The dean of Harper’s made the modern magazine what it is.
Lewis Lapham’s influence on the shape of the American magazine through his work at Harper’s can hardly be overstated. Many tributes have been written to this effect in the past few days, and I suspect many more will be written in the weeks and months to come as all the little eminences of American literary life crawl out to draw their lines of connection to the great man. Lapham was like a liberal William F. Buckley, in that he cultivated, through his magazine, a sensibility whose influence emanated far beyond its pages. But unlike Buckley, who with National Review gave his readers politics, Lapham only sought to suggest an approach to politics (and to life more generally). His sensibility was that of the genial skeptic. And, as he wrote in a 1984 manifesto, with Harper’s he aimed “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.”
That vision of Harper’s still holds today. It is not a compliment to say that it is the best general interest magazine in America; it is just a fact. This is due in large part to the magazine’s structure, which Lapham designed in the early 1980s, shortly after he took over as the magazine’s editor (for a tenure that lasted until 2006). Harper’s had existed in several incarnations to that point. At its founding in 1850, it had been a sort of thesaurus of current affairs. It had subsequently become a literary magazine, then a journal of opinion and policy, and then, finally, before Lapham took the reins, a failure, about to go out of business. Lapham’s genius in rebuilding Harper’s was he realized that people already got their news and opinion from the daily papers and television, and that for a magazine to be a worthwhile product, it has to exist outside of all that. (This realization became even more pertinent with the advent of the Internet.) A successful magazine lives in its own world with its own rules, where, when it is pleasing, it can safely peer into any number of other worlds and comment on their proceedings.
In Harper’s, Lapham achieved that effect through a series of formal innovations, which still form the skeleton of the magazine today. These are the Readings, Annotations, and Index. The first is composed of a series of excerpts (often very funny) pulled from recent books, poems, speeches, government documents, advertising copy—whatever the editors imagine might amuse, delight, or horrify their readers in any given month. The second is usually a map or some other document reproduced with a written explanation of its elements. And the third, the greatest of these, consists of a series of statistics that, when taken together, read almost like a short story. One of Lapham’s literary models was Edward Gibbon, and at its best, the Index is a Gibbonian exercise in antithesis. I read it aloud with my wife whenever a new issue of the magazine appears in the mail.
As for the rest of the magazine, Lapham believed that on the strength of the departments, he could give over the features and reviews to longform reporting and well-thought-out essays, which often took years for authors to finish. A quick glance through the Harper’s archive seems to confirm that he was right in that belief. Everyone knows that the magazine published David Foster Wallace’s famous essay about cruise ships (commissioned by Charis Conn, who wrote the bulk of the Index under Lapham), but in that period the magazine also published a great debate between Neil Postman and Camille Paglia and a strange, raw symposium on abortion that I don’t think would be possible today. My favorite thing published during Lapham’s time is Don DeLillo’s novella Pafko at the Wall: It is worth the whole magazine put together.
I haven’t said much here about Lapham’s own writing style. Gibbon was one model, but he also looked up to Sir Thomas Browne. And like many other admirers of that gentle doctor, his love of the ornate was a dangerous game. “If one fails in the style of Pascal, one is merely flat; if one fails in the style of Browne, one is ridiculous,” Lytton Strachey once observed. “He who plays with the void, who dallies with eternity, who leaps from star to star, is in danger at every moment of being swept into utter limbo, and tossed forever in the Paradise of Fools.” Lapham only rarely fell into the void, but all the same, I do not think it is for his writing he will be remembered.
I never knew Lewis Lapham personally. My only encounter with him could hardly even be called a brush: I emailed him last year asking for a contribution to a symposium published on the occasion of Cormac McCarthy’s death. He declined, almost immediately, but with more grace than is usually expected in a refusal. I thought that would be the end of it; it usually is with these cold-call emails. But a funny thing happened. Over the next few months, I would occasionally receive pitches—none of them worked out, I’m sorry to say—from writers who began their emails with something along the lines of “Lewis Lapham thought this might be a good fit for The Lamp…”
I don’t know what to make of that recommendation, except that I find it impressive that at 89 years of age, the man’s mind was still whirring and that his sight was still cast all over the literary world. It is a world that he deserves much credit for creating. His death this week did not come as a shock, but it is a melancholy event all the same. May he rest in peace.
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