Speak, Notebook: Nat Hentoff’s Speaking Freely: A Memoir

By Nicholas Stix

[This is the 2,488-word first draft of a book review I wrote for Karl Zinsmeister and Bill Kauffman at the late, lamented American Enterprise magazine, and which appeared in the January, 1998 issue. I had to cut the manuscript by 63 percent, in order to “make weight” (900 words).

Karl was the editor-in-chief, and Bill was the book review editor. Both are brilliant writers. Unfortunately, the magazine was inseparable from Karl, and when he decided not to want to edit it anymore, American Enterprise Institute shut it down. Or do I have the causality backwards?]


Speaking Freely: A Memoir
By Nat Hentoff
Alfred A. Knopf, 303 pages, $25

In writing his memoirs, a journalist has an advantage over a non-writer, in having a record of his life, through his notebooks. And where Nat Hentoff ‘s notebooks left off, his FBI files picked up, with items he ‘d forgotten, such as the name of the haberdashery where, at age eleven he ‘s had his first job, and some which he ‘d never known, such as the Russian towns where his parents had come from. And Hentoff has the advantage over most contemporary novelists, in having had a life.

With weekly columns in The Village Voice and Washington Post, and some forty books under his belt, including a number of non-fiction works on jazz, others on the First Amendment, a few novels for adults and several more for children, Nat Hentoff is an American institution. I didn’t mean that as an insult; that’s just the way it is. Hentoff ’s importance is due as much to the catholicity of his interests and a career of gutsy stands, as it is to the mediocrity and conformity that pervade his profession.

Some of Hentoff’s positions make him look like your standard-issue, mainstream, socialist, er liberal, journalist: his atheism, his support of trade union organizing, defense of flag burners, and a quaint faith in school integration that most American blacks no longer believe in. And yet, the same man has supported the right of Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois, and opposes both abortion and capital punishment, and has supported the rights of children born with birth defects against a purported “right of privacy” invoked by feminists that would allow women to “abort” living children. It is no wonder that many of Hentoff’s colleagues at the Village Voice have stopped speaking to him. Not to worry: Hentoff gets to hear the other side every day at the dinner table from his ardently pro-choice (though otherwise neo-conservative) wife, journalist Margot Hentoff.

Speaking Freely picks up where Hentoff’s 1987 book, Boston Boy, left off. Boston Boy told of Hentoff’s “exuberantly anti-Semitic hometown,” which he describes as then the most anti-Semitic city in America. In briskly covering his forty-odd years in journalism, Speaking Freely could easily have been two or three times its actual length. The volume leaves any reader of Hentoff’s columns hungry for more, e.g., there is nothing on Skokie, on the politics at the Voice surrounding the newspaper’s 1992 co-sponsorship of then Pennsylvania Gov. William Casey’s Cooper Union talk on his opposition to abortion, which was shut down by jackbooted feminists, much to the glee of Hentoff’s colleagues, or on a fascinating Voice colleague and sometime collaborator, Paul Cowan, who wrote movingly of his return to Judaism, before succumbing at a young age to cancer. Hentoff does, however, expand on stories that he had covered in his columns and elsewhere, including his friendships with the late Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan and with the very alive John Cardinal O ‘Connor, Catholic archbishop of New York. And this book is suffused with a wry, self-deprecating sense of humor that his columns and First Amendment books (The First Freedom and Free Speech for Me, But Not for Thee) lack.

Hentoff’s preoccupations have been jazz, the bill of rights, race, education, and the sacredness of life. He freely admits that jazz has served as a substitute religion: “From the time I was eleven, jazz was my vocation, the equivalent of a religion.” I think that he has sought to stretch his faith in jazz to cover his beliefs regarding the constitution and life. It doesn’t work, but then our beliefs all have their limits.

Hentoff got his start in journalism writing on jazz, most notably for Down Beat magazine, and has since written many books on the subject. In 1956, he got fired by Down Beat, whose New York office he ran. It seems he had hired a(n overqualified) “black” secretary without getting permission from the home office in Chicago. Hentoff notes that the magazine, which was devoted to black music, had never hired a black staffer, suggesting that this tradition would not have changed, had he gone through channels. He neglects to tell us whether his hire survived his dismissal. In an ironic afterthought, however, he reports that,

“Several years later I found out that the secretary at issue was not black, but Egyptian. Of course, these days, the creators and practitioners of Afrocentricity would rule that, being Egyptian, the new secretary was, of course, black. Either way, I would still have been fired.”

