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?

Garlic and Sapphires

Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise

Ruth Reichl (Penguin Books, 2006)

     Sometimes, you're the last to know about your own life. In 1993, while she was the restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times, Ruth Reichl got a call from the New York Times trying to lure her back East. The Times already knew her work, and they knew she'd say yes. The department secretary knew. Her journalist husband arranged with his employer for a spot in their New York bureau. She grudgingly agreed to a day of interviews; still thinking she wasn't interested, she was free to say what she really thought, which made them want her all the more. And really–she'd have been nuts to say no.

     As soon as she said yes, she had a new problem: her fame preceded her. Her picture was posted at the waiters's stations in all the best places, with bonuses for spotting her. This could be delightful: "And then fireworks began shooting across the table: black truffles and white ones, foie gras, lobster, turbot, venison. The play of flavors was a symphony, as if we were the only people in the restaurant and fifty chefs were cooking just to please us. Each dish was rushed to the table the instant it was ready; each was served at the peak of perfection." But since that's not an experience most people can ever have, it's not the experience she was trying to review.

     The solution was wigs, or rather, personas. An old friend of her late mother sent her to the right consignment shop, and got her a makeup artist. Ruth became Molly, a wealthy nonentity from the Midwest, someone who could blend in to the point where the service at Le Cirque was actively bad. This was an interesting sociological study: Can a dull, poor person get a decent table? At what apparent age does a woman disappear? Or, on the other end of the power scale, why do the editors of the Times like to be seen with her?

      Even more, as she tried on different looks, Reichl found herself engaged by the psychological implications. When she wore her mother's jewelry and clothing, she understood her perhaps better than ever before. "I felt my mother's joy as I swept up the stairs, breathing in the affluent air. By the time I arrived at the top I was seeing it all as she would, thrilling to the chains rippling seductively across the windows and the deep, private underwater feel of the room."

     Plenty of things about the New York of twenty-five years ago seem both familiar and strange: smoking sections in restaurants! Pay phones! The Trump Tower as merely a gaudy temple of excess! The era of classic French restaurants was bumbling to a close, and Reichl sought out ethnic enclaves that seemed bold and new (at least for the Times.) But the gulf between the rich and the poor already yawned like the Grand Canyon, with the same blindness on the part of the wealthy that we see today.

      Reichl's predecessor as critic was somehow still glowering around the office, giving evidence that the job had a limited life span. She was missing too many dinners with her young son. And, by 1998, she had started to run out of faces. A few of her later personas were the worst kind of customers: the peevish, the demanding, or the snobbish, occasionally to the horror of her friends who went out with her. 

      Once again, blessedly, the powers that be had a better plan for her than she had for herself. Offered the editorship of Gourmet, she had the good sense to say yes. Time being what it is, you probably can't go back to these restaurants, and you probably wouldn't want to. But the recipes Reichl includes may count as compensation, and the writing itself is delicious.

Any Good Books, July 2019

Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music

Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music

Glenn Kurtz (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)

      As a young boy in the early seventies, Glenn Kurtz was accounted a guitar prodigy by the staff and students of his local suburban guitar school. He could play anything, it seemed, from folk tunes like "The Jolly Roving Tar" to the classical 'Segovia repertoire', with side excursions, as the decade went on, into rock and jazz. He was a musical true believer, spending his afternoons in ecstasies of Beethoven and Bach. Practicing is the story of what happened to Kurtz's dreams as he came to maturity.

      Disregarding his parents' skepticism about a career in music, Kurtz accepted admission to the New England Conservatory, which catapulted him into a whole different league. NEC is centered on Jordan Hall, a performance space surrounded by rehearsal spaces. "In every room deeply committed musicians were aspiring to concert careers. The whole structure vibrated with intensely focused ambition and the insidious undertone of competition that came with it. Every hour of the day we were immersed in one another's practicing, each contributing our part to the din." The students study music history and theory, conducting and composition, but what they are really there to do is practice, and practice some more.

