Lewis Lapham Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Let's go back to journalism now. You wound up at Harper's. You came to Harper's at the time that Willie Morris was editor?
Yes, Willie Morris was [editor when] I came to Harper's. I'd been at the Saturday Evening Post in the sixties and the Saturday Evening Post folded, I think, in 1968, and I had a contract to write eight pieces a year. I spent six months a year traveling in California, Europe, Washington, the Caribbean, wherever, and that was a wonderful job, but the magazine failed. Then I had the same job at Life; Life folded, and then I became a contributing writer to Harper's magazine about 1970.
The first piece that I wrote was about the oil bonanza in Alaska, when the Prudhoe Bay, North Slope oil came in and all of the money went into the jurisdiction of the government. I spent the three months of the first legislature in Juneau to see how they would dispose of the sudden good fortune, and I wrote that article for Harper's magazine, and then I was working on a second article about Wall Street when Willie Morris got into an argument with the then publisher of the magazine, a man named Coles -- the magazine was then owned by the Minneapolis Star and Tribune company. I didn't know Willie very well. I had met him a couple of times, mostly in a bar called Wayne's of uptown New York, Second Avenue, and so I was not really privy to the argument. I'd only been in the office twice to bring a manuscript, so I didn't see it the way he did. He and his friends, and the other contributing writers, saw it as an argument, art versus money, and I didn't see it that way. So then, when he quit or was fired, it depends who's telling the story, so did the other five or six people, and so on Monday I was a contributing writer and on Tuesday I became the acting managing editor. I stayed as the editor because it gave me a chance to write, and that was dear to me. So, I learned to be an editor.
So, you fell into a position for a distinguished magazine in American history. Tell us a little about that magazine and what it stood for.
We like to say that Harper's magazine is the oldest continuously published magazine in the country. It was established in 1850. The Scientific American was established in the 1830s but then went out of business for thirty years before it was revived. Harper's has never missed an issue since 1850.
There was a company called Harper & Brothers, they were a book publisher, founded in 1819, by 1850 the biggest publisher in the world, bigger than any publisher in Europe and England, or in Scotland. They started the magazine to take up down-time on their new presses, and also to use the magazine as a way of promoting their books -- they [published] serial novels by Dickens and Trollope -- and also to attract writers. Harper's magazine published the first piece published by Mark Twain. It came in as a letter from Hawaii and -- but the Ts in those days could look like an S, so the first piece appears under the name Mark Swain.
The first editor was an extraordinary man named Henry Raymond, who'd been born in what was the outback country of western New York in 1820. He came to New York in the 1840s and he was the executive editor of Horace Greeley's Tribune, a man who went around, liked to make speeches. He was a presence. Young Raymond was the man that actually wrote the paper in the 1840s. The Harper Brothers hired him to be the first editor of Harper's magazine, and in 1851 Raymond founded the New York Times, and he was the first editor of the New York Times, at the same time that he was the editor of Harper's magazine. Then in 1853 he was elected to the legislature in Albany and became speaker of the lower house, still retaining the editorship of the Times and the editorship of Harper's magazine. Manuscripts would be sent up the river to him by steamboat. Eventually, he gave up the magazine, kept the paper, then he gave up the political career to become the speechwriter and champion for John Charles Fremont, the senator from California, the great pathfinder who was the first Republican candidate for the presidency in 1856.
Raymond wrote the founding documents of what we now know as the Republican Party for a convention in Pittsburgh in the 1850s, but he was still the editor of the Times. Then Fremont loses and Raymond becomes friends with Lincoln, writes a campaign biography, very good book about Lincoln, prior to the election of 1860 -- and died at an early age, at the age of 50, in 1870. But he was a very fine writer, as well as an energetic editor.
Does being an editor make you a better writer? Is there a nice synergy between those two?
Yes, I think it might. It helps you see your own errors. It helps you appreciate -- again, like the story in Oakland, cutting it by 4,000 words, it helps you to trim out excess language. My writing, I think, is getting better because it's getting simpler. I'm getting more careful about using adjectives. [audience laughter] But yes, it does.
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