Sunday, October 25, 2009

By Reviewed by John French

"The Whole Five Feet"

by Christopher R. Beha

Grove Press, $24

'The Whole Five Feet" by Christopher Beha is a useful, if exasperating, book about a highly useful, if exasperating, set of books, the "Harvard Classics," also known as the "Five Foot Shelf." Notwithstanding the criticisms that follow, I am glad that I read Beha's book.

Beha follows hard on the heels of Ammon Shea ("Reading the OED") and David Plotz ("Good Book") in devoting a year of his life to reading a huge literary product and then writing a book about the experience. (And, for that matter, of Julie Powell, who spent 365 days cooking every recipe in Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," then turned her blog about it into a book, "Julie and Julia," now the subject of a hit movie and Joanna Schmida's Keys Cuisine column in Solares Hill this week.)

In that sense, "The Whole Five Feet" can be viewed as a snapshot memoir. According to its publisher, Grove Press, the acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates considers it "A unique memoir ... Intimate, confiding, deeply moving." Maybe, but if I had wanted a memoir, I would have bought "Angela's Ashes."

As his self-imposed year of reading begins, Beha is a man who, at age 27, has quit a good job among friendly colleagues, dumped a girlfriend, whom he still loves, for no good reason, and moved back in with his parents. These life experiences in a young man do not a memoir make.

Our other glimpses into Beha's life are extensively medical and pretty grim. His beloved Aunt Mimi has died of cancer. He himself has recently survived a bout with cancer and, during this reading year, he has suffered a torn meniscus and contracted Lyme's disease. This is rotten luck, deserving of sympathy, but it is also sufficiently commonplace that it falls a bit short of memoir material. Besides, it gets in the way of the "Harvard Classics," which provided my only reason for reading "The Whole Five Feet."

My wife and I own a set of the "Harvard Classics" courtesy of her parents. I have never cracked one of its 51 volumes, but now, thanks to Beha's introduction, I probably will.

Beha's set of the "Five Foot Shelf" came to him from his maternal grandmother, a woman whose formal schooling ended at the eighth grade. She educated herself by reading the "Harvard Classics." Obviously Beha's grandmother was an extraordinary woman. Beha provides a photo of her during her career as a model in Paris for Christian Dior. Now that sounds like it has the makings of a memoir.

The "Five Foot Shelf" was compiled and published, in 1909, because P. Collier and Sons publishers approached the recently retired president of Harvard, Charles Eliot, to propose the project. The object, in Eliot's words, was "to select from the best literature of the world a five-foot shelf of books" that "will give any man the essentials of a liberal education, even if he can devote to them but 15 minutes a day."

The undertaking was a roaring success. Over the next two decades Collier sold almost half a million sets, or approximately 25 million volumes. The popularity of the "Harvard Classics" led Eliot and Collier to supplement it with a 20-volume Shelf of Fiction.

There are two off-putting aspects to the "Harvard Classics." The first is that the sequence of publication makes no sense in the abstract, or in any way explained by Eliot, or in any way Beha could comprehend. While one might reasonably expect Volume I to begin with selections from the Old Testament or perhaps Homer, it opens with Benjamin Franklin's autobiography.

Unfortunately for Beha, he'd decided to read these volumes in numerical sequence, so it was not until he reached Volumes L and LI that he discovered the editors had provided an Introduction, Readers' Guide, Index, and Lectures on the "Harvard Classics." The reader who simply wants to consult, say, Cicero (Vol. IX) will not have to cope with Beha's confusion.

The second problem arises out of the notion of both Eliot and Collier that the set would not sell if it contained popular works already owned by potential buyers. To me, this seems fanciful; if I had owned a few of these books, it would hardly have deterred me from buying the set to obtain the dozens of others. Nonetheless, apparently because of this assumption, we are given one obscure volume by Mark Twain but not his reputation-making works on Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Similarly, we are offered two novels by Tolstoy but not "War and Peace."

And there are puzzles of inclusion as well as exclusion. The Pennsylvania Quaker, William Woolman, appears to have been an admirable man but Beha finds his journals "almost always unreadable." And William Penn's "Fruits of Solitude" is a forgettable book of maxims, lacking any narrative.

Beha's decisions on what to include or omit from "The Whole Five Feet" are sometimes comparably mystifying. The "Harvard Classics" contains two volumes of religious writings, including Confucian, Buddhist, Hindu and "Mohammedan." As a provincial westerner, I would have appreciated an introduction to these works. Beha covers them in one sentence. And it is not until he reaches his "Afterword" that Beha realizes he has failed to comment on the outrageous Benvenuto Cellini's remarkable "Autobiography."

Still, I remain pleased that I read "The Whole Five Feet." First, it has reminded me of all the remarkable writing I have known and loved and forgotten. Consider Blaise Pascal: "Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed." Or fast forward to Dana's "Two Years before the Mast," explaining that "Death is at all times solemn, but never so much as at sea": "A man is shot down by your side in battle and the mangled body remains an object, and a real evidence; but at sea, the man is near you -- at your side -- you hear his voice, and in an instant he is gone, and nothing but a vacancy shows his loss."

Also, Beha has introduced me to fine writing I had not previously known. These passages range from Hippocrates' ("Life is short and Art long; the crisis fleeting; experience perilous, and decision difficult") to Frank Aretas Haskell, a lieutenant in the Union army, musing on the field of battle at Gettysburg: "Another spring shall green these trampled slopes, and flowers, planted by unseen hands, shall bloom upon these graves; another autumn and the yellow harvest shall ripen there -- all not in less, but in higher appreciation for this poured out blood.")

My problem now is simply which volume of the "Harvard Classics" to take down from our shelf.