A knave and his index: Lewis Lapham continues to wound our culture.

WHAT was Karl Marx's best line? My candidate is his mot, from the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), about history repeating itself first as tragedy, then farce. Consider: It was a minor cultural tragedy when Lewis Lapham trivialized Harper's magazine beyond all recognition. Once upon a time, Harper's was home to such eminences as Henry James, Winston Churchill, and Mark Twain. Under Lapham's long stewardship, the magazine became a poster child for the dumbed-down limousine leftism that Lapham himself so effulgently personified. The infamous Harper's Index, which Lapham introduced in an effort to pander to his readers' diminishing attention spans and confusion of Trivial Pursuit with useful knowledge, epitomized the spirit of the enterprise. Disconnected observations, many of dubious authority, were jumbled together in a pathetic cocktail-game collage:

   Number of pointless "facts" jostled
   together in the pages of a once-great magazine:
   5 billion.

   Number of Harper's Index items that
   actually illuminated anyone's experience
   of the world: Zero.

I did not look into Harper's often. I felt about it the way C. K. Dexter Haven, in The Philadelphia Story, felt about George Kittredge, Man of the People: that "to hardly know him is to know him well." But I vividly remember "Tentacles of Rage," the 8,000-word fulmination Lapham wrote for the September 2004 issue. Most documents denominated "screeds" do not really live up to the word. "Tentacles of Rage" did so, in spades. Ostensibly an expose of "The Republican Propaganda Mill," the piece was really a mildly paranoid and disjointed compendium of leftish cliches about conservatives.

What chiefly distinguished it, however, was not its tone--an amalgam of hysteria and smugness--but its inaccuracy. As I pointed out at the time, "Tentacles of Rage" was littered with falsehoods, including falsehoods about the founding of The New Criterion. What made the piece notorious--and confirmed the widespread opinion that Lapham was a knave as well as a fool--was its "report" on the Republican National Convention. Lapham included an eyewitness description of the event, replete with withering comments on the crappy, ideologically motivated speeches given by Republicans. Unfortunately, no sooner had that issue of Harper's hit readers' mailboxes than some public-spirited citizen pointed out that Lapham had been reporting on an event that took place after that issue of Harper's had been mailed. In other words, he just made it up.

"Oh, but I just reported the kinds of things that Republicans always say": That, in essence, was Lapham's uncomprehending response. He just didn't get it. Why all the fuss? Who cares if a journalist deliberately scrambles facts, invents unflattering scenarios, and puts words in the mouths of politicians he doesn't like? Didn't people realize that these were conservatives he was talking about--that is, people who do not deserve elementary respect and presumption of good will?

Recollecting this affair leads me from the tragedy of Harper's to the farce of Lapham's Quarterly, volume one, number one of which rolled off the press in November. The great irony, given Lapham's cavalier disregard of historical facts, is that he should embark in his twilight years on a new magazine ostensibly dedicated to history.

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The inaugural issue, titled "States of War," is Harper's Index on steroids. Lapham contributes a 3,500-word "Preamble"; there are a few original essays ("Further Remarks") at the back of the book; but most of the magazine's 274 pages form a promiscuous literary congeries--two or three pages from Edward Gibbon, Lenin, George S. Patton, and 50-odd others. Most pieces include a boxed quotation or two from another writer: The bit from Tacitus includes a quotation from Shelley, a speech from Tecumseh includes a quotation from Genghis Khan. Sprinkled throughout are various tables, charts, and compilations conveying some miscellaneous bits of random information. On page 131, for example, we read about a "U.S. serviceman's chances of death in battle" from the Revolutionary War (1 in 50) to the Persian Gulf War (1 in 3,162), while page 103 is given over to a chart listing statistics of death and mayhem in the three "Rambo" movies (e.g., "Number of bad guys killed by Rambo with his shirt on," ditto for a shirtless Rambo). T. S. Eliot spoke about shoring fragments against his ruin; Lapham just beaches the lot with no apparent end in view.

