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

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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:

I have no doubt that I often speak of things which are better treated by the masters of the craft, and with more truth. This is simply a trial [essai] of my natural faculties, and not of my ac- quired ones. If anyone catches me in ignorance, he will score no triumph over me, since I can hardly be answer- able to another for my reasonings, when I am not answerable for them to myself, and am never satisfied with them. . . . These are my fancies, in which I make no attempt to convey in- formation about things, only about myself. I may have some objective knowledge one day, or may perhaps have had it in the past when I hap- pened to light on passages that ex- plained things. But I have forgotten it all; for though I am a man of some reading, I am one who retains nothing.

My own case more or less to the letter. When I was thirty I assumed

that by the time I was ! fty I would know what I was talking about. The notice didn’t arrive in the mail. At ! fty I knew less than what I thought I knew at thirty, and so I ! gured that by the time I was seventy, then sure- ly, this being America, where all the stories supposedly end in the key of C major, I would have come up with a reason to believe that I had been made wise. Now I’m seventy-! ve, and I see no sign of a dog with a bird in its mouth.

I’m reminded instead of a story told about Pablo Casals at the age of ninety-three, living in Puerto Rico with a woman many years younger than himself. A journalist sent forth from New York asked him why he practiced the cello ev- ery morning for four hours. Here he was, the most famous cellist in the world, no longer performing on the concert stage, at ease in the Caribbean sun. Why then the unnecessary labor? Because, so Casals is reported to have said, I’m learning something.

I approach the act and art of writ- ing with the same hope. I never know what I think about any- thing—the stains on Monica Le- winsky’s blue dress, O. J. Simpson’s golf swing, a “war on terror” de- clared against an unknown enemy and an abstract noun, the mystery of the Laffer Curve, the death and trans! guration of Ronald Reagan— unless and until I try to set up a thought in a sentence or catch it in the butterf ly net of a metaphor.Construe the essay as a think- ing out loud, and by its improvisa- tional nature it inclines in the di- rection of poetry or music, the language meant to be heard, not seen. On the opening of a book or the looking into a manuscript I listen for the sound of a voice in the first-person singular, and from authors whom I read more than once I learn to value the weight of words and to delight in their meter and cadence—in Gibbon’s poly- phonic counterpoint and Guedal- la’s command of the subjunctive, in Mailer’s hyperbole and Dillard’s similes, in Twain’s invectives and

burlesques with which he set the torch of his ferocious wit to the hospitality tents of the world’s “co- lossal humbug.”

The work never got easier, but neither did it lose its character as play. Notebook was a speculation on whatever was then the current market in ideas, and I was more in- terested in the wandering of the mind than in the harnessing of it to the bandwagons of social and political reform. I welcomed revi- sions pursued through six or seven drafts as chances to improve a choice of word, experiment with the uses of satire, control the bal- ance of a subordinate clause, re- place the adjective with a noun. The best that I hoped for was a manuscript that required not only the shifting around of a few para- graphs but also the abandonment of its postulates and premise.

My object was to learn, not preach, which prevented my induc- tion into the national college of pundits but encouraged my reading of history. Again I borrowed the method of Montaigne, who mea- sured the worth of his own observa- tions against those that he came across in the archive of classical an- tiquity, most reliably in the writings of Plutarch and Seneca. I soon dis- covered that I had as much to learn from the counsel of the dead as I did from the advice and consent of the living. The reading of history damps down the impulse to slander the trend and tenor of the times, instills a sense of humor, lessens our fear about what might happen to- morrow. On listening to President Barack Obama preach the doctrine of freedom-loving military invasion to the cadets at West Point, I’m re- minded of the speeches that sent the Athenian army to its destruc- tion in Sicily in 415 b.c., and I don’t have to wait for dispatches from Af- ghanistan to suspect that the shoot- ing script for the Pax Americana is a tale told by an idiot. In the news- magazines I read about the unhy- gienic environments imperiling the health and safety of the American people (pesticides in the rivers, car- cinogens in the soup, cigarette smoke in the park), and somehow I

