Lewis Lapham and Other Heroes

 

In the midst of this summer from Hell, sandwiched between the withdrawal from the presidential race of Joe Biden and the speech by Bibi Netanyahu to the assembled Houses of Congress in the Nation’s Capitol, came the news that Lewis Lapham had died. 

At this dark moment, when there are few protagonists on the world stage who project anything that could be regarded as heroic and most news makers appear to be competing to reach never before seen levels of incivility, it seems obligatory to publicly note the passing of one of the best writers and editors of the past hundred years. 

foto by Nicole Bengivino for the New York Times

Lewis H. Lapham was one of my heroes and will remain so as long as I am able to read and write. Do we need heroes? Should we have them?  Blind devotion to to imperfect people can lead to irrational and dangerous cults. We saw that a few decades ago with the Jonestown Massacre and more recently politics have come to be dominated by personality cults in place of policy discussions. However, most of us do look to people we respect and who can serve as models for how we hope to conduct our lives and achieve the goals we set for ourselves. 

In my experience, boys’ early heroes are often sports figures, and those early enthusiasms can sometimes last for a lifetime. For me, Ted Williams remains the greatest baseball ever and as soon as someone figures out how to bring his carefully frozen corpse back to life, everyone will get to see what I mean. With adolescence, the sex drive comes into play and all the many variations of the mating game begin to take over and often dominate the consciousness of newly energized youth. Music plays an integral role in these mating rites and it is no accident that one’s lifetime musical enthusiasms are shaped by our experiences of adolescence and those post-adolescent years, lately extended to the edge of middle age by ever longer periods of academic study and economic dependency. Our heroes in this period are often musicians and usually about a decade older than we are. They will have achieved fame as up and coming artists of their era in the genre to which they were assigned. Decades later, you can usually tell the age of people, regardless of their state of conservation or decline, by knowing their musical heroes. 

As we develop our own interests, the people we esteem tend to be those whose work and goals set an example for what we hope to achieve. Being an architect, my architectural hero was Frank Lloyd Wright, as he probably was to more than half the people in the western world who went on to become architects over the past one hundred years. With the possible exception of Albert Einstein in the realms of physics and mathematics, I can’t think of a similarly dominating figure in any other field. 

While as a boy I had sports heroes across all popular sports, none of them had much of a tangible effect on my life because no matter how strong my interest in sports, I just wasn’t very good at any of them. However, I did go on to draw and to paint, activities which spawned a whole new personal Olympus of inspirational figures, from Rembrandt to Klimt, with Thomas Nast, George Grosz and Giorgio Forattini stimulating my appreciation of the art of cartooning. While I would never claim to have equaled any of the work of these role models, they have all influenced what I do. 

Most of the heroes of my lifetime have been musicians. As with all the sports heroes, they have had little direct effect of what I do since I am even less of a musician than I am an athlete. At least I tried to play basketball, even breaking a hand once in the effort. However, the musicians, even more than the sports figures, brought me an abundance of joy and a fuller appreciation of the gift of life that we have received. 

 I’ve thought of myself as a an architect, a painter and a cartoonist, but I’ve rarely thought of myself as a writer. We all write! Sometimes it’s to friends, or lovers, teachers or government officials, impersonal corporate offices, or even in a diary, but we all write. I’ve been writing this blog for nearly twenty years and before that I wrote two books, never published, first on the joys of Italy, and later on the darker side of life here. In the course of doing some of this writing I started to recognize what it was I appreciated in writers. 

There were a few models that I related to, starting with Jean Shepherd, who wasn’t so much a writer as he was a speaker, running an hour-long radio show every night for many years featuring nothing and no one other than himself telling stories about a remembered or invented youth. Through all those years he revealed nothing about his rather singular private life. His fame was never really acknowledged by the cultural establishment, except by the fact that his program continued for years on New York’s most powerful commercial radio station. His silent band of listeners, Night People he called us, ran to the hundreds of thousands, a fact which he played with, exhorting his listeners to show up at a given time and place to do something both harmless and mysterious to all those not in on the prank. 

Another writer who I identified with was Bill Bryson, an American from the Mid-West who has become something of a fixture in the UK Establishment. You can now hear his recorded voice explaining every British tourist attraction to the tourists. However, in his earlier books I had the sensation of identity theft, that is, I had the sense that he’d written exactly what I had wanted to say before I had the chance to write it down. If he needs a ghost writer, I’m always ready to help; if I need a ghost writer, well, I couldn’t afford him, but I do try to keep a similar sense of humor, along with a bit of an edge. Maybe that’s the common denominator in all the writers I admire. 

Tom Wolfe was another fitting that description but I have no illusions about being able to match his colorful creativity in language usage. He satirized the cultural elite that he succeeded in becoming a part of, creating his own celebrity identity for a celebrity culture. 

I’ve been reading Harper’s Magazine for most of my life, starting, if I remember correctly, back in my college days. I’ve let my subscription lapse a few times when I moved from one place to another, but I’ve always managed to return to the fold. Lewis Lapham was managing editor or editor-in-chief of the magazine from 1971 til 2006, with a year off during the magazine’s economic crisis of 1982. That long period covered much of my extended readership of the nation’s oldest continuously published monthly. IMHO it remains the best publication produced in the United States, filled with excellent essays on all manner of subjects, poetry, paintings, photographs, book reviews and readings from sources you would never be exposed to otherwise. It was, and still is, where the work of America’s best writers first appeared, among them Mark Twain.

Lewis Lapham had his own heroes, the most important of which was Mark Twain, whose honesty, sarcasm, irony and humor shaped Lapham’s own writing and outlook. He retired from running the magazine to found his own Lapham’s Quarterly, but his impact on Harper’s lives on in its outlook and in several features he introduced. The Harper’s Index, a one-page list of statistics which provides a snapshot of the state of the world at the moment; Annotation, a line-by-line analysis of documents that usually do not draw much attention; and Findings, a random but carefully curated sampling of curious happenings in the natural world. Featured writers may have an agenda to promote or a partisan view regarding a particular topic under discussion but the magazine seeks to present thoughtful essays on issues that exist now with the goal of informing the readership of what drives the issue at hand. That’s a role that the major media have abandoned some time ago. 

Bicentennial Heroes

About forty years ago I did a painting, Bicentennial Heroes, to celebrate my favorite Americans of the first two hundred years. Lewis Lapham does not appear in it. Indeed, until I saw his obituary in the New York Times, I don’t recall ever having seen a picture of him. The last time I visited the United States, ten years ago, I did visit both the offices of Harper’s, and the offices of Lapham’s Quarterly, in a vain effort to get some writing of mine published. In subsequent years I was not even sure if he was still alive or not. Now I know from his NYT obituary that he moved to Rome with members of his family in January of this year and he died there on July 29th. For a classical scholar, which he was, that seemed like perfect planning. 

I’ve mentioned a few of my heroes and how they’ve influenced what I do. With Lewis Lapham, it’s slightly different. I try to think about how he would say what I want to write, but more than that, I feel that he’s looking over my shoulder offering comments, maybe not spoken aloud, just thoughts, like the cat’s comments in some of my cartoons. “wordy”, “clumsy”, “too long”, too emotional”. I do try to make the adjustments that seem to be called for but it’s like having a very exacting English professor standing over you and watching your every word. Lacking a flesh and blood proofreader, I am grateful for this otherworldly presence. Lewis Lapham, rest in peace, but may your spirit endure.