Self-education seems to have been big business in postwar America. A look through the pages of a middle-class magazine like Playboy reminds us that the popular conception of the good life combined not only hi-fi, booze, tobacco, fast cars and tits but also access to literature and ideas. While many veterans were entering college on the G.I. Bill, others were stocking the bookcase with The Great Books of the Western World.
The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Wall Street Journal have published reviews of a new book by Alex Beam, The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books. It looks like an interesting read, with enough gossip and irreverence to rile serious-minded folks.
I own a near-complete secondhand set of the first edition of the GBOTWW. I’m missing Shakespeare (vols. 26 & 27), which is fine because I own the excellent 1974 Riverside edition, and Plotinus (vol. 17), which I don’t see myself wanting to read anytime soon. The set was so cheapily acquired that any of the standard reservations (poor translations, no annotations, ugly double-columned type, Anglo-centricity) were rendered irrelevant. The English language texts are generally fine: Paradise Lost and Moby Dick, in particular, are single-columned and very readable books. But I have consistently gone to better texts for works in translation: Dante (Mark Musa in verse as opposed to C. E. Norton in prose), Homer (Lattimore for the Iliad and Fagles for the Odyssey), Montaigne (Frame) and Cervantes (the recent Edith Grossman Don Quixote in a sturdy Ecco hardcover).
The Great Books – fifty-four volumes from Homer to Freud, originally published in 1952 – was compiled by Robert Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler. It’s easy to make fun of Hutchins and Adler’s earnestness and self-importance (see Dwight MacDonald’s contempory review for the New Yorker). And I’m sure neither Hutchins or Adler intended that this forebidding enshrinement of the monuments of Western culture should find its ultimate success via hard-sell door-to-door salesmen. But that is what happened. Here is Time magazine in 1962:
Learn Now, Pay Later. To reach the butcher and baker, [national sales manager Kenneth M.] Harden set about building an indefatigable, door-to-door sales force. Operating out of Los Angeles, Harden set up a course at which new salesmen learned how to use the Syntopticon and to pronounce the names of the authors (reading them is not required).
In the field, Harden’s salesmen offered the Great Books (sold in sets costing from $298 to $1,175, depending on binding) for as little as $10 down and $10 a month, and threw in a bookcase and a Bible or dictionary to boot. In chart-studded sales broadsides, they talked earnestly of the importance of a liberal education for children, and displayed Great Books reading lists for youngsters. To help spread the Great Books idea, more than 50,000 adults were signed up in Great Books discussion groups (run by the non-profit Great Books Foundation).
It’s clear that most of those thousands of sets were dusted rather than read. In addition to the supposed unreadability of the editions, MacDonald pointed out that in 1952 most of the titles were easily available in cheap reprints, and almost all the rest for less than the GBOTWW rate of five dollars each volume. This is even true today. Is there a single book on the list that could not be found secondhand from an online seller for less than a fiver?
But let’s put aside these quibbles and look to a more general malaise. The self-education impulse – at least that based around the study of some sort of Western canon rooted in the works of classical Greece, Rome, and post-medieval Europe – has now vanished from the mainstream. Of course there are still serious readers out there, and the desire for self-education is still strong enough to make best-sellers of polemics by people like Harold Bloom (The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages, 1994). Indeed, new sets of the Great Books are still for sale (US$995 at amazon.com), although no longer sold door-to-door. But at some point the auto-didactic aspirations of the middle-class consumer eroded. What is to blame? The usual explanation is the dumbing down of contemporary life, and nobody can really argue with that in an age of widespread functional illiteracy. But what else? University education became more accessible to the middle class – theoretically reducing the demand for self-education in the classics – but ironically as more people (and more kinds of people) entered the academy, the humanities abandoned its reverence for canonical books and began to explore works of other cultures, minority voices, pop culture, etc.
It’s boring to defend the Hutchens/Adler vision of the canon – sorted, commodified and yet still stuffily inaccessible. The high/low culture divide is often fraudulent and useless, which is not to say there shouldn’t be a hierarchy of literary value. There must be. History continues to decide it. History asserts the fundamental importance of some or most of the books these men enshrined in their quixotic list, as well as hundreds of other books.
But the sad truth is that today, in almost all fields except postgraduate academia (and sometimes not even there), an intellectual grounding in the Great Books (or, rather, the great books) is essentially useless cultural capital. The only viable motive for self-education today is intellectual curiosity. So the middle class have opted out.
[Update 24/11/08: See a related discussion, with my comments, at Robert McHenry's blog at Britannica.]
Posted by matthewasprey 
Posted by matthewasprey 
Posted by matthewasprey 