I don’t care for Hentoff’s writing on music; as with most music writers (with sparkling exception of Newsday’s Gene Seymour, who can write on anything), his words just don’t evoke music for me. Hentoff on musicians, however, is another matter entirely. He provides powerful, personal images of Billie Holliday, Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, and the “chronically original” tenor saxophonist Lester Young, known as “Prez,” who (with Bud Powell) was one of the inspirations for the 1987 film ‘Round Midnight.

Hentoff devoted one of his most memorable columns to Gillespie, upon his death in 1994. It seems that Dizzy only married once, and stayed married, to a woman who made it clear to him that he would have to “walk the straight and narrow.” [P.S.: After his death, it turned out that he hadn’t; he’d fathered a child out of wedlock.] And so he carried always his marriage certificate in his pocket, to remind him who he was. Hentoff had asked Gillespie whether marrying the right woman might have saved Charlie Parker. Gillespie said he just didn’t know.

Although he generally gets short shrift here, Speaking Freely does have one lovely Gillespie vignette. Recalling Louis Armstrong’s evocation of Fats Waller, that “when he entered a room, you could see a gladness in all the people there,” Hentoff tells of a 1980s concert at Lincoln Center in Dizzy’s honor. “He would be leading a big band. I hadn’t seen Dizzy, except as part of an audience, for a few years, and I decided to come to the rehearsal. In the hallway, Dizzy was talking with someone, saw me, ran over, and grabbed me in a bear hug. To the man he was talking to, Dizzy, grinning, explained, ‘It’s like seeing an old broad you used to go with.’

“This old broad has seldom been so honored.”

It is not just the portraits of jazz immortals and political leaders that make Speaking Freely worth reading, but its snapshots of great talents who had been consigned to oblivion, such as the visionary producer-director-writer of early TV, Robert Herridge. I had never heard of Herridge, nicknamed “Huckleberry Dracula,” a magician with a camera and lighting who often worked without a set, whether in presenting a play, or a live jazz performance, such as 1957 ‘s The Sound of Jazz, on which Hentoff collaborated. Hentoff calls the presentation “the truest and therefore the most exciting jazz program in the history of television. “Billie Holliday, Count Basie, Lester Young, Roy Eldridge, Pee Wee Russell, Henry “Red” Allen, Thelonious Monk, Ben Webster, Vic Dickenson, Jo Jones, and Jimmy Rushing all performed live.

Herridge, who was used to exercising total artistic control over his productions, would say, “Keep it pure, Partisan Review pure. “But “this was not the wistful cry of an academic. Herridge was an untenured barroom boozer, womanizer, and exemplifier of what Thomas Wolfe (the one not in the white suit) called the ‘goat cry.’”

Ruing that many of the kinescope tapes of Herridge’s great productions were not saved, Hentoff reports on the campaign by Herridge’s old boss—for whom Herridge had had some of his greatest successes—TV producer David Susskind, to bury the memory of a man who was too rebellious, too aesthetic, too intellectual for Susskind: “‘Herridge affected being a bohemian, never wore a tie,’ Susskind complained to me. ‘He tried to substitute nonconformity of dress for talent.’ And Herridge would meet writers outside of the office, in ‘those little bars where people pose as artists. Herridge creates anarchy. That’s what he creates, no matter what he’s doing....’

“Maybe that’s why, years ago, Susskind’s final word to me on Herridge—shaking his fists and shouting—was, ‘the Herridge legend must be broken!’”

During the past fifteen to twenty years, Hentoff has had less time for writing jazz, except for a procession of obituaries to old friends—and has become indelibly associated with the Bill of Rights, particularly the First Amendment. He began writing on such matters for free, for an upstart publication founded by non-journalists Ed Fancher and the late Dan Wolf, and which was once as unpredictable as it is now a canon of political correctness, The Village Voice. Resigning during the early 1960s over the matter of pay, Hentoff quickly “unresigned,” and continued freelancing for the Voice for a time for the princely sum of ten dollars a week. Hentoff tells sadly and with a touch of bitterness (though he might not admit it) of the deterioration of the Voice, of his life with editors, and of his hopes for a reinvigoration of the Voice under its current editor-in-chief, Don Forst. (Though I never dealt with him personally, Forst was editor of the late New York Newsday, a newspaper I freelanced for both under my own name, and under a “front” (here and here). For the past several years, I have found Hentoff to be the sole reason for reading the Voice.

Hentoff has become anathema to many of his younger colleagues at the Voice due to his turn, late in life, against abortion, and his consequent campaign against all forms of euthanasia, may they wear such deliberate disguises. As he says, “euphemism kills.”

