The Whole Five Feet by Christopher Beha

Christopher R. Beha

The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About, Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else

New York: Grove Press, 2009.

When Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins released their Great Books of the Western World, Alex Beam reports, Adler boasted that the set measured 62 inches, two inches more than the five-foot shelf of The Harvard Classics.  Really? When I think of the myriad ways in which to artificially and arbitrarily ensure that mine is bigger than yours, I have to laugh.  Of all things on which to base a comparison of sets of great books!

Interestingly, his boast foreshadows the rather masculine form of stunt journalism, reading through these sets of books in a set period of time.  (Is that fair?  To call it masculine?  There’s Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia, and Robyn Okrant’s Living Oprah.  But conquering sets of books seems to be male terrain.  There is Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21, 730 Pages by Ammon Shea.  Then there’s The Know-It-All, A. J. Jacobs’s book about his reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, and his Year of Living Biblically, about, you guessed it, living by the 800 or more rules in that book.) 

David Denby did the great books project well, by going back to school rather than simply holing up with a great pile of books.  By being part of a community of readers, his re-reading of the classics has a wonderful dynamism and depth.  His book also predates the other examples of stunt journalism I mention above, and it has a leisurely feel to it that distinguishes it from the other races to read/do/write.

Christopher Beha, by contrast, reads his way through the whole five feet of the Harvard Classics over the course of one year, but alone and as a direct consequence of feeling adrift in his life after moving back into his parents’ apartment.  In one of my favourite passages, he describes his boomerang angst:

Of course, as a necessary condition of our post-belated age, one can never merely feel adrift or turned against oneself.  One must also hold certain awkward feelings about these feelings.  One must recognize such malaise as banal and used up, as a kind of American consumer indulgence.  One must stand detached even from one’s sense of detachment, alienated from one’s own alienation. (3)

Wonderful insight.  We are so worldly that we no sooner have feelings than we dismiss them as clichéd.  Nothing can be felt as new, as insight, but as always already yesterday’s news.

Perhaps that is the appeal to immersing oneself in a set of the classics for a year.

The set of Harvard Classics appeared in 1909, and they were edited by Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard for four decades spanning the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of World War I.  He wrote, “It is my belief that the faithful and considerate reading of these books … will give any man the essentials of a liberal education, even if he can devote to them but fifteen minutes a day.”  The idea was to democratize higher education at a time when only 3% of the adult population finished undergraduate education.

Beha’s grandmother owned a set, and he remembers investigating their contents, tentatively, as a child and young man.  Unlike the Great Books of the Western World, the canon established by Eliot was never revised.  This was a one-time-only offer of what constituted the great, and his grandmother seems to have taken that on faith.  When he tells his mother and aunt about his plan to read them, he is thrilled to hear their stories about their mother’s discussions of individual books from the set.  The books were not just decoration, and Beha knows that his own reading of them is not simply about acquiring knowledge, rather, “I had started reading them with the idea that they might bring me closer to her.  Perhaps this is the knowledge we are always after, though it’s destined to remain out of reach: the knowledge of those we have lost.” (120)  Indeed, much of the narrative is given over to his discussion of his relationships with parents, siblings, grandparents and aunts, and they make charming secondary characters.

Unlike the Great Books of the Western World, Eliot’s set of classical texts is not ordered chronologically.  After working his way through the first several volumes, which appear to him to have been ordered randomly, Beha has a revelation:

All the knowledge I might gain from reading these books, Socrates seemed to be telling me, would be worth little beside the knowledge of how little I still knew. … The earliest parts of the Harvard Classics were trying to turn me into the person I needed to be in order to read whatever came next.  (30, 33)

I am particularly fond of this trick: let the book tell you how to read it, let the book define you as its reader.  I performed this trick in many graduate school papers, and with considerable success with Britomart and The Faerie Queene. 

