A Great Idea at the Time

by Alex Beam

  Because the Columbia University bookstore places Epictetus’s “Handbook” so near the cash registers, I spent a New York to Boston train ride feasting on the delightful first-century philosopher whose thoughts undergirded Tom Wolfe’s sprawling 1998 best-seller, A Man in Full. I fell in love with the gnarly-legged Stoic when he wrote: “If you drink water, do not say at every opening that you drink water.” It was as if he had read my mind. At the time I had forsworn alcohol, and made a great show of carrying my own bottles of Pellegrino or Perrier to dinner parties. He had pricked the vanity of my preening abstemiousness. “If you wish to train yourself to hardship,” he wrote, “do it for yourself and not for those outside.” Another line of his that I love: “Remember that the contest is now, the Olympic games are now, and you cannot put things off anymore.” I remember.

  In the first chapter, I noted that early-to-the-game bookies likes Frederic Farrar and Auguste Comte believed in literary “hygiene,” that a taste for good books chased out a taste for the bad. They are right; greatness can spoil one’s appetite for the merely normal. This happened to me. After leaving my Chicago Great Books weekend, where about a hundred of us discussed not only Swift but also Oedipus Rex and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, I was pining for an un-Great book. At O’Hare airport, I snatched John Hart’s sexed-up legal thriller The King of Lies off a paperback rack. For about the ten-thousandth time, I bought a book for its cover. I read it, and I hated it. It was one of the worst books I have ever read. Curse you, Sophocles! Curse you, Sherwood Anderson!

  Both Adler and Hutchins died deeply disappointed men. They were convinced that they had an important message for the world, and the world spurned them. Or did it? How far removed is Oprah’s Book Club, headquartered in Chicago just a few miles from Adler’s old offices, from the better-living-through-reading precepts of the Great Bookies? In 2004, Oprah helped sell a million copies of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, a great book by almost any definition. What is the Teaching Company, which flogs its Great Courses DVDs in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and elsewhere, if not a digital version of the Great Books? “Park your car in Harvard yard?” a Teaching Company ad asks, channeling the bygone hucksters of Chicago’s Midway. “No, it’s more like parking Harvard in your car, living room, and life!”

  What is the “One Day University,” which packages lectures by professors from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia into a daylong Chautauqua format, if not a come-hither marketing scheme reminiscent of the Britannica hucksters? “There is an illusion that Americans wanted it then and don’t want it now,” says Peter Temes, the former Great Books Foundation president who now organizes Great Books seminars for business executives and aspirational high school students. “Homer, Plato, Socrates, Emily Dickinson, Cervantes—what an inspiring list of great writers, and what a challenge for young and old alike to pick up these works and make them new,” reads the hype for Temes’s Great Books Summer Program. “Our approach to sparking dialogue dates back to Plato’s teacher Socrates.”

  The Great Books are out there, to be sure. A Massachusetts psychiatrist, Jonathan Shay, won a MacArthur “genius” grant for his work teaching The Iliad and The Odyssey to traumatized war veterans. Educator Earl Shorris, who likes to quote Robert Hutchins’s dictum that “the best education for the best is the best education for all,” started teaching the Great Books at the Roberto Clemente Family Guidance Center in Manhattan in 1997. Now administered by Bard College, the Clemente program has been tried in fourteen states. Three St. John’s College tutors first introduced their Socratic, Great Books seminar pedagogy, called Touchstones, into an inner-city magnet school in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1985. Over 500,000 men and women have since participated in Touchstones discussion groups, in school systems around the world, in prisons, at the National Security Agency, and at the Austen Riggs mental hospital in western Massachusetts. Even though Touchstones uses the texts of Plato, Aquinas, and other ancients, the phrase Great Books does not appear in any of their materials. Cofounder Howard Zeiderman says Touchstones has modified, and improved upon, the “shared inquiry” model. “I don’t call it Great Books because that focuses on the text as a kind of artifact or museum piece,” he says, “rather than on the experience of the people in the discussion. Our model is a kind of pilgrimage for the group; I am trying to turn leadership over to them. That would be heretical on other programs.”

