Although most knew him as a Village Voice columnist, Nat Hentoff was a quick-change artist. In the morning, he could be a music critic. In the afternoon, a novelist of young adult lit. In the evening, he could excel as a historian, an anti-abortion activist, a record producer, a feature writer or a broadcaster, depending on the assignment he had drawn. Had he not died in January and lived beyond his 91 years, who knows what other duds he would have donned? Comic book artist? Sculptor? Dancer?
Above all, this child of Russian immigrants born in Boston in 1925 was a freethinker, questioning orthodoxies where he encountered them. As a critic, he countenanced no boundaries in music, writing about Duke Ellington, Bob Wills, Bob Dylan and Charles Ives as if their tracks belonged on a playlist together. As a reporter, he countenanced no boundaries in topics, writing profiles for the New Yorker about Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, New York Mayor John Lindsay, author/illustrator Maurice Sendak, Bob Dylan (again), jazzman Gerry Mulligan and others. In his Playboy interviews with Eldridge Cleaver, William Sloane Coffin, William Kunstler, Bob Dylan (yet again) and others, he went at his subjects like 40-grit sandpaper, scrubbing through surfaces to get to the meat. His Voice column, which ran from 1958 to 2009, showcased his skills as an advocate, mostly as a defender of our civil liberties.
Hentoff’s rebellions against the status quo began early. One of his first targets was the Jewish faith into which he was born. In his memoir, Boston Boy, he writes of eating a salami sandwich on his front porch on Yom Kippur, a day when Jews are supposed to fast, as other Jews walked by to attend services at the synagogue. “I wanted to know how it felt to be an outcast,” he wrote. “Except for my father’s reaction and for getting sick, it turned out to be quite enjoyable.” His symbolic rebellions continued: He insisted on living an analog lifestyle, preferring a typewriter, fax machine and a landline to the modern conveyances.
Hentoff looked like an Old Testament prophet—“I belong to the 4,000-year-old tradition of atheistic Judaism,” he told me, as I edited one of his pieces—and could argue the law better than most lawyers, lecturing judges on precedents and procedures. But he wasn’t an argumentative man. Instead, he practiced persuasion in his 70-plus years of work. As the journalist Tobin Harshaw once observed, Hentoff could provoke intense disagreement among his readers without necessarily provoking anger. While he didn’t bring peace to the American valley, his work did inspire respect across the political spectrum. What other writer could possibly earn a Viking’s send-off from both National Review and the Nation?
In his later years, Hentoff’s opposition to abortion made him persona non grata in many corners, including at the Voice, where some writers shunned him. He opposed abortion, he said, for the same reason he opposed capital punishment: To make any sense, he wrote, the fight for life must be “indivisible.” The position made him a million enemies on the left, as did his criticisms of other forms of political piety. Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Hentoff wrote, were as insincere protectors of the Bill of Rights as George W. Bush. But the enmity Hentoff faced made him happy, because he didn’t take himself that seriously. “I found out that having a byline can quickly make you an authority to people who aren’t very intelligent about authority,” he said in a documentary about his life.
Hentoff loved practically all music but especially jazz, making his first professional mark as a disc jockey and then as a critic. “No writer did more for jazz,” acknowledged the critic Terry Teachout. Hentoff’s close relationships with such jazz figures as Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Bill Evans and Charles Mingus, all of whom he wrote liner notes for, made him “one of the last living links to the founding fathers,” as Teachout put it. (One of Hentoff’s most famous sets of liner notes was for—you guessed it—Bob Dylan.) Hentoff returned to the subject of jazz again and again in his books and articles, as if recharging himself for his more profane works. Reading his pieces, you find yourself humming to a deep rhythm of his invention.
Hentoff worked for almost every publication that mattered—a partial list of credits would include DownBeat, Esquire, Harper’s, Commonweal, the Reporter, the New Yorker, Playboy, the New Republic, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the New York Herald Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, the Nation, Rolling Stone, Inquiry and the New York Times—but he never stopped writing, never retired, even after the Voice sacked him in 2009.
In that farewell Voice column, Hentoff’s last line thanked his readers for all the kind comments streaming in.
“It’s like hearing my obituaries while I’m still here,” he wrote.
Nat Hentoff died at his Manhattan home with his family by his side, listening to Billie Holiday.
******
Listen to Hentoff interview Dylan for two hours. Send your contrarian views to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. My email alerts toil in the morning, Twitter feed labors in the afternoon, and my RSS feed for takes every evening off.
Beatriz Simpkins 