Murray Kempton, Around Forever: Resurrecting a Forgotten American Journalist

About seven years ago, I decided that in my time outside of work I would read the ten or eleven thousand newspaper columns written by Murray Kempton, the distinguished American reporter who died in 1997, with an eye to editing the first collection of his writing in three decades. No one asked me to do this.

Murray Kempton certainly didn’t: I never knew him, and during the brief part of the last century when our lives overlapped, my reading tastes tended more to Highlights than the New York Review of Books.

In Kempton’s voice on the page, though, I heard an account of American life in the last century—from H.L. Mencken to Tupac Shakur—that contained style, prescience, a sense of history, and an appealing moral intuition inflected by Marx, the Episcopal Church, and the vagaries of life in New York City. An entertaining, informative, and possibly helpful book, in other words.

And yet, to present the case for reading Kempton as self-evident, the way these dusty deans of “American letters” are sometimes reintroduced, would have been too easy.

Presumptuously, I figured my enthusiasm and allergy to the profit motive were credentials enough for this endeavor, which my own publisher would later describe in an internal email as “quixotic.” He was right, but I was never sure whether I was Don Quixote or Sancho Panza to Kempton’s Quixote, or if I was actually the horse, Rocinante, in way over his head.

David Remnick, who was encouraging and knows Kempton’s work better than anyone, clarified things. I had my work cut out for me with this book, Remnick told me one afternoon over the phone, because nobody reads Murray Kempton anymore. “Except you,” he said, “and you’re a freak.”

My sense of the book changed one day in the summer of 2019, when I arrived—freakily, but by invitation—to the Sugar Hill brownstone of Helen Epstein, the writer and teacher of public health who is also Murray Kempton’s literary executor. Helen inherited this role from her mother, Barbara Epstein, the founder and editor, with Robert Silvers, of the New York Review of Books. We sat in her kitchen and talked about her mother’s magazine.

The first issue of the New York Review appeared at just the right time for Kempton, in 1963, when he was straining against the conventions of daily newspapers like the New York Post and political digests like The New Republic. He longed to stretch out, formally and intellectually. In the space Epstein and Silvers provided him for the next thirty years, he wrote about subjects ranging from Edgar Degas and Do the Right Thing to the swimmer Greg Louganis and the architecture of the Russian avant-garde.

Kempton agreed with Westbrook Pegler, bilious reactionary columnist of the Thirties, that reporters probably do their best work when they are at war with their employers. At the Post, Kempton regularly frustrated his superiors over this or that matter—contractual, editorial, personal. (In 1953, his editor James Wechsler even named his name before Joseph McCarthy’s Un-American Activities Committee, but that’s another story.)

His employment at the New York Review was different. Not only was he not at war; he was, before too long, in love with the co-founder and co-editor.

Theirs was not to be a showily prosecuted relationship, Epstein and Kempton agreed. “Barbara had a secret,” Darryl Pinckney recalls in Come Back in September, his memoir of apprenticeship in the circle of the New York Review. This particular evening at Epstein’s apartment, in the company of Elizabeth Hardwick, Pinckney was sworn to secrecy about a late-arriving guest: “Murray Kempton came over, pale, courtly, and thin. He had carefully combed white hair, a booming bass voice, and a bicycle clip still on one trouser leg.”

Discretion suited each of them by disposition, and anyway they knew how ugly the alternatives could look. Their friend “Lizzie” Hardwick, for one, had suffered an extraordinary public humiliation when her ex-husband, Robert Lowell, published a book of poems called The Dolphin that reproduced parts of her private letters and went on to win a Pulitzer Prize.

Because Kempton was mostly a reporter, and because he shared a familiar midcentury-male opacity about emotional life, he never, to my knowledge, published a word for good or ill about either of his wives, Mina Bluethenthal and Beverly Gary, or about Epstein. Compared to Lowell—or Mailer, or Kerouac, or take your pick—the silence Kempton tendered to matters of the heart can read like cautious regard.

“Heterosexuality, being the most pervasive, is the most destructive of all mankind’s deviations,” he once observed. “It is a thing whose beauty cannot be mentioned without paying due respect to its terror.”

Back in Helen Epstein’s kitchen, we discussed my exercise in windmill-tilting. I was on my way out when she mentioned that somewhere upstairs was still a box of her mother’s work as Kempton’s literary executor, records that had not gone along with the rest of her papers to archives at the New York Public Library.

Included among these files were Barbara Epstein’s preliminary choices for a book of Kempton’s journalism that she had hoped to edit herself, but the book never came together before she died in 2006. If I wanted to borrow the box, Helen offered, I could.

Executorship is an underappreciated sort of literary labor, I soon discovered. Executors are brokers with posterity—they protect the brand—and for that they can sometimes be real sticks in the mud before the good-faith efforts of others to boost a writer’s posthumous fortunes.

But that is the job: the executor’s discernment was trusted for a reason, you must believe. There are a lot of freaks out there. How do you think A.A. Milne would feel about Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey?

With Kempton, the consummate down-at-heel aristocrat, there was never going to be any question of a fortune to preserve or enlarge. Barbara Epstein knew, though, that beyond its literary merit, Kempton’s bushels of clippings amounted to a unique historical resource.

“Some of these columns are in a yellowing and frail condition, dating as they do from the Forties,” she wrote one archivist. “Preserving them is one of my main concerns, since they present a brilliant and virtually daily chronicle of over fifty years of history.”

She wrote to several libraries before choosing Columbia University, in Kempton’s neighborhood (an institution that, incidentally, he loathed in life). Without his archive at the Butler Library, without the stewardship of the archivists there, and without his executor’s foresight, a new book of Kempton’s journalism would have been impossible.

As I made my way through Barbara Epstein’s box, feeling all the while like a trespasser, I learned why her own book of Kempton’s writing never happened. Here were letters from sympathetic publishers she had queried: “it seems too hard from a commercial point of view”; “would be very difficult to sell….”; “I hope that you’re able to find another publisher…[.]”

I thought of my own similar collection of polite but discouraging correspondence. My book would be the dilettante’s version next to the one she would have made, but this box preserved an essence—the pulse of an editorial and personal relationship to be honored. The time Barbara Epstein spent editing Murray Kempton after he died, Helen suggested, was time she gave herself to spend with him again.

In the box I found more intimate paperwork as well, a record of business attended to in mourning: condolence letters, a list of clothing donated to Housing Works, the arrangements for a funerary plaque. There was a handwritten note from the Yankee catcher Yogi Berra, dated the day after Kempton died. “If you remember I said ‘It ain’t over ‘til it’s over,'” Berra wrote. “For Murray it will never be over. His memory and his words will be around forever.”

In light of Kempton’s obscurity these past thirty years, I wondered if this could be another of Berra’s wiseacre aphorisms: “Around forever,” sure, but gathering dust all the while, twelve linear feet of document boxes in an archive. Forever is not as long as it used to be, Berra might have said.

Of course he’s right, it’s only that memory and words live on haltingly, between periods of dormancy. Writers must be escorted to a dubious future, wrapped up with treasures, canopic jars, and the cat for a journey of uncertain duration. The officiating priestess does what she can.

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Going Around: Selected Journalism by Murray Kempton is available Seven Stories Press.