The 50s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  DWIGHT MACDONALD

  NOVEMBER 29, 1952 (ON MORTIMER ADLER’S GREAT BOOKS SET)

  OR $249.50, WHICH is (for all practical purposes) $250, one can now buy a hundred pounds of Great Books: four hundred and forty-three works by seventy-six authors, ranging chronologically and in several other ways from Homer to Dr. Mortimer J. Adler, the whole forming a mass amounting to thirty-two thousand pages, mostly double-column, containing twenty-five million words squeezed into fifty-four volumes. The publisher of this behemoth, which cost almost two million dollars to produce, is the Encyclopædia Britannica, which is jointly owned by Senator William Benton of Connecticut and the University of Chicago. The books were selected by a board headed by Dr. Robert Hutchins, formerly chancellor of the University of Chicago and now an associate director of the Ford Foundation, and Dr. Adler, who used to teach the philosophy of law at the University of Chicago and who now runs the Institute for Philosophical Research, an enterprise largely financed by the Ford Foundation. The novelty of the set and to a large extent its raison d’être is the Syntopicon, a two-volume index to the Great Ideas in the Great Books. The Syntopicon (“collection of topics”) was constructed by a task force commanded by Dr. Adler, who also contributes 1,150 pages of extremely dry essays on the Great Ideas, of which, according to his census, there are exactly a hundred and two. It also contains 163,000 page references to the Great Books, distributed under 2,987 topical subdivisions of the Great Ideas, plus an Inventory of Terms (which includes 1,690 ideas found to be respectable but not Great), plus a Bibliography of Additional Readings (2,603 books that didn’t make the grade), plus an eighty-page essay by Dr. Adler on “The Principles and Methods of Syntopical Construction,” and it cost the Encyclopædia just under a million dollars. If these facts and figures have an oppressive, leaden ring, so does this enterprise.

  “This set of books,” says Dr. Hutchins in The Great Conversation, a sort of after-dinner speech that has somehow become Volume I of Great Books, “is the result of an attempt to reappraise and reembody the tradition of the West for our generation.” For some, this might take a bit of doing, but Dr. Hutchins makes it sound as easy as falling off a log (with Mark Hopkins on the other end): “The discussions of the Board revealed few differences of opinion about the overwhelming majority of the books in the list. The set is almost self-selected, in the sense that one book leads to another, amplifying, modifying, or contradicting it.” But if the criterion of selection really was whether a book amplifies, modifies, or contradicts another book, one wonders how any books at all were eliminated. Actually, the Board seems to have shifted about between three criteria that must have conflicted as often as they coincided: which books were most influential in the past, which are now, which ought to be now. Cicero and Seneca were more important in the past than Plato and Aeschylus but are less important today; in excluding the former and including the latter, the Board honored the second criterion over the first. On the other hand, devoting two volumes apiece to Aristotle and Aquinas could be justified only by their historical, not their contemporary, interest. The third criterion was involved here, too; these philosophers are important to the Adler-Hutchins school of thought, and the Board doubtless felt that if they are not important in modern thought, they damned well should be. My objection is not to this method of selection—jockeying back and forth between conflicting criteria is the essence of the anthologist’s craft—but to the bland unawareness of it shown by the impresarios, Dr. Hutchins and Dr. Adler, who write as if the Truth were an easy thing to come by. This doctrinaire smugness blinds them to the real problems of their enterprise by giving them mechanical, ready-made solutions that often don’t fill the bill.

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  The wisdom of the method varies with the obviousness of the choice, being greatest where there is practically no choice; that is, with the half of the authors—by no means “the overwhelming majority”—on which agreement may be presumed to be universal: Homer, the Greek dramatists, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Virgil, Plutarch, Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Machiavelli, Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Milton, Pascal, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Gibbon, Hegel, Kant, Goethe, and Darwin. A large second category seems sound and fairly obvious, though offering plenty of room for discussion: Herodotus, Lucretius, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Tacitus, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Swift, Montesquieu, Boswell, Mill, Marx, Tolstoy, Dostoevski, and Freud. The rest of the list depended entirely upon the Board, and in this case the choice seems to be mostly foolish. Only two selections are both daring and sound: Moby Dick and William James’ Psychology. The former is, of course, well known but could easily have been passed over; the latter is an extraordinarily rich and imaginative work that has been overshadowed by the Freudian vogue. The Freud volume, with no less than eighteen books and papers in it, gives an excellent conspectus of Freud’s work; the Marx volume, on the other hand, contains only the Communist Manifesto and Volume I of Capital (misleadingly titled, so that it suggests it is the whole work), which is barely the ABC of Marx’s political thought. This unevenness of editing is prevalent. There is a provincial overemphasis on English literature at the expense of French; we get Boswell, Gulliver, Tristram Shandy, and Tom Jones but no Molière, Corneille, or Racine, and no Stendhal, Balzac, or Flaubert. This is what might be called an accidental eccentricity, the kind of error any board of fallible mortals might make. But most of the eccentricities are systematic rather than accidental, springing from dogma rather than oversight.

  A fifth of the volumes are all but impenetrable to the lay reader, or at least to this lay reader—the four devoted to Aristotle and Aquinas and the six of scientific treatises, ranging from Hippocrates to Faraday. “There is a sense in which every great book is always over the head of the reader,” airily writes Dr. Hutchins. “He can never fully comprehend it. That is why the books in this set are infinitely rereadable.” I found these ten volumes infinitely unreadable. There is a difference between not fully comprehending Homer and Shakespeare (in that one is always discovering something new on rereading them) and not even getting to first base with either a writer’s terminology or what he is driving at. Aristotle and Aquinas should have been included, I would say, but four volumes is excessive. Furthermore, no expository apparatus is provided, no introduction relating their Weltanschauung to our own, no notes on their very special use of terms and their concepts. Lacking such help, how can one be expected to take an interest in such problems, vivid enough to Aquinas, as “Whether an Inferior Angel Speaks to a Superior Angel?,” “Whether We Should Distinguish Irascible and Concupiscible Parts in the Superior Appetite?,” “Whether Heavenly Bodies Can Act on Demons?,” and “Whether by Virtue of Its Subtlety a Glorified Body Will No Longer Need to Be in a Place Equal to Itself?” In fact, even with help, one’s interest might remain moderate. In the case of a philosopher like Plato, essentially a literary man and so speaking a universal human language, the difficulty is far less acute, but Aquinas and Aristotle were engineers and technicians of philosophy, essentially system builders whose concepts and terminology are no longer familiar. The difficulty is much more urgent in the six volumes of scientific work, so urgent that almost no expository apparatus would suffice. A scientific work differs from a literary, historical, or philosophical work (the three categories, aside from science, into which the Great Books fall) partly because it is written in a language comprehensible only to the specialist (equations, diagrams, and so on) and partly because its importance is not in itself but in its place in the development of science, since it has often been revised, edited, and even superseded by the work of later scientists. Milton, on the other hand, does not supersede Homer; Gibbon represents no advance over Thucydides. All this is pretty obvious, but in this one instance, the editors of the Great Books exhibit a remarkable capacity for overlooking the obvious. Their dogma states that all major cultural achievements are of timeless, absolute value, and that this value is accessible to the lay reader without
expository aids if he will but apply himself diligently. Because science is clearly part of our culture, they have therefore included these six useless volumes without asking themselves what benefit the reader will get from a hundred and sixty double-column pages of Hippocrates (“We must avoid wetting all sorts of ulcers except with wine, unless the ulcer be situated in a joint.” “In women, blood collected in the breasts indicates madness.” “You should put persons on a course of hellebore who are troubled with a defluction from the head.” “Acute disease come [sic] to a crisis in fourteen days”) or how he can profit from or even understand Fourier’s Analytical Theory of Heat and Huygens’ Treatise on Light without a special knowledge of earlier and later work in these fields.

