NOT MUCH OF A DECENT LEFT LEFT:

The Village Voice was founded in 1955 and flourished quietly for ten years or so before everyone discovered that various attitudes and styles from the Voice had taken root on a national scale, and people were reading the Voice in more than a few places around the country, and in some of those places were founding new "alternative" weeklies of their own, on the model of the Voice. That was a marvelous development, and yet, under the pressure of success, something in the presiding spirit at the Voice itself and at some of the other weeklies began to grow a little coarser, without anyone taking note. The coarsening was a product of the transition from the bohemian and downtown non-communist left of the 1950s and early '60s to the vast and national New Left that followed, which was a mass movement. And it was a product of the transition from the downtown avant-garde to the counterculture of the late '60s and '70s and later, which became a popular culture. The older audiences were coteries, the newer ones were publics. The older spirit was anti-conformist, the newer spirit lent itself sometimes to groupthink. Nat remained a man of the older spirit. He expressed it in his unrelenting hardline campaign for free speech. And he expressed it in his memoir Boston Boy, about growing up in knockabout Jewish Boston, persecuted by Irish anti-Semites and admiring the jazz world; and his books on jazz; and his pioneering biography of A.J. Muste, the leftist and pacifist--maybe the biography, especially.

Muste was his hero--Muste, the original great churchman of the 20th-century American left, a Congregationalist minister who somehow ended up a labor leader; then a labor educator; then a Trotskyist; then an appalled ex-Trotskyist; then the leader of a tiny circle of pacifists and leftists who exercised a huge influence on the Civil Rights revolution, in its early stages; and ultimately the principal leader of the mass anti-Vietnam War movement in the mid-'60s. He was, in short, a man of power, capable of shaping the political imagination and actions of masses of Americans--who, ever faithful to his own conscience, never thought of himself as a man of power. He was Edmund Wilson's leftwing hero, which was fitting, given the cantankerous quality of Wilson's individualism. And Nat's admiration of Muste was likewise fitting. It is true that, as the decades wore on, the downtown and intellectual left that revered people like Muste gradually faded, which left Nat feeling a little stranded, I think. But that was to his honor.

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