Fortune's Child,
Lapham, Lewis H.
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "Fortune's Child," The front of the jacket to this book refers to Fortune's Child as "a portrait of the United States as spendthrift heir." This describes the book's point of view pretty well, and it is not hard...
...In brief, Lapham seems rather unsure of his own sensibility...
...From the beginning, Bahzell has had his eye on what many would regard as the central problem today in America, indeed, in the entire Western world: the problem of authority in a social order that has been wracked and tormented by the for~es of modernity, however benign many of these may be intrinsically to the ends of freedom and democracy...
...In The Protestant Establishment he wrote: Following Tocqueville's classic analysis of the decline of authority in France, I THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1980 31...
...Around the same time Philip Agee started spilling the beans on his fellow operatives, Lapham began to write Harper's' Easy Chair column with a similar--and, let us add, more sensible--purpose...
...But it was anything but acceptable when Bahzell's writing began in the 1950s...
...Lapham's predecessor in the Easy Chair, Bernard DeVoto, fi)r example, made himself familiar through his indignant conservationism...
...the American upper class...
...In New York or Los Angeles, as well as in Houston or Cheyenne, men exchange travelers' tales about their journeys into Freud or Zen...
...I am in danger ot: quibbling too much, however...
...They are diffusely opinionated...
...The most seriously provocative of his notions here is that an American courtly society, fundamentally hostile to the tenets of democracy, has begun to entrench itself...
...The holy city of absolute truth shines in the eternal sunlight beyond the next range of abstractions...
...But when new ethnic and religious elements entered the mainstream of American history, offering fresh creativity and enterprise, and when the Protestant Establishment refused, through all the means establishments have, to allow any of these new, fresh movers and shakers into its ranks, its day became twilight...
...Lapham formulates theories where idle observations will do...
...The splendid thing about Baltzell's work is that it has never been rooted in the false idols of egalitarianism...
...No doubt I ask too much of him, but as a general rule I'd like to see less of the sage and more of the rascal in Lapham, less homage to Hotchkiss, Yale, and Cambridge, and more attention to the ratty little secrets of the streets and the staterooms which he seems capable of understanding...
...His family is apparently wealthy: Lapham's views on the oil market first took form at meetings of the Mitchell S. Ross is the author o f The Literary Politicians...
...on the other, he is without striking prejudices of his own...
...His most recent book is An Invitation to Our Times, published by Doubleday...
...Some of his pronouncements are very odd, such as this one: "The greatness of man expresses itself in the force of mind, in Bach's music or Shakespeare's plays, in the art of da Vinci, the physics of Newton, or the theories of Marx...
...In The Robert Nisbet is Albert Schwettzer Professor Emeritus at Columbta University and Resident Scholar .at the American Enterprise Institute...
...There is an astringent excellence to his journal of a failedBroadway musical and to his account of a visit to an Indian ashram favored by the Beatles and Mia Farrow in the late sixties...
...30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1980 He is best when true to his original role as a spy in rich man's land...
...He is now the nation's foremost policeman of the privileged...
...It can come packaged in virtually any form...
...Lapham is reliably learned and eloquent, and he strikes many a telling blow...
...An arrested development led to newspaper work instead of employment by the CIA, favored by so many of his Yale contemporaries...
...And, even when he gets carried away with the themes and variations he plays on his typewriter, Lapham is bound to make several penetrating points...
...That is, Baltzell took care to be born a Proper Philadelphian, thoroughly at home from the beginning in Philadelphia's upper crust and able to make his way naturally to Boston's, needing thereafter only.the acquisition of the tools and strategies of professional sociological research...
...The n , in the mid-1970s, he ascended to the editor's position at Harper's, and shortly thereafter it became disconcertingly clear that the modest reporter had all along been operating a one-man spy service...
...In Philadelphia Gentleman, Baltzell demonstrated an enviable capacity to write with objectivity about Proper Philadelphians, which must have been mildly upsetting, vo say the least, *o some of those who found themselves case studies and statistics in his book...
...On the one hand, Lapham is imprisoned by none of the traditional ideologies...
...Was it really like that: young Lapham gazing sadly out over Nob Hill, with a cry of "Eastward, Ho...
...How did they get in there...
...rising out of the depths of his soul ? And, if so, does this not qualify him as one of the "American bedouins" he characterizes in another essay as wandering "in search of the soul's oasis...
...There is sound reporting on the Army and the "energy debacle...
...This is bosh...
...Whenever Lapham's byline appears, his old schoolmates run for cover...
...He made it evident from the beginning that while the old upper class had lost or squandered its rights of authority in America, some system of upper class authority was indispensable to a free and creative society...
...Lapham's essays, in contrast, have more of the odor of Sunday sermons about them...
...Is he leveling with us when he writes, "I left California because I didn't have the moral fortitude to contend with the polymorphousness of the place . . . . I needed the company of other men wllo had roused themselves from sleep and who had set forth on the adventure of civilization...
...clan...
...His answer to the last was, like Tocqueville's on the Old Regime in France, the loss of authority...
...They embody some of the same qualities I have always disliked in Ralph Waldo Emerson...
...Today, even in the innermost precincts of sociology and political science it has become acceptable--well, almost acceptable--to question the virtues 6f all-out egalitarianism and to say a good word occasionally about social class and elites...
...PURITAN BOSTON AND QUAKER PHILADELPHIA: TWO PROTESTANT ETHICS AND THE SPIRIT OF CLASS AUTHORITY AND LEADERSHIP E. Digby Baltzell./ The Free Press / $19.95 Robert Nisbet I t is safe to say that no other living social scientist or historian is as qualified to write this important and fascinating book as E. Digby Baltzell...
...Because there are so many bad parents on the East Side of Manhattan, where he lives, it occurs to him that "American society bears a grudge against the future . . . . By denying the reality of its children, the society expresses its rage against change...
...Class consciousness like Lapham's is an uncommon thing these days, and Fortune's Child, which for the most part is a collection of "Easy Chairs," is an odd specimen of it...
...It was a fateful choice...
...The result, though, was the best book yet written on...
...In addition to the sociological and historical skills he brings to his work--skills developed in the researching and writing of two earlier studies of American upper classes and elites, Philadelphia Gentleman and The Protestant Establishment-he brings also the kind of knowledge of subject that is the result exclusively of belonging to what he writes about...
...He is genuinely sensitive t o the various corruptions of freedom practiced by free men...
...As long as WASP norms and values contained the greater part of American literary and scientific creativity, of political leadership, and of social and economic enterprise, WASP ascendancy worked to the lasting benefit of American civilization...
...He was grandly educated at Hotchkiss and Yale, even tasting the scholarly desserts served at Cambridge University in England...
...There are times when I wonder about him...
...Is there not a connection to be made here, one which would involve more personal writing but ultimately contribute to a deeper resonance...
...Others begin with a confession of personal frailties, a recital of enthusiasms, or a grunt at specific objects of scorn...
...They confuse metaphysics with geography, and they speak of t h e i r newfound philosophies as if they were places on the map...
...Tile theories of Marx...
...He is also, it so happens, a fine reporter...
...Prejudice is, after all, the chief tool of the personal essayist...
...Great because successful...
...This describes the book's point of view pretty well, and it is not hard to see how Lewis Lapham arrived at it...
...For two decades Lapham labored in comparative obscurity as a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner, the New York Herald Tribune, the Saturday Evening Post, Life, and Harper's...
...Protestant Establishment he showed how the old WASP aristocracy in this country came into existence, bow it prospered and left its mark on American society, and how and why it fell into decay...
Vol. 13 • May 1980 • No. 5
