The raccoon got up on the roof and wouldn’t come down. I threw rocks
at it and it danced between them. Finally I decided to get my shotgun.
I got a ladder from the garage and climbed up on it. Then I took aim and
fired. It danced like crazy, but I missed and tore a hole in the roof.
Denny, the little boy from next door, came running out of his house yelling,
“Don’t shoot, that’s my pet raccoon!” I turned on the ladder and stared at
him in disbelief. “All right, you can have him if you can catch him,” I
said. He stood at the foot of the ladder and said, “Come here, Billy.” And
to my amazement, the raccoon came down and nestled in his arms and they walked
away toward Denny’s home. I put the ladder away and walked into my house
with my shotgun. I went into my study and started to work for a while.
I finished a report for work in about three hours, then decided to take
a nap. I went into the living room and lay down on the couch. I slept for
about an hour and when I woke up the raccoon was in my lap. I started to scream
but then thought better of it and just started to pet its head, which it seemed
to like. So we lay there like that for another half hour until there was a
knock on the door. I picked the raccoon up and walked to the door. It was
Denny, the boy from next door. “Can I have my raccoon back?” he said. “I
don’t know how he got in here, really I don’t. But, sure, here’s your
raccoon,” I said. “By the way, what’s his name?” “Elvis,” he said, grabbing
Suggested Reading
Letters to James Schuyler
By Joe Brainard“2 glasses of milk with Ovaltine everyday”
The Daily
Letters
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
The Paris Review Podcast returns with a new season, featuring the best interviews, fiction, essays, and poetry from America’s most legendary literary quarterly, brought to life in sound. Join us for intimate conversations with Sharon Olds and Olga Tokarczuk; fiction by Rivers Solomon, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, and Zach Williams; poems by Terrance Hayes and Maggie Millner; nonfiction by Robert Glück, Jean Garnett, and Sean Thor Conroe; and performances by George Takei, Lena Waithe, and many others. Catch up on earlier seasons, and listen to the trailer for Season 4 now.
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