Oh, Contrarian

Lewis Lapham paces back and forth in front of a young audience at Columbia University. At 63, he is very lean and very tall. He hunches slightly, and his fingers configure themselves around the cigarette he is not allowed to smoke in this room. His preferred gesture, a sort of sweep led by the first two fingers of his right hand, is meant, in its purest form, to leave a trail of smoke. He has the bouncy walk of a jazz musician. His voice has that nicotine-soaked rasp so rarely heard in Los Angeles.

The lecture by the editor of Harper’s Magazine is called “The Commodification of Dissent.” It’s a spring night, in that single week that happens each spring in New York, when every bud is just about to burst and the grass in Central Park is a feathery green.

“Some time after the Kennedy election,” he tells the slightly defensive graduate students, “the entire avant-garde in this country was co-opted. For the last 30 years, Americans haven’t given a damn about literature or the arts. When I was at Yale, we would get up at 3 a.m. to meet the train carrying a new issue of the New Yorker, with, say, a new Updike story. What train,” he asks, palms up, facing the next generation, “are you meeting?”

Lapham claims to have witnessed, on June 12, 1950, the death of the Beats. He and some friends were playing chess and discussing something important in a North Beach bar when a crew rushed in to film Jack Kerouac’s “The Subterraneans.” They offered everyone in the place $50 to go home and shave, put on khakis and dresses, and come back as extras.

“One year earlier, no one would have moved,” he mourns. “That day, there was a terrible scraping of chairs--I can still hear it in my mind--as the ex-Beats raced home to change. I’m not pessimistic,” he says to the students, who do not share his grief. “The last 50 years were fallow, but I’m hopeful for the next 50.”

One wonders what kind of suicide Lapham is trying to commit. An angry student raises his hand.

“What about Julian Schnabel, what about David Mamet, what about Frank Gehry? And as for music . . .”

But Lapham cuts him off.

“When I look at American painting over the last 50 years, I might as well be looking at cartoons in a Hearst paper. As for music? There’s been nothing since Thelonius Monk and Chet Baker. What do we get to replace Clifford Odets and Tennessee Williams in American theater? Andrew Lloyd Webber? Are the movies of Preston Sturges supposed to be replaced by the ‘Titanic’?

“American literature? We’re still buying Norman Mailer and John Updike off the rack--no one has replaced them. And I cannot take seriously the architecture of Frank Gehry. No, our creative talent has gone into the sciences, into medicine, weaponry and the financial arts. Ahhh,” he says with a wave, “it doesn’t matter, it was all bull anyway.”

Harper’s magazine is a quizzical entity in American letters and has been since the first issue was published in 1850. Now owned by the nonprofit Harper’s Magazine Foundation, it is a magazine of modest observations that add up to larger insights about American culture. It has been a crucible for the art of the essay.

Lapham is extremely proud of his audience.

“They’re people who like to think for themselves,” he says. “They are skeptical, well-informed grown-ups who tend to be self-employed. We don’t talk down to them. We assume they are smarter than we are.”

The monthly’s main competitors are the New Yorker, the New Republic and the Atlantic Monthly.

“Reading the New Republic,” says Lapham, “is like listening to the courtiers in the anteroom at Versailles. They’re preoccupied with the intrigues of Washington, D.C. The New Yorker, on the other hand, is so very uneven. There’s usually one good piece, and the rest gets confused in their preoccupation with celebrity.” As for Harper’s: “We don’t make the concessions to graphics that other magazines do. We’re for people who read. Our readers buy an average of 35 hardcover books per year.”

Lapham went to Yale and then Cambridge with every intention of becoming a historian. After one year, he was back in his hometown of San Francisco, where his grandfather was the mayor and where he was a reporter on the Examiner. One day, young Lewis came into work to find the publisher and about 10 senior editors huddled around his desk. The magazine sections of the Los Angeles Examiner and the San Francisco Examiner, both owned by the Hearsts, were printed together at a plant in Bakersfield.

On that Sunday, a cover proclaiming Los Angeles “The Athens of the West” ran by accident in the San Francisco edition. He was told he had until the end of the day to prove this a lie.

“Nobody was home in San Francisco,” Lapham remembers mournfully. “Los Angeles had Christopher Isherwood, Thomas Mann!” Failing his assignment, Lapham was told by the editor that he “would never be a newspaperman.”

This became true. He became, instead, the Typhoid Mary of literary journalism.

