A Great Idea at the Time

by Alex Beam

  In the course of a conversation about NCAA Division II football, I mentioned to University of Massachusetts journalism professor Ralph Whitehead, Jr., that I was writing about the Great Books. The Great Books! Whitehead grew up in Chicago, where his mother sometimes saw Robert Hutchins practice his fly casting in the lagoon at Washington Park, and in Appleton, Wisconsin, where his father worked as an executive for Kimberly-Clark. His parents participated in Great Books discussion groups and owned many of the inexpensive paperbacks published by the Great Books Foundation. The books were read, and not just by the grown-ups. Included in our copious e-mail exchanges, here is Whitehead’s account of his early encounters with greatness, lying on the living room floor of his family’s tiny apartment, where he slept on a bed that folded out from the wall:

  I was born in 1943, and by the time I was five or six my dad had told me, largely in his own words, the stories of The Iliad and The Odyssey, and then began actually to read to me from Robinson Crusoe—not every paragraph, as I later realized when I read it for myself years later, but the parts that speak to a boy’s sense of adventure and some of the parts about how Crusoe went about building a dwelling and getting food.

  It was at some point after we’d gone through Robinson Crusoe that my dad suggested that I look at Gulliver’s Travels and try to read it for myself. By then, I had already heard about Gulliver and the Lilliputians, and since the book doesn’t begin with the voyage to Lilliput, I was thrown off at the start. I’d already made my way through the dialect in Huckleberry Finn and saw the old-fashioned prose in Gulliver as a similar challenge. It took me hours just to decipher three or four pages of the book. I knew nothing of the original satiric objects of the book, of course, and read it strictly as a ripping yarn.

  I clearly remember that I opened up the Aeschylus book and the Sophocles book repeated times. Because they were books of plays, there was a lot of white space on the pages, and I kept figuring that this would make them easy to read. But I never could succeed in figuring out what the hell was going on. In time, this proved to help me with the book of Plato. The Socratic dialogues (I had no idea then that this is what they were called) also had a lot of white space, and I was actually able to understand them a bit—not a lot, but better than the plays. This told me something that I was able to act on when I was a number of years older: Philosophy sounds like it’s hard, but Plato is surprisingly easy to read.

  Whitehead later attended Lawrence College (now Lawrence University) in Appleton, where President Nathan Pusey—a future Harvard president—had instituted a Great Books-like “core” program for first-year students, called Freshman Studies. For the young Whitehead, the reading list was déjà vu all over again: Plato, Antigone, The Communist Manifesto, and The Prince, admixed with some of the more modern readings that Adler shoe-horned into the Great Books second edition: Heart of Darkness, Chekhov, and so on.

  The Great Books paid off in spades in Whitehead’s senior year, when he traveled to New York with the Lawrence team to face down the Virginia Military Academy in the popular national TV show “General Electric College Bowl.” The team attended a play at the American Place Theater, and Whitehead still remembers spotting the intellectual celebrities of the day: “Orson Bean was sitting in front of us, making out with a young woman. During the intermission, we went out into the lobby, and there were Ralph Ellison and Robert Lowell and Allen Tate catching a smoke.”

  VMI had been drilling. Footloose in the big city, the self-confident Lawrence team had been “chilling.” “There wasn’t a lot of time for practice,” Whitehead explains. The cadets crushed Lawrence in several practice rounds, but when the klieg lights came on, Whitehead and his friends won a surprise victory, and then went on to defeat four more adversaries, before being forcibly retired.

  During the contests, Whitehead remembers,

  [a] number of my answers were things I somehow dredged up from my earlier acquaintance with the Great Books. As it happened, there was a question about Aeschylus. There was a question about Moby Dick, a question about Thoreau, a question about Engels.

  At one point, the host, Robert Earle, showed my team a painting of two men dressed in classical garb. One was pointing up, the other was pointing either straight or down (I can’t recall!). The question was something like: Can you identify each of the philosophers in this painting? Because a copy of Plato had been in my home for 15 years, it was pretty easy to say that Plato, the philosophical idealist, was the guy who was pointing up, and so the guy who was pointing flat or down would have to be the more empirically-minded Aristotle.

  “Whatever I was able to contribute was mainly thanks to the Great Books,” Whitehead says.

  The late critic Ian Hamilton wrote a wonderful book called The Keepers of the Flame. It describes the devotees, the fanatics, the misguided relatives, the people left behind by great talents, who fancied themselves serving their idols long after the great flames had been extinguished. Hamilton offers several examples, the most notorious being Rupert Brooke’s overbearing mother and executor, known as “The Ranee,” and Robert Louis Stevenson’s widow Fanny Osbourne, who devoted their natural lives to protecting their dear and departed from scandalous memoirists and former lovers hawking troves of compromising letters. An updated version of Hamilton’s book would have to include flame tender Max Weismann, a dapper, 72-year-old businessman turned Great Books devotee.

  The Great Books changed many lives, and Max Weismann’s was one of them. A high school dropout whose father wanted him to become a house painter, Max has instead become a character, an icon of a bygone Chicago occasionally stumbled upon by newspaper feature writers. When I met him, he was still holding court at the Pump Room of the Ambassador East Hotel, which, many years ago, was a place to be seen. Bicoastal celebrities traveling by train would overnight at the Ambassador, and the photographers and gossip columnists working for the big newspapers and syndicates would visit the Pump Room most evenings to snap a picture and grab a few harmless quotes. “The arrival of these celebrities by train is a sign that they desire to be interviewed,” A. J. Liebling noted sardonically, “since otherwise they would simply fly over.” These days, it is a celebrity graveyard, with photographs of Frank Sinatra, Eddie Albert, and Gig Young still adorning the walls. Max, who claims the title of “honorary president of the Pump Room,” notes that the hotel still has a Frank Sinatra suite: “In Chicago, this is the only place he stayed.”

  Max lives in the neighborhood, Chicago’s Gold Coast, near St. Chrysostom’s, where he spoke at Mortimer Adler’s memorial service. Max was impeccably dressed in a tweed sport coat and dark turtleneck, and as we talked he nursed his favorite drink, a Grey Goose essence of orange vodka, and smoked Benson & Hedges menthol cigarettes. Since our encounter, Chicago has banned smoking in bars that serve food, so Max now smokes on the street, alongside the Ambassador’s doorman, whom he has known forever.

  Max was a young design engineer, a 1950s-era motorcyclist first and a young husband and father second, living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, when a friend convinced him to attend a Great Books seminar on The Communist Manifesto at the public library. “Khrushchev was in power, it seemed like a chance to see what communism was all about. My friend had made a mistake, the discussion was actually about Plato’s ‘Apology,’ which we hadn’t read. I had never heard of Socrates before,” Weismann explains. “I had a religious epiphany. I owe that discussion leader everything. I realized what an ignorant person I had been. It changed my life, every day, to this day that we are sitting here.” Weismann asked the discussion leader, “Whose idea was this? And he said, ‘Some-body named Mortimer Adler.’”

  Max became a different person. “I sold my motorcycles and started buying books. I realized that I wanted to be a philosopher and teacher just like Mortimer Adler. My wife thought I had lost my mind.” He even bought a set of the Great Books of the Western World for $595, which, he reminds me, “was a lot of money in those days.” Professionally, Weismann apprenticed himself to an
architect and learned the construction engineering trade. He also made a tidy sum of money patenting a color printing process, but he explains that “I was never into architecture—that was just a way to do philosophy. I wanted to make money only because I wanted to do what Adler was doing and I wanted to work with him.”

  And that is exactly what he did.

  Weismann moved to Chicago, and befriended Adler. Max says he and Adler dined together every evening in the Pump Room when his mentor still lived in the neighborhood. (Adler moved to San Mateo, California, in 1995.) As Adler started to lose his vision, Weismann says he began to handle some of the master’s correspondence: “That is how close we were.” In 1990, the two men founded the Center for the Study of the Great Ideas. A $20 membership still entitles you to the weekly e-journal “The Great Ideas Online” and the quarterly publication, Philosophy Is Everybody’s Business. For $45, you also receive “Personal philosophical and educational consultation, access to Dr. Adler’s books, articles, and video programs, [and] participation in The Great Ideas Discussion Forums and Seminars.”

  The Center exists on the Internet, and on the hard disc of Max’s iMac computer. It is a digital shrine to the memory of Adler. Every June 28, Max sends an e-mail message to all of his members, reminding them that “[t]oday is the anniversary of Mortimer Adler’s departure from our midst.”

  The Center hosts online discussion forums that don’t seem to be very well attended, and several times a year Max himself leads an online Great Ideas seminar—not a Great Books seminar—where “we do not discuss books per se, but rather the ideas and issues found in them.” They attract between twenty and thirty participants. The Center also engages in e-commerce, and is the go-to site for the handful of people, like me, who might want to buy DVDs of all of Adler’s appearances on William F. Buckley’s TV show Firing Line, or any book that Adler ever wrote. Max says he has sold “millions” of books, tapes, and discs off of the website, but doesn’t want to discuss specific numbers. When I inquired about copyrights, Weismann told me that Adler had granted the nonprofit Center access to all of his materials. He declines to say how many members he has.

  And every day, he tends the flame. “I’m digitizing everything Adler ever wrote,” Weismann says. “I would like to write a Syntopicon of his work.”

  I attended several official Great Books events while researching this book, one of them a weekend retreat in Mystic, Connecticut. In March 2007, about a hundred people converged on the Mystic Hilton for two and a half days. Most of them knew one another from previous Great Books events. A core of perhaps thirty or forty make an annual tour of the major Great Books events, from the Chicago Great Books Week (now just a weekend) in May, to the longer Classical Pursuits seminar in Toronto, and finally to the well-attended summer Great Books week at Colby College in Maine.

  Great Books people are great socializers, so I had no trouble making friends at the bar under the rescued buoys and thick hawsers in the faux-nautically themed Soundings Lounge of the Mystic Hilton. I have the Great Books bar scene to thank for meeting Karen Pizarro, a parochial school principal from Princeton, New Jersey, who was sitting in the Lounge with a couple of friends, nursing a drink and talking about books, of course. Karen was funny. Practically the first story she told was how she and her mother met Mortimer Adler and Clifton Fadiman at the Hotel Jerome bar in Aspen in the mid-1950s. “They were very flirtatious,” Karen recalled. “My mother was this gorgeous redhead, and when they invited us over to their table for a long conversation, I thought that quite an ordinary occurrence, since Adler was a household name in our home.” Her brother Tom, a young boy at the time, remembered the scene clearly when I spoke with him later: “Adler was hitting on my mother.”

  Karen and Tom had grown up in an extremely unusual household captained by their father Thomas Hyland, whose two main interests in life, according to his son, were “reading Great Books and killing Japs.” Though Thomas was born poor, his stellar academic and athletic record at Denver Cathedral High School won him a scholarship to Columbia in 1938. He had to hitchhike to Manhattan’s Upper West Side because he couldn’t afford a bus or train ticket.

  Pilot Thomas Hyland, who loved “reading Great Books and killing Japs.” COURTESY OF THE HYLAND FAMILY

  Hyland fell under the spell of Columbia’s legendary Classical Civilization course, a core curriculum created at almost exactly the same time as John Erskine’s General Honors program. “Contemporary Civilization turned my Dad’s life around,” his son recalls. “He left for Columbia as a devout Catholic, and the school just shattered his world. He came back a dedicated Marxist who later led union strikes and met with Jimmy Hoffa.” Hyland studied hard and also worked full-time, to supplement his scholarship and to send money back to his family. The effort overwhelmed him. He left Columbia after two years to return to work in a Denver bank.

