Sure, newspapers still have columnists. But the era of the city newspaper columnist has become a particularly artifact-y artifact of when newspaper journalism held real power. (No shots at Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman, but do they really feel like they’re writing as or for New Yorkers?) For The Point, Ross Barkan wrestles with Jimmy Breslin’s long shadow—and paints the portrait of a complicated man whose prose was as sharp as his views.
Certain writers curdle with time, while others manage to keep adequate pace with the accolades they amassed when alive. Breslin lacked the pretensions of his contemporaries. Although he was associated with the New Journalism that brought literary techniques to conventional journalism, he eschewed Wolfe’s pyrotechnics and Mailer’s existential swaggering; he had no signature outfit, never stabbed anyone and didn’t, like his sometimes-colleague and rival Pete Hamill, date Shirley MacLaine. He did not grasp at Hemingway’s shadow. His masculinity was not performed, nor was it tortured. He was more bookish than he let on— Dostoevsky was a favorite—and he wasn’t, unlike Hamill, prone to fits of reactionary nostalgia. Breslin’s columns, though crafted on deadline and yoked to long-faded news cycles, are wry and crackling enough—and tangle with more universal fare, like the nature of political power and the strictures of class—to appeal to those who never lived through his various heydays.
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