• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1092 0

’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 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’s 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’s 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.

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. 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