The Whole Five Feet

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?