      Each student, naturally, has a teacher. Kurtz's teacher took him back to the very beginning, because his technique had too much tension in it, and he had trouble getting a clean tone out of the guitar. That was going to be a severe obstacle to being the next Segovia, but so be it–he would start again. The Conservatory being what it was, he was soon schooled in another reality: "Even if I could play the melody by Brahms as beautifully as the pianist next door, Brahms didn't write for the guitar. I had thought I was a musician. Now, for the first time, I realized that I was just a guitarist. Nothing had changed. I still had to practice. But suddenly these études felt like a kind of exile." 

 

      The guitarists had one notable advantage in the conservatory environment: they were very popular in the gig office. Kurtz could make a modest side living playing in the background at parties and weddings–if he didn't mind playing in the background. But he coveted the concert stage, which is dominated by other instruments. Plenty of pianists since Liszt had made a concert career of the piano, and plenty of violinists since Paganini, but classical guitarists generally need some kind of day job.

     Kurtz made a sojourn in Europe after graduation, but the story was the same. "Nothing prevented me from earning a living as a classical guitarist–I could teach, I could play at cafés and weddings, perform the occasional concert. But this was not the life I had striven for. Time splintered. Exercises became agony; preparing for competitions seemed futile." So, in a fog, he came home and got a menial job in publishing. Going on to graduate school in literature, he left the guitar untouched.

     Kurtz wrote this book because he picked up his guitar again in his mid-thirties with a new attitude, and a new understanding of what it is to practice. "I'm trying not to repeat myself. My first time through, I practiced badly, chasing an ideal that ruined music for me, turning what I had loved the most into torture. Now I'm pursuing not an ideal but the reality of my own experience." 

 

      It's complicated: he'll never get back some of the speed and ease he had in his twenty-one-year-old hands. But he can play every day; he can be kinder to himself, and more in the moment. Nothing is wasted, really, neither the time he gave to the guitar in his youth, nor the years when he had to put it down and face the rest of life. From now on, it's one day at a time.

Any Good Books, June 2019 Emailed.

Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen

Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen

Mary Norris (W.W. Norton, 2019)

      When I reviewed Mary Norris's Between You and Me, a memoir about her life on The New Yorker's copy desk, I hoped we'd hear from her again. In Greek to Me, she's back with the story of the obsession that occupied her non-working life. She studied both modern and classical Greek; she traveled all over the Greek world (the book would have benefited from a map); and she immersed herself in Greek myth and drama. She was fortunate to work for The New Yorker, which had a policy of supporting educational opportunities for its employees. Her boss there, Ed Stringham, loved Greece; he helped her plan her first journeys, and loaded her down with books to encourage her new enthusiasm.

     One of Norris's first delights was the Greek alphabet itself. She sprinkles it through the book as a challenge to the reader, but of course, we already know a good deal of it, from the 𝜶 and 𝜷 of the word 'alphabet', to the 𝝍 of 'psychology' and the 𝜒 of 'charisma'. And, of course, there's the noble 𝜴. "Oh! Omega has energy has energy in it, it has breath and inspiration...Nobody seriously translates 'I am the Alpha and the Omega,' the words of the Almighty from the Book of Revelation, as 'I am A through Z.' The Greek alphabet is infinite."

     I love the connections Norris finds between antiquity and the present day. The conversational putty that fills American English ("like, totally, so, you know, OK, really, actually, honestly,...") has its counterpart in the particles of ancient Greek. "I was amazed, in reading Plato's Apology of Socrates, how much nuance these syllables give to Socrates' speech–they act like nudges, winks, facial expressions. You can almost see Socrates poking his listener as you hear his confidential 'don't you know,' a folksy expression from a sage older generation." The casual nature of the smallest words poses a translation problem, as the literal English tends to weigh more than the Greek original. But then, in writing, we have punctuation for some of the purposes for which they only had words. Translation is always, always an imperfect art.

     That's why people sometimes perform ancient Greek plays in the original language. Norris joined the Barnard Columbia Greek Drama Group in the chorus of the Electra of Euripedes, walking around New York City in a fog of memorized Greek texts. The following year, she was promoted to the lead in The Trojan Women, as Hecuba, Queen of the defeated Troy. Her husband and son have been killed, and her home is burning. "The play is an exercise in comparative and superlative: Hecuba starts out sad and gets sadder and sadder and sadder until she is the saddest woman who ever lived." She wrote to Katharine Hepburn to ask for advice about the pacing of all that sadness, which is totally ludicrous, except it's exactly what Mary Norris would do. She misses no opportunity.

