralizing journalists are almost always bores, mostly because they moralize so easily. Mr. Kempton's moralizing, though, is not the pallid stuff of the New York Times Op-Ed page, and the decline in liberal-Left polemics may be measured by the distance between him and Anna Quindlen. His moralizing springs from a deeper and more colorful place, and while it is erected on a fancy intellectual scaffold, it seems to have a discreet Christian base.

Here and there he offers hints. In 1968, in explaining how he became a McCarthy delegate to the Democratic National Convention "from the only congressional district this side of Albania where the name of Joseph Stalin still evokes some reverence," Mr. Kempton wrote about his beliefs this way:

I ought to commence by saying how I happened on this scene. "I am, and my father was before me," John Ruskin began, "a violent Tory of the old school - Walter Scott's school, that is to say, and Homer's." I then am a violent Whig of the old school - Lord Byron's school, that is to say, and St. Thomas Aquinas's, being for whatever is the opposite of Ruskin's most sincere love of kings and dislike of everyone who attempted to disobey them. I am for Doctor Spock against the Department of Justice, and I am for Ernesto Guevara - or anyway his ghost - against the Central Intelligence Agency.