But, and by my use of the word trick you may have guessed where I’m going with this, it is a trick, and its novelty does wear off.  Beha did not capture and keep my attention in the same way that Denby did, and again, I have to put it down to too limited a canvas.  Beha devotes very little space to discussing the actual works he reads, and it is a lack that weakens the book.  Denby goes back to the classics because he knows that these books have formed him but he no longer remembers why.  He wants to steep himself in the books again.  Beha’s pace is much faster, and more shallow as a result.  By the end of his book, we know that Denby has worked the classics back into the fabric of his life.  Beha, on the other hand, has been on holiday from his life:

It must seem an odd thing for one to “realize” about books at such a late stage in the game.  But somewhere in my months of checking titles off a list I had forgotten the simple fact that great books were meant to be reread.  In many ways, this is precisely what makes them great.  It felt invigorating to be reminded of this truth, to be reminded that I could live with these books for as long as I wanted, that I never had to return to the cultural landscape I’d left behind for the most of this year.

But a certain sadness came with this realization.  After all, one wants to go home. (216)

Home is a world where no one else reads Wordsworth, whose “Tintern Abbey” inspired the insight.  Home is where no one else partakes of the Great Conversation, and because Beha does not want to be a “scold” and prescribe a course of the canon to his contemporaries, his reading of the classics is cast as, well, a stunt, an exercise with a limited shelf life.  It can be bracketed off and left behind.  I prefer Denby’s model of excavating, re-inhabiting and reviving books that can continue to live in us, to enrich our lives.

Read Full Post »

Alex Beam’s A Great Idea at the Time

Alex Beam

A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books

New York: Public Affairs, 2008.

I’m afraid that I did not wholly enjoy this one.  Too much snark by far.  Curiously, David Denby, whose Great Books I simply loved, has written a book called Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining our Conversation.  I’m with Denby.  It ruined the book.

Alex Beam has a hate on for Mortimer Adler, one of the founders of The Great Books Foundation: 

to be reading Mortimer Adler’s two autobiographies and watching his endless, self-promotional television appearances was a nightmare from which I am still trying to awake. (5)

Who knows, maybe I would hate him too after watching hours of him on television by way of research for my book.  Unfortunately, Beam’s snide remarks about Adler just intrude too much into his own project, effectively kidnapping his book from him.   I found myself waiting for (and dreading) the next attack on Adler as I read rather than being able to focus on the history that Beam writes. 

It’s a shame, really, because the history of the great books is a fascinating one, and I am grateful for what I gleaned from Beam’s book between the jabs at his subjects.

There is wonderful material here about the evolution of post-secondary education in America, about the astounding financial success of the Encyclopedia Britannica set of The Great Books of the Western World, about how that financial success turned eggheads into media stars and Time magazine cover material, about the equally astounding plummet in sales, about the personalities involved in shaping what America read, both in university and at home.  Those personalities include Mark Van Doren, his son, Charles Van Doren (who famously cheated on the quiz show Twenty-One), Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, Orson Welles, Gertrude Stein, Kay Graham, Susan Sontag and Clifton Fadiman, father of Anne Fadiman, patron saint (as declared by me) of books about books. 

Chapters include the history of groundswell of the Great Books movement, both in colleges and adult education programmes, the printing of the great books as a set, and the sales strategy of the Encyclopedia Britannica team. 

In the 1930s Robert Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago, hired Mortimer Adler away from Columbia, in New York, where he taught the core curriculum both at the college and to the general public,  in order to help him establish a similar program at the University of Chicago.  They founded The Great Books Foundation, and at The University of Chicago, The Great Books of the Western World seminar team taught by Hutchins and Adler, was immediately and immensely popular. 

Chicago suddenly became the most talked-about university in America.  In 1935, Time magazine splashed Hutchins’s face on its cover and spared no horses hailing the “golden boy of U.S. education. …Time-Life founder Henry Luce was a college classmate of the “prodigious Yaleman Hutchins,” as Time called him.  Luce’s stable of magazines, Time, Life, and Fortune, would churn our generally uncritical agitprop on Hutchins and Adler and the Great Books for decades. (49-50)

Their seminars became spectacle, and “Hollywood bigs like Orson Welles, Ethel Barrymore, and Lillian Gish found their way to the Hyde Park seminar room” (53).

