Saturday Links
Remembering Lewis Lapham, Puritan literature, working telephone reference at the Brooklyn Public Library, “Harmonium” revisited, and more.
Good morning! I was sorry to learn that Lewis Lapham, the former editor of Harper’s and the founding editor of Lapham’s Quarterly, has died. He was 89: “Lewis was also one of the few major American literary and journalistic figures whose work spanned all the major media—print (newspapers and magazines), books, radio, TV, film (The American Ruling Class), and the internet; he was wisely wary about the last.”
Christian Lorentzen, who worked for Lapham at Harper’s, remembers him for his humor and professionalism: “Rare among intellectuals, he was hardly ever not funny, even on the most serious of subjects. ‘Funny’ is not a word I recall him ever using in print, but wherever he was, laughter followed. Unlike his peers in the era of New Journalism, with whom he was sometimes grouped, he never endeavored to make himself the main character, though his readers could always sense that they were in the presence of a strong and reliable narrator with a singular talent for metaphor. These were his qualities as a newspaperman, magazine feature writer and monthly columnist. He was also one of the great editors of his time, reshaping America’s oldest monthly, Harper’s Magazine, and creating Lapham’s Quarterly from scratch.”
In Liberties Journal, Rosanna Warren revisits Wallace Stevens’s groundbreaking collection Harmonium, which was published 100 years ago last year: “When Knopf published this brashly youthful and original first book of poems in September 1923, the poet himself was hardly youthful, and he was known only to a few modernist cognoscenti from his poems in little magazines such as Poetry, Others, and The Little Review. Nor did Stevens look like a poet. A firebrand on the page, in person Wallace Stevens in 1923 was a portly, clean-shaven, forty-four-year old executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, working hard to support his wife in a comfortable house in Hartford. ‘I am far from being a genius — and must rely on hard and faithful work,’ he had explained to her, referring not to his poetry, in which she had little interest, but to his legal labors with bonds and surety claims.”
Stephen Akey worked in the Telephone Reference Division of the Brooklyn Public Library answering random questions from callers—three questions and five minutes per caller, max, which, he writes, “we routinely disregarded.” He laments the end of the print encyclopedia—and the old way of finding facts—in The Hedgehog Review:
How do you find the life expectancy of a California condor? Google it. Or the gross national product of Morocco? Google it. Or the final resting place of Tom Paine? Google it. There was a time, however—not all that long ago—when you couldn’t Google it or ask Siri or whatever cyber equivalent comes next. You had to do it the hard way—by consulting reference books, indexes, catalogs, almanacs, statistical abstracts, and myriad other printed sources. Or you could save yourself all that time and trouble by taking the easiest available shortcut: You could call me.
From 1984 to 1988, I worked in the Telephone Reference Division of the Brooklyn Public Library. My seven or eight colleagues and I spent the days (and nights) answering exactly such questions. Our callers were as various as New York City itself: copyeditors, fact checkers, game show aspirants, journalists, bill collectors, bet settlers, police detectives, students and teachers, the idly curious, the lonely and loquacious, the park bench crazies, the nervously apprehensive. (This last category comprised many anxious patients about to undergo surgery who called us for background checks on their doctors.) There were telephone reference divisions in libraries all over the country, but this being New York City, we were an unusually large one with an unusually heavy volume of calls. And if I may say so, we were one of the best. More than one caller told me that we were a legend in the world of New York magazine publishing.
Gustav Jönsson reviews Nicholas Jenkins’s The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England: “In 1933, the English poet W.H. Auden told his friend Stephen Spender, ‘I entirely agree with you about my tendency to National Socialism, and its dangers.’ It’s a surprising confession. He’d later travel to Spain to serve in the Republican medical corps, praising the soon-to-be vanquished loyalists in the Marxisant poem ‘Spain 1937.’ He befriended the socialist playwright Ernst Toller, whose elegy he penned when Toller, in penurious exile from Nazi Germany, killed himself . . . Perhaps only someone susceptible to fascism could see its full menace. Still, Auden’s confession should prompt serious thought. So says Nicholas Jenkins in The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England.”
Poem: John Foy, “Water Comes Out”
Sally Thomas reviews a new collection of Emily Dickinson’s letters and Renée Bergland’s study of Dickinson’s relationship to Charles Darwin: “‘My mind to me a kingdom is,’ wrote the 16th-century English poet Edward Dyer, whose lifetime encompassed the paradigm-changing era of New World exploration. Three centuries later, an obscure poet in Amherst, Mass., would write similarly of dwelling ‘in Possibility.’ Like Dyer’s, Emily Dickinson’s mind to her a kingdom was: an unbounded place of observation and synthesis, a numinous space illuminated by mysteries of matter and spirit alike.”
