Wallace Stevens describes the philosopher George Santayana as an “inquisitor of structures” in his poem “To an Old Philosopher in Rome.” When I heard that Lewis Lapham, the legendary editor of Harper’s magazine, had died in Rome last week at the age of 89 these words came back to me. Lewis, whom I grew professionally close to during the years when he published me in Harper’s, was an inquisitor of structures if ever there was one.
He was far too gregarious to be a philosopher. “Lewis is the best dinner companion in New York,” the late journalist Michael Elliott once told me, and that might well have been true. He was a dazzling storyteller, often holding court at Il Cantinori, an atmospheric Italian restaurant in the West Village.
One night, when he had taken me out to dinner there, a man who had been sitting a few tables away came over to say hello to Lewis. He was in his sixties, well-heeled, smiling and withdrawn. Like Lewis, he wore success lightly.
Lewis introduced him to me with a playful nod to their shared pedigree, and me, an obvious outsider, to him with an air of mischief, as if shifting his pedigree into something entirely of his own making. It was half European, half American. Lewis and he chatted amiably, before the man returned to the table he had been sharing with a woman and another couple, all exuding an air of prosperous high spirits. This was the milieu Lewis – son of a banker, grandson of a mayor of San Francisco, and great-grandson of a founder of Texaco – was most comfortable inhabiting. And poking in the eye.
As soon as the man was out of earshot, Lewis launched with hushed brio into the man’s backstory. He was a wealthy banker now. But back in the sixties, he had worked for the CIA and had been stationed in Vietnam during the war. At one point, the man had been assigned the task of blowing up a North Vietnamese safe house. But after the explosives were laid, his superiors transmitted a message to him to abort the mission.
The man was furious. Who were these commanders to annul his craft and his courage, just like that? Lewis’s eyes gleamed with relish as he finished his story: “So he said to himself ‘Fuck it’ and blew the place up anyway.” Lewis laughed quietly. He had a louche, soft, wicked, raspy, inviting galleon of a laugh that sailed towards you with stately bonhomie.
The encounter and the story summed up much of Lewis’ complexity. He relished belonging in the same class as such an elevated acquaintance, he treasured the man’s colourful background, he admired the man’s defiance and his pride, as perverse as the latter was. And he cherished the story, above all, as an example of both America’s heedless arrogance and the destructive hubris of Lewis’s own class.
Lewis was the last of a breed that never had many members to begin with: the patrician liberal. Gore Vidal was probably the most famous of them. They had nothing in common with the “limousine liberals” of yore, the ancestors of today’s luxury believers. On the contrary. The liberal patricians weren’t interested in accumulating or boasting moral assets (they operated in a universe far from the pious contemporary left), they had plenty of real world ones.
All of this made their attacks on the fustian morality – used to justify American imperialism abroad and American betrayals of the powerless at home – more convincing. This small cohort could be best defined as highborn subverters of America’s ruling class. And, winning their approval could not help but make you feel superior to society’s official superiors.
Despite his pedigree – and occasional tendency to speak in house style for the initiated – Lewis managed to remain a true outsider, who was drawn to true outsiders. That outsiderness is a quality of mid-century liberalism almost entirely absent now. These days the most radical social pietist often uses the appearance of virtue to try to make it to the inside.
Lewis the patrician liberal knew in his bones, for example, that when Kennedy radically cut the top marginal tax rate, he did much to undercut the march toward civil rights. The cost of precious goods shot up along with the highest incomes, and newly enfranchised black people found themselves struggling to eat and to live in the slums of northern cities. That was just as well since they could always turn to the military, which welcomed them with open arms and sent them off to the slaughterhouse in Southeast Asia. The same went for the white working class, whose shift to Reagan in 1980 had much to do with the decimation of the sons of the white working class in the liberals’ war.
Lewis was wise to all of that. It is why he published Barbara Ehrenreich’s lacerating essays about the ordeal of America’s working class, and Christopher Hitchens’ meticulous indictment of that darling of the foreign policy establishment, Henry Kissinger. It’s why Lewis published anyone who saw things clear from the outside, so long as they wrote beautifully and with lucidity. Good writing was essential. Lewis was a left-wing aesthete, which saved him from left-wing earnestness.
He himself was a beautiful writer. His winding yet lapidary prose also served to rescue him from the complacency that could befall him from time to time. Though Lewis the patrician, with a country house in the old WASP redoubt of Newport, Rhode Island, might have been highly amused at the following comparison, his attitude toward people on the social margins echoed the perspective of that quintessential New York Jewish intellectual, Harold Rosenberg. Rosenberg once wrote that the purpose of New York’s postwar downtown Bohemia was to “transmute the ranks established by social class into a hierarchy based on talent or daring.” Inquisitors of structures, if you will. Lewis found profound pleasure in using his glamour, wealth, privilege and social connections to raise up people like that. That was the hierarchy he, in his best and most fearless moments, sought to establish in his professional life. He prized individual literary style, which has no social origin.
No valediction to Lewis should fail to credit Harper’s managing editor Ellen Rosenbush. The two of them did as much to create and sustain a social hierarchy based on talent and daring as any American literary editors ever have.
“Writers don’t like each other, really,” Lewis said to me once, with his sly Newport-Roman smile. He knew how tough literary life could be, how sudden its reversals. He and I, perhaps inevitably, grew apart, through no fault of either of us. He also knew, as well as anyone I have ever met, how people who make their life in words often forget how words pale before actions. Sensing my financial predicament at the time, he put me on retainer, something Harper’s had never done for a writer, he told me. It was not that I was so talented, it was that I was so broke. Of course, without the consent of the magazine’s owner, Rick MacArthur, another great liberal patrician, Lewis could not have made his magnanimous gesture a reality.
After all, you can be a rhetorical saint of race, gender, sexuality and climate change, but if you don’t put your actions where your gestures are, you might as well be on the other side of where you claim to stand.
My most powerful memory of Lewis is the time he met me for yet another precious dinner on a cold rainy fall night. I was in the wake of a divorce, and “life”, as the old standard goes, “was no prize.” Lewis, effortless sangfroid and all, invited me out to help me through it. I told him that I wanted to get away, to live in Paris for a while and leave everything behind me (I never did). His face brightened. “I’ll write to the editor of Le Nouvel Obs”, he said. “He’s a friend. He’ll fix you up.” Afterwards, I waited with Lewis in the rain for a cab to return him to his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “Everything will be okay,” the cynical patrician ironist said to me, with sudden, disarming sincerity. As he slipped into the taxi, the chilling rain beginning to fall a little more heavily, the bottom of his elegantly tapered trousers slipped up his leg to reveal a bare ankle above his luxurious Italian loafers. I will never forget that. The flash of super-privileged insouciance was like the very spirit of kindness itself. Fleeting but real. Then he—and it—was gone
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