  Another drawback is the fetish for Great Writers and complete texts, which results in a lot of the same thing by a few hands instead of a more representative collection. Minor works by major writers are consistently preferred to major works by minor writers. Thus nearly all Shakespeare is here, including even The Two Gentlemen of Verona, but not Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus or Webster’s Duchess of Malfi or Jonson’s Volpone. Nearly all Milton’s poetry is here, but no Donne, no Herrick, no Marvell, or, for that matter, any other English poetry except Chaucer and Shakespeare. We get Gibbon in two huge volumes but no Vico, Michelet, or Burckhardt; six hundred pages of Kant but no Nietzsche or Kierkegaard; two volumes of Aquinas but no Calvin or Luther; three hundred pages of Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws but no Voltaire or Diderot. Even if in every case the one right author had been elected to the Great Writers’ Club, which is not the situation, this principle of selection would give a distorted view of our culture, since it omits so much of the context in which each great writer existed.

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  So much for the selection, which, for all its scholastic whimsicality, is the most successful aspect of the enterprise.1 Having caught your goose, you must cook it. But the editors are indifferent cooks. They have failed to overcome the two greatest barriers to a modern reader’s understanding and enjoyment of the Great Books—that their authors were largely foreigners in both place and time.

  Only a third of them wrote in English; almost all of them were citizens of strange countries fifty to three thousand years away. Except for a few scientific works, apparently no translations were commissioned for this undertaking. The existing translations of prose writers are probably adequate, and some are classic. But just two of the verse translations seem good to me: Rogers’ Aristophanes and Priest’s Faust. (I speak of reading pleasure, not of their fidelity. But I assume, first, that a work of art is intended to give pleasure, and that if it does not, the fault lies either with the writer, a thought too unsettling to be entertained in the case of the Great Books, or with the translator; and, second, that if any writer, Great or not, wrote verse he must have had in mind the effect of verse, in which the unit of form is the rhythmical line rather than the sentence or the paragraph, and that a prose rendering which runs the lines together produces something that is to poetry as marmalade is to oranges.) Rhoades’ Virgil and Cookson’s Aeschylus are in verse, but they are dull and mediocre, the former smoothly so and the latter clumsily so. Charles Eliot Norton’s prose Dante is unbelievably graceless (“In my imagination appeared the vestige of the pitilessness of her who…” “While I was going on, my eyes were encountered by one, and I said straightway thus…”). Jebb’s Sophocles and E. P. Coleridge’s Euripedes are in that fantastic nineteenth-century translator’s prose (“Yon man…” “Ay me! And once again, Ay me!” “Why weepest thou?” “Thus stands the matter, be well assured.” “In fear of what woe foreshown?”). Homer is in Samuel Butler’s translation, the best prose version extant, except for T. E. Lawrence’s Odyssey, and far better than the Wardour Street English of Butcher-Lang-Leaf-Myers, but it is still prose, and Homer was a poet. In prose, he reads like a long-winded novel. It is not as if there were no excellent modern verse renderings of the Greeks: Richmond Lattimore’s Iliad, published last year by Dr. Hutchins’ own University of Chicago, and the eleven plays by various hands in Dudley Fitts’ Greek Plays in Modern Translation, put out by Dial in 1947. At modest expenditure, the editors could have used these translations and commissioned others that would have for the first time made all the Greeks, Virgil, and Dante readable in English. However, since to the editors the classics are not works of art but simply quarries to be worked for Ideas, they chose instead to spend a million dollars in compiling that two-volume index, or Syntopicon.