  While it would be a wild exaggeration to suggest that the Great Books are making a comeback in the academy, the situation certainly isn’t as glum as Yale’s professionally despondent Harold Bloom wrote in The Western Canon in 1994: “Things . . . have fallen apart, the center has not held, and mere anarchy is in the process of being unleashed upon what used to be called ‘the learned world.’” It is true that one would be hard-pressed to find “general education” requirements, or obligatory Western Civilization curricula, at most universities. There are, however, several modest programs that have puttered forward during the past decades, most of them inspired by Hutchins’s and Adler’s Chicago experiments. Tiny Shimer College has been teaching a Great Books curriculum since the Hutchins era, occasionally teetering on the verge of oblivion. Small Catholic institutions like Thomas Aquinas College and St. Mary’s College, both in California, teach the Great Books. Notre Dame’s three-year Program of Liberal Studies has been teaching Great Books seminars since 1950, a product of Adler’s friendship with the university’s former president, John Cavanaugh. The program once had 160 students, but now, competing with electives, double majors, and junior years abroad, it has about 120. “We face a challenge in recruiting that we didn’t have in the past,” chairman Stephen Fallon says.

  Even Yale (“supine before oncoming waves of multiculturalists,” Bloom groaned) offers a one-year-long Great Books program, called Directed Studies, to about 10 percent of its freshmen each year. In the late 1990s, after both Blooms decried the disappearance of the Great Books, DS increased its enrollment from 90 to its current level of 125, says program director Jane Levin: “It’s very popular.” I noticed that a recent DS syllabus included only one woman, Hannah Arendt, among the fifty authors being studied. Had any undergraduates complained about the overrepresentation of the old, bearded fellows on the course list, I asked? “Truthfully? No, they haven’t,” she replied.

  Every ten years or so, a popular writer rediscovers the Western tradition. In 1987, Allan Bloom proclaimed his love for the great, classical works: “The books in their objective beauty are still there,” he wrote, “and we must protect and cultivate the delicate tendrils reaching out toward them through the unfriendly soil of students’ souls.” In 1997, at the end of his “adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf and other indestructible writers of the Western World,” the New Yorker’s David Denby concluded that “the culture-ideologues, both left and right, are largely talking nonsense.” “The great thing about Western culture,” he wrote, “is that any American can stand on it, or on some small part of it. . . . The courses in the Western classics force us to ask all those questions about self and society we no longer address without embarrassment—the questions our media-trained habits of irony have tricked us out of asking.”

  In 2007, Yale’s Anthony Kronman reported in his book Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life that “the excitement that accompanied the ideas of multiculturalism and constructivism in their early days has subsided.” A former dean of the Yale Law School—shades of Robert Hutchins!—Kronman boldly opined that “it is not only appropriate but necessary to speak of the privileged position of Western civilization,”

  understanding by this the unique place which the civilization that began in the West but now rests on universal moral and intellectual foundations occupies among the civilizations of the world. The ideas and institutions of the West, liberated from the accidental limits of their historical beginnings, have become the common possession of humanity.

  For the past several years, Kronman
has been teaching in Yale’s Directed Studies program. “At the heart of the program is the question of what living is for,” he writes. Who is on the reading list? If you don’t know by now, then you haven’t been paying attention: Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, Herodotus, Thucydides, Aquinas, Augustine, Descartes, Dante, Shakespeare, Flaubert, Goethe, Milton, Locke, Rousseau, Machiavelli, and Mill. It is funny how their names keep coming up.

  Really. Have you ever had that experience, when you learn someone’s name, and suddenly you start seeing it all the time? Sometimes I feel as if I am surrounded by Great Books. At an achingly cutesy chocolatier in the old mill town of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, friends told me about businessman Robert Strassler, who has commissioned opulent new coffee-table editions of Herodotus and Thucydides. A New Yorker review of the Strassler Herodotus declared, without irony, that “the father of lies” was hot: “The moment has come, once again, for Herodotus’ dazzlingly associative style.”

  While writing these pages, I bought Michael Harvey’s shoot-em-up detective novel The Chicago Way, “steeped in the glorious, gritty atmosphere of a great city,” to learn more about Chicago. What did I get? Several lines rendered in ancient Greek, including the famous aphorism γνѡθɩ ϭεαυτν (“know thyself”) inscribed on the wall of the oracle at Delphi. Harvey was a classics major in college. In James Collins’s recently published romantic novel Beginner’s Greek, the boy-girl intrigue hatches from a shared love of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which the beautiful Holly is reading on a New York to Los Angeles flight. The male lead Peter, an icon of eligibility traced from the Jane Austen template, is reading Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield.

  They are everywhere!

  The Great Books are dead. Long live the Great Books!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  WRITING IS TRAVELING, even if you never leave your room. So many people helped me on this journey; here is my chance to thank them.

  My longtime friend and literary agent Michael Carlisle always liked this project. His father, the writer Henry Carlisle, had a whiff of the Robert Hutchins magic as a young man. When I proposed writing about this abstruse, fundamentally Midwestern topic, Michael encouraged me. Editors Lisa Kaufman and Susan Weinberg at PublicAffairs books were equally enthusiastic. For her sins, Lisa had to edit the manuscript, and of course did an excellent job. Thank you to all.

  There may come a time when newspaper writers won’t be able to thank their colleagues for book help, because daily print journalism is heading the way of, well, the Great Books. Happily, that time is not now, so I can thank my editors at the Boston Globe—Martin Baron, Fiona Luis, Mary Jane Wilkinson, and Stephen Greenlee—for freeing me to work on this project. Mark Feeney and David Warsh laughed when they heard my title; I took that as a good sign. Wesley Morris loaned me the Great Books he read as a boy. Lisa Tuite and her talented research team at the Boston Globe library—Richard Pennington, Elizabeth Grillo, Marleen Lee, Marc Shechtman, Matthew Mahoney, Robert Burke, Rosemary McDonald, Jeremiah Manion, and Colneth Smiley—helped me early and often.

  I believe that librarians are the unacknowledged legislators of the universe. The past three years have only confirmed my view. At the University of Chicago’s Special Collections Research Center, Julia Gardner, Christine Colburn, and Judith Dartt were especially helpful. At Harvard, Barbara Meloni and Tim Driscoll offered me aid, as did Harvard magazine editors John Rosenberg and Jennifer Carling. Job-sharing Stanford librarians Michelle Futornick and Regina Kammer found materials for me. I also received help from Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and from my wonderful public library in Newton, Massachusetts. At the Federal Trade Commission, Jackie Dizdul chased down materials for me. As did Audrey Fischer at the Library of Congress, and Edward C. Fields and Jennifer Mundy Johnson at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

  In Chicago, many people were generous with their advice and company. Historian Tim Lacy not only squired me to Mike Royko’s old hangout, The Billy Goat Tavern, but also gave me a digital version of his excellent PhD on the Great Books. At the University of Chicago, Josh Schonwald helped me with many questions, as did students Luke Joyner and Tim Murphy. I learned a great deal from Dean John Boyer, and from Professors Michael Jones, James Chandler, Francisco Barrenechea, and Steven Walt, who is now at Harvard. Thank you, Clare Pearson, for teaching me about the Basic Program. At the Great Books Foundation, Daniel Born, Don Whitfield, George Schueppert, Carolyn Groenewold, Jason Smith, and Susan Hayes offered me invaluable aid. Tom Panelas answered my questions about Britannica. In Massachusetts, Vincent Stanton, Ruth Greene, and Peg Mahoney helped me enjoy my local Great Books reading group.

  Special thanks to ur-Chicagoans Max Weissmann of the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas, and Sydney Hyman, for their time and help.

  At St. John’s College, the legendary tutor Eva Brann put me in touch with Dean Michael Dink, who arranged for my visit. I enjoyed speaking with tutors Leo Pickens, Susan Paalman, Emily Rena-Dozier, Nick Maistrellis, and Howard Zeiderman. Students Erica Beall, Clint Richardson, John Okrent, Paul Wilford, and Molly Rothenberg were kind enough to spend time with me. Communications director Rosemary Harty generously provided me with background materials.

