Lewis Lapham

 

Lewis Lapham, who passed away at 89 last month, was a prince of American letters. To say that Lapham was well put together would be an understatement.  Lapham’s prose was as elegant and sharply cut as his bespoke City of London suits. Like Twain, he was a quintessential American specimen, a distinctly New World literary product grounded in centuries of Old-World cultivation.

The most important aspect of Lapham’s legacy was not his refinement but his critical mind and glee at exposing bullshit. This made him something of a traitor to the “equestrian class” from which he sprang.  Indeed Lapham was innately disdainful of the various masters of the universe who have lorded over American society, whether the tycoons of Wall Street, the celebrity pundits of mainstream media, the wonky denizens of the Washington swamp — which he referred to as “the Stygian marshes” — the field marshals of the military-industrial complex, or Silicon Valley’s superman techno-capitalists.

Lapham couldn’t be fully objective about the ruling classes because he knew far too much about them as the scion of big oil, shipping moguls and the New England and West Coast elites.  Lewis had the keenest nose for the hypocrisies and vanities of his native social set.  He did not try to conceal his high-brow rearing, but he was unpretentious about it and did not suffer fools.  He had a deeply democratic spirit and practiced equal opportunity social criticism…

Lapham defied political classification. He was a liberal in the classical sense: an open-minded ally of excellence and a sworn enemy of all kinds of rectitude. Another leading journal editor once commented to me, “Lapham just pisses on everything and everybody from on high, and he does it quite gloriously.” 

Lewis was skeptical of high-minded theories.  He painted with the colors of the middle distance—  the space of mind in which ideas resonate across centuries and cultures and can touch our lives today.  This radical notion of the present being embedded but not trapped in the past was the conceit of Lapham’s Quarterly.  It is the intellectual bequest that Lewis shared with his readers…

Mark Medish, a lawyer in Washington, D.C, is a former senior White House and Treasury official in the Clinton Administration.

Lewis Lapham, a Prince of American Letters and Traitor to His Class - CounterPunch.org

Playing with Fire by Lewis Lapham glen brown: Playing with Fire by Lewis H. Lapham (teacherpoetmusicianglenbrown.blogspot.com)