When Lewis Lapham was approached in 1965 about considering a job in television reporting, he "turned it down with contempt." Having already spent almost a decade as a writer, he thought "television was for children," Lapham said to an audience in MacMillian 117 on Thursday afternoon.
Lapham, who recently retired after nearly 30 years as managing editor of Harper's Magazine, the country's oldest political journal, is the author of several books of essays, including "Fortune's Child," "Money and Class in America," "Imperial Masquerade," "Hotel America," "Waiting for the Barbarians" and "Theater of War." As editor, he wrote a monthly essay for Harper's called "Notebook." In 1995, he won the National Magazine Award for three of those pieces.
Lapham's respect for history and traditional literary knowledge was a recurring theme throughout his lecture, which was titled "Observations on 40 Years in the Literary Trade." In describing the transformation of the media and its effects on his writing career, Lapham claimed he has "learned more about politics from Machiavelli, Cicero and Shakespeare than from George Will and the New Republic."
Lapham admitted having a "romantic perception" of the newspaper business when he began his writing career at the San Francisco Examiner in 1957, a year after completing a graduate program at Cambridge University, entering "with literary expectations ... a notion that long-form journalism could be raised to low-end literature."
Although he was hoping to write "longer pieces and to employ various literary devices," Lapham quickly experienced the reality of print journalism when his first story on a local flower show was cut from 4,000 words - "4,000 very beautiful words," he said - to a mere paragraph. "It was my introduction to editing," he said.
Before heading to Harper's Magazine in 1971, where he was almost immediately appointed managing editor, Lapham worked for the Saturday Evening Post and The New York Herald Tribune for six years and two years, respectively.
Lapham explained that the nature of media was changing at the end of the 1960s. "So much was getting replaced by television networks," he said.
"The language for print is entirely different than the kind of language that is made for television," Lapham added. He referred to television communication as requiring only "Dick and Jane" language - a simplistic subject-verb construction. In television, the focus is on what "emotion a picture evokes, not necessarily what the picture is of. ... Content is secondary and there is little cause and effect," Lapham explained. He added that there is little use of irony, as well as an increase in loose vocabulary in broadcast discourse.
This transformation caused a "loss of force of a literary way of thinking," Lapham said. Following a two-year exile from the magazine in the early 1980s after being fired, he returned to his role as editor of Harper's determined to change the publication's structure.
"The expectations of the audience had changed," he said. Lapham reconstructed the format of the magazine in 1984 to feature only one long and several short articles, because people have less patience, he said.
However, Lapham was sure to maintain the tradition of this 155-year-old monthly, founded by Henry Raymond, who also founded the New York Times, by thoughtfully choosing the main article in each issue.
"The magazine has published a wonderful group of American writers," he said, citing Herman Melville and Mark Twain as notable contributors. In his selection process, Lapham determined whether he could "hear a human voice with the first couple pages," because, he explained, social change depends on "language that induces a change of heart."
The magazine is currently experiencing its highest circulation in the last 30 years, according to Lapham.
Having retired just last week, Lapham is planning new endeavors to "combat the destructive and diminishing effects of television," he said.
To do this, he said he hopes to start a new quarterly journal and a weekly radio show. Both are "intended to restore, encourage (and) fortify the use of history," which he believes is "absent in the political consciousness."
The journal will highlight an important idea in current news and use 50 to 60 relevant texts to bring the issues forward in the context of a historical continuum, he said. Lapham believes knowledge and history - "concrete facts on which we can rely" - are essential for adequate reasoning. There is "nothing to build the future but the lumber of the past," Lapham said.
Following his talk, Lapham took questions from the audience, encouraging members to inquire about political issues. The request elicited inquiries ranging from his reasoning for urging the impeachment of President George W. Bush to the magazine's political orientation.
In response to a question on the Internet's potential for destruction in comparison to television, Lapham said he is unsure, but not completely pessimistic, about the Internet. "The Internet is relatively new," he said. "Whether or not we can make elevated use of it is in question."
Lapham's speech was part of the John Hazen White lecture series organized by the Taubman Center for Public Policy.