When Hentoff writes here of abortion and euthanasia it is with the sort of prophetic bluntness that readers of his columns are well acquainted with. In one federal court decision after another on behalf of “physician-assisted” suicide (which Hentoff also opposes, pointing to the experiences both in Nazi Germany and the contemporary Netherlands), and finding for a right of mothers (or doctors who had annointed themselves takers of life) to let imperfect children die, or actively kill them, Hentoff found judges accepting arguments that consciously referred back to Roe v. Wade, where a pregnant woman was presumed to have a “right to privacy” that allowed her to kill her unborn child. But the identical argument was now being used to justify the murder of living persons with rights to due process and the equal protection of the law. The Left, which had taken upon itself to speak for the powerless, was silent, or worse, the Devil’s disciple.

In another related case, Hentoff devoted the better part of 1995 to fighting the practice of testing pregnant mothers for HIV, recording the results for research purposes, and then refusing to notify the mothers of the results. Thus were thousands of children condemned to terrible, premature deaths due to opportunistic infections, if they lived long enough to contract full-blown AIDS. It also meant that the mothers themselves learned too late, through watching their babies die, that they were infected.

The obscene “justification” given by the AIDS lobby for keeping the women in the dark was that notifying them that they were carrying HIV+ babies would cause them to “flee” the health-care system. Noting that the “privatists” had never come up with a single case of a mother “fleeing” the health-care system, Hentoff argues that even if some women did flee the system, that would not justify neglecting the thousands of others testing positive.

[P.S.: The political enforcer of this mass murder was New York State Assemblyman Richard Gottfried, still in the Assembly after over 40 years, and who never paid for his evil. The mass murder was eventually stopped by State Assemblyman Nettie Mayersohn, with Hentoff’s and Jim Dwyer’s support, but it took her several years to overcome Gottfried and the murderous gay lobby.]

During my own graduate training in philosophy, I never heard the kind of arguments I have gotten used to reading—without pedantry—in Hentoff’s writings. Even when their own colleagues’ First Amendment rights were under siege, my professors gave such half-hearted defenses that it was clear that they saw such “rights” merely as privileges, though they lacked the decency to admit this. Similarly, in the case of abortion, the deep, professional thinkers could do no better than come up with pro-abortion boilerplate, refusing to take the other side seriously.

While teaching college during the past five years, I have observed, if anything, a consolidation of the Gleichschaltung effected during the 1980s. That consolidation makes Hentoff’s public role all the more precious, whether he is pointing out the biological notion of a continuum of life, or pointing out the slippery slope that would see in “privacy” first a justification for the abortion of the unborn, and then one for the clear-cut murder of the already born, or in arguing for the complementarity of the First and Fourteenth amendments, against those who claim that we must choose the latter against the former.

Hentoff seems to see a kindred spirit in the “Genghis Khan of the Catholic Church,” John Cardinal O’Connor. Hentoff observes that Gloria Steinem considers the two worst things about New York AIDS and Cardinal O’Connor. However, he also tells of the reaction by a lesbian activist to O’Connor. Gays generally hate O’Connor, but when he gave an audience in the New York Archdiocese to a contingent of lesbian activists, he made a point of shaking each woman’s hand in greeting. O’Connor’s predecessor, Terence Cardinal Cooke, had refused to meet with homosexuals, and when one of Cooke’s secretaries met with gays, he made a point of refusing to shake their hands. O’Connor’s act was not lost on Karen Doherty, a member of the group, who struck up a correspondence with him. Later she spoke to Hentoff of O’Connor’s “integrity,” despite their deep differences, calling him a “warrior bishop.”

A talk Hentoff once gave in Toronto on abortion and contraception physically agitated some pro-life Catholic men. Hentoff then introduced the next speaker, Cardinal O ‘Connor, who sought to calm tempers with gentle humor: “I am delighted that Nat is not a member of the Catholic Church. We have enough trouble as it is.”

In Speaking Freely, the best expression of Hentoff’s faith in the freedoms enunciated in the First Amendment, and more importantly the sort of sensibility required to appreciate and defend them, is in the words of John Cardinal O’Connor. Hentoff had sharply criticized O ‘Connor over Pope John Paul II’s having granted an audience to Kurt Waldheim, after Waldheim had been exposed as a Nazi war criminal. O’Connor in turn had attacked Hentoff, in a letter, charging the latter’s with taking a cheap shot. Before Hentoff could complete yet another column attacking both the Pope and O’Connor, another letter came from O’Connor: “Now that I have won that argument, let us proceed. You may recall how Belloc ends his Path to Rome: ‘So let us love another and laugh. Time passes and we shall soon laugh no longer. Meanwhile, earnest men are at siege upon us all around. So let us laugh and suffer absurdities, for that is only to suffer one another.’”

The defense of both one’s own right to freedom of belief, and that of one’s opponent, requires a kind of love, and the embrace of absurdities. And yet, the loving and the embracing are best done by a warrior journalist.