TV exhausts, athletics can bleed. Movies cost. Journalists, we might as well read.

by Jon Margolis

Jon Margolis, former chief political reporter for the Chicago Tribune and the author of "The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964," lives in northeastern Vermont, where he writes and teaches.

The reaction to Nat Hentoff getting sacked by the Village Voice hit the usual suspects – the economic plight of print journalism, the corporatization of “alternative” weeklies, the crotchety conservatism of Hentoff in recent years. But not a word about that other change in the world of newspapering illustrated by Hentoff ‘s dismissal.

Hentoff is not just a political commentator. He has also been – to use an appropriately archaic term – a man of letters, the author of nine novels and five books about jazz. Public policy was but one of his passions, rivaled by his interest in the arts and in what is (or used to be) known as the higher culture.

Not so unusual when Hentoff started writing for the Voice in 1958. In those days, there was enough reality to justify the myth of the newspaper reporter who had a half-finished novel next to the bottle of booze in his bottom drawer. At least some of those guys (they were mostly guys then) considered themselves artists as much as journalists. At home at night, they read Hemingway and Faulkner as well as the latest political tome.

The publishers have long since banned the booze, and today’s reporters seem to be less likely to read novels, much less try to write them.

Not that anyone had to wait for Hentoff’s departure to figure this out. On the last day of 2005, The New York Times arts section ran a story about Palestinian playwright Mohammad el-Thaher's new Arabic-Hebrew play, pointing out that "his inspiration was Luigi Pirandello's ‘Six Actors in Search of an Author.’”

Pirandello's 1921 classic is “Six Characters in Search of an Author.” Not the worst mistake in the world. But you'd think that someone on the Times copy desk would have known the name of one of the most celebrated plays of the twentieth century. No doubt Nat Hentoff does.

But that assumes a link between journalism and culture that may no longer exist. When Timothy McVeigh was executed in 2001 for the Oklahoma City bombing, the reporter witnesses recounted his last words verbatim, clearly unaware that they were reciting William Ernest Henley's Invictus, for more than a century one of the most anthologized works in English literature.

Not a sign of the decline of Western civilization. For all its fame, Invictus isn't very good; like Joyce Kilmer, Henley wrote many good poems and is remembered for a bad one. But it was remarkable that nobody on the scene seemed familiar with it – unless there is something anachronistic about the assumption that those who care about what's happening in the world also care about the arts, as Hentoff and so many of his contemporaries did or do.

A few decades ago, there was an unspoken assumption that the people who read The New York Times were also likely to read Hemingway, Frost, perhaps even Wallace Stevens. In 1970, those who knew that, say, Richard Ogilvie was the governor of Illinois and Walter Hickel was secretary of the interior probably also knew that Saul Bellow wrote The Adventures of Augie March, that Leopold Stokowski was the venerable conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra and that Jacob Epstein was a sculptor (and perhaps even that his name was part of a Dorothy Parker ditty). There was then something like a common life of the mind, in which curiosity transcended categories. Today, there are more specialists, fewer generalists.

This is not necessarily a change for the worse. But it is a change, and like all change, it has consequences. One is the decline – almost the disappearance – of the newspaper column as an aesthetic pleasure.

There are superb columnists. People read them because they love (or hate) what they say and because they say it with vigor, punch and sometimes humor. But people used to read Murray Kempton, Russell Baker, Jimmy Breslin, Mike Royko and before them Westbrook Pegler, Damon Runyon and H.L. Mencken, not for political reinforcement but for the sheer joy of spending a few minutes savoring the delights of the English language in the hands of a master.

Nowadays, even on the sports pages, long home to some of the best writing in the paper, the finely written column seems obsolete. Today’s sports columnists proclaim their cynical edginess. They call it ‘attitude.’

Red Smith did not have attitude. “There is seldom any prodding urge in this corner to take up cudgels, hold briefs or bare fardels,” he wrote in 1954, “partly because there is no very clear idea here of what a fardel is.” What Smith had was elegance, wit and a feel for the rhythm of the language he got from immersion in the English lyric poets and the King James Bible.

There are no surveys, and no doubt there are exceptions, but it does seem that the typical journalist today is far less likely to be familiar with either Keats or Isaiah than were Smith and many of his colleagues. Not to mention that a feel for the rhythm of the language may not sell any more.

Like Ring Lardner and Grantland Rice before them, Smith, Jimmy Cannon and Jim Murray tried to make every column a small work of art. No fools, they understood how small. They knew they worked for what Cannon called the newspaper's “toy department.” But some of those columns are still a pleasure to read, long after the games that inspired them have been forgotten.

Whether writing fiction, commentary or criticism, stylistically Hentoff was never quite in Russell Baker’s or Red Smith’s league. His prose is muscular and clear, but it never had the rhythm or the innate irony of some of the other great columnists of a generation or so ago. But muscular, clear prose is hard to find these days. Hentoff may be both an ideologue and a policy wonk, but he isn’t just an ideologue and policy wonk. He’s a man of letters.

The great columnists embraced their limitations. "I write every day for the next and walk wide of the cosmic and settle most happily for the local," Kempton wrote, conceding that his was "a precinct less modest than I make it sound, since my local happens to be the only city under the eye of God where the librettist for ‘Don Giovanni’ could find his closest friend in the author of 'The Night Before Christmas.'"

Always beware the older guy lamenting how much better everything used to be. It was not. There is something to be said for leaving the fine writing to the novelists and letting the journalists concentrate on getting their facts straight.

But there’s a loss here. Newspapers (even, in its own way, the Voice), are for everyone – the waitress and the truck driver whose coffee she pours at the diner, as well as the barista fixing a latté for the professor at the trendy coffee shop across the street. There was a time when all of them had the chance – even if it depended on someone inadvertently leaving the paper open to the right page at the diner counter – to read really good writing once in a while.

Hentoff’s departure from the Voice cuts one more thread – perhaps one of the last – in the fabric connecting journalism with the arts, culture and the pleasure of prose for its own sake. Well, mutatis, as people say – or at least as they used to say – mutandis.

You can tell Jon what you think even if you don't make a reference to Pirandello.