The Whole Five
Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty
Much Everything Else
Christopher R.
Beha (Grove Press, 2009)
When he set
out to read the Harvard Classics in 2007, Christopher Beha was at
something of a loose end. He had broken up with his girlfriend, left
his editorial job, and moved back into his parents' apartment on
Manhattan's Upper East Side. He had a degree from Princeton, and a
Masters in creative writing, but his novel wasn't selling, and the
publishing career looked like an all-too-comfortable dead end.
Fortunately, his parents could afford to shelter his retreat from
independence, and, when his aunt's terminal cancer caused her to move
in as well, he was there to help. It was to be a tough year for his
own health as well, and his reading project became a lifeline.
The Harvard
Classics set is not often spoken of these days. When it is, it's as
the epitome of the Dead White Men canon; a curiosity rather than a
living document. But it was once as much a part of the middle class
home as the piano in the parlor, and for a similar reason: people
aspired to partake of Culture, in an un-ironic way that we can
scarcely now conceive. In 1909, Charles William Eliot, after some
forty years as president of Harvard, was invited by the publisher P.
F. Collier & Son to compile the collection, following on a remark
he had sometimes made that "a five-foot shelf would hold books
enough to give in the course of years a good substitute for a liberal
education." He proposed omitting Shakespeare and the Bible, on
the grounds that people already owned them; in the end, they made the
cut. Dickens and Thackeray had to wait for the Harvard Classics Shelf
of Fiction, a twenty-volume successor to the fifty-one-volume
Five-Foot Shelf.
Beha initially
conceived of reading the whole 22,000 pages in one year as the sort
of literary stunt that had seen such successes as cooking all of
Julia Child, or swallowing the Oxford English Dictionary: a sort of
indoor Appalachian Trail. "The book I intended to write was
essentially a comedy, about a feckless, somewhat lost young man who
shuts himself away from the modern world and its cultural white
noise–from life as it's lived in his own time and place–in order
to immerse himself in classic literature." It became something
much more than that when he learned how the Shelf had shaped his late
grandmother's life. In his youth, he had often seen the books in her
house at Sag Harbor, but he'd never gotten much beyond Eliot's
introduction. "I realized that a woman I had never thought of as
especially literary had likely gained from these books a greater
grasp on the history of literary culture than her grandson now had."
A
front-to-back reading was almost certainly not what Eliot had in
mind; the last two volumes contain lectures and reading guides that
outline possible paths through the volumes. One could read
philosophy, religion, drama, or poetry in a connected way. One might
concentrate on Greece (Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles) or France
(Racine, Descartes, Rousseau) or the United States (Ben Franklin,
Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson.) The randomness of taking the
volumes as they came was compelling in its own right, though. Beha
keeps being moved by the conversation the authors are already having
with one another: "I was still reading to some degree to acquire
knowledge, and I was certainly still reading for pleasure. But I was
also reading to be a part in a great chain of readers: Aurelius read
Plato, then Aurelius died. Milton read Aurelius, then Milton died.
And here I sat up in bed reading Milton, fighting off the time when
sleep would overtake me. Such is everything."
And here am
I reading Christopher Beha (who went on to publish novels, and edit
for Harper's;) and you are reading me. There's no telling how far
back it goes, or how far forward. Much as we enjoy the doing of it,
isn't it lovely to step back and look at reading that way?
Posts
