THE PRESENCE OF MURRAY KEMPTON

 

Mass had ended at St. Ignatius of Antioch, an Anglo-Catholic church on the Upper West Side. The candles had been extinguished, and the echo of the last notes of the organ postlude had faded. Worshippers rose from their pews, genuflected, crossed themselves, and made their way out onto W. 87th Street.

Standing in the shallow narthex was Murray Kempton, a slim man about six feet tall, wearing a wrinkled tan raincoat, which looked like it might have been borrowed from Colombo. I knew who he was even without the pipe he smoked in every picture I had seen of him. That was in 1995, near the end of his distinguished career as a columnist and journalist.

For one so widely admired and respected, so extraordinarily accomplished, it seemed odd that he was not surrounded by fans. As I recall, he was standing rather apart. Not aloof, but not putting himself forward either.

I introduced myself, and we chatted briefly. I didn’t know enough about him or his writing to ask any conversation-starting questions.

Shortly after that, Ann and I moved to Hong Kong, and for a number of years, our residence in Manhattan was intermittent. Only a year or so ago, did we resume full regular membership in St. Ignatius. We were away when Kempton died in 1997, but to me he was still fully present last Sunday.

It is the practice at St. Ignatius during Sunday Mass to commemorate the death of parishioners on their anniversaries. Their names are read, and prayer is offered for their souls. The list is usually short – just a few names – and I rarely know any of the departed. Murray Kempton’s name on the list last Sunday caught my attention. Not only that, a few feet from where I sat was the columbarium niche that contains his remains.

Back in the apartment, I found a volume of his collected works. It was published in 1994, and I guess I bought it somewhere around then. I probably had read some of the pieces in it before I shook his hand, but last Sunday, I couldn’t remember any of them. I spent the next several days catching up.

Most of the essays and columns refer to some event or personality from a period that started right after the war and extended to the 1990s. I lived during that time, but my knowledge of many of the subjects was vague or fading. Becoming acquainted with them through Kempton’s remarkable prose was enchanting. I was present with young John Kennedy when he made a group of nuns wonder if they still wanted to be married to Christ and I read an excoriating and clever description of New York mayor Ed Koch and learned of Governor Mario Cuomo calling one of Kempton’s colleagues to ask how he could get on Kempton to “love” him and followed Ronald Reagan from his acting days through the California governorship and the Whitehouse where he continued to be the so-so actor he had been earlier and Nancy was as insufferable in fact as she had always seemed to me to be.

Kempton won a Pulitzer Prize and other awards, and his columns appeared in a succession of New York newspapers. In them he refused to write down to ‘oi polloi; his writing is characterized by allusions that mean little to any but the learned, vocabulary that Microsoft Editor would never accept, and a style described as baroque or rococo, often featuring long sentences. It is a stylistic peculiarity that in the hands of a lesser artist would cause yawns. (I’ve tried to demonstrate this point in the previous paragraph.) And still, he was enormously popular. A pimp once told Kempton he was a great fan, and he had “made me what I am.”

Kempton didn’t know how to drive, and he rode a bicycle around Manhattan dressed in a suit and listening to classical music on a portable device. At his request, his funeral rite was from the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, and it included no eulogy.

He was a liberal Democrat who was a Communist when young, got arrested while demonstrating at the 1968 Democratic convention, was an ardent supporter of Adlai Stevenson, had affection and respect for Richard Nixon, and was a close friend of William Buckley. He strongly supported the civil rights movement and wrote extensively about it. He said he would break out in a rash upon hearing the name Bill Clinton.

It’s difficult to imagine Murray Kempton writing today.

You can read a 1993 New Yorker profile by David Remnick here.
You can read an obituary here.

 

 

 

2 thoughts on “THE PRESENCE OF MURRAY KEMPTON

  1. Nancy Garniez

    Beautiful and so evocative of a past when people actually observed and thought as individuals, not as faceless social media mobs. I am so glad you shook his hand. I was very aware of him riding and writing around and am always happy to be reminded of him.

    Reply

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