Lewis Lapham, a Prince of American Letters and Traitor to His Class
Lewis Lapham speaking at Harvard, circa 1989. Photo: Mark Medish.
Lewis Lapham, who passed away at 89 last month, was a prince of American letters. To say that Lapham was well put together would be an understatement. Lapham’s prose was as elegant and sharply cut as his bespoke City of London suits. Like Twain, he was a quintessential American specimen, a distinctly New World literary product grounded in centuries of Old World cultivation.
The most important aspect of Lapham’s legacy was not his refinement but his critical mind and glee at exposing bullshit. This made him something of a traitor to the “equestrian class” from which he sprang. Indeed Lapham was innately disdainful of the various masters of the universe who have lorded over American society, whether the tycoons of Wall Street, the celebrity pundits of mainstream media, the wonky denizens of the Washington swamp — which he referred to as “the Stygian marshes” — the field marshals of the military-industrial complex, or Silicon Valley’s superman techno-capitalists.
Lapham couldn’t be fully objective about the ruling classes because he knew far too much about them as the scion of big oil, shipping moguls and the New England and West Coast elites. Lewis had the keenest nose for the hypocrisies and vanities of his native social set. He did not try to conceal his high-brow rearing, but he was unpretentious about it and did not suffer fools. He had a deeply democratic spirit and practiced equal opportunity social criticism.
I was lucky to have Lewis Lapham was a lifelong mentor. Our relationship started around 1981 when I had just started college thanks to an 18-cent postage stamp. My father, a fiercely independent-minded scholar who came to America from the ruins of the Old World, had encouraged me at a young age to read newspapers and not to be shy: to engage with the national conversation, as we might say today. So I would read and read — and occasionally write letters to the editor or directly to favorite columnists. Which is what I did to Lewis Lapham, who was writing a weekly column for The Washington Post after being rusticated from the editorship of HARPER’S.
Imagine the thrill for a college freshman to receive a typed response on heavy “Lewis H. Lapham” letterhead with a swank Park Avenue address. I doubt the great editor knew that his correspondent was nineteen years old, but the exchange launched a lifelong friendship.
I first met Lewis in person at Georgetown University around 1983. The legendary Dean of the School of Foreign Service Peter Krogh, who rivaled Lapham as a walking model of substance and style, organized a public lecture. Before a packed auditorium Lewis read an advanced version of his next Notebook column in HARPER’S. This talk was followed by deliberations among a small group of us with Lewis on the possible decline and fall of Western civilization over long drinks at The Four Seasons hotel.
A few years later, we reprised the university gig when I arranged a talk on Money and Class in America at Harvard. I collected Lewis from the curb at Logan Airport. This was long before the convenience of emails and text messages — how did we manage to keep an appointment? I must have known when to show up because Ann had called me with the flight details. Sure enough, Lewis appeared from the doors of the terminal in a dapper suit, a boxy light brown Brooks Brothers briefcase in hand. Lewis performed effortlessly over lunch with students and faculty at Adams House.
Obituaries have quoted Lapham to the effect that every great editor is a pirate. His method must have rubbed off. Around the time we first corresponded, Lapham’s collection of essays Fortune’s Child appeared with the subtitle “A Portrait of the United States as Spendthrift Heir.” I recall devouring it. One chapter particularly stuck with me. It dealt with our perspective on current events and history. Lewis argued for adjusting our focal range, avoiding both the narcissistic weeds and the dispassionate “view from 40,000 feet.” He sought the perspective of “the middle distance.” As an aspiring social scientist student, I confess to pirating Lapham’s phrase and concept to good effect in any number of applications and scholarship essays.
Somehow we always remained in dialogue, at least in my own mind, which is the definition of mentorship. I wondered what Lewis would think of this idea or that author. We met many times but much of our dialogue was epistolary. I have mislaid, and maybe lost forever, many of the dozens of letters from Lewis. We exchanged emails in more recent decades but there was something special about the paper versions with Lewis’ signature in real ink of different colors.
