A man of few spoken words, on the page he was a marvel.
Richard Lingeman, longtime executive editor of The Nation, at the magazine’s copy office in 2016. (Judith Long)
Richard Lingeman, The Nation’s longtime executive editor, died on July 5 at the age of 95. As the tributes collected here eloquently attest, Richard was a quiet force at the magazine for more than three decades. Born in Indiana, he was famous in the Nation offices for being a man of few spoken words. On the page, however, he was a marvel, lovingly and laboriously tightening the prose and improving the arguments of writers well-known and obscure. He also wrote many important and memorable pieces himself. In The Nation and elsewhere, Lingeman was a master of the art of “Reviewmanship,” as he titled a still-scintillating 1984 essay in our pages: “Practitioners of Reviewmanship recognize that the primary purpose of reviewing a book is to display one’s talents, punish an enemy or achieve power.”
(Subscribers can find the piece, as well as all of Lingeman’s Nation work, in the digital archive.)
Yet Richard’s capacious knowledge of American history, literature, and politics is undoubtedly best captured by the books he himself published, including widely praised biographies of Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser (a fellow Indiana native); studies of small-town America and the home front during World War II; and Double Lives, an insightful depiction of literary friendships. “The magnitude of Mr. Lingeman’s research,” a New York Times critic once wrote, “is not just impressive, it is appalling.”
RICHARD KREITNER
I believe I was one of the last fresh-faced up-and-comers at The Nation to work with Richard, starting in 2012. He was putting together a collection of Gore Vidal’s writings for the magazine, and I was assigned to help. We later did the same for Kurt Vonnegut. A few months into our collaboration, I visited Richard at his Upper West Side apartment to interview him about his latest (and last) book, The Noir Forties: The American People From Victory to Cold War, a riveting study of the cultural and political context behind the rapid rise and fall of the film genre—partly informed, as he explained, by his own work for US intelligence in Japan in that period. Richard’s late wife, Jane, served us tea, and we spoke for hours. “I’m a small actor in the currents of history,” he told me as the light waned in his study, “and I’m just trying to understand.”
KATRINA vanden HEUVEL
My first image of Richard Lingeman was of him sitting at his desk in front of a typewriter that must have dated to the time of The Nation’s founding in 1865. Richard seemed a part of that desk, rarely getting up from it as he edited or eyeballed every piece of copy that appeared in the then-weekly issues of the magazine. It was roughly 1980 or 1981, and I was a Nation intern. There was no web or social media back then, nor computers or even fax machines. I remember Richard asking me to use the teletype machine tucked into a corner in the office to send copy to Kai Bird, who was then in the Middle East. Richard was the kindest man—always patient with the interns and the most difficult writers.
When Victor Navasky and Hamilton Fish had bought the magazine in 1977, they brought Richard to The Nation as executive editor. Richard had worked with Victor at the satirical quarterly Monocle, and at the New York Times Book Review. Victor trusted Richard completely. They seemed to have telepathic powers of communication, a language no one else could fully understand. He was Victor’s editor. And he was the editor whom Victor relied on to formalize the many assignments he often casually made at cocktail parties.
Then there were the joint projects, like Starr’s Last Tape, a one-character play satirizing the Monica Lewinsky affair. Richard’s own writing was splendid, as in his biographies of Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis, his social history of the American home front during World War II, and his final book, The Noir Forties. Richard was a quiet man from Crawfordsville, Indiana, whose satirical spirit and innate kindness speak to the only “ism” he ever really adhered to: humanism.
ROANE CAREY
I remember well the first time I met Richard. I’d just been hired as copy chief, and Art Winslow, who’d been instrumental in my hiring, was introducing me to the editorial staff. He walked me into the office of Richard, then executive editor. The most baffling encounter followed, in which all of Art’s attempts to spur conversation, and all of my rejoinders as well, were met by only a few disjointed words from Richard, trailing off into awkward silence. How odd, I thought, for The Nation’s executive editor to be so nonverbal.
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But first impressions can be deceiving. I soon realized that behind Richard’s often mute demeanor lay a razor-sharp editorial eye and a delightful sense of humor. From my vantage point as copy chief, I saw every week how he transformed the sometimes hopelessly mangled prose of contributors into graceful articles. And I came to realize that, especially during the years when Victor Navasky was our chief editor, Richard’s phlegmatic Hoosier sensibility was the perfect fulcrum for a turbulent, sometimes squabbling team of editors. Richard was the steady tillerman, the sturdy chief mate, the peaceful eye of the hurricane. He guided The Nation’s craft through stormy editorial waters with seemingly little effort and without the slightest fuss. Never a harsh word for anyone, always kind, always collegial. I was lucky to have Richard as a colleague. We all were.
CALVIN TRILLIN
Whether in a Sunday morning basketball game or in the early days of Monocle, I always found Richard an exemplar of that prized Midwestern virtue—quiet competence.
JUDITH LONG
Pecksniffian—one word, among oh so many, for which I thank Richard. He was an education.
A soft-spoken, witty polymath, Richard shared a wall with me in the old office—on one side of the plaster and lath, he, the executive editor, enveloped in clouds of cigarette smoke, a jug of antacids within reach in his desk drawer, a public jar of crackers on his desk; on the other side, me, worshipful galley slave.
As PC throttled thought, we took to calling Richard Lingeman “Richard Lingeperson.”
