Today we are going into shelter,
we are going underground to discover the passage that leads
to the next world. We will be happy there,
or we will not worry about happiness; we will make neat designs
in skin and wool, emblems we set against the stone walls
for posterity to find. Today I picture the generations
of our kind, crossing the marshy bridge into this country,
picture the long ramble down the icy, scoured valleys,
and I wonder what made them do it, without philosophy
or belief, without even much they wanted from the earth.
I see them haggard at the edge of a muddy wallow,
their minds like notches cut into stone, the stick
they fling a kind of miracle, a glance like a handful of fire
tossed in the air, no language to back them up. Today,
from the suburbs, I salute them, as if I am drunk
and falsely exuberant, as if I am just leaving the house
of a friend who is dying, who has dragged her bed
under the window to watch the ordinary street pass by.
I could tell lies to the dying, it would be easy,
easy to say that we are at the beginning, not at the end,
that all the business in the swamps with cutthroat beasts
was only prologue, as Homer was prologue,
as Dante and Stalin and your Aunt Edna were prologue,
that the trek is just getting under way here
as we flash our knives and call
over the “great distances of our longing”
promising to love each other the way we promised.
Suggested Reading
Les Cinquante Glorieuses
By Fredric Jameson“‘What’s up with the signified?’ ‘Oh, we’re through with that now. We’re doing the passé.’”
The Daily
Lectures
The Art of Editing No. 4
By Lewis Lapham
Photo by Matthew Septimus, courtesy of Harper's Magazine.
It is dangerous to excel at two different things. You run the risk of being underappreciated in one or the other; think of Michelangelo as a poet, of Michael Jordan as a baseball player. This is a trap that Lewis Lapham has largely avoided. For the past half century, he has been getting pretty much equal esteem in a pair of distinct roles: editor and essayist. As an editor, he is hailed for his three-decade career at the helm of Harper’s, America’s second-oldest magazine, which he reinvigorated in 1983; and then, as an encore a decade ago, for Lapham’s Quarterly, a wholly new kind of periodical in his own intellectual image. As an essayist, he was called “without a doubt our greatest satirist” by Kurt Vonnegut.
By the time I arrived in New York in the late seventies, Lapham was established in the city’s editorial elite, up there with William Shawn at The New Yorker and Barbara Epstein and Bob Silvers at The New York Review of Books. He was a glamorous fixture at literary parties and a regular at Elaine’s. In 1988, he raised plutocratic hackles by publishing Money and Class in America, a mordant indictment of our obsession with wealth. For a brief but glorious couple of years, he hosted a literary chat show on public TV called Bookmark, trading repartee with guests such as Joyce Carol Oates, Gore Vidal, Alison Lurie, and Edward Said. All the while, a new issue of Harper’s would hit the newsstands every month, with a lead essay by Lapham that couched his erudite observations on American society and politics in Augustan prose.
Today Lapham is the rare surviving eminence from that literary world. But he has managed to keep a handsome bit of it alive—so I observed when I went to interview him last summer in the offices of Lapham’s, a book-filled, crepuscular warren on a high floor of an old building just off Union Square. There he presides over a compact but bustling editorial operation, with an improbably youthful crew of subeditors. One LQ intern, who had also done stints at other magazines, told me that Lapham was singular among top editors for the personal attention he showed to each member of his staff.
Our conversation took place over several sessions, each around ninety minutes. Despite the heat, he was always impeccably attired: well-tailored blue blazer, silk tie, cuff links, and elegant loafers with no socks. He speaks in a relaxed baritone, punctuated by an occasional cough of almost orchestral resonance—a product, perhaps, of the Parliaments he is always dashing outside to smoke. The frequency with which he chuckles attests to a vision of life that is essentially comic, in which the most pervasive evils are folly and pretension.
I was familiar with such aspects of the Lapham persona. But what surprised me was his candid revelation of the struggle and self-doubt that lay behind what I had imagined to be his effortlessness. Those essays, so coolly modulated and intellectually assured, are the outcome of a creative process filled with arduous redrafting, rejiggering, revision, and last-minute amendment in the teeth of the printing press. And it is a creative process that always begins—as it did with his model, Montaigne—not with a dogmatic axiom to be unpacked but in a state of skeptical self-questioning: What do I really know? If there a unifying core to Lapham’s dual career as an editor and an essayist, that may be it.
—Jim Holt
From the Archive, Issue 229
Interview
Season 4 Trailer
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