  On principle, they have ignored the other barrier, time. “The Advisory Board,” Hutchins writes, “recommended that no scholarly apparatus be included in the set. No ‘introductions’ giving the editors’ views of the authors should appear. The books should speak for themselves, and the reader should decide for himself. Great books contain their own aids to reading; that is one reason why they are great. Since we hold that these works are intelligible to the ordinary man, we see no reason to interpose ourselves or anybody else between the author and the reader.” (The Doctor doesn’t explain why scholarly introductions represent an editorial interposition between author and reader while a two-volume Syntopicon does not.) It is true that our age tends to read about the classics instead of reading them, to give such emphasis to the historical background that the actual text is slighted, and the Adler-Hutchins school is quite right in combatting this tendency. But surely, without distracting the reader from the text, a “scholarly apparatus” could have given the essential information about the historical and cultural context in which each work appeared and have translated terms and concepts whose meaning has changed with time. For example, while some of the theories advanced in James’ Psychology are still fruitful, others are not—a fact that the modest and admirably pragmatic James would have been the first to accept—and the general reader would profit from such an expert discussion of the point as is provided in Margaret Knight’s introduction to a recent Pelican anthology of James’ writings on psychology. By presenting the complete text with no comment or exposition, the Board of Editors implies it is a “classic,” timeless and forever authoritative, which of course is just what they want to suggest. This is not my concept of a classic. Nor do I agree with Dr. Hutchins when he implies that indoctrination (“giving the editors’ views”) is the only function of an introduction. There is a difference between informing the reader and telling him what to think that seems to escape Dr. Hutchins, possibly because in his case there isn’t any difference.

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  We now come to the question: Why a set at all? Even if the selection and the presentation were ideal, should the publishers have spent two million dollars to bring out the Great Books, and should the consumer spend $249.50 to own them? Some of the more enthusiastic Great Bookmanites seem to think The Books have been preserved for us only through the vigilance of their leaders. Last spring, Clifton Fadiman, in the expansive atmosphere of a Waldorf banquet for the founding subscribers, saluted those present as “you who are taking upon yourselves…the burden of preserving, as did the monks of early Christendom, through another darkening…age the visions, the laughter, the ideas, the deep cries of anguish, the great eurekas of revelation that make up our patent to the title of civilized man” (applause). But with or without the present enterprise, the eurekas and the deep cries of anguish would continue to resound. The publishers themselves state that all but twenty-one of the four hundred and forty-three works are “generally available in bookstores and libraries.” Most of the Great Books can be had in inexpensive reprints, and almost all the rest can be bought for less than the five dollars a volume they cost in this set. This presents a dilemma: Those who are truly interested in books probably already have most of these, while those who don’t may be presumed not to be ardent readers, and not in a mood to spend two hundred and fifty dollars. Even when need and desire coincide, as in the case of young bookworms (if such there still are), it is more fun—and cheaper—to buy the books separately. Not only that, but sets, especially of different
authors, are monotonous and depressing; books, like people, look better out of uniform. It bothers me to see Tristram Shandy dressed like the Summa Theologica. Milton should be tall and dignified, with wide margins; Montaigne smaller, graceful, intimate; Adam Smith clear and prosaic; and so on. Mr. Rudolph Ruzicka has done his best, by varying the type faces and the title pages, to give variety and distinction to the set. In this respect, and in the binding, he has made a vast advance over the Harvard Classics (no great feat). But he has put nearly everything into double columns, which I find textbookish and uninviting. (Even the Classics are not double-column.) This was doubtless necessary for the lengthier books, but such slim volumes as Homer, Dante, Hegel, Bacon, and Rabelais get the same treatment. Rabelais looks particularly grotesque in this textbook format. There is, however, one work in the set to which double columns are admirably suited: Dr. Adler’s Syntopicon.

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  With this formidable production I shall now grapple. I have already pointed out that insofar as the set has a raison d’être, the Syntopicon is it. It is, however, a poor substitute for an introductory apparatus. According to Dr. Adler, “this gargantuan enterprise” represents “about 400,000 man-hours of reading…over seventy years of continuous reading, day and night, seven days a week, week in and week out from birth on.” Since he did not start reading at birth and is not seventy, he had to call in some help; the Syntopicon is “the product of more than one hundred scholars working for seven years,” which is to say that a hundred scholars worked on it at one time or another during the seven years of preparation. (The staff fluctuated between twenty and fifty people.)