HARPER'S: Not So Bizarre

LONG BEFORE America's oldest monthly changed its look and format, there were long faces and knowing smiles in the magazine world. Rumor had it that Lewis Lapharm. Harper's former editor, had regained his job on the strength of a memo he wrote to Harper's board which outlined a proposal for a drastic change in the magazine's ideology. There were whispers that the economically troubled monthly was going to become a glorified op-ed page in an effort to become more commercially successful.

The impending change was almost universally bemoaned in the New Journalistic community, which had been well-represented in Harper's during the two year reign of former editor Michael Kinsley. During Kinsley's tenure the magazine had been witty, controversial, and occasionally profound as it attempted to revive the essay from and apply it to intriguing, off-beat subjects such as the ethos of Thanksgiving or the politics of funeral homes. Kinsley delighted in using his "The Easy Chair" column to lambaste sacred cows, including Jonathan Schell just after Schell had written The Fate of the Earth and was considered an untouchable prophet.

But Kinsley's irreverent editorial policy and his publicly stated wish to be intellectually independent of the magazine's backers, the Mac Arthur Foundation, lead to a series of publicized run-ins with John MacArthur. Harper's President and Publisher Mac Arthur was looking "for a more Saturday Review-type audience, small-town school teachers who bemoan the fact that nobody writes letters anymore, says a former Harper's writer, Timothy Noah '80. Kinsley left last summer and moved to Washington to become a senior editor at The New Republic.

After Lapham took over, the magazine continued in a holding pattern until January, when Lapham's "Letter to the Reader" hinted at the changes to come. He addressed the "aura of intellectual defeat" surrounding national magazines dealing in ideas, and advanced the profound observation that "fewer and fewer people find the time to even glance at the papers."

In February's "The Easy Chair," Lapham dropped the bomb. Harper's would become "a synopticon of fact and fiction," summarizing ideas and trends, reprinting short articles from other sources, providing a list of interesting facts from around the world and establishing a Forum on ideas of national interest. The monthly that had won the 1983 National Magazine Award for General Excellence was going to cut back on its essays and polemics, admit that jounalism was at its nadir, and begin dealing in second-hand short forms and juxtapositions of images.

Lapham, relying on the dictum that the best defense is a good offense, made claims bordering on the visionary. The new Harper's would help America "see how much more beautiful and strange and full of possibility is the world that can be imagined by the mythographers at Time or NBC." But he was in effect, admitting that for the sixth time in its 134 year history. Harper's was changing its format in order "to continue to function as a barometer of the social and intellectual weather of the times"

Now this does not necessarily mean that Harper's is catering to The People's Almanue generation, nor is it necessarily a bad thing to change every once in a while. But George V. Higgins in his "Literary Life" column in The Boston Globe was one of the few people who not only prasied the new look, but admired the courage it took to make the change Most other commentators pelted Lapham and his brainchild with the verbal equivalent of rotten fruit. The Crimson editor who suggested this story fully expected that I would "trash" the new magazine, and after reading Lapham's bombastic manifestoes, I was fully prepared to do so.

BUT THE NEW Harper's isn't that bad Really. It does have problems, most obviously the hamburger-helper layout, which features lots of blank space and confusing or pointless graphics. They also haven't figured out how many columns they want on a page, and the new typeface is hard on the eye. Their "Annotation" (applying the techniques of history to a confusing modern document), which featured a doctor commenting upon a hospital bill, was almost laughably silly And the greatest problem is that unless their succession of short articles; tables and charts are extraordinarily compelling, they tend to vanish from the mind as soon as the page is turned.

Yet the short remarks by Kurt Vonnegut on Nuclear War and John Gardner's posthumous advice to young fiction writers remained in my thoughts after the ephemeral had been forgotten. A few facts from the "Index," which was designed to "reflect the shifting currents of fact below the surface of the news," also stayed with me; the number of students who scored "double 800's" on the SAT's in 1982-83 (only 4), the number of wars in 1983 (41), and the percentage of Americans who think the afterlife will be boring (5 percent).

Although the three long essays were stuffier than the Kinsley days, they were very well-written and boasted the by-lines of such prominent literary figtures as V.S. Naipaul, John Updike '54, and Joseph Epstein. Epstein's article on the status of intellectuals in America. "The Rise of the Verbal Class," was a perfect example of the sharp-eyed, reflective, faintly self-indulgent prose which is the pride of the American middle-brow magazine.

Admittedly, this switch to recognized authorities cuts out the younger, more extreme writers, and narrows the range of coffeetable magazines. "If literary America has really touched bottom," says Noah, "they should be encouraging young writers to write great essays, not turning to the established writers."

Those who read Harper's because of Kinsley will probably throw up their hands in disgust and join great Harper's writers like Wilfrid Sheed and David Owen in jumping ship. But the new Harper's is not hopeless or craven, just different. It's still witty and informative, and the counterman at Nini's Corner reports that it's selling very well. At the very least it deserves a chance to prove itself.