     Norris had time to do all this because she was single. There was nobody to mind if she got caught up in study and forgot to eat dinner or collect the mail. As a woman traveling alone in Greece, she attracted the attention of every man with a pulse, which could be awkward, especially given the imperfect state of her spoken Greek. Even more, however, her love of Greece had a liberating effect.

     Her Catholic girlhood had offered Norris a very limited menu of ways to be a woman, either a mother or a nun. "Other women and girls may favor a different goddess. Many opt for Artemis, the huntress; someone who longs for children might identify with Demeter; great beauties are chosen by Aphrodite. Hera is not popular; in her Roman guise as Juno she is statuesque and confident, but what a bitch. For me, it had to be Athena. Whereas the Virgin Mary is a model of humility and servitude, Athena is the template for a liberated woman." Mary Norris has taken full advantage of that template, and the result is glorious.

Any Good Books, May 2019 email edition.

Dreyer's English

Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

Benjamin Dreyer (Random House, 2019)

     One day I'm going to write a review consisting solely of large chunks from the book, because the writing is just so damned sprightly. I don't think this is that day, but it wouldn't be a bad one to choose. Benjamin Dreyer, in his capacity as the Copy Chief at Random House, has made the world a better place by cleaning up the prose of innumerable writers. He knows a good sentence from a bad one, and he has written a beautiful, witty book about how to tell the difference. 
 

    "A good sentence, I find myself saying frequently, is one that the reader can follow from beginning to end, no matter how long it is, without having to double back in confusion because the writer misused or omitted a key piece of punctuation, chose a vague or misleading pronoun, or in some other way engaged in inadvertent misdirection."

    The book is mostly a catalog of misdirections Dreyer has known. He hastens to say that it's not actually comprehensive; you still need The Chicago Manual of Style "whose edicts I don't always agree with but whose definitive bossiness is, in its way, comforting," and Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, in addition to a few good dictionaries. 
 

    But what a catalog! Under "Notes on Proper Nouns", under "Colombia", this: "South American country. Two o's. Columbia, with a u, is, among other things, a New York university, a recording company, a Hollywood movie studio, the District also known as Washington, the Gem of the Ocean, and the female representation of the United States." 'Among other things?' Seriously? Nice. 
 

    You will find at least a few things you didn't know in that chapter, as you might in "Notes on Easily Misspelled Words" and "The Confusables." Some of you, though, spoiling for an argument, will turn directly to "Peeves and Crotchets." "The thing is, everyone's peeves and crotchets are different. People who couldn't care less about 'could care less' will, faced with the use of 'impact' as a verb, geschrei the house down, and that mob that sees fifty shades of red, scarlet, and carmine over the relatively newfangled use of 'begs the question' to mean 'raises the question' may well pass by a 'comprised of' without so much as batting an eye." 
 

    Some entries ("Based off of") get "No. Just no." Some get "I don't think that's asking a lot." Others get "Move on already," or, at greater length: "As to people who object to supermarket express-lane signs reading '10 items or less'? On the one hand, I hear you. On the other hand, get a hobby. Maybe flower arranging, or decoupage." Good writers avoid some expressions because they're wrong, and others because people will come running to tell them that they're wrong. 
 

    That same mob of peevers and pedants are the indirect subject of the chapter on "Rules and Nonrules," such as 'Never End a Sentence with a Preposition,' and 'Contractions Aren't Allowed in Formal Writing.' "Why are they nonrules? So far as I'm concerned, because they're largely unhelpful, pointlessly constricting, feckless, and useless. Also because they're generally of dubious origin: devised out of thin air, then passed on till they've gained respectable solidarity and, ultimately, have ossified." All good reasons. 
 

    No matter how many books on usage you already have, you want this one. It's funny; it's timely; it's authoritative, but in a way that keeps the conversation going. Dreyer again, by way of conclusion: "There's no rule without an exception (well, mostly), there's no thought without an afterthought (at least for me), there's always something you meant to say but forgot to say. There's no last word, only the next word." And thank Goodness for it. 

Published by email,

Any Good Books, April 2019