Three memories of RL: An angry group of Indigenous men in native apparel arrive at the Nation offices, unannounced, demanding a hearing. It falls to Richard to handle the situation (Victor’s out). He escorts them to the conference room, calls a staff meeting, where shy Richard metamorphoses into the diplomatic and imposing moderator of a Nation seminar. The Indians smile.
Another: The editorial staff are on retreat in the country (oddly, where Oliver North grew up). Some of us venture into the rough little village for a beer. Inside the bar, leather-jacketed, be-chained toughs think it fun to challenge the city slickers to a game of pool. Ha—taunt—ha. Richard takes up a pool cue. As our jaws drop, he cooly beats their pants off. (Minnesota Fats, meet Indiana Dick.) The Leather-Chains buy him a beer.
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The last: At a party in her honor, we are mourning the memory of our flaming-haired, foul-mouthed, heart-of-gold production manager, who died young. At the end of the speeches, Richard takes the mike. He launches into a torchy “The Lady Is a Tramp.” Eyes bug. Tears flow. We are in awe.
As am I. Love you, RL.
JOANN WYPIJEWSKI
Ah, Richard: You of the long drag, leaning back, savoring a cigarette (Pall Mall Red, I think), hand outstretched, smoke curling during a pause from “turning straw into gold,” as Kirkpatrick Sale described the job while subbing for you as executive editor. You of the wry remark, the smudging pencil, the rhythmic, almost automatic rewrite in that time before indoor smoking bans and computers. Back when The Nation published weekly, and we worked on two issues simultaneously; when every word outside of the literary section came across your desk; and unless those words were written by Kai Bird and later Andy Kopkind and a few others, there you were, Rumpelstiltskin.
Everything about you seemed untroubled, twinkling at the absurdity of our collective situation in the back at 72 Fifth Avenue; apparently unconcerned if Jane Sharples or Janet Gold or, later, I, having got the answer we needed, departed while you were still talking. You alone seemed never to be in a hurry. You were cool, Richard. Even while playing first base in league softball, you were cool. You angled your body, arm reaching wide, one foot on the base pad, and got the easy out—Stretch Lingeman. You smoked and shot pool and had hung out at the Cedar Tavern when most of us were children, when “bohemian” implied something radical. We met in 1980. Eventually there was less straw, more dynamism. When we worked most closely, from 1983 to 1987, I had thought you in your cardigan were a bit of an outlier to the more hot-headed or politically outspoken, sometimes riotous bunch that ran the production process then—the “copy cowgirls” and the whole art/paste-up/typesetting team.
Now, recalling that time, I think it was that demeanor of yours—the jokey charm, the appreciation of personalities and moments at an angle to the universe—that gave us space to say what we liked, be who we were, come into our desires. We loved you, Richard. The last time I really saw you was the winter of ’13. A sad moment because Jane had died; a joyful one because she had insisted on a party. You sang, unexpectedly and with aplomb, “That’s why the lady is a tramp…” If I could channel Ethel Merman now, you’d get, “You’re the top!”
KAI BIRD
Richard was such a wonderful editor, self-effacing to a fault. Such a decent man. Victor’s humorous sidekick, and later a formidable biographer. Watching Victor and Richard have a conversation was a marvel in telepathic communication.
AMY WILENTZ
Richard Lingeman was always a quiet presence in The Nation’s offices. Quiet and calm was special in an office full of gabbers and spouters and gossip and endless eloquence of all kinds. He seemed to be the equivalent of a laconic Midwestern farmer among a gaggle of overly articulate New Yorkers, even if those talkative New Yorkers included Christopher Hitchens and Kai Bird and Elizabeth Pochoda, none of whom could have properly been called native New Yorkers. His office was down a hall from the rest of the editors’ cubicles, so he had to be sought out.
As far as my cohort and I were concerned, the Nation staff was divided into two factions: Nation girls, and the Men With Beards. Lingeman was one of the latter. Lesser male staffers, even if they had beards, were honorary Nation girls. All important visitors to our offices, it turned out, were also Men with Beards. Man-With-Beard-in-Chief was the irrepressible Victor Navasky, editor of the magazine and a Yale Law School buddy of Richard’s.
For Victor, Richard was a source of wisdom and clarity, even though the two of them were (in)famous for having founded the jokey and satirical magazine Monocle together in their first days of distancing themselves from the law. If you happened to be returning from the outskirts of the Nation offices—from the restrooms, say, or the Xerox machine—you might pass by Victor, standing in the doorway of Richard’s den, and shifting from one foot to the other as he listened to Richard offering his quiet rumble of advice and counsel from his swiveling office chair.
Richard and I were not intimate officemates. I was the next generation; he was lofty and remote, and shy, I think. But he never held himself above us. If you had a question about his edits on a piece, he treated you like a full-fledged editor whose comments should be taken into account. We were all on the same team, he seemed to be saying, even though we knew that at any moment he or Victor could overrule us. But Richard’s vibe was egalitarian.
Proof of this came during the 11-day transit strike of 1980. Always aware of the value of cooperation and solidarity, but short on cars, The Nation’s West Side staff traveled each morning down Broadway in a much too small vehicle owned and piloted by the Coca-Cola-fueled Eric Etheridge, a recently hired junior editor from Mississippi, or “Missssippi,” as he pronounced it. I can’t recall who all (as Eric would say) rode on those trips down Broadway to the magazine’s HQ, but I do remember that one day, when attendance was high, I managed to score the last available seat, on Richard’s lap—about which there was much hilarity during the trip. He and I laughed, too, and he was so sweet and respectful, but still full of humor, and that is how I always found him, and how I will always remember him.
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