In my faded chron files, I recently uncovered a letter dated May 19, 1989, typed on HARPER’S stationery: “Dear Mark, I’m afraid that were caught up in what you call, felicitously, “the anxiety of context.” A lovely phrase that expresses the sense of existential loss felt by the editor of a commercial journal of opinion when rejecting, no matter how delicately, an article submitted by a scholar on such friendly terms with Adorno, Brecht, Marx, Shakespeare and Rilke.” I do not remember what my essay was about, and I shudder to think I had the temerity to share my writing with the great editor. I was probably seeking to impress him with whatever theory of history or literature I was working through at the time.
Courtesy Mark Modish.
Lapham continued, “I was delighted with your essay, but you write, alas, for a different audience than the one served by Harper’s Magazine. As much as I enjoyed the music of abstraction, which reminded me of Hesse’s glass bead game, I have no choice but to return the manuscript. I do so with reluctance, admiration and regret. Yours, Lewis.” The initials at the bottom were “LHL : aks” referring to his long-serving aide de camp Ann Gollin who managed the flow of correspondence and much more.
Later in life, Lewis would ask my opinion or advice on various matters, as when he first told me about his vision for the Quarterly over lunch at the Tabard Inn, a literary oasis near Dupont Circle in Washington. By then I was a law firm partner and had the resources to cut one of the first friendly checks to the Agora Foundation to support Lewis’ vision of an aesthetically magnificent journal of ideas interweaving authors and images, past and present. He eventually asked me to sit on the informal jury for the Janus Prize which recognized leading writers in the classics and humanities. Lewis was increasingly convinced that America had much to learn from the decay of the Roman Republic.
I have a mosaic of other memories of Lapham encounters over the years. An Upper East Side cocktails to celebrate his white-clad Southern pal Tom Wolfe. A garden party at the Georgetown home of his brother Anthony who worked as a top CIA lawyer. Visits to the HARPER’S offices on Broadway followed by drinks on Washington Square, and more drinks. A launch confab near The White House for Christopher Hitchens as the Magazine’s Washington correspondent. An early look at the Quarterly’s digs near Union Square and lunch at an Italian joint nearby. Lewis inevitably excused himself to step away and smoke.
Then there was our chance meeting at Davos in January 2003. Lapham was speaking on a panel on the cusp of what would become known as Desert Storm. Already a critic of the Afghanistan intervention, which had no end in sight, Lewis recounted the history of US military debacles big and small. I happened to be sitting next to a famous New York Times foreign correspondent and columnist who shook his head and muttered “useful idiot.” The blob never learns.
The last time I saw Lewis in the flesh was at the Decades Ball days before the pandemic shut down social gatherings. He was markedly older but witty and wry as ever. My wife Sue and I sat at a table of honor amid Lewis’ highfalutin’ New York Illuminati friends.
I don’t know what exactly kept us so close over forty years. I never published with Lapham. I could tell he was intrigued by occasional war stories from my meandering career in the upper echelons of policy, law and finance. Perhaps he viewed me as a useful secret agent, a mole in the belly of Leviathan.
Lapham defied political classification. He was a liberal in the classical sense: an open-minded ally of excellence and a sworn enemy of all kinds of rectitude. Another leading journal editor once commented to me, “Lapham just pisses on everything and everybody from on high, and he does it quite gloriously.” Lewis was skeptical of high-minded theories. He painted with the colors of the middle distance— the space of mind in which ideas resonate across centuries and cultures and can touch our lives today. This radical notion of the present being embedded but not trapped in the past was the conceit of Lapham’s Quarterly. It is the intellectual bequest that Lewis shared with his readers.
I knew Lewis was ailing when he missed the Janus Prize luncheon at the Grolier Club in New York last fall. We spoke briefly in January before he left for Florida and then Rome, where he took his final leave. Good night, sweet prince.