Lewis Lapham Lights Up

"I love the magazine," he says, "and I don't feel any need to make some big statement because I became editor."

Deciphering the Code

"Lapham is a very mysterious character," says Kinsley. "One of the mysteries is: What the hell is he saying when he's writing? I sometimes feel like I'm in a reading comprehension test and I'll turn the page and there will be questions like: What is the theme of this passage?"

Ouch.

Lapham's monthly essays -- they'll appear bimonthly after his retirement -- are an acquired taste. In 1995, they won a National Magazine Award, the judges praising his "exhilarating point of view in an age of conformity."

But others are not so kind. "They all amount to pretty much the same contemptuous, Olympian jeremiad," Kurt Andersen wrote in New York magazine. To Kinsley, the essays are "dripping with disdain."

"They're missing the jokes," Lapham responds, sitting in an Italian restaurant near his office, a place that appears to have spent a fortune trying to look like a grungy peasant trattoria. "The disdain could be read as comedy. It's satire."

Part of the problem is Lapham's style, which is self-consciously old-fashioned, a cross between Edward Gibbon and H.L. Mencken with a dash of Ambrose Bierce. Here, for instance, is a passage from his column about the funeral of Ronald Reagan: "I was reminded of the resemblance between the countercultural uprising of the 1960s and the Republican Risorgimento of the 1980s -- two troupes of utopian anarchists believing themselves entitled to more than they already had, one of them refusing to grow up, the other determined not to grow old."

Lapham sees his essays as ironic observations of a flawed species. "Human folly is human folly in whatever century it's encountered," he says. "I'm watching fools leap and dance. What am I supposed to do, say they're not fools?"

That attitude pervades Lapham's satirical documentary film, "The American Ruling Class," which premiered last spring in New York and will finally open in Washington on March 31. Lapham wrote the script and he also acts in the film, guiding two actors who play naive young Yale graduates on a tour of America's elite. The movie is not likely to break any box office records, but it does illustrate Lapham's impressive ability to persuade his famous friends to appear on camera: Kurt Vonnegut, Walter Cronkite, Bill Bradley, outgoing Harvard President Larry Summers, former Reagan and George H.W. Bush administration official James A. Baker III, among many others.

Pondering retirement, he does not speak lyrically of spending the golden years with his wife and three adult children. Instead, he ticks off a long list of projects. He'd like to start a quarterly history magazine, and he's got lots of ideas for books: a biography of William Howard Taft, a history of America in the second half of the 20th century and perhaps the rise and fall of America's shipping industry.

"My family has been in the shipping business since the late 18th century," he says.

By now, he has finished his pasta and fish and he's getting visibly antsy, twitching in his seat like a boy trapped in school or a junkie hungry for a fix.

"I've got to take a brief cigarette break," he says.

He strides out of the restaurant, flares up a Parliament and stands on the sidewalk in his spiffy suit, inhaling avidly.

Is this a historic moment? Are we witnessing the last of the great literary smokers?

"Kurt Vonnegut still smokes," he says. "He smokes more than I do. I smoke two packs a day, he probably smokes four."

He takes a final drag, then tosses the smoldering ruin of his Parliament into the gutter.

"Kurt says he's going to sue the tobacco companies for false advertising," Lapham continues. "He says every pack has a warning that says smoking will kill you, but it has failed to kill him."

Lapham laughs. "They'll probably write back and say, 'Smoke more, you crazy bastard!' "

Then he lights up another cigarette and heads back to work.