In Praise of Singularity

Convergence is that force that is supposed to blend our computers into our TVs into our toaster ovens, mix all media into one shiny digital river. I worry about a corollary; call it content convergence. Already, neutrons from story A are mating irresponsibly with protons from story B. Wait till Paula Jones gets closer to court and The New York Times and National Enquirer sides of the press meet at the question of those distinguishing marks on the president.

In order to converge, my theory goes, news wants to be homogenized, both in substance and style. Local TV has all but surrendered to this force and newspapers are next. This spring I drove my family south, twenty-six hours straight, most of it on I-95, a route so featureless that our sense of the Southland came only from the waitresses at the waffle joints where we stopped for coffee and from the newspapers we bought at every opportunity. We did better with the waitresses. The newspapers felt interchangeable, as if they had been conceived and produced at the same shopping mall in the same air-conditioned room. Maybe it was the caffeine.

Around that time came a trio of deaths that made people in the business think about newspapers and where they're going. Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle had already died on February 1, at 80; Mike Royko of the Chicago Tribune died April 29, at 64; Murray Kempton of Newsday on May 5, at 79.

In San Francisco, thousands gathered to say goodbye to Caen in that city's way. Robin Williams spoke ("Hello, my name is Charlton Heston," he began) and Joan Baez sang. Dozens of bars advertised specials on vodka martinis, the columnist's drink, and Mayor Willie Brown told of Caen's dry route to that dry martini when it was raining: ". . . through that hotel, through the back door, out the alley, through the Emporium, out the door, through the Flood Building, through the garage at Ellis and Stockton . . ." and so forth.

 Caen knew his way around. He wrote not so much a unified thought as a series of by-the-way bulletins: that ship that docked in our beautiful harbor this morning lost a man overboard out at sea; that bureaucrat who wrote the memo about how city employees ought to live in the city? He lives in the 'burbs. Caen's connection with readers had to do with a shared sense of place, with the accumulation of telling detail built up over nearly fifty-nine years.

Mike Royko, a heavyweight boxer of a columnist, connected in a different way. He had the only office at the Tribune where smoking was allowed, and there was something incorrect and fuming in there. Royko's subject was the screwing of the common man, although he could be startlingly tender as well. He could describe so clearly, for example, the sense of belonging and community that kept an old lady running her dry-cleaning establishment in a deteriorating neighborhood.

 Of the three, the one I read was Kempton. I was even lucky enough to meet him once, at the trial of a union leader accused of corruption, one of those fallen angels he had such a weakness for. Sydney Schanberg reported, in a posthumous salute in Newsday, that Mario Cuomo once asked him, "How can I get Murray Kempton to love me?" "Well, Governor," Schanberg replied, "why don't you get yourself indicted?"

 What amazed me was that Kempton talked as he wrote, in those long and curlicued sentences, nuance balanced against nuance, until the whole thought either condensed into fog or else captured something elusive and important with the clarity of a photo snapped in sunlight. He was rooted in the day-to-day -- trials, issues, elections -- but he was after cosmic fish. He took risks, as Nat Hentoff put it in another salute, not merely with the shaping of sentences, "but in his perceptions."

 We can find commonalities in these writers but distinctions are more to the point. You cannot imagine Royko's mythical everyman, Slats Grobnik, wandering into a Caen column or a Caen pun slipping into Kempton or quotes from Kempton's obscure poets and saints getting comfortable in either of the other two men's prose. Nor can you imagine transferring these three into each other's city. Each was unique, anti-convergent.

 I am not one of those who think years on a Royal typewriter built better writers. We have many wonderful columnists still coming up. But I fear the newspapers that Caen, Royko, and Kempton came of age in were more nourishing to the oddball singularity of their gifts than newspapers are now. Newspapers have lost some confidence and in their quiet panic they act against their nature. They strain to please. They sand off their edges. They yearn for the dull comforts of convergence like an alcoholic yearns for drink.

 Francis X. Clines, saluting Kempton in The New York Observer, wrote that working next to Kempton affirmed for him that newspapering is "the best business because it allowed for Murray." It's true. But when it's more true once again, newspapers will have fewer problems than they do today.

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