  Michael Holquist, Jonathon Kahn, John Battat, Addison Anderson, Rebecca Lee, Roosevelt Montas, Christopher Beam, and Michael Shavelson helped me navigate the nuances of Columbia’s core curricula. Dorie Baker, Jane Levin, and Penelope Laurans explained Yale’s Directed Studies program to me. Matt Storin and Stephen Fallon introduced me to Notre Dame’s Program of Liberal Studies.

  Thanks to Peter Temes, who continues to be involved with Great Books, and to John Kristensen of the Firefly Press, who explained Fairfield type. Mark Adler graciously spent the better part of a hot Washington, D.C., day with me, talking about his father. Karen Pizarro, Tom Hyland, Jr., Ralph Whitehead, Jr., the late Rhoda Pritzker, Sue Lummis, and Michael Dirda were kind enough to discuss their Great Books experiences with me.

  This is the second book I have published with PublicAffairs. All writers should be so lucky. I have already mentioned Lisa and Susan. I also enjoyed counsel from Clive Priddle, Whitney Peeling, and Peter Osnos. PublicAffairs turned my manuscript over to a formidable, University of Chicago-educated production team. Thank you, Meredith Smith and Christine Arden, for wrestling my book into shape.

  “Better a hundred friends than a hundred rubles,” the Russians say. I don’t have a hundred friends, but I treasure the ones I have. Thank you Richard Roecklein, Margaret Ferguson, Eric Tomb, Byron Swift, and Margo Howard for your help. My mother remains a great friend and a sharp-eyed one at that; thanks for spotting the Susan Sontag material, Mom. A friend can make no greater sacrifice than to read a manuscript, and Katherine Powers and Cullen Murphy read parts of this one. My wife Kirsten Lundberg, one of the best writers I know, read the entire manuscript and made many important suggestions. I claim—nay, embrace—this book’s shortcomings as my own.

  THE (RANDOMLY ANNOTATED) GREAT BOOKS OF THE WESTERN WORLD

  CHOSEN BY MORTIMER J. ADLER,

  ROBERT M. HUTCHINS & CO.

  HUTCHINS: “He did the work, I took the credit.” 1. Homer: The Iliad and The Odyssey “The greatest adventure story of all time”

  —HUTCHINS

  2. Aeschylus, seven plays; Sophocles, the Oedipus cycle plus three plays; Euripides, nineteen plays; Aristophanes, eleven playsThe U.S. Postmaster General declared Aristophanes’s Lysistrata to be obscene, creating problems for the Great Books Foundation in 1955.

  3. Herodotus: The History The best account of the 300 Spartans’ stand at Thermopylae.

  4. Thucydides: The History of the Peloponnesian War Boasts of “no fables,” contrasting his work with that of Herodotus.

  5. Plato: The Republic and twenty-four other works“There you are,” said Alcibiades, “just as usual: when Socrates is present, nobody else has a chance with the handsome ones. You see how resourceful he was in devising a plausible reason why our young f
riend should sit beside him.”

  6. Aristotle, two volumes: thirty-one works, including Rhetoric, Politics, The Nichomachean Ethics, On Sleep and Sleeplessness “Poppy, mandragora, wine, darnel, produce a heaviness in the head.”

  7. Hippocrates: seventeen works, including The Oath, On Fistulae, On Hemorrhoids “Make the irons red-hot, and burn the pile until it be dried up, so as that no part may be left behind.”

  8. Galen: On the Natural Faculties “Now Nature constructs bone, cartilage, nerve, membrane, ligament, vein, and so forth, at the first stage of the animal’s genesis.”

  9. Euclid: The Elements “FG, GH are rational straight lines commensurable in square only; therefore FH is an apotome. I say next that it is also a sixth apotome.”

  10. Archimedes: ten works, including the Books of Lemmas, on the Sphere and Cylinder Of the top ten, only Hippocrates and Archimedes did not appear on the committee’s original, unanimous “first string” list.