In the age before mass market paperbacks, the Great Books movement gathered momentum before the books became widely and cheaply available.  The Great Books groups needed, well, books.  Adler and Hutchins collaborated with William Benton to publish the books with Encyclopedia Britannica, but sales were initially slow.  Hutchins had been reluctant to use Encyclopedia Britannica because he feared that the books would become merely “colorful furniture.”  Once they gave in to using the sales model of the foot-in-the-door salesmen, however, sales skyrocketed.  As Beam points out, stellar sales were not always because of what was between the covers:

The Federal Trade Commission busted Britannica not once, but twice, for deceptive sales practices.  The salesmen used a variety of tricks—among them, trying to pass themselves off as assistant professors from the University of Chicago. … In one version of the charade, the salesmen would claim to be contacting potential scholarship students on behalf of the university. (107)

Even with the troubles with the law, the 1960s was the decade of the Great Books’s ascendency, but its legacy is still tainted:

Over time, the Great Books made plenty of money for the University of Chicago, just as Benton had promised.  Britannica, the business Benton had begged the U. of C. trustees to invest in, eventually returned $60 million to Chicago, almost doubling founder John D. Rockerfeller’s $34 million worth of donations.

The university’s official history has this to say about “Benton’s folly”:  “The Great Books of the Western World was a financial disaster, until it was sold as Hutchins feared it would be—by door-to-door salesmen touting ‘culture’ to an insecure American middle class.”  (114-115)

The Great Books never seem to have overcome that taint of the middlebrow:

the Great Books became the “colorful furniture” that the acerbic Hutchins feared they might.  He had always had his doubts.  “A classic,” he liked to say, “is by definition a book no one reads.” (192)

Beam provides evidence to the contrary.  One of my favourite chapters is “The People of the Book” in which Beam profiles a handful of ordinary people whose lives were transformed by their reading of the Great Books, including one Thomas Hyland, who gives us all license to buy more books:

When he died in 2003, Hyland had amassed a library of 63,000 books.  In his will, he asked for them to be redistributed in a three-day estate sale, with paperbacks priced at ten cents and hardcovers at three dollars.  Maybe news was slow on the weekend of January 31, 2004, but five Denver television stations covered the sale, broadcasting pictures of hundreds of buyers lined up outside of Hyland’s split-level home to carry off bagfuls and, in some cases, rolling containers full of books.  (145-146)

My other favourite chapter is the chapter on St. John’s College, a four-year undergraduate college with campuses in Annapolis, Maryland and Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the curriculum is all Great Books all the time.  It’s my favourite chapter because Beam so clearly enjoyed his time there; indeed, he declares his pleasure in writing about it.

The college’s famous, two-hour-long evening seminars often repair to the coffee shop afterward, and then spill into the dormitory corridors.  “We talk about our souls,” sophomore Clint Richardson told me amidst the clattering of the college’s only dining hall….  In our conversation, Richardson, a graduate of Michigan’s East Lansing High School, used the adverb eidetically  in the presence of three classmates.  It was obvious that I was the only person at the table who would be heading for the dictionary, to learn that eidetically means something like “visually.”  Welcome to the republic of learning.  (167)

Now, what does this say about me as a reader?  Am I a flake who only wants to read love-ins?  Far from it.  I loved Laura Miller’s The Magician’s Book for how she wrestles with falling out of love with her childhood idol, C. S. Lewis, and there are places where she skewers him.  I simply do not want to trip over passages of mean-spirited caricature with quite so much regularity as Beam provides.

I do recommend this book as a history of the great books; just be warned that you will have to walk around unrelenting attacks on Adler and many muddy puddles of snark.

Read Full Post »

Stop Reading! The Great Books Are Bad for You!

I am reading A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books by Alex Beam.  (Full discussion of which coming soon to a blog near you.)

I laughed out loud today after reading this wonderful bit of history from the 1940s:

Dr. Jules Masserman, scientific director of Northwestern University’s Foundation for Psychiatric Research, lashed out at the Great Books in the journal Diseases of the Nervous System.  “It is regrettable indeed that certain teachers of our youth revert to this form of medieval scholasticism at a time when old errors should be left to moulder in the dust of history, ” Masserman wrote.  The Great Books were a form of escapism known as “substitute behavior,” he insisted.  “Other forms of evasion,” he said, are “preoccupation with trivia of fashion, the spurious excitement of spectator sports, the false hopes of reckless gambling, the diversions of profligate sensuality, or the numbing haze of alcohol and drugs.” Masserman scoffed that the books are selected by “intellectual betters and so attempt to solve all the unprecedented problems of today by the ancient artifices of Aristotle or the pert platitudes of Plato.”

Dr. Masserman forgot to take his alliteration medication.

Profligate sensuality, forsooth!

Read Full Post »