Lapham's Quarterly is a curious mental ("intellectual" isn't quite the right word) artifact. Physically, the magazine is a moderately lavish affair, sumptuously printed, full of color reproductions, bedizened with arty layout and typography. But its contents are ... well, it is difficult to say. In his novel The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse described a quasi-mystical game of the future that was "a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette.... The game could, for instance, start with a given astronomical configuration, or with the theme of a fugue by Bach, or with a sentence from Leibniz or the Upanishads." Lapham's Quarterly is a little like that, but Hesse's image fails to convey the skin-crawling nausea the magazine induces.

The main cause of this disease is unremitting pretentiousness. The consistency of the effect is remarkable. It begins with the list of "supporting institutions," which includes the MacArthur Foundation and Newman's Own Foundation: the place that every year anoints another crop of "geniuses," and Paul Newman--what a combination! Who else but Lewis Lapham would have offered readers an "among the contributors" page that juxtaposed (among many others) Winston Churchill, Joseph Goebbels, and Private First Class Jessica Lynch? Who but he would say of St. Augustine (another "contributor") that he "formulated his notion of Christian morality as a response to his having been sorely tempted by a peach"? We are meant to admire the allusion to Augustine's Confessions but overlook, or perhaps even savor, the mockery of the description.

But smug pretension is only one arrow in Lapham's quiver. There is also the missile of political correctness. Where do you suppose Lapham's Quarterly comes down on the war in Iraq? On the prospects for American society? On George W. Bush? To ask the questions is to answer them. The novelist Caleb Carr, whose "Storm Warning" concludes the issue, says the Bush administration has made a mess of ... everything. A new Dark Ages may be just around the corner: The United States is Rome, "generalized environmental catastrophe" may well be nigh, "international catastrophes of every stripe ... are bearing down on us." The sky is falling!

But in many ways Carr's effusion is just an afterthought, a coda that reinforces but does not define the main thrust of Lapham's Quarterly. That distinction belongs to Lapham himself. His mastery of the non sequitur and command of the startling half-truth and tendentious declaration have long been admired by connoisseurs of logical deficit and rhetorical incontinence. It adds greatly to the effect of vertiginous exasperation I mentioned above. "The history of Western Civilization," writes Lapham, "bills itself as the romance of war." Er, no it doesn't. But resistance is difficult. Lapham's prose is a logorrheic swamp. The sucking sounds you hear as you wade through it are the little semantic collisions with which Lapham has strewn the reader's pathless journey. What do you make of this gem: "When I complicate the proceedings with a superimposition of marginalia reaching across a distance of fifty years and written while traveling in cities as unlike one another as Chicago and Havana, I can begin to guess at what the physicists have in mind when they talk about the continuum of space and time"? Or how about these two sentences, from near the end of the piece?

   Consistent with the story lines of the
   twentieth century's wars to end all wars,
   the conclusions drawn by Keegan and by
   Mueller suggest that President Bush's
   splendid little war in Iraq is the work of a
   man imprisoned in an obsolete tense. His
   adjutants [for Lapham, the president has
   no aides, only "adjutants": I suspect he
   thinks it sounds more sinister] apparently
   find it hard to say anything in his presence
   that doesn't go well with the sound of
   bugles, and in the speeches staged against
   a backdrop of flags and high-ranking uniforms,
   he presents himself as a military
   commander in the romantic tradition of
   General George Patton (page 24), captivated
   by the song of the sword that Oliver
   Wendell Holmes brought to the students
   at Harvard University in 1895 (page 30),
   content with the blessing of Saint Augustine
   (page 36).

Put simply, there's no there there. What makes this emetic production more than a passing irritation is the fact that it poaches on the authority of historical truth only to trivialize and besmirch it. Lapham is certainly right that our culture's addiction to the present, to the ephemeral, bequeaths us an intellectual poverty that is a recipe for moral and political folly. But by swaddling that important commonplace with his baroque, politically tendentious verbiage, Lapham makes it vastly more difficult to acknowledge, let alone address, the disaster of historical nescience. Lapham's Quarterly is not so much a response to as a symptom of the cultural cataclysm it pretends to diagnose.