Lewis h lapham net worth

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

—Gustave Flaubert

Notebook departs this month from the table of contents, its pur- pose served and its license expired after a term of twenty-six years in office. The occasion allows for a fond farewell. The rubric made its ! rst appearance in March 1984 as a function of the magazine’s redesign that followed by two months Apple’s bringing forth the ! rst of its Macin- tosh computers. The Internet didn’t exist, the tweet and blog post were not yet known as forms or ! gures of speech. Three elements of the rede- sign (Readings, Annotation, the In- dex) anticipated the sensibility soon to venture forth on the wine-dark sea of cyberspace. Notebook was rooted in the soils of print, a month- ly ref lection on the ways of the world, intended to acquaint the magazine’s readers with the presup- positions of its editor.

To meet the requirement I under- took to learn to write an essay, a form of literary address at which I hadn’t had much practice but in which, fortunately, I had encoun- tered most of the authors in whose company I had learned to read. Also fortunately, my understanding of what constituted an essay was sufficiently non-restrictive to ac- count for the letters of Seneca as well as Twain’s sketches and Thur- ber’s fables, Flaubert’s Dictionary,

Poor Richard’s Almanack, Gibbon’s notes on the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, together with the miscellaneous observations of Plu- tarch, Swift, Strachey, Guedalla, Diderot, Lincoln, Chester ton, Mencken, DeVoto, Bolitho, Hazlitt, and Voltaire. A long list that be- came even longer when I added the names of the living authors, among them Connell, Didion, Galeano, Leonard, Lopez, Hoagland, Dillard, Karp, Rodriguez, Ehrenreich, Fair- lie, Keizer, Hitchens, Geng, and Robinson, whose essays I had the chance to publish in Harper’s Maga- zine during the administrations of ! ve American presidents.

The names are representative, meant to suggest the range of ex- pression and the wealth of possibili- ty that I rope into a notion of the essay borrowed from Michel de Montaigne. The sixteenth-century French autobiographer, a contem- porary of Shakespeare and Cer- vantes, derived the approach to his topics from the meaning of the word essai, from essayer (to try, to embark upon, to attempt), asking himself at the outset of his re" ec- tions, whether on cannibals or the custom of wearing clothes, “What do I know?” The question distin- guishes the essay from the less ad- venturous forms of expository prose—the dissertation, the polem- ic, the article, the campaign speech, the tract, the op-ed, the arrest war- rant, the hotel bill. Writers deter- mined to render a judgment or swing an election, to cast a money- lender out of a temple or deliver a message to Garcia, begin the ! rst

paragraph knowing how, when, where, and why they intend to claim the privilege of the last word. Not so the essayist, even if what he or she is writing purports to be a history or a field report. Like Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, the es- sayist lights out for the territories, never sure of the next sentence un- til the words show up on the page. Thus an improvisation, experimen- tal and provisional, amenable to multiple shift s of perspective, quickly changed, with only a slight tinkering of emphasis or circum- stance, into a sales pitch or a ser- mon. Which probably is why Benja- min Franklin treated the essay as the literary device best suited to the restlessness of the American spirit in a hurry to settle a new line of country, ! nd a fortune, assemble a body politic, compose the portrait of a convincing self. Daniel Boor- stin, the historian and once-upon- a-time Librar ian of Congress, touched on the same point when describing the makeshift character of the colonial experience:

No prudent man dared to be too cer- tain of exactly who he was or what he was about; everyone had to be pre- pared to become someone else. To be ready for such perilous transmigra- tions was to become an American.

Carry the observation around the next bend in the river or up into the next stand of cottonwood trees, and the essayist, like it or not, willingly or no, becomes, as per the advisory once issued by another Librarian of Congress, the poet Archibald MacLeish, “the dissenter [who] is ev-

Lewis H. Lapham is the editor of Lapham’s Quarterly and the National Correspondent of Harper’s Magazine.

NOTEBOOK Figures of Speech

By Lewis H. Lapham

NOTEBOOK 7

Nov Notebook Final3cx3.indd 7Nov Notebook Final3cx3.indd 7 9/28/10 2:51 PM9/28/10 2:51 PM

8 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / NOVEMBER 2010

ery human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momen- tarily from the herd and thinks for himself.”Easier said than done, the thinking for oneself. I was never very good at it, and an opinion I al- ways found hard to come by. The monthly Notebook called for re- marks somehow related to some- thing visible in the news—scandal in Washington, war in Israel, money in Hollywood, sex in Connecticut, divine revelation in Arkansas—but on none of the topics was I equipped with either certain knowledge or in- side information. What I was apt to know about President Clinton or Michael Jackson was of a piece with what I was apt to know about Prin- cess Diana or President Bush—i.e., nothing much beyond what I’d seen on television or read in the news- papers, which, as I remembered from the years in which I’d worked as a reporter for the New York Her- ald Tribune and a contract journal- ist for both The Saturday Evening Post and Life, often was even less than nothing much. How then to proceed? By drawing upon the au- thority of Montaigne, who begins his essay “Of Books” with what would be regarded on both Wall Street and Capitol Hill as a career- ending display of transparency: