The Whole Five Feet

Grove Press

Contents

Introduction, or "A Careful and Persistent Reader".........................1January, or "I Made a Little Book".........................................19February, or "Take Up and Read"............................................37March, or "Not By the Knowledge of Words"..................................57April, or "Mambrino's Helmet"..............................................75May, or "To the Daughters of the Air!".....................................95June, or "No Wiser Than Before"............................................111July, or "The Enjoyments of Life"..........................................129August, or "Go to Grass"...................................................149September, or "Not of Athens, but of the World"............................167October, or "To My Own Sons, and Those of My Teachers".....................185November, or "Food for Future Years".......................................201December, or "The Thinking Reed"...........................................221Afterword, or "I Shall Go On in the Same Way"..............................239Appendix I.................................................................251Appendix II................................................................257

Chapter One

Volume I: Franklin; Woolman; Penn

Volume II: Plato; Epictetus; Marcus Aurelius

Volume III: Bacon; Milton; Thomas Browne

Volume IV: Complete Poems, Milton

Dear Son-So begins Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography (1788), and with it the Harvard Classics. On that New Year's night, the words seemed to confirm my idea of the Classics as a communication from earlier generations, and I was excited to be finally receiving this communication. Several times over the months since I'd come up with my plan to read the Shelf, I'd considered getting an early start. I would walk to the place where the volumes waited in my parents' library and run my fingers along their spines, wondering what secrets they held for me. The fifty-one volumes took up three shelves, each close to two feet wide-the whole thing a bit more than the advertised five feet, I guessed. Reading a volume of four or five hundred pages a week didn't seem like much of a task, but when these books were taken together the expanse was overwhelming.

Now there was nothing to keep me from them. I was ready to read.

But first, I thought I might fix myself a drink-after all, it was New Year's eve. I walked from the library to the kitchen, thinking idly about the contents of this first volume. After Franklin's Autobiography, the volume is rounded out by William Penn's Fruits of Solitude and the journals of a Quaker named John Woolman. To be honest, I'd questioned the way the Shelf started ever since I first considered reading it. What was it about these relatively marginal works that earned such a prominent place for them? Why did Eliot start here?

As it happens, I wasn't the first to ask these questions.

Eliot announced his retirement from Harvard in October 1908, to take effect the following May, on the fortieth anniversary of his election to the presidency. A few months after this announcement, two men-William Patten and Norman Hapgood-approached him about editing what became the Classics.

Patten had started in the advertising department at P. F. Collier & Son, where he was the assistant to Cond Nast. He was later moved to the book department, which produced mostly cheap anthologies to be used as inducements for subscribers to Collier's Weekly, the muckraking magazine that was the company's major business. (A few years earlier, the magazine had published Upton Sinclair's initial investigations into Chicago's meatpacking industry.) When Patten had the idea of a series of great books that could be offered for subscription, Eliot's name came to mind. Patten proposed his idea to the editor of Collier's Weekly, Hapgood, who was an acquaintance of Eliot's. Hapgood assured Patten that there was "not a chance in the world" Eliot would agree to this sort of commercial undertaking. But after Patten produced an old article from Scribner's Magazine, in which Eliot had mentioned his long-standing theory about a five-foot shelf that might provide a liberal education, Hapgood agreed to introduce Patten to Eliot. Somewhat to the surprise of both men, Eliot signed on, with the one condition that he be allowed an assistant. For that role, he chose William Neilson, a literature professor at Harvard who would later become the president of Smith College. Work on the Shelf began almost immediately.

A few weeks into this work, Eliot remarked in a speech given to a high school in Atlanta that he planned to dedicate the early days of his retirement to compiling his Five-Foot Shelf. The news quickly spread that America's most famous educator intended to provide an outline by which any man or woman could attain the best education. It's difficult now to imagine the excitement this announcement generated. Editorials appeared in newspapers around the country. While they waited for Eliot's list to materialize, many of these newspapers invited the presidents of their own local colleges to offer candidates for inclusion. There was a great deal of debate about whether a true education could be had without formal instruction, especially in Latin and Greek.

Initially, Eliot gave no suggestion that his list was part of a business venture, and a number of other publishers-Houghton Mifflin and Funk and Wagnall's among them-approached him with offers to publish his Shelf. Once Collier's involvement became clear, there was suspicion about the project, especially among Harvard alumni, some of whom argued that their university's name-and by extension, its reputation-was being used for personal gain. (In today's age of rampant college licensing, the real surprise is how little compensation Eliot and the university received for their imprimatur: Eliot was given a $2,500 honorarium, which was renewed in later years; Neilson, who did the bulk of the work, was paid $50 a week; the university allowed its name and seal to be used free.)

In May 1909, well before the selection of the Classics was finished, Collier's salesmen began soliciting subscriptions, using a tentative, incomplete list of titles. This list soon made its way into the press, where it was roundly ridiculed. "Eliot Names Books for 5-Foot Library," read a headline in the New York Times over the subhead, "Shakespeare Is Not in It." On the basis of the odd selection of titles, some newspapers reported that Eliot had been duped into a scheme to unload Collier's underselling backlist. In response to this report and to letters from a number of alumni, Eliot wrote an open letter in the July 7 issue of Collier's Weekly.

"The incomplete and inaccurate list which appeared in the newspapers a few weeks ago was issued without my knowledge," he wrote, "and gives an erroneous impression of [the] project." He acknowledged Collier's commercial motives, but he emphasized that his own interest in the project was educational-an assertion that Collier's payment scheme tends to confirm. Eliot also assured readers that he had complete autonomy in choosing the titles for Shelf.

As it happens, this last part wasn't entirely...