Brian T. Allen praises an “eye-popping, enlightening” retrospective of Marisol Escobar: “She was called ‘Marisol,’ a childhood nickname playing on the Spanish word for sea and sun. I’ve always loved her weird, fresh, disruptive sculpture, tokenized as Pop Art but always much more. She defied categories and pushed boundaries, so simple minds among critics and art historians — and there are many — ignored her.”
Justin Marozzi reviews a “galloping exposé” of two 20th-century Afghan “literary fabulists”:
Published in 1928, Ikbal’s first book, Westward to Mecca, was a self-mythologizing travelogue that made the adventures of Voltaire’s Candide look tame stuff. His fabrications in The Golden East, his next book, seemed so pervasive it was difficult to know whether the journey described happened at all. He claimed to have been pursued by knife-throwing Senegalese soldiers in Syria, whom he had only evaded by leaping out of an upstairs window, turning a neat somersault and shouting back at his assailants: “Come on, you black sons of Shaitan!” There was a romantic liaison in Kuwait, a near gunfight in Turkey, and on it went. One minute his trek across the Middle East was 15,000 miles; the next, after officialdom again rebuffed his insistent petitions for work, it became 25,000 miles. Writer’s block was never an issue. Between 1932 and 1934, he published twelve books, taking in Sufism, Afghanistan, Turkey, the Quran and a biography of the Prophet.
Undeterred by rejection, he continued to dash off letters to prime ministers, secretaries of state, India Office mandarins and newspaper editors. By 1941, he had found a short-lived berth at the ministry of information as a wartime propagandist — a prelude to working for Eric Blair (better known as George Orwell) at the BBC.
In the post-war years of imperial demise, Ikbal’s currency diminished. But his legacy lived on spectacularly through his son Idries, who, after initial forays into magic and the occult, became a widely revered purveyor of a rebranded Sufism for the West.
Brendan Walsh reviews Micheal O’Siadhail’s Desire and Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s Dear Dante—collections of poetry that are “designed and erected meticulously in an ancient style that an avid reader is unlikely to see in much contemporary poetry. The themes of each collection, however, are defined by their relationships to modernity and humanist and spiritual thought.”
The Jewishness of Vladimir Nabokov: “There was an amusing and fascinating dynamic in the Nabokov marriage: Vladimir was more sensitive than Vera to anti-Jewish comments. Nabokov’s visceral disgust against antisemitism did not begin with his marriage. Rather, it had a long family history. Nabokov’s parents and grandparents were prominent liberals and advocates for Jewish rights in czarist Russia . . . Vladimir’s grandfather Dmitri Nabokov (1826-1904) served as minister of justice under Czar Alexander II. With the accession of Alexander III, who became czar following the assassination of his father in 1881, reaction set in backed by virulently antisemitic legislation intended to destroy the Jewish communities of Russia. Nabokov’s grandfather became an advocate for Jewish rights and an outspoken opponent of Konstantin Pobedonostev, Alexander III’s reactionary adviser who famously declared of Russian Jews that ‘one third will be baptized, one third will starve, and one third will emigrate ... then we shall be rid of them.’ Pobedonostev vilified Dmitri Nabokov for his objections to the persecution of Russian Jews.”
Forthcoming: Johanna Harris and Alison Searle, editors, The Puritan Literary Tradition (Oxford, September 11): “What is meant by the Puritan literary tradition, and when did the idea of Puritan literature, as distinct from Puritan beliefs and practices, come into being? The answer is not straightforward. This volume addresses these questions by bringing together new research on a wide range of established and emerging literary subjects that help to articulate the Puritan literary tradition.”
I used to read Lapham’s Harper’s regularly in my 20s. It was a great magazine at the time, although I’m sure having the politics of a typical 20-something helped me not find it abrasive. But I’m surprised to read that Lapham was funny in person. His bloviating, pointless editorials were always the worst part of every issue. I’m not sure his writing ever made me smile, much less laugh.
Lauren's attraction to National Socialism and subsequent service in a Marxist cause reminded me of Eric Hoffer relating Hitler's advice to seek new followers among the Communists. Hitler recognized a personality type.