Robert McHenry: That book about the Great Books

A fellow by the name of Alex Beem* has written a book about the Great Books idea, the idea that there are identifiably great books that form the core of Western civilization and that these books ought to form also the core, or at least a substantial part, of higher education. His book is called A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books, and like much of the book itself, the title opts for wit, or something like it, over sense. I had occasion recently to react to a review of the book, which I had not yet read. I have now read it and can report that I am none the better or worse for the experience.

Beem is a journalist, and I am willing to bet that he is a pleasant fellow to meet at a cocktail party. He has produced a kind of cocktail-party book: full of chitchat leavened with occasional anecdotes, epithets, and one-liners. The chat reveals no particular point of view; our interlocutor is always genial and willing to seem to agree with either side of a question.

Just to be clear, there is Great Books the educational theory and method, and then there is Great Books of the Western World, usually and confusingly referred to simply as the “Great Books,” which is a set of volumes published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Beem’s book is a comic magazine piece about Great Books in the second sense, padded out to book length with some superficial stuff about Great Books in the first sense.

As to the first and larger sense, Beem takes us back to the late 19th century to begin his tale, walks us quickly through the Harvard Classics collection (the famous “five-foot shelf” of books), mentions such things as the People’s Institute and Cooper Union and, at the very end of his book, the St. Johns colleges and others that teach a Great Books curriculum. Yet while this is, potentially, a large and important subject, it is the comedy that forms the center of the book.

The stars of the show are Robert M. Hutchins (below left), at the time of our tale the president of the University of Chicago, and Mortimer J. Adler (left), philosopher, writer, and irrepressible systematizer. That the one was tall and patrician, the other short and, yes, Jewish, provides good material, and Beem is not above mentioning Mutt ‘n’ Jeff. Adler, the jester in the tale, is elsewhere a “troll” and a Hobbit and a “Talmudic Terrier.” (A writer might well be judged, it seems to me, on the potshots he resists taking. Beem resists few.) Minor characters include William Benton (below right), owner of the Britannica company at the time, and a variety of academic oddities, including Stringfellow Barr, who, Beem helpfully points out, had an unusual name.

(I should pause here for the ritual disclosure: I knew Mr. Adler, though not well. Early in my career I worked for him, at one remove, and for the last few years, as managing editor and editor in chief, I attended meetings of the Britannica Board of Editors, over which he presided. I disagreed with him about some things, notably the organization of the encyclopedia, but I retain a deep respect for his accomplishments.)

Robert Hutchins and William Benton with a volume of the Great Books.

Twenty pages are devoted to the creation of the Britannica Great Books collection and of Adler’s Syntopicon, butt of many a fine jest. Twenty more go to the selling of the set in a chapter titled “Faster, Pussycat! Sell! Sell!” (How many readers, I wonder, will catch that allusion to the immortal Russ Meyer? And how many of those will imagine they have any idea what the point of it is?) We learn here that selling books is a tough business and that salesmen can be pushy and sometimes deficient in scruple. Insofar as any reader is enlightened by this revelation, it must be conceded that Beem has performed an educative service.

Along the merry way we get to know about Hutchins’ haughty wife and her art work, Adler’s philandering, William Benton’s terror of his mother’s disapproval, the sad late years of nearly everybody, and other such matter intended to lighten our path through the murky woods of academia and publishing. Let’s face it: Just reading about arguments among scholars is a bit of a bore for most folks.

The honey on the lip of the bowl of wormwood (read your Lucretius, people!) is Beem’s introduction, which begins by describing the scene at the lavish dinner given in New York in 1952 to announce the Great Books set. There is Hutchins; there is his “Hobbit-like sidekick,” Adler; there is the “huckster extraordinaire,” Benton. The “deluxe, faux-leather Great Books” are shown to the “pseudo-celebrities” amid laudatory remarks from the principals. We are treated to a couple of brief examples of the contents, dense sentences ripped from their context to emphasize their obscurity. We are told that the subsequent success of the venture is just another example of “postwar fads like drive-ins, hula hoops, and Mexican jumping beans.” We are told, quite falsely, that the books “purport to encompass all of Western knowledge from Homer to Freud.” We are set, in short, to make jolly good fun of some stuffed shirts and pointy-heads.

But then, when he turns from the making and selling of the books to the people who bought them and, sometimes, read them, Beem changes his tone. He rather empathizes with their thirst for something beyond the everyday; he almost respects their efforts. Notably he refrains from satirizing the autodidacts who, with more fervor sometimes than grammar, praise the books and, believe it or not, the trollish Hobbit Adler.

Not for a moment does Beem inquire into this thirst, the persistence of which over time is suggested but unexplored in the book. Had he thought a little more about it, he might also have mentioned the Chautauqua meetings of the 19th century, the lecture circuits that brought famous thinkers and writers to cities and towns across the country, the readers employed by cigar makers in New York tenements to keep them current on events and philosophy. He might have wondered if man, in fact, desires by nature to know, and what it is that satisfies or stifles that desire. He might have asked if there is, indeed, a written intellectual core in Western culture, and if there is, what relation the ordinary citizen might or ought to have with it. Some of the puppet characters are allowed to speak, very briefly, on these matters, but mostly to lampoon the process of selecting a set of works to be published under the general title Great Books. As Beem admits, it’s hard to resist poking fun.

There is the usual quota of errors. Among those that jumped out at me are Beem’s belief that interim U.S. senators are appointed by the President; that there was a Native American leader called Chief Joseph Seattle; that Gibbon wrote of “The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire”; that a bluestocking and a bluenose are the same thing; that Cooper Union is in Union Square; that in 1952 the tax-filing deadline for Americans was April 15. Small potatoes, perhaps; still, what are we to think of the author’s seriousness?

Other reviews of the book that I have seen have duly taken their cue and run the gamut from snide to snotty about the Hutchins-Adler project. From them I gather that it is proper to ask, jocularly, of course, “Is this one a Great Book?” Well, I’ll say this: A Great Idea at the Time shares certain of the features of a Great Book, as type, pages, binding, &c.; it lacks others, such as thesis, argument, conclusion, and wit.

* I have deliberately misspelled Alex Beam’s name throughout this review in conformity with his misspelling of the name Encyclopædia Britannica (”Encyclopedia Britannica”) throughout his book. If your publisher’s typesetter has jettisoned his ligatures as an economy move, Mr. Beam, you could have told him to use the separate letters a and e, as in “Encyclopaedia Britannica,” which is common practice.