A Great Idea at the Time

by Alex Beam

  On Friday evening, we gathered for a warm-up discussion of two poems that we hadn’t read before coming: Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sestina” and “Choose Something Like a Star” by Robert Frost. Whatever I spent, my money came back to me in those two hours. I have a “thing” about Bishop. Could they have known? I once drove my family hundreds of miles off the beaten track just to see the house where she grew up in Great Village, Nova Scotia. The Frost poem sounded hauntingly familiar. In the ten minutes at the end of the class reserved for introducing materials from “outside” the book, a woman from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I both realized that we had heard the same performance of the Randall Thompson choral version of “Star” at a tiny morning chapel service on the Harvard campus. It was, literally, unforgettable.

  How was the intellectual experience? In the case of these two poems—fantastic. I hadn’t participated in a classroom discussion in at least thirty years, and this particular brand of poetry—careful, revealing, intelligent but not abstruse—lends itself perfectly to filling up an evening with cheerfully exchanged discoveries. I would call both poems beautiful, and hard, but not impossible to understand and to love. And we literate citizens around the table, like sparrows with tiny crumbs in our beaks, each brought a little meaning, or experience, or knowledge, to each carefully crafted line. My first Great Books experience turned out to be one of my best.

  On Saturday we discussed Freud in the morning and then Stephen Mitchell’s jaunty, sexy, and partly fictional rendition of Gilgamesh in the afternoon. I say fictional because there are large gaps in the 4,000-year-old epic, which Mitchell fills in masterfully. Here is the animal-like Enkidu’s first encounter with the fruits of civilization:

  She [the priestess Shamhat] stripped off her robe and lay there naked, with her legs apart, touching herself. Enkidu saw her and warily approached. He sniffed the air. He gazed at her body. He drew close, Shamhat touched him on the thigh, touched his penis, and put him inside her. She used her love-arts, she took his breath with her kisses, held nothing back, and showed him what a woman is.

  That’s what I call a great book!

  The old John Erskine rules governing “shared inquiry,” the ones still scrupulously observed at St. John’s, were in effect. We received a printed sheet of discussion guidelines, which almost everyone but me already knew by heart: “Read the entire book more than once.” (I didn’t.) “Discuss only the book everyone has read.” (I did.) “Speak Up, Join In . . . Back Up Your Statements, Listen Carefully . . . Be Courteous,” and so on.

  But the inflexible rules seem silly, especially when we have excellent textual notes to Stephen Mitchell’s jazzy new translation of Gilgamesh right inside the book itself. Likewise, Peter Gay’s brief introduction to our slender Freud essay contains the tantalizing biographical detail that Freud, after suffering for years from a painful jaw cancer, asked his friend and doctor, Max Schur, to kill him with a lethal injection of morphine. Surely this was a man who was not a slave to religious illusions of the kind he describes in his famous essay.

  The last ten minutes of each two-hour session are a free-for-all, and anyone can introduce facts and stories from outside the book. Sometimes these tiny aperçus are the most revealing moments of all. In Hummingbird, the very long Urrea novel, the author notes that the protagonist, his relative Teresita, who was credited with shamanistic healing powers in her native Mexico, eventually found her way to New York City. One of our classmates learned that she became a model for the turn-of-the-nineteenth-century ideal of feminine beauty, the Gibson Girl.

  My group was funny. One woman seemed on the edge of a nervous collapse. A woman dressed in a track suit with extravagantly disheveled “red” hair proved to be brilliant, and then mysteriously developed laryngitis after our first meeting and was never seen again. A too-serious-for-my-tastes retiree, who was extremely well prepared for Freud and for the Sumerian epic, refused to participate in our discussion of The Hummingbird’s Daughter. He sent word through an intermediary that he thought the novel was too frivolous to merit serious discussion. Mortimer Adler would agree, but I don’t.

  The curse of every Great Books group is someone like Henry the hydrologist—not his real name or profession—who knows a little and talks a lot. It’s people like him that the veterans know to avoid. His wife seemed smart, but she was not in our group. Husbands and wives are never paired in these seminars. If his wife had been there, she would have told him to clam up, and that would have been the end of it. Henry regaled us with his understanding of fluid dynamics, and initiated exchanges like this one:

  HENRY: “Man is basically good, we’re a herding animal.”

  WOMAN ON HENRY’S RIGHT, ROLLING HER EYEBALLS, FOR THE NTH TIME: “But that’s not what Freud is saying.”

  HENRY: “Yes, but that’s what I am saying.”

  Saturday night’s suggested activity was “an evening of informal board and card games and a chance to socialize.” I had already been socializing, after the Great Books fashion. In the bar, and at mealtimes, the common conversational icebreaker was: “How was your Freud?” or “How was your Gilgamesh?” The answers vary, depending on which group your interlocutor landed in. “Very lively”; “Pretty good”; or “It never really came together.” This must be what it’s like to attend St. John’s College, every day of the year.

  So I passed on socializing and repaired to my room to watch some of the “March Madness” NCAA semifinal basketball games on television, which were particularly dramatic that year. My roommate was a genial, 80-something retired schoolteacher from upstate New York. For each book discussion, he had prepared a sheaf of notes, written out in a narrow, precise hand. He stared at the basketball game on the oversized screen, eyeing each flash-and-dash Gatorade or deodorant commercial as if seeing TV for the first time. “I don’t get to a lot of television,” he remarked quietly, emphasizing the obvious.

  I had other Great Books experiences, most of them equally memorable. For its annual Great Books weekend in its hometown of Chicago, the Great Books Foundation organizes a cultural wingding. In 2007, to celebrate the theme “Know Thyself,” the Foundation sponsored a screening of Julie Taymor’s disturbing, Japanese film version of Oedipus Rex and a matinee at the Alvin Ailey dance theater. But the books were the real stars. I fell off my seat laughing at the Houyhnhnms—every author can relate to a narrator who gets crapped on by screaming ninnies in trees—although my fellow Bookies engaged Swift with a grim, determined seriousness. “This is funny stuff !” I exclaimed to a roomful of readers, as I watched Swift’s best material die like a decaffeinated Vegas lounge act. There was no reaction. Everyone wanted to talk about identity and the self.

  The people of the Books are earnest to a fault, which is not to say that I didn’t learn from them. While revisiting Winesburg, Ohio, one woman kept insisting that George Willard, the book’s narrator, was impotent. There’s plenty of evidence that he’s not. For instance, Willard fires up a cigar right after an encounter with the town floozie. But I can see that sex scares him quite a bit. I hadn’t thought of that.

  A 2008 Great Books discussion group in Chicago. COPYRIGHT © 2008 BY THE GREAT BOOKS FOUNDATION

  I also started visiting my local public library, which had been hosting monthly Great Books sessions more or less forever. We have read portions of Richard Tawney’s fascinating Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, certainly not a book one would have come across, nor I daresay a book that is taught much anymore. The library groups are free and open to anyone, and a predictable barn dance ensues. Tawney wrote a compelling intellectual and social history of seventeenth-century England, but my Newton, Massachusetts, neighbors wanted to talk about Mormonism, the presidential elections, the state of Indiana, almost anything that came to mind. One night, while we were discussing Edward Gibbon’s The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, a participant remarked that Gibbon was considered to be the worst writer, ever, in the English language. I had heard considerable sniping at Gibbon’s serpentine prose
style over the years, but “worst ever” seemed a bit strong. It turned out that the reader had confused Gibbon with Edward Bulwer-Lytton, of “A dark and stormy night . . .” fame, who has lent his name to an annual contest of bad writing. Oh, well. Never mind. At a subsequent session, we read Machiavelli’s The Prince, which occasioned much George W. Bush-bashing, for whatever reasons. “Sort of like an Albee play,” my notes read. “Sharp intellects and lost souls.”

  Reading The Prince, we encountered the same problem that prompted William Benton to publish the Great Books of the Western World in the first place. We all had different translations and editions, and couldn’t follow one another’s textual allusions. I own the Benton-Britannica Prince, but because the double-column narrow type is unreadable, I used a Harvey Mansfield translation I bought at the University of Chicago bookstore. This in no way alleviated the textual nightmare. A good half-hour was wasted discussing whether Machiavelli ever said “the ends justify the means,” which is certainly suggested by some of the English renderings. But how would we know? And the ten different translations represented at the table didn’t help at all.

  If the Great Books were a stock, would you invest in them? Looking around the room at the white-haired shareholders, you would have to say no. But Great Books Foundation president Schueppert remains loyal to the product. “We’re going to keep the brand name,” he told me in his modest office in Chicago’s Jewelry Building. “We are going to champion the notion of shared inquiry. We do have a door opener in the name, and it’s sad that we have never been able to capitalize on a brand that so many people praise. It’s seen as a high-quality brand that regular people could never engage in. When we propose the books for use in school systems they think, ‘Oh, those are the books by old guys with robes and beards.’”

  TWELVE

  DEAD BOOKS WALKING

  SO WHO KILLED THE GREAT BOOKS? Certain persons have to be held harmless, among them Aeschylus, Dostoyevsky, and William Shakespeare. The assassination of the Great Books is like the famous plot of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express; everyone was guilty. Hutchins, Adler, and Benton signed a pact with the devil of commerce, and hawked their books the way Benton sold his Crest toothpaste. Forget that it cleans your teeth; you’ll be popular! Wisdom of the ages, schmisdom of the ages. Forget about learning—your boss will be impressed, women will seek you out (“Oh! You’re reading Fourier’s ‘Theory of Heat.’ . . . How fascinating!”), your kids will get into college, and so on. The frenzy of overselling provoked a predictable reaction from the tastemakers of the Eastern elite who had mistrusted Hutchins’s and Adler’s ambitious plans for general education from the get-go. Soon enough the Great Books were synonymous with boosterism, Babbittry, and H. L. Mencken’s benighted boobocracy. They were everything that was wrong, unchic, and middlebrow about middle America.

  Television, too, drove a stake through the heart of the American living room, shattering what Allan Bloom called “the real American privacy.” Faux-leather-bound, double-column textbooks were no match for the nonstop thrills and gags of the flittering little blue-gray screen. The half-century-long attack on the American attention span began sometime after 1950, social historian Joan Shelley Rubin wrote: “The rise of television heightened Americans’ preoccupation with celebrity and further devalued the idea that acquiring knowledge required patient, disciplined training.” In short order 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.”

  The culture wars of the 1980s effectively buried the Great Books in a blizzard of anti-Establishment, multicultural rhetoric. The academy turned against the dead white males whose busts adorned the friezes atop university libraries, and the defenders of the classical tradition—the best-selling Chicago philosopher Bloom and the octogenarian Adler—did themselves few favors in the struggle for the American mind. Bloom claimed the classics on behalf of intellectual conservatives, and planted the flag of right-wing politics smack in the middle of Hutchins’s sixty-two-inch-wide shelf. This was more than ironic, as Hutchins, the one-worlder who dreamed about framing a world constitution, was a frequent target of the House Un-American Activities Committee. The animating idea behind publishing the Great Books, aside from making money for Britannica and for the University of Chicago, was populism, not elitism. Hutchins and Adler “sought the redistribution of cultural capital,” according to historian Tim Lacy, who went on to observe that it all ended badly. The Great Books, he writes, “became a despised cultural commodity.”

  Now the fingerprints of conservative politics are all over the Great Books, with shadowy connections made between the volumes and Allan Bloom’s mentor, the purported “father of neoconservativism,” Leo Strauss, who taught at Chicago and St. John’s. (“Hired at the University of Chicago on the basis of a single interview with Robert Maynard Hutchins, who shared his passion for the classics,” Jacob Heilbrunn writes in They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, Strauss “wanted his students to return to the great books.”) Signals get confused in translation. Strauss and Bloom were both intellectual conservatives, but also confirmed elitists. Where cultural capital was concerned they were hoarders, not sharers.

  Conspiracy types like to point out that Joyce Rumsfeld, wife of the former secretary of defense, sat on the board of directors at St. John’s, Santa Fe, and that the two St. John’s have received (modest) grants from the right-wing Olin and Bradley Foundations. (Harvard and Yale have, too.) These nefarious associations supposedly explain the George W. Bush administration’s decision to send a former president of St. John’s, John Agresto, to reestablish Iraq’s Ministry of Education after the 2003 invasion. In retrospect, it was a fool’s errand. Alas, they picked the wrong fool. Agresto wrote a harsh, articulate indictment of Bush’s Iraq reconstruction policies, Mugged by Reality: The Liberation of Iraq and the Failure of Good Intentions.

  Right-wingers do love the great books. The conservative Manhattan Institute has created a Veritas Fund to support classical curricula. The conservative Liberty Fund, headquartered in Indianapolis, publishes many Great Books texts “to encourage study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.” The rightward gravitational pull is real enough so that Clare Pearson, who runs that vestigial Great Books program for the University of Chicago’s extension school, no longer promotes her connection to the famous brand. “We try to distance ourselves from it a bit,” she told me. “Unfortunately, a lot of the Great Books movement has become associated with the political right. These books don’t put forth any univocal political view that we can discern, so the label isn’t very useful anymore.”

  Another problem: Many men and women who love the Great Books love them too well. Great Books Foundation president George Schueppert is correct to worry that his brand conjures up images “of old guys with robes and beards,” because a stultifying, high-poetic seriousness has sapped much strength from the enterprise. The two Britannica sets are almost unreadable, with potentially awe-inspiring works of art mummified in cheapo-depot, public-domain translations. To have them on one’s shelf, as I do, is to experience their serried, sepia-toned reproach: Why haven’t you finished Plato’s Symposium? they ask. Lord knows I tried, but I had no idea who half the characters were, and furthermore, why is Alcibiades hitting on Socrates? Dear Mr. Hutchins: Enquiring minds require explanatory introductions, and footnotes.

  Somehow, somewhere, someone drained the energy and fun out of the Great Books. It was depressing for me to sit through the aforementioned doleful wake of Gulliver’s Travels. Hutchins obviously anticipated the no-fun problem by begging for the inclusion of Tristram Shandy in the Great Books of the Western World, because he hoped it would lighten the load. More Mark Twain, less Marcus Aurelius? It’s just an idea. It was disconcerting to think that someone would boycott an assigned book, such as The Hummingbird’s Daughter, just because it was a modern
novel. In my mind’s ear, I hear the raspy, hectoring voice of Mortimer Adler: All the great books were modern, once.

  “It’s hard to resist poking fun at ‘The Great Books of the Western World,’” Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda wrote in his 2003 literary memoir, An Open Book. His working-class parents paid $400 for a Great Books set when he was a teenager in Ohio in the 1960s, but the family came out ahead in the end. As one of its sales come-ons, Britannica sponsored essay contests for its customers’ children. Young Michael and his three sisters racked up $2,500 in essay prize money, and won four complete sets of the Great Books for their high school. In the end, he lost interest in the set, which “invited worship rather than discussion. . . . Not the sort of books one reads under the cover with a flashlight,” Dirda concluded.

  It is hard to resist poking fun. And yet. About two-thirds of the way through my research, I found myself occasionally succumbing to creeping Great Books-ism, almost like a low-level staph infection that invaded my metabolism. When my local library reading group assigned Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, I embarked on what my mother would call a “jag” (“Oh, you’re on a Greek ‘jag’”), reading three or four of the playwright’s hilarious, bawdy, wildly disjointed and awfully translated plays in a row. On a whim, I picked up a copy of John Stuart Mill’s autobiography, the book that convinced Mortimer Adler that he was wasting his time scribbling for the New York Sun, and prompted him to apply to Columbia. It did not convince me to stop scribbling for a living, but I read most of it, and enjoyed what I read. Adler seized on Mill’s astonishing education, but I was seduced by Mill’s Zen-like conclusion that erudition can’t buy you love or, in his case, happiness: “Those only are happy,” Mill wrote, “who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness.”