Lapham Rising Read Free

be presented at the Chautauqua Institution tomorrow morning, twenty-six hours from now. I’ve just begun working on it. I’m glad I didn’t put it off till the last minute.
    “We’re devoting a week to the twentieth century,” said the chief Chautauquan in his phone call some ten months ago. He had the voice of the nonprofit CEO—liquid clarity trembling with hope, which at any other time I would have dashed at once. I keep a mental portfolio of rare diseases from which I suffer whenever I am threatened with a social experience, and I was about to share with Mr. Chautauqua the melancholy news of my scurvy. But his call arrived on the very day that Laphamworld received its first Big Bang. I read the coincidence as a sign, and of the two events I forged my mission.
    “An entire week?”
    “Yes, it’s a tall order,” he went on earnestly, evidently assuming that I still dwelt among normal people who said normal things. “But I thought we’d break it down into special subjects: twentieth-century art, politics, science, and so forth.”
    In my former life, I used to give readings from time to time at Chautauqua’s upstate summer utopia, but I would stay only a day and not one second longer. That was as much ofinstitutionalized sublimity as I could bear, of watching the worthy citizens patrol the grounds licking ice cream cones and waving to one another in a smiley somnambulism, as in movies about heaven in which candidates await their ascension. Yet these were, I knew, good, decent, modest, temperate folks. They used words such as supportive but were otherwise admirable.
    “And what do you want me to talk about?” I asked him.
    “The whole thing.”
    “The whole century? Well, I hope you’ve allotted me a good fifteen minutes.”
    “We thought a novelist, a creative thinker like yourself, might find an unusual approach.”
    Respectability is a curse, take it from me. I have found that a good reputation is much more difficult to shake than a bad one. People do not forgive respectability. Despite the fact that I stopped writing long ago, and despite my, shall we say, distinctive behavior, I continue even now to receive invitations to speak or read from my books.
    “Of course, you’re welcome to bring Mrs. March.”
    “I would, but she’s getting a bit heavy to carry around.”
    Give us the meaning of the twentieth century, will you do that? called the Chautauquans from their lacy red-and-blue porches stuffed with gladiolas, and their leafy glade and their true blue lake and their bell tower out of Vertigo and their hotel out of The Shining , and their largest outdoor pipe organ in the world, and their poorly concealed caches of booze forbidden by the original founding Methodists. Will you do that for us? No problem, I said.
    The twentieth century! One hundred years of progress! Edison becomes Freud becomes Einstein becomes Lapham. Yeats becomes Picasso becomes Stravinsky becomes Lapham. Silas Lapham becomes Lapham, too—the difference between William Dean Howells’s arriviste protagonist (who also built a big house, in Boston) and the newer version across the creek being that in early America, money alone could not buy social position, while today who cares?
    Well, that’s my lecture, Chautauquans. You’ve been a wonderful audience. I’m here till Doomsday.
    “Have you laid out your Lapham theory yet?” Hector asks from a hole he has just dug in the damp sand for typically purposeless amusement. He trains his little black eyes on me as I write. “About how Lapham represents all that’s wrong with modern civilization? That’s my favorite part.”
    “Keep digging, Mr. Tail.” I sometimes call him that to remind him of his place in the animal hierarchy. “You haven’t hit six feet yet.”
    “You’re such a cliché,” he says. “A recluse on an island, railing against his times.”
    “ I’m a cliché? And what do you call a talking dog?”
    He extends himself in the Westie stretch—rump