A light has gone out in the world of letters. Lewis Lapham has died. The American writer and editor was 89. In what seems apposite of his literary inclinations to the classics, he took his last breath in Rome. Lapham was editor of the revered magazine Harper’s (1976-81) and then from 1983 to 2006. Each issue began with an example par excellence of his views on American life, its foibles, its failures, particularly in the government’s foreign policies (he was scathing of the Bush father and son team and the incursion into Iraq) and sometimes its transference into beauty.
The magazine in its homage to Lapham this week stated that his columns and essays ‘compared to the work of Michel de Montaigne, Mark Twain, and H. L. Mencken. ‘What so annoys people about the media,’ Lapham once wrote, ‘is not its rudeness or its stupidity but its sanctimony.’ His life and career, at Harper’s and later at Lapham’s Quarterly, were distinguished by a different approach, not to produce a magazine that would clothe readers ‘with opinions in the way that Halston or Bloomingdale’s dresses them for the opera’, but rather one that would aim ‘to ask questions, not to provide ready-made answers, to say, in effect, look at this, see how much more beautiful and strange and full of possibility is the world than can be imagined by the mythographers at Time or NBC’.’’
Kurt Vonnegut described Lapham’s book Money and Class in America as the work of America’s ‘greatest satirist’’. Many of Lapham’s columns, which in their observations and articulation drew echoes of Twain and Mencken, became books such as Waiting for the Barbarians, Theater of War, Pretensions to Empire and Age of Folly. He also wrote of his time with The Beatles in India in With The Beatles. After he left the Harper’s editorship he started up Lapham’s Quarterly in 2007. Its aim was to take a theme and then illustrate it both lyrically and painterly from the ages of history, presaged with a column by himself.
Two of his most striking achievements as Harper’s editor, as has been noted by other obituarists, was to go in a direction that was not being taken by daily news outlets. Thus his use of the talents of Christopher Hitchens, who memorably accused Henry Kissinger of war crimes and the fostering of writer Barbara Ehrenreich in her work on America’s underclass. Her consequent book Nickled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America is regarded as a classic of undercover journalism.
Lapham also introduced a piece of furniture into the parlour of magazines that has become a thing of renown in its own right. Harper’s Index is, on face value, merely a collection of statistics. But it has over the years attained a life of its own, both quirky, insightful and knowledgeable.
As an editor and writer, Lapham was always guided by seeking to hear the human voice in all its flawed, fractured, inspired and soulful range. And having heard it, help it be passed on to others. He was acutely conscious of this human link in history. A guiding principle was the observation by German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: ‘He who cannot draw on 3000 years is living hand to mouth.’
Lapham saw in the rise of technology in people’s lives the descent of the considered moment in people’s thoughts and therefore their lives. The hurried minute was the lost hour.
‘I borrowed the method of Montaigne, who measured the worth of his own observations against those that he came across in the archive of classical antiquity, most reliably in the writings of Plutarch and Seneca. I soon discovered that I had as much to learn from the counsel of the dead as I did from the advice and consent of the living.’
He was often described as patrician, and he did come from privilege. He went to Yale, immersed himself in the classics, studied and played piano (Beethoven was a favourite, for whom he has quoted: ‘Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?’
He studied medieval English history at Magdalen College, Cambridge. Of his columns, he once wrote: ‘My object was to learn, not preach, which prevented my induction into the national college of pundits but encouraged my reading of history.
‘I borrowed the method of Montaigne, who measured the worth of his own observations against those that he came across in the archive of classical antiquity, most reliably in the writings of Plutarch and Seneca. I soon discovered that I had as much to learn from the counsel of the dead as I did from the advice and consent of the living.’
His observations of the state of the world went deep into not only the events at hand, but the soul of the players and the link that runs unseen through the years. Always, he described the landscape we were walking in, but also what once grew in the soil, what bones were turning to dust, what paths had already been taken, and most importantly, posing the thought, See this is how we got here. In the past was the present.
Such was his intimacy with history back to the classical empires, his insight and erudition became compelling reading. This was not just of politics and war, but also art. He once observed: ‘The supposition that art is a gift as opposed to a collectible, something that doesn’t try to sell you anything, runs counter to our contemporary notions of what constitutes a meaningful exchange.’
Lapham was scathing of American hubris. In Theater of War, written after the 9/11 attacks, he wrote, while acknowledging the national grief and the deaths, ‘America’s once certain virtue now seems to me closer to a fiction than a fact, and if the essays in this book run against the tide of much of the commentary published since September 11,2001, it is because they follow from the premise that attacks were to be expected and should have come as no surprise. Not because America deserves to be blamed for all the world’s misfortune, but because the makers of America’s foreign policy over the course of the previous 50 years have embraced a dream of power as vainglorious as the one that rallied the disciples of Osama bin Laden to the banner of jihad.’
Empires, like power, eventually turn to ash. He advocated for the power of the spirit to transcend. It was, he would have admitted, a Sisyphean task.
Following his death, the board of Lapham’s Quarterly posted this essay of his, which includes this:
‘The question ‘Why must I die?’ and its implied follow-up, ‘How then do I live my life?’, both admit of an answer by and for and of oneself. Learning how to die, as Montaigne goes on to rightly say, is unlearning how to be a slave. The question ‘Why can’t I live forever?’ assigns the custody of one’s death to powers that make it their business to promote and instil the fear of it — to church or state, to an alchemist or an engineer.’
One can perhaps imagine as his eyes last closed, his vision would have been a ship, in sail, gliding to time’s horizon.
Warwick McFadyen is an award-winning journalist. He has won two Walkley Awards and four Quill Awards. He has published several books of poetry. The latest is 21+4 Poems. His prose and poems have also appeared in Quadrant, Overland and Dissent.
Main image: Lewis Lapham. (Harper's)