*

In 1960, Lapham went to New York, spent two years at the Herald Tribune and six months at a magazine called USA1 before it folded, became a contract writer for the Saturday Evening Post (it folded), then a contract writer for Life (it folded) and finally in 1971 a contract writer for Harper’s under the editorship of Willie Morris.

In 1976, after a galvanizing run and then some office politics, Morris quit, taking with him the entire staff except for Lapham and the art director.

“On Monday I was a writer, on Tuesday I was managing editor. There was literally no one else in the office.”

The magazine was rescued in 1980 by John R. MacArthur, of the genius-awards family, its current publisher. In 1981, Lapham was fired by a board of 13 trustees who thought he was too critical of American society (“Boosters,” Lapham calls them). After two years, he rejoined on the condition that be allowed to redesign the magazine.

In 1984, the new issue appeared with Lapham’s imprimatur. The new Harper’s was cleaner looking and easier to read. Lapham added the much-imitated Harper’s Index, a compendium of odd facts and figures, a Readings section of eclectic excerpts, and a variety of forms in which to present information.

“It’s like a sonnet,” he says. “Once you have the form, you can be very creative within it--it’s much easier than free verse.” Readers liked the redesign: Harper’s’ circulation jumped from 120,000 to 220,000, where it has stayed at last count.

What makes a good essay?

“It is,” he says, “a kind of adventure story. A writer starts out, in the Montaigne sense, in an attempt to discover something. If it’s good, the writer doesn’t know where it will go. Sometimes it’s brilliant, sometimes it’s a miserable failure. There is a sense of an attempt to come to terms with an idea or with the nature of one’s experience, of making connections, of insight. The end result is the ‘Aha!’ phenomenon.” Right now, Lapham is eagerly awaiting a piece on bees from Susan Morrow.

“Bees are under pressure at the moment,” he says, “because of a mite that threatens the bee population on the East Coast. If you don’t have bees, you don’t have fruit. They have to be cared for!” (This might be the quintessential Harper’s essay.)

Besides outstanding science writing, the magazine in recent years has focused a lot on Washington dysfunction, the overselling of technology, and fissures in the global economy. Star writers include David Foster Wallace, Barry Lopez, Sallie Tisdale, Annie Dillard and David Guterson.

Lapham himself contributes a gloomy column, an elegant rant on the stupidities of the ruling class. These pieces have just been collected in a book, “Waiting for the Barbarians” (Verso, 1998).

*

Lapham has been accused of being an upper-class radical, which, of course, he denies.

“I don’t even think of myself as being particularly radical, but I do hold the old notion that if you’re going to be in this business, even at this level--I mean it’s not the front lines like the newspapers--you’re not supposed to become part of the system. I mean, if you do your job right, only two people show up at your funeral.”

He looks through squarish black-rimmed glasses over an extremely cluttered desk in his office at the magazine.

“I try not to let my associations get in the way, and I’m naturally suspicious of the American ruling or governing class. If anybody wrecks the country, it will be them, am I right? It is their vanity, stupidity, greed and shortsightedness that sooner or later gets us all in trouble. So I may not be the person one thinks of when pulling together a small dinner party for important politicians,” he says gleefully.

“I’ve never gotten used to New York,” he insists, raising his voice above all the spring fervor. “I think the California landscape is the real one and New York is a stage set. There’s something overdone and stagey about a New England spring.” A wheezy laugh. “My feelings for California are genuinely affectionate, but New York is where the action is.”

He makes an intriguing comparison.

“Around six years ago, I didn’t have a good writer in Los Angeles, so I made a concerted effort to read the LA Weekly, the Los Angeles Times Magazine and a few others. I found six writers whose writing I liked, and I flew out there and asked them to dinner in Brentwood. What astonished me was that none of them knew each other! That never could happen in New York! If I didn’t know X, I would most certainly know his girlfriend!”

On the wall behind his desk are pictures of his three children with his wife, Joan. Andrew, his oldest son, is 25 and working in the financial world.

“Andrew wants to make a large fortune. He does so with my blessing. The Wall Street job is often the job of a writer. Andrew writes leveraged buyouts, 17-page manuscripts worth $270 million. Even Norman Mailer doesn’t get those rates!”

It’s Lapham, the merry provocateur. As he explained to the Columbia students: “If you look at American magazines in the ‘20s and ‘30s, there was a sense of humor and self-deprecation that disappeared after the war. Once we became an imperial nation, all the insufferable Harvard/Princeton types in the State Department became way too self-important. There’s a sense of desperation in society now. We must ask what will generate or prompt a desire for authenticity?

“Perhaps a nice bracing recession,” he growls, badly in need of a cigarette.