New York in the '50s by Dan Wakefield

his wife and four young children, for I’d read his column during my Columbia days, and he’d become my idol.
    Kempton’s fans were a cult, a rabid band who realized nobody anywhere was writing this kind of elegant, ironic, iconoclastic prose about the passing scene in New York and America—and in a newspaper . H. L. Mencken, from Kempton’s hometown of Baltimore, was probably the closest model. His liberal views were never orthodox;in fact, he and Buckley became fast friends as fellow intellectual raconteurs who sometimes seemed to be the only people who could comprehend their esoteric conversations. It wasn’t Murray’s politics that made the blood of his followers race, but his novelistic perception of current events and figures. For a nickel I got to read a new column by a journalistic Proust that was hot off the press three afternoons a week.
    Kempton’s first book was published the season I went to work in Princeton, and I seized the opportunity to review it for the Packet on the grounds that he was a local man, a point I stressed in my lead, which ran: “Murray Kempton of Edgerstoune Road and also the New York Post has written a book that was published last week called Part of Our Time: Some Monuments and Ruins of the Nineteen Thirties .”
    The book was a series of essaylike portraits of leading political and literary figures who were shaped by “the myth of our time” in the thirties, like Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss, and it was the first thing I read that gave me a sense of the passion and excitement of what had always seemed to me a drab and dreary decade, the hangover after the Roaring Twenties.
    But the book was more than the sum of its parts or the political or historical significance of its subject. It was a young person’s book, a book that stirred the blood and caught the imagination of my friends and me, who not only read it but memorized parts and recited them aloud, as we had memorized the poetry of Yeats and Millay and that other dreamer in the guise of a journalist who brought ideas alive, John Reed. We took Kempton’s words as wisdom, coming not from some graybeard but a journalistic genius in his prime, who had seen into the heart of things and understood them for us. We called Part of Our Time “the Good Book.” It was our bible.
    I can see Bill Chapman, the twenty-two-year-old copy boy who years later would be a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post , pacing the paint-peeling living room on West 92nd Street as we recited from Kempton’s book and drank Chianti. I still remember these words: “Each of us lives with a sword over his head. There are those who can ignore its shadow and those who cannot. Those who cannot are the ones who make the special myth of their time.”
    Another passage switched on like a light in my mind for years afterward, in times of crisis far from New York, reminding me of the eerie power of Kempton’s prose to predict the inner feelings of our futures: “There were new endeavors and fresh disasters, for they are the way of life, and the art of life is to save enough of yourself from each disaster to be able to go on in something like your old image.”
    In my review for the Princeton Packet I tried to sound like a critic, not just a fan. The next morning, after the paper came out, the landlady in my roominghouse shouted up the stairs that someone wanted to talk to me on the telephone. It was Murray Kempton, calling to thank me.
    â€œYou really dug the book,” he said, then hastened to explain he meant “dug” in the sense of “understood,” not just in its other sense, “liked.” I dug what he was telling me—in both senses of the word. He invited me to come by sometime and have a beer. I was there that afternoon.
    Kempton had reddish hair in a crew cut like Mills’s, but unlike Mills he was strictly Ivy League straight in dress and