Reader and friend Greg Connors passed along this link to The Paris Review interview with the late Lewis Lapham. Conducted in 2019 by Jim Holt, I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation, because it brought me back into the presence of Lewis, whom I always felt was a kindred spirit under all the Laphroaig and privilege.
It is a painful thing to be a Natural Born Editor—which Lewis was, and I am, too—and live through our current exuberantly, defiantly unedited age. For ex: Even though it’s 12:57 A.M. and my contacts are tiny slabs of milky glass, nobody looked this piece over before I hit “publish.” There are surely typos. Also, it may not make sense. Welcome to modernity: instantaneous semi-coherent communication.
In addition to an amusing by-the-way bitch about how the war effort screwed his family over in World War Two, Lewis talks at length about the kind of literary arcana I seem to be increasingly obsessed with myself—influences, upbringing, and the misguided energies of one’s youth; how dopey trends in one’s field buffet a career hither and yon; how one becomes a writer, if one ever really does; how one edits other writers (I’m working on a book about that); how essays are the art of getting into trouble and then writing your way out of it…
In other words, all the stuff that makes a fella famous. And wealthy!
If you are somehow still neither, the link is free. Thank you, Greg! And thank you, Lewis, and sorry about all the ships. ◊
When he is not ripping off wonderful graphic designers, MICHAEL GERBER is the Editor & Publisher of The American Bystander.
