F. Scott Fitzgerald, It Seems, Never Met Lewis Lapham

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that there are no second acts in American lives, but he never met Lewis Lapham.

In September, the silver-haired septuagenarian former editor of Harper's Magazine is set to launch Lapham's Quarterly, a journal of history.

With a patrician demeanor and cigarette often in hand, Mr. Lapham has for decades punctured pomposity with wry observations on American society. An editor at Verso, Tom Penn, described his crystalline prose as "rapierlike."

In a glass-enclosed office on Irving Place, Mr. Lapham sits in a gray scarf and immaculately tailored suit, leaning over a desk, writing in longhand on a legal-size notepad — no computer.

His journal will examine current topics from numerous historical perspectives. With a sheaf of historical texts alongside reflection by contemporary essayists, each issue will, according the Web site Laphamsquarterly.com, open "the doors of history behind the events in the news" and be a bulwark against "the general state of amnesia." In the office lay paperback copies of Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey."

This is fitting, as the first issue is about war.

Mr. Lapham is steeped in history, and the journal in a sense marks a return, as he studied history in Cambridge, England, before joining the San Francisco Examiner in 1957, in the city where his grandfather had been mayor. Author Nelson Aldrich said Mr. Lapham's writing has long been filled with allusion to historical events. "So is his conversation," Mr. Aldrich said. "It's a neglected way of thinking." Indeed, his former magazine, Harper's, which was founded more than a century and a half ago, published the Lincoln-Douglas debates when they were news.

Mr. Lapham declined to be interviewed for this article, saying it was premature. Still, Mr. Lapham has launched American Agora Inc., which received its nonprofit status in August. Its attorney, Thomas McGrath, said the entity was raising money for the magazine from individuals and foundations.

A writer for the Village Voice, Nat Hentoff, said Mr. Lapham's undertaking was valuable and compared him to what James Madison called an "active citizen." With exceptions, Mr. Hentoff said, many Americans have a diminished sense of history. For a lot of people, he said, history means "last week." Likewise, the president and publisher of Harper's magazine, John MacArthur, said, "We dispose of history the way we dispose of everyday household garbage."

Mr. Lapham's new magazine sounds as though it will place events into context, a former publisher of the Nation, Victor Navasky, said. He added that while the best journalism does this anyway, "maybe he's inventing something new."

Mr. MacArthur said Mr. Lapham was one of the great innovators in magazine journalism. At Harper's, Mr. Lapham introduced the "Readings" section featuring speeches, diaries, and other documents that previously had seldom been published by the magazine because they lay outside the conventional article format. In addition to its famous Harper's Index, Mr. Lapham also conceived the "Annotation" section, in which a single text was submitted to a barrage of commentary. The Yale-and-Hotchkiss-trained Mr. Lapham got the idea from the Talmud, Mr. MacArthur said.

Not all admire his decades-long tenure at the magazine (which Graydon Carter likened to "eons" in editor years). A co-editor of the New Criterion, Roger Kimball, said Mr. Lapham was "the perfect person to preside over Harper's slide into fatuousness."

Although he once hosted "Bookmark," a weekly television book round table, Mr. Lapham's new magazine is more like a print version of Steve Allen's PBS show "Meeting of Minds," which brought to life historical personages of the past to joust verbally with one another.
Mr. Navasky said he admired Mr. Lapham's judgment, but added puckishly, "I'm compromised." For, as he explained, after Mr. Navasky left the New York Times magazine in 1971, Mr. Lapham paid him $250 monthly to go to a restaurant of his choice to pick his brain for story ideas.

Mr. Navasky said Mr. Lapham had moved politically over the years to a quasi-radical from a libertarian monarchist position. The location of the magazine's office — across the hall from the Nation magazine — may be an augur of Mr. Lapham's political mood. At a Harper's forum on impeachment at Town Hall last year, Mr. Lapham referred to President Bush's "executive tyranny." In his "Notebook" column, Mr. Lapham argued for impeachment "on charges comparable to those brought against George III." A political science professor at Colgate, Robert Kraynak, told the Sun that Mr. Lapham is making "a false analogy."

As with King George III, Mr. Lapham has had his own dust-ups with history. He drew criticism for a column in 2004 that contained a brief description of the Republican National Convention before it happened. Regarding literary history, he sparred with a preceding editor at Harper's, Willie Morris, who resigned from the magazine in 1971. "What Mr. Morris presents as a golden age I remember as an age of tinsel; his cast of fearless prophets I remember as a crowd of self-important Pharisees," Mr. Lapham wrote in the New York Times in 1993. Mr. Morris in turn decried Mr. Lapham's "bulky piquancy."

These brouhahas aside, Mr. Lapham was inducted into the Hall of Fame this month at American Society of Magazine Editors, to thunderous applause. At the awards, the editor-in-chief of Oklahoma Today, Louisa McCune-Elmore, told the Sun that Mr. Lapham had inspired generations of writers at Harper's, including herself.

Perhaps Mr. Lapham is slowing down, but only in that the pace of a quarterly allows for more historical reflection than a monthly. Mr. MacArthur said if Mr. Lapham had not become a journalist, he would have been a historian.

Speaking of history, at the ASME induction, Mr. Carter, on video, recalled the time an attractive woman who looked like a model showed great interest in Mr. Lapham one evening at Elaine's — until she learned he was editor of Harper's, not Harper's Bazaar.