http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0802,barra,78810,6.html
And that's just at the Voice. After half a century, Nat Hentoff is
still a work in progress
by Allen Barra
January 8th, 2008
Sometime in the late '80s, during a typical internecine squabble at
the Voice, I took a cheap shot, in the form of a letter to the
editor, at Nat Hentoff. There were many such squabbles back then, and
an amazing number centered around Hentoff. Nat had a way of pissing
off the writers and editors of two generations of lefties (by which,
not to put too fine a point on it, I mean just about everyone who
came of age from the Vietnam era on) that was unmatched by anyone I know of.
Suffice it to say that the spat had to do with something Hentoff had
written about abortion, and my letter, which earned me pats on the
back from some of my friends at the Voice, made liberal use of the
word "fascist." (We were young and passionate then and slung such
words as "fascist," "zeitgeist," "subversive," and "existential" the
way Giuliani uses "9/11.") I had also shown our disdain for Hentoff
by briskly passing by his office door and refusing to ask him if he
had gotten any good jazz records in the mail, which hurt me a lot
more than it did him.
A few days later, I got my reply. In my mail slot, I found a reissue
of a Pee Wee Russell album with a note taped to it: "Hey, give me a
break. You may need it yourself some day. P.S. Listen to this. It
might clear your head out." What an asshole. Instead of jumping into
the argument with pettiness and personal acrimony, he sought to
create a dialogue with reason, tolerance, and jazz. What can you do
with a guy like that?
Well, for one thing, you can read him, andto borrow André Gide's
advicedo him the favor of not understanding him too quickly. It took
me over 25 years to understand Nat Hentoff, and I'm still in the
process of clearing my head.
I came to The Village Voice from Alabama in the early '80s. (My first
feature was a grudging appreciation of Alabama football coach Bear
Bryant, about which Hentoff said to me, "I'm not sure what the hell
you were writing about there, but I loved it.") I arrived in New York
burdened with a concept of liberalism that time and experience have
painfully stripped away. Our idea of liberalismby which I mean most
of my friends and colleagueswas grounded in sensitivity: We were
determined not to give offense to any but those who weren't as
liberal as we were. More than one editor in chief (though not you,
Marty Gottlieb) made us feel as though they were looking over our
shoulder as we wrote. Nat Hentoff was fearless, never afraid to
remind management that he wasn't obliged to take a poll on something
before coming to his conclusion. ("When I want your opinion," I once
heard him say to another Voice editor during a verbal debate, "I'll
ask Tom Hayden for it.")
This caused resentment among those of us who lacked his courage, but
that didn't stop us from using his catch phrases: "crisis
journalism," for instance, about publications that descend on a story
en masse when the shit hits the fan, but who ignored the issues
before they exploded; the "tyranny of majoritarianism," referring to
activist groups who suppress dissent in their own ranks; "flash
journalism," exhibited by publications like New York Magazineand all
too frequently, he felt, The Village Voicethat stressed sensation
over content; and my own personal favorite, "Free speech for me, but
not for thee," which I had to stop stealing when he used it for a book title.
"An intellectual," said Camus, "is someone whose mind watches
itself." Nat Hentoff was and is an intellectual. Moreover, he is a
liberal intellectual, out of a liberal tradition that predated my
generation's, one grounded not in sensitivity but in tolerance, a
word I once snickered at but whichat a time when the right has
adopted much of the prickliness and busybodiness of the leftis
starting to look pretty darned good to me.
His politics, Hentoff once wrote, are "libertarian socialism," two
words that in theory seem to be as compatible as the NRA and ACLU,
but in practice could have much of interest to say to each other.
Because Nat Hentoff has never allowed his thought to harden into
ideology, he's never lost his talent to agitate us and make us
rethink our own positionsto make sure that our minds watch
ourselves. And if he's contradicted himself occasionally, very well
then, he's contradicted himself. His note to me, I would find out
over the years, made good sense. In giving him a break, I learned to
give them to a lot of people and thus earned a few for myself. God
knows, I've needed them. And the Pee Wee Russell record wasn't bad, either.
.
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