In 1991, as cultural battles over the future of the humanities raged across college campuses, David Lehman, a Newsweek culture reporter, book reviewer and disaffected academic, fired a shot aimed squarely at some of the nation's most prominent scholars. Written in the wake of front-page revelations that the late Yale literary critic Paul de Man had spent part of WWII as a journalist at a Belgian collaborationist newspaper, where his pieces were easily in line with the paper's fascism, Signs of the Times (Poseidon) castigated practitioners of deconstruction (of which de Man was a leading proponent). Lehman argued that de Man had charmed a generation of critics with rhetorical prowess and personal charisma, and that their methods of analyzing literature could be traced directly back to de Man's writings during the war, with all the moral failings that that implies.
Although Lehman was hardly the lone critical voice, the mainstream media saw Signs of the Times as finally shoving a mirror in front of an unclothed academic emperor. Others were less pleased, especially the deconstructionists themselves, who struck back with scathing rebuttals ("Lehman is nostalgic for the Ozzie &Harriet certainties of the 1950s," said one). "The problem of writing a book like that is that you're going to have people who ardently love it, and you're going to have people who are your enemies forever," says Lehman. "Having done it, I'm not all that eager to get into more fights and controversies. I've had to pay for it."
Lehman's relationship to academe has never been easy. A p t and critic who spent 10 years committing what many p ts and critics see as a cardinal sin of inauthenticity -- journalism -- he is the founding editor of Best American P try and has the kind of publishing clout often out of reach for many academics. Yet Lehman continues to move within scholarly circles.
Lehman half-jokingly describes his latest book, a critical paean to the 1950s and '60s New York School of p ts, The Last Avant-Garde (Doubleday; Forecasts, Aug. 24), as a "labor of love rather than of righteousness." Lehman's book is the first to examine systematically the years John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch (a teacher of Lehman's at Columbia) and James Schuyler spent living, working and collaborating in the city's artistic ferment. There, in the company of abstract expressionists, beats, composers and musicians, they produced p try that cheerfully flouted literary protocols, celebrated the city and resisted easy pigeonholing.
Lehman himself is clearly bent on resisting labels. He now spends much of his time far from campus battlegrounds. His New York apartment is right across from the defunct San Remo bar in Greenwich Village, once the nightly haunt of the p ts and painters whose lives and works he chronicles in The Last Avant-Garde. Buzzing in to a nondescript tenement, and walking down a narrow hallway paved with the tiny white tiles peculiar to New York, PW is met by Lehman at the door of his first floor railroad flat.
Slim and on the tall side, Lehman is wearing a snug green golf shirt and khakis, along with markedly hip looking glasses. He leads his visitor through the kitchen to a small living-room study, where a stunning b&w photo of Frank O'Hara hangs over his desk.
For Lehman, who grew up the son of European refugees in Manhattan's northernmost neighborhood of Inwood and attended Stuyvesant high school and Columbia (both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student), being "in New York and part of the world that is New York" has always been second nature. It is a warm August morning, and Lehman suggests we sit out on the deck, a solid foundation of redwood planks rivaling any suburban patio. Settling in with the last of the morning's espresso, Lehman explains his turn from academia.
Against Tenure
In 1980, having taught at New York State's Hamilton College, Lehman was in his early 30s and living in Ithaca with his wife, with whom he would soon have a son (Lehman is now divorced). He landed a one-year appointment at Cornell, then a deconstructive hotbed. There, Lehman felt the values that had drawn him to literature in the first place were under attack. Lehman had trained at Lionel Trilling's Columbia, absorbing the master's lessons and even serving as his assistant. "I believed in having an immediate relation to the text and how books instructed us in leading our lives and also taught us history, and made us understand the social world. And that's very different from subscribing to an ideology or a methodology."
He finally decided to take the clips he had been amassing since college -- book, theater and movie reviews, along with the p ms that had been appearing in prestigious journals -- and embark on a career as a freelance writer, a decision that at best offered uncertain prospects. "I had to reinvent myself. I had nothing in me that was going to be commercially salable. I didn't even want to write a novel. But I feel that it gave me independence." Lehman rode a Greyhound bus to New York and began looking for a job in publishing. Tom Disch, a writer, p t and friend who was reviewing for the Washington Post, "told Mike Dirda to have me review. I've known Mike ever since as a colleague and friend, but at the time it was just a name to me. So I started reviewing books for Mike Dirda and Bob Wilson, who was also at the Post. And the Post, it turned out, also owned Newsweek."
After some cold-calling, Lehman landed an interview with Newsweek's Charles Michener. "I showed up on the day that poison was put into Tylenol capsules, bumping Jack Kroll's cover story on the musical Cats. Jack, who I of course then didn't know, was throwing a tantrum while I was waiting outside the office to meet with Michener. So they needed a smaller culture piece, and I was there hawking James Merrill and Elizabeth Bishop."
