More on Lewis Lapham

This is becoming a fan blog, and why the hell not?

Friend Greg Connors pointed me to this tender and perceptive appreciation of the editor and publisher Lewis Lapham. Writer Elias Altman brought dear Lewis back to me so precisely, I actually heard his smoker’s baritone again. A lovely piece of writing you should read.

But it also brought back something that I felt was Lewis’ central flaw. Lewis was fiercely, defiantly erudite in an ever-dumbening era, and he relished the context of history—even fetishized it—in a time fatally enthralled by anti-history in human form, that is to say celebrity. (I was glad to read that Lewis despised Andy Warhol, a feeling I share.)

Lewis had values, and he had integrity, and engaging with him demanded a certain level of mentation. I liked these things about Lewis, and I know lots of other people did, too. I think they were very valuable, and if a Lewis Lapham hadn’t existed, someone would’ve had to invent him.

Even so, there was a strange…passivity about Lewis, something that I saw (and see) throughout publishing. A sense of limitation, that there was no use in trying to reach the ensorcelled masses. That there are people who read and think, and people who don’t, and to attempt to do creative work with any chance of breaking out of a fairly narrow ghetto of high culture, had little chance of success and a much greater possibility of fatally polluting the message.

For someone who saw the flaws of his time so clearly, Lewis seemed to have little appetite for trying to change them. What many called Olympian was also sort of…decadent? Lewis was a Lapham of San Francisco. Creating a not-for-profit quarterly should have been the work of an afternoon, not something, in the article’s words, “[Lewis] had barely been able to get off the ground.” Perhaps Lewis had been posing poor to pay the author less, but there is something so…publishing about that. How many exquisitely forensic essays in Harper’s must one write before the conversation turns to the agglomeration of real money and real power, and the focusing of same to improve the situation? Why do these conversations only seem to happen—incessantly—on the Right?

Lewis was born wealthy, and enjoyed a stable, thoughtful, integrated-with-the-past flavor of education that even people who go to those very same schools do not enjoy today. The Yale students I know utterly lack Lewis’ instinct to judge, and that instinct comes from confidence in one’s precision of mind and the worldview one has been given. Today, only the worst people have that kind of self-confidence, and the all-pervading uncertainty suffered by the rest of us—even the wealthy, well-educated good guys like Lewis—is the main sticking-point to beating back everything from Fascism to shrinkflation.

Historically, it has fallen to people like Lewis Lapham to lead society. But certainly in the fifty-five years I’ve been alive, too many of them are content simply to comment upon it. Lewis was a marvelous perceptive nuanced and humane commentator, and as such, a valuable one. But it is difficult to argue that America was better off with him as a writer, rather than in a position of much greater influence and power. I mean, my God—even Bill Buckley ran for Mayor.

•. •. •

This morning I was telling a friend about a Monty Python bit which encapsulates why I love that group so much. It’s a track off their 1973 LP Matching Tie and Handkerchief, called “The Background to History, Pt. 4.”

It’s not a major piece of work, but it’s brilliantly done, the type of expert context-smashing that epitomizes so much great comedy of the Seventies. The premise of the bit is simple—dry-as-dust academic information performed as contemporary rock songs (topped off by Palin’s pitch-perfect performance of a mush-brained post-verbal musician). The genius is in the execution, surely by Neil Innes.

What does this have to do with Lewis Lapham? Well, what is great about the Pythons—perhaps their greatest quality—is their immense confidence. They believed that they could get any idea, no matter how intellectually complex, across to a mass audience simply by the excellence of their writing and performance. When I was 12 and plopped this used record on my turntable, I had less than no idea about Anglo-Saxon farming, but laughed my ass off nevertheless because I did know what reggae sounded like, and bombastic rock, and of course “Hey Jude.” And from this bit, I began to be a little more comfortable with academic prose (remember, I was 12), so in six years when I was expected to absorb it, I could. Academic prose was just another type of information, a flavor that any smart person could engage with and, if they were really smart, get comfortable enough to write a reggae song about it and make everybody laugh.

Monty Python opened up intellectual worlds for many, many people; Lewis’ work instead spoke beautifully to an elect. In saner times like the Seventies (and there’s a phrase!) there’s plenty of room for both. But since then, the gap between high and low culture has steadily grown, and both publishing and comedy have become more and more insular. They have their spheres, and stay within them. Not only is high culture less prevalent in our society, it’s shrinking; today, listening to jazz is roughly equivalent to what listening to Brahms was when I was 12. Very few people first learn about Herodotus from Lapham’s Quarterly, just as even the most intellectual sitcoms are the same basic joke structures over and over. Even after Python showed that it could be done, our comedy culture refuses to do it. Just not confident enough, or too corporate, or full of people who themselves don’t know about anything but comedy.

This societal change is, of course, not Lewis’ fault; he was gifted in a particular way, and not in others—his was not the common touch. But one of the real regrets of my life is throwing my lot in with comedy thinking that stuff like Python, the first five years of National Lampoon, even early SNL, was the future. “You and I thought it was the beginning of something,” my old writing partner Jon said last night. “But it was really the ending.” The ending of mass education, of social and financial mobility, of lots of little media companies willing to take a risk on talent, of being able to make a living outside corporate media.

How did this happen? How and why did Western societies decide to educate their citizens so widely and thoroughly for a few generations, so that exquisitely well-schooled comedy troupes could make money with jokes about medieval farming? And why don’t our societies do that anymore? That’s a topic too long for this post, but I think the answer would be found in the wealthy families at the top. And I think Lewis wrote incessantly about this change, indirectly and occasionally directly; but Hotchkiss and Yale and Cambridge produce a lot of people who can talk and write like that. They produce, as it turns out, many fewer Pythons, maybe no more ever. “Fuck us,” I replied to Jon. “That thing people called a movement turned out to be only a moment. And by the time we were 20—15, even!—it was back to Porky’s.”

So we read Lewis’ essays, and chuckled silently at the follies of the powerful, rather than laughing out loud at everything—literally everything—else.◊

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Editor & Publisher MICHAEL GERBER isn’t always this pessimistic—okay, let’s be honest, he usually is—but he manages to scrape together enough optimism to publish The American Bystander, an all-star print humor magazine.