Remembering Lewis Lapham, eloquent skeptic of power and great nurturer of talent

In an age of hyperbole and literal-mindedness, Lewis H. Lapham, who died on Tuesday at 89, was a master of ironic understatement. As the personal computer and the touch screen turned everyone into a prose minimalist, he remained committed to a mandarin style, the majority of his sentences demonstrating the force of periodicity and sinuosity. Rare among intellectuals, he was hardly ever not funny, even on the most serious of subjects. “Funny” is not a word I recall him ever using in print, but wherever he was, laughter followed. Unlike his peers in the era of New Journalism, with whom he was sometimes grouped, he never endeavored to make himself the main character, though his readers could always sense that they were in the presence of a strong and reliable narrator with a singular talent for metaphor. These were his qualities as a newspaperman, magazine feature writer and monthly columnist. He was also one of the great editors of his time, reshaping America’s oldest monthly, Harper’s Magazine, and creating Lapham’s Quarterly from scratch.

Lucky for me, I got to work for him. I was an intern at Harper’s in the first half of 2003. One morning Lapham ran out of Parliaments while trying to finish his column, and I bummed him a couple, to be repaid the next week with a pair of Cuban cigars. One afternoon in the office conference room, we watched in disbelief as Secretary of State Colin Powell presented the case for the invasion of Iraq based on satellite photos of aluminum tubes that were said to somehow indicate the preparation of nuclear warheads or at least the vaguer “weapons of mass destruction.” One night a few weeks later, we watched the flashes on the screen as the first bombs were dropped on Baghdad. Lapham was one of the few voices in national publications who strongly opposed the war. Later, he called for the impeachment of George W. Bush. These stances, lonely at the time, have been vindicated in the tumultuous decades that have followed. Lapham, however, was never a pundit. As columnists more and more fashioned themselves as outside electoral strategists for one party or another, he kept up the tradition of the observer as Socratic gadfly. He believed in America as a republic, at its best a democracy, but never as an empire. He was a skeptic of power but never a cynic when it came to human beings.

Internships only last a few months, but in 2006 I rejoined the magazine as an associate editor. It was Lapham’s last month as editor. One evening we were out for drinks at the Noho Star, his regular watering hole on Lafayette Street, around the corner from the Harper’s office on Broadway, along with a couple of our colleagues and some of his new collaborators on Lapham’s Quarterly, then in the early stages of development. Someone asked him the secret of editing. He said he’d learned it from his editor at the Saturday Evening Post, and it could be summed up in one word: “steel.” We were dumbfounded for a moment — was an editor really like an NFL lineman or Superman? — until we realized we’d heard him wrong: The word was “steal.” And many of Lapham’s innovations at Harper’s and LQ were elegant systems of thievery. (Perhaps borrowing is a better term, and of course copyright holders were always paid for the republication of their poetry or prose in the magazines.) The Harper’s Index and Readings Section and every issue of Lapham’s Quarterly were exercises in the arts of collage and anthology. Sometimes the trick was thematic unity, sometimes impish juxtaposition, of documents, lists, cut-ups, jokes, numbers and images. Lapham and the young editors he surrounded himself with scouted widely and took from everywhere.

But for all his artful thievery, his signal achievement as an editor was the discovery and amplification of writers, talents he stole from obscurity, from little magazines, from small presses, from the unrealized and frustrating years of youth, and often from the halls of his own office. Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, Michael Pollan, David Foster Wallace — some of their earliest works appeared in Harper’s under his editorship, and that’s not to mention the many distinguished contributions of Evan S. Connell, Guy Davenport, Don DeLillo, Barbara Ehrenreich, Christopher Hitchens, John Leonard, John Edgar Wideman and so on. These were names rarely seen, if ever, in the pages of his magazine’s uptown rival, the New Yorker; perhaps their styles were too unruly. Lapham once acknowledged the achievement of the New Yorker’s William Shawn in a review for the New York Times of Ved Mehta’s “Remembering Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker”: “The art of Shawn’s editing was plainly visible on every page of the magazine, which for the 35 years of his term in editorial office governed the republic of American letters.” Whereas the New Yorker had and has a house style from which only a few Barthelmes and Kaels have been allowed to deviate, house style at Harper’s never stretched beyond a few conventions of punctuation. The idea was never to spawn a legion of Lapham clones. The notion would have repulsed him.

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For my generation, arriving before the floodgates of under-compensated and under-edited online writing were opened wide, Lapham provided young people a stage on which to do major work for a decent paycheck, publishing some of the earliest work of Tom Bissell, Ben Metcalf, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, the late Matthew Power, John Jeremiah Sullivan and Jennifer Szalai. Some of us, like myself and Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, a onetime Harper’s intern who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for magazine feature writing, never quite got around to writing for Lapham, but for us and many others his encouragement was the crucial intervention. The mere example of watching him toil for two weeks every month in longhand over each column, cigarette in hand, was inspiring. It was more time than a newspaperman in a city bullpen ever had, and having been one of those he knew it, and earned the privilege of his long days by taking the appropriate pains with each sentence.

Under the elegant sentences and the elegant suits and ties was a mischievous man who wore no socks with his loafers. He was a son of, critic of and traitor to the Establishment. His grandfather, Roger Lapham, was a Republican mayor of San Francisco in the 1940s, and his brother Anthony worked for the CIA, an organization that turned down Lewis’s application. That sent him to the newsroom of the San Francisco Examiner and then the New York Herald-Tribune, the source of his favorite stories to tell, many of which were not fit to print. He had tried to be a poet, coming down from Yale on the weekends to seek out W.H. Auden at Manhattan cocktail parties. He had tried to be a scholar, going up to Cambridge to study with C.S. Lewis, but he found he didn’t have the footnotes in him. He had tried to be a pianist, auditioning once for one of his profile subjects, Thelonious Monk, who told him simply: “I heard you.” He was, I think, happiest as a reporter, endlessly amused by the men and women he encountered on the road, something evident from the many barroom scenes in “Alaska,” his first contribution to Harper’s, in 1970. As an editor, he resisted the two forces he thought had ruined magazines in his lifetime — television and celebrity — and he made it his mission to bring his readers great writing or something as close to it as he could get hold of in any given month. He knew the life of a writer was one of frustration, failure and humiliation, relieved only by a sense of constant dedication and occasional delight. That’s why on reading an early published work of one of my colleagues and detecting in it the beginnings of a real writer, all he said was: “I’m sorry.” Then he published it.

Christian Lorentzen is a critic and essayist whose work regularly appears in the London Review of Books, Harper’s, Bookforum, Granta and other publications.

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