LEWIS LAPHAM, the former editor for 25 years of the 160 year old Harper’s Magazine, now editor of Lapham’s Quarterly and a national correspondent of Harper’s informed his avid readership in the November issue, 2010 that the Notebook section that leads off every issue, “departs this month from the table of contents, it’s purpose served and it’s license expired after a term of twenty-six years in office.”
My heart and head sank. But then, after a pause, I remembered the hundreds of wonderful moments that the notebook provided. The brilliant half column one sentence paragraph to be read over and over for it’s sheer resonance, craft, meaning and perspicacity. I have marveled for years at the vast knowledge and readings of this teacher. Mr.Lapham is a motivation, a dynamo of words. As well as the Notebook, Lapham’s Harper’s has been a leading magazine for the investigation of the issues of the day, criticism, essay’s, photo journalism, literature, review’s, the Harper’s Index and the Findings. A treat to find in the mailbox every month and a template for magazines such as The Walrus.
Mr. Lapham in the final notebook reveals to us how the notebook came about, how he had to learn to write an essay, the resources at his disposal. Using the “ notion of the essay borrowed from Michel de Montaigne, the sixteen century French auto biographer, a contemporary of Shakespeare and Cervantes, 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 reflections, whether on cannibals or the custom of wearing clothes, “ What do I know?” The question distinguishes the essay from the less adventurous forms of expository prose– the dissertation, the polemic, the article, the campaign speech, the tract, the op-ed, the arrest warrant, the hotel bill.” What a card!
Mr. Lapham goes on to tell us that the essay seemed appropriate for the American experience and that the essayist becomes as the poet Archbald MacLeish stated, “ the dissenter [who] is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.”
“ The monthly Notebook called for remarks somehow related to something visible in the news…”
Mr. Lapham is the author of several books as well, including, 30 Satires, Money and Class in America, Imperial Masquerade, The Wish of Kings, Hotel America, Waiting for the Barbarians and Theatre of War.
The following are excerpts from the last Notebook entitled ‘Figures of Speech’. The Notebook always lead off with a quote:
“Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.” Gustave Flaubert
Mr. Lapham writes: “ My object was to learn, not preach, which prevented my induction into the national college of pundits but encouraged my reading of history.”
“ The reading of history damps down the impulse to slander the trend and tenor of the times, instills a sense of humour, lessens our fear about what might happen tomorrow.”
“ On being informed by the propaganda ministries of the Republican right that money is a synonym for peace on earth and good will toward men, that the capitalist free market is virtue incarnate, I resist the call for a standing ovation by remembering that Hugo Boss dressed Hitler’s troops, that the Ford Motor Company in the 30′s outfitted the Wehrmacht with it’s armoured trucks, that the Rockefeller Foundation financed the prewar medical research meant to confirm Nazi theories of racial degeneration.”
“ 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 codex, the book, the computer, the iPad ) but the force of imagination and the power of expression. It is the strength of the words themselves, not their product placement, that invites the play of mind and induces a change of heart. Acknowledgment of the fact lightens the burden of mournful prophecy currently making the rounds of the media trade fairs.”
“ The questions in hand have to do with where the profit, not the meaning, is to be found, who collects what tolls from which streams of revenue or consciousness. The same questions accompanied the loss of the typewriter and the linotype machine, underwrote the digging of the Erie Canal and the building of Commodore Vanderbuilt’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 wit and the bankroll to float the pretense that monopoly is an upgraded synonym for a free press, “prioritized” and “context-sensitive,” offering “quicker access to valued customers.””
“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 figure or a form of speech. The surfeit of new and newer news comes so quickly to hand that within the wind tunnels of the “innovative delivery strategies” the data blow away and shred. The time is always now, and what gets lost is all thought of what happened yesterday, 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 become disoriented and confused. I know no other way out of what is both the maze of eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.”
I remember several years ago, on a crisp early winter late morning, hastily running out the door for some engagement or other and there in the mailbox was my Harper’s. Stepping onto the Gerard streetcar, sliding into a sun drenched single seat and expectantly opening my Harper’s to the Notebook like a child at Christmas. The words trilling off the page, my heart bright as the snowy sun, images of words searing my soul.
I wrote Mr. Lapham about that day on the streetcar, the joy it had brought me in an early winter funk and how I had been compiling his articles and reading his books in hope of some day mounting a one man show in the tradition of Will Rogers or Mark Twain.
Weeks later I received a personal reply, humbly thanking me for the encouragement and that if I wished to embark on such a project then he would be amenable.
I have never achieved the goal. The essay is a difficult form to translate to the stage. Reading Laphams words resonate in the skull as an intimate cathartic experience. It’s Action of the Mind. And laziness wins the day.
I encourage all to read Lewis Lapham. His essays compiled in book form are in the library. I encourage all to get subscriptions to Harper’s and to Lapham’s Quarterly. The Quarterly takes on single issues per quarterly with essays and articles from different approaches.
Lewis Lapham has been of great public service to America. Would that there were more of his integrity, honesty, humility and intelligence. Long Live Lapham!
