Vocation, Vocation, Vocation: Lewis Simpson’s Lives

Abstract

In the jacket photograph for Imagining Our Time, Lewis Simpson poses with a slightly arch smile, almost but not quite a smirk, and his tieless collar is open and spread. He looks less like a citizen of his beloved republic of letters than an Israeli general in civilian clothes. When he died in 2005, at the age of eighty-eight, he had written six books and edited several more on American and Southern literary culture (the upper-case S must be used for Simpson's work), and edited the New Series of the Southern Review from its inception in 1965. Without heading up a cult or school, Lewis Simpson set a standard. Some of my own best work appeared in the Southern Review under his editorship; of all the elders in the field, Simpson was the one I most wanted to be. If I had been consulted in the editing of this ensemble of Simpson's late essays (most postdate his retirement in 1986), I would have suggested another subtitle: Essays in a Furtive Autobiography. I do not mean furtive to be pejorative, but rather to reflect Simpson's habit of self-effacement. He was a modernist in temperament, after all, and clung to the modernist rule of the invisibility of the author. But autobiography nevertheless found a way. As Fred Hobson points out in his introduction, the typical Simpson essay begins with a modest personal anecdote, then dives into an intricate, sometimes Jamesian (as in Henry James in his Master phase) investigation of the writer whose work fascinated him. In the intellectuals and writers covered in Imagining Our Time Simpson finds