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October 08, 2003
Harper's Lewis Lapham’s great-great grandfather
Harper's
Lewis Lapham’s great-great grandfather was the United State’s Secretary for War in 1813, and his great grandfather was a founder of Texaco. Who knew that this stalwart of the left-wing media, the long time editor of Harper’s magazine, had a pedigree to make George W. Bush jealous? To be fair, Lapham family politics seem to have already drifted leftward by 1945 when Lapham’s grandfather, the mayor of San Francisco, gave the welcoming speech at the drafting of the charter for the United Nations.If Lapham is at once son and fierce critic of what he calls the American “oligarchy,” he is the embodiment of his magazine, the oldest, continuously published in America. Under Lapham’s 32 year tenure, the magazine has been consistently smart, and frequently brilliant. It has been refined of tone and elegant in design. It has won every sort of industry award, and published the great writers of the day. It is, without question, a pillar of the upscale media landscape.
But lately one senses something amiss. Lapham’s “Notebook” commentaries, though no less intelligent, are perhaps more self-indulgently academic and veer more frequently to the disdainful. And the magazine itself, though beyond reproach in its format and selection of articles, begins to feel self-satisfied, like a long-tenured professor. One detects a lack of institutional urgency and, with this, a declining relevance.
As has been the case since Mark Twain and Teddy Roosevelt wrote for it, Harper’s offers a mix of literature and politics. But unlike the New Yorker, which forsakes political activism for cultural authority, Harper’s liberal politics often overshadow its literary ambitions. Indeed, some will refer to it as a “political journal” while others call it a “literary journal.”
In 1970, at the time Lapham arrived as a contributing editor, Harper’s was a looser beast. Visually, the magazine was somewhat of a free-for-all, with colorful covers, a jumble of ads, a mixture of paper stocks, and very little white space. While the tone was certainly more a clubby extension of the Ivy League than it is today – a typical story: “Porn and Man at Yale” -- it was also younger. In its orbit were hot young journalists like Gay Talese, David Halberstam and George Plimpton, as well as intellectual heavyweights the likes of Bernard Malamud, Peter Drucker and Simone de Beauvoir. And the magazine was unconventional. In the March 1971 issue, for example, it published Norman Mailer’s book, “Prisoner of Sex,” in its entirety.
Today’s Harper’s is better organized and, without question, still delivers powerful work, but it is less plugged-in, less talked about.
The current layout, which arrived in 1984 thanks to Lapham, is a triumph of simple elegance. The old covers have long since given way to the façade of an academic journal: a clean, rectangular picture box at the top followed by a simple listing of the month’s features against a white background. Today’s magazine has few ads, and those that there are come at the very front, the back, and around the popular “Index” feature. Articles run from start to finish without jumps, awash in white space. Photographs and reproductions of paintings float frameless on the white background, often free of captions or credits. Typically not more than 90 pages, the magazine is a pleasure to hold – about the size of a copy of Time, but on thicker stock.
Indeed, there is little to complain about in the layout, expect that it hasn’t changed substantively in 20 years. It is refined, luxuriously non-commerical, and monotonous.
In early 2001, Lapham published Christopher Hitchen’s two-part series arguing passionately that Henry Kissinger should be tried for crimes against humanity. It was a provocative article that had a widespread impact, and quickly became first book then documentary film. Such quality is not atypical. More recent issues, for example, have featured William Finnegan on the economics of the American empire or Pulitzer Prize winning anthropologist Jared Diamond on the global environmental crisis.
But one senses that these writers do not form a community as did their predecessors. Increasingly they are hired guns, not drinking buddies. The voice of today’s magazine is solitary, that of Lapham. And, over time, this shift has brought a decline in Harper’s currency.
True, the magazine’s circulation, at approximately 232,000, is still respectable for the genre, but it is small compared to more mainstream publications, or even the traffic to web sites such as Salon which are increasingly home to the intellectual action. Not surprisingly, Harper’s online offerings can only be described as reactionary.
In 1981, Harper’s then corporate parent, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, threatened to close the magazine down. Lapham and the soon-to-be publisher John McArthur managed to convince the John D. and Catherine T. McArthur Foundation to provide the funds to create a not-for-profit foundation that would run the magazine in perpetuity. Since then, the magazine has been owned and operated by the Harper’s Magazine Foundation. This arrangement likely explains the relative absence of advertising and the generous use of white space.
One worries, however, that this financial support has also insulated Lapham and the rest of the magazine’s editorial staff from the tonic of market exposure. While there is editorial advantage in being somewhat free from financial pressure, there is also the risk of complacency. It may well be time for this tenured magazine to shake itself up.
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Posted by oliver at October 8, 2003 10:13 PM