Lapham on Lapham
And editing, via The Paris Review
Reader and friend Greg Connors passed along this link to The Paris Review interview with the late Lewis Lapham. Conducted in 2019 by Jim Holt, I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation, because it brought me back into the presence of Lewis, whom I always felt was a kindred spirit under all the Laphroaig and privilege.
It is a painful thing to be a Natural Born Editor—which Lewis was, and I am, too—and live through our current exuberantly, defiantly unedited age. For ex: Even though it’s 12:57 A.M. and my contacts are tiny slabs of milky glass, nobody looked this piece over before I hit “publish.” There are surely typos. Also, it may not make sense. Welcome to modernity: instantaneous semi-coherent communication.
In addition to an amusing by-the-way bitch about how the war effort screwed his family over in World War Two, Lewis talks at length about the kind of literary arcana I seem to be increasingly obsessed with myself—influences, upbringing, and the misguided energies of one’s youth; how dopey trends in one’s field buffet a career hither and yon; how one becomes a writer, if one ever really does; how one edits other writers (I’m working on a book about that); how essays are the art of getting into trouble and then writing your way out of it…
In other words, all the stuff that makes a fella famous. And wealthy!
If you are somehow still neither, the link is free. Thank you, Greg! And thank you, Lewis, and sorry about all the ships. ◊
When he is not ripping off wonderful graphic designers, MICHAEL GERBER is the Editor & Publisher of The American Bystander.
Thanks for this. I loved Lapham's Harper's. And subscribed to his Quarterly til I couldn't afford to have it mailed to Europe anymore. I'm going to miss his voice.