Lehman would spend the next seven years at Newsweek. While he was required to travel for some stories, the job also allowed him to keep his home base in Ithaca, where he spent a good deal of time on reviewing assignments. "Read the biography of Mountbatten. Read William Safire's book on the Civil War. Read 1,100 mysteries and review them all. Read Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose -- that was a discovery."
Unsurprisingly, Lehman has nothing but praise for his journalistic colleagues: "If I think of the literary journalists I know, compared with the academics, I'd much rather work with Nina King and Becky Sinkler and Chip McGrath. Their hearts are in the right place. They like books. They believe in serving as an intermediary between the author and the publisher and the public. They really do a service. Academics are always putting down journalists, but they're the greatest news junkies themselves."
A Newsweek cover story on mysteries prompted by Elmore Leonard's Glitz in 1985 resulted in Lehman's first book contract, for The Perfect Murder (Free Press, 1989; reissued this year by the University of Michigan), a study in the history of detective stories. His first book of p ms, An Alternative to Speech, appeared from Princeton University Press in 1986. By then, Lehman had also edited collections of essays on John Ashbery and James Merrill.
Pushing P try
Around this time, Lehman was struck with the idea for Best American P try, and sent Glen Hartley, who remains his agent, a proposal for a p try series modeled on the short-story annuals then on the market. After Houghton Mifflin's Peter Davison politely turned it down, they took it to Amanda Vail at Viking. As Lehman notes in his introduction to this year's Best of the Best American P try, "she said you'll be lucky to sell 2000 copies. She was just being realistic. That was what realism meant." John Glusman (then at Scribner, now at FSG) finally signed the anthology up for two years, beginning with the 1988 edition, edited by John Ashbery. It sold out three printings before it even pubbed. Each year's edition now regularly sells 30,000-40,000 copies, and the series has played a major role in the increased media attention to p try in the last 10 years. "Something has certainly changed," agrees Lehman. "I'd like to think we had something to do with that, that we created our audience." Lehman continues to pick each year's editor, to "sift, screen and cull" work from the annual mass of p try magazines and to write the introductions and author bios.
Lehman accomplished all of this, and wrote most of his second book of p ms, Operation Memory (1990) while holding down his Newsweek gig, which is perhaps the best testament to what leaving academe afforded him. One p m in that book, "With Tenure," decries, in the voice of Ezra Pound, the non-productive torpor Lehman saw as tenure's consequences: "Came not by tenure Wallace Stevens/ Not by tenure Marcel Proust/ Nor Turner by tenure/ With tenure hath only the mediocre/ a sinecure unto death. Unto death, I say/ WITH TENURE." (Lehman's wit comes through in many of his p ms, such as the sestina "Big Hair," which features a lingerie-shopping Jorie Graham.)
He also thinks Signs of the Times could never have been written had he been so entrenched in an academic department. "One advantage of not having an institutional affiliation is that you don't have to be as mindful of collegial relations, and you can write a book like that, which would be suicide in academia."
In 1991, weary of the controversy, Lehman began The Last Avant-Garde as a biography of Ashbery, his favorite p t. It was to be written with Ashbery's cooperation, but when, two years later, Brad Gooch published City P t, a pathologizing biography of Ashbery's friend and New York School collaborator Frank O'Hara, the eminent p t suddenly got cold feet. "I think that book has virtues," says Lehman, "but it d s paint a picture of Frank that really disturbed Frank's inner and wider circles." Lehman had already begun taking copious notes on Ashbery, and on his New York School brethren, and so began a larger scale portrait of the era.
A third book of p ms, Valentine Place -- named for Lehman's street address in Ithaca, where he now spends about half the year -- was published in 1996. Working on The Last Avant-Garde while writing the collection was no hindrance, since the New York School p ts are those to whom Lehman feels closest. "As a p t, I come from this particular place, the New York School, and I felt it had never received the treatment it deserved."
The book's final section, on why our media culture will never again give rise to an avant-garde, is "the part that's going to get me argued with," Lehman says. An avant-garde, he argues there, could not possibly "`shock the bourgeoisie'" of today since we no longer have "a middle class capable of being shocked and shamed." Such a claim, while bound to provoke grumbling from artists and critics alike, isn't meant to imply that Lehman is pessimistic about the health of American p try. "I think our period will rank favorably with any," he enthuses. "Louise Glück. Jorie Graham. Mark Strand. Charles Simic. James Tate. Adrienne Rich. Frank Bidart. And so many others. Incredible vitality."
Mediating between the roles of p t, critic and impresario (he also curates an N.Y.C. reading series), Lehman finds himself constantly switching gears from one vocation to another. He has a forthcoming book of p ms called The Daily Mirror, for which he has been writing a p m a day; he's also been teaching again, at Bennington and elsewhere, for the last several years. Ever restless, however, Lehman still wants to do "eight things, not just one. I still don't see myself as a Mr. Chips or the beloved old hand at a small private liberal arts college."