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take comfort in the long life and splendor of Louis XIV, who is said to have bathed only once during the years 1647–1711. Water was under suspicion in seventeenth-century Christian Europe, and except in the baptismal font bathing was to be avoided because it invited sin. Con- fronted with the malfunction of the critics handing out the nation’s lit- erary prizes I grant them the excuse of an historical precedent, bearing in mind President Teddy Roosevelt’s opinion of Henry James (“a misera- ble little snob”), of Thomas Paine (“! lthy little atheist”), of Leo Tol- stoy (“a sexual and moral pervert”). On being informed by the propa- ganda ministries of the Republican right that money is a synonym for peace on earth and good will to- ward men, that the capitalist free market is virtue incarnate, I resist the call for a standing ovation by remember ing that Hugo Boss dressed Hitler’s troops, that the Ford Motor Company in the 1930s out! tted the Wehrmacht with its armored trucks, that the Rockefell- er Foundation ! nanced the prewar medical research meant to con- ! rm Nazi theories of ra- cial degeneration.The common store of our shared history is what Goethe had in mind when he said that the in- ability to “draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth.” It isn’t with symbolic icons that men make their immortality. They do so with what they’ve learned on their travels across the frontiers of the millennia, salvaging f rom the wreck of time what they ! nd to be useful or beautiful or true. What preserves the voices of the great authors from one century to the next is not the recording device (the clay tablet, the scroll, the co- dex, the book, the computer, the iPad) but the force of imagination and the power of expression. It is the strength of the words them- selves, not their product placement, that invites the play of mind and induces a change of heart. Ac- knowledgment of the fact lightens the burden of mournful prophecy currently making the rounds of the

media trade fairs. I listen to an- guished publishers tell sad stories about the disappearance of books and the death of Western civiliza- tion, about bookstores selling cat toys and teddy bears, but I don’t ! nd myself moved to tears. On the sorrows of Grub Street the sun nev- er sets, but it is an agony of Mam- mon, not a hymn to Apollo. The renders of garments mistake the container for the thing contained, the book for the words, the iPod for the music. The questions in hand have to do with where the pro! t, not the meaning, is to be found, who collects what tolls from which streams of revenue or conscious- ness. The same questions accompa- nied the loss of the typewriter and the Linotype machine, underwrote the digging of the Erie Canal and the building of Commodore Van- derbilt’s railroads, the rigging of the nation’s television networks and telephone poles, and I expect them to be answered by one or more corporate facilitators with both the wit and the bankroll to " oat the pretense that monopoly is an upgraded synonym for a free press, “prioritized” and “context- sensitive,” offering “quicker access to valued customers.”

The more interesting questions are epistemological. How do we know what we think we know? Why is it that the more information we collect the less likely we are to grasp what it means? Possibly because a montage is not a narrative, the ear is not the eye, a pattern recognition is not a ! gure or a form of speech. The surfeit of new and newer news comes so quickly to hand that with- in the wind tunnels of the “innova- tive delivery strategies” the data blow away and shred. The time is always now, and what gets lost is all thought of what happened yester- day, last week, three months or three years ago. Unlike moths and fruit flies, human beings bereft of memory, even as poor a memory as Montaigne’s or my own, tend to be- come disoriented and confused. I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words. !

NOTEBOOK 9

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HOW TO LIVE

—OR—

A LIFE OF MONTAIGNE

IN ONE QUESTION AND TWENTY ATTEMPTS

AT AN ANSWER

S

A

R

A

H

B

A

K

EW

ELL

MONTAIGNE: arguably the first truly modern individual. His daring explorations were unlike anything written before. His honesty and charm continue to inspire devotion as readers come to him in search of companionship, wisdom, entertainment—in search of themselves.

HOW TO LIVE: the first full life of Montaigne in English for nearly 50 years relates his story by way of the essential questions he posed … and the mind-expanding answers he explored.

www.otherpress.comOTHER PRESS

“Conveys genuine enchantment….

Revealing one of literature’s enduring figures as an idiosyncratic, humane,

and surprisingly modern force.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

EARLY PRAISE:

A PERFECT