I am sitting near Perth Amboy, N.J. on the port quarter of the scow whose starboard side is swinging just free of one of the Colonial docks.The water is dung-coloured and slides away smoothly, horizontally before the eye. A tanker. Low brown and green countryside, low bridges. Concrete piles.Elevated roads with automobiles like little bugs running across them. Squat and strutted things, trucks, gastanks, tele-graph poles, scows, gravel, endless concrete, low, flat, dispersed, representing man's functional rape of unenviable countryside, marginal, flat and bogland. As the afternoon wears on the sky is becoming thin and milky white and the water is gleaming in reflection. I feel constricted. To walk beyond it would take how long, one pillbox after another through a skeleton factory, mile after mile flat and deserted? The nearest bar, I was informed by the last dockhand before they knocked off, is just over a mile away beyond that under-pass—that the first evidence that man is not only a working animal; but it is really not much more than a filling station between here and the next one a mile further on, and so on. It reminds me of Hull or Sheerness, places like that on the east coast of England. The nearest bar a mile away. I've been down for some time now and there's no more heroin. I have smoked a joint. It has had the effect so far of increasing my depression.
What a Godforsaken spot, and to be hung up here for three days with less than six dollars! They told me that too before they knocked off, that they wouldn't be unloading me until the day after tomorrow. What the hell am I doing here?
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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
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