  Just a few months before America entered World War II, Hyland joined the navy and became a pilot. He was a much-decorated ace, flying B-24 Liberators in the Pacific theater, and was credited with shooting down twelve enemy planes. His own bomber was shot down twice. His crewmen, whose lives he saved on several occasions, worshipped him. “We were led by the Great Tom Hyland, in my opinion the best P.P.C. [Pilot-Patrol Plane Commander] to fly a PBY4-1,” bow gunner Walter Bryant recalled after the war. “He always passed credit around. He never used the word ‘I,’ his word was ‘we.’” Hyland’s son Tom remembers how much Thomas loved fighting: “When he found out the war was over, he cried. He didn’t want it to end.”

  After the war, Hyland began a thirty-year career as a pilot for United Airlines, a job he adored for one reason: It afforded him time to read. “He said flying a plane was just like being a cab driver,” Pizarro told me. “He liked the job because it gave him all kinds of time to read the Great Books.” He never talked politics in the cockpit, and he never discussed literature, either. “He had no respect for pilots,” Tom says. “He said they were the dumbest sons of bitches that ever walked.” But flying had its perquisites. One day, before taking off from San Francisco, flight attendants summoned Hyland from the cockpit to deal with a frightened passenger. It turned out to be John Steinbeck, who needed several drinks to quell his fear of flying. Hyland thought the author of The Grapes of Wrath was America’s greatest living writer, and told him so. Flattery calms all turbulence, emotional and atmospheric. Whenever Steinbeck needed to fly cross-country, he phoned Hyland to learn his schedule, and planned his flights accordingly.

  Hyland was the perfect citizen-reader who figured prominently in the imaginations of Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, but less so in the real world. Back from Columbia, he wooed his bride-to-be with talk of books and ideas. “Our whole family used to watch the quiz shows, ‘21,’ and ‘The $64,000 Question,’ and what was so awesome was that my Mom and Dad got all the answers right without cheating,” Tom recalls. “As far back as I can remember, books were everywhere, books were talked about constantly. From my earliest memory they were both hammering home the idea of the Great Books.” Did they own the Britannica set? “Yes, we had several copies of those,” Tom says. “They’re rather forbidding, they are something you think of monks reading in monasteries in the Middle Ages.”

  “Home was our school,” Karen Pizarro remembers. “School was dull. When the teachers would say, ‘You need to go to the library and get a certain book,’ I would just look on my Dad’s shelves. I didn’t enter a library until I was an adult. He encouraged us not only to read, but to memorize the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Gettysburg Address. He thought that everyone had an unconquerable mind.” Her father gave away a fair portion of his pilot’s salary to family members who needed the money for school or college. His one extravagance was books. “I remember the sound of the hammer going all the time, with him building bookshelves,” Pizarro says. “At one point, when the books began to replace necessary furniture like beds, one of my brothers built stacks of
shelves, and my sister catalogued the books using the Dewey decimal system!”

  When he died in 2003, Hyland had amassed a library of 63,000 books. In his will, he asked for them to be redistributed in a three-day estate sale, with paperbacks priced at ten cents and hardcovers at three dollars. Maybe news was slow on the weekend of January 31, 2004, but five Denver television stations covered the sale, broadcasting pictures of hundreds of buyers lined up outside of Hyland’s split-level home to carry off bagfuls and, in some cases, rolling containers full of books. “It really does look like a library,” gushed reporter Karen Tilley in a live shot for Channel 7.

  Hyland’s children and grandchildren honored his last request: to be buried with a copy of Adler’s 1940 best-seller, How to Read a Book. Hyland’s son Tom, a self-styled “urban monk” who devotes his life to learning, still swears by How to Read a Book and calls Adler “one of the greatest Americans who ever lived.” Even if—or perhaps because—he made a pass at Hyland’s mother. “It’s a book I still read,” says Tom. “I made certain all three of my children read it. They have thanked me again and again for doing it.”

  His sister Karen reports that she has eighty-five copies of Adler’s best-seller in her home, most of them gifts from her father. She parts company with her brother when discussing the merits of Adler’s famous tome. “It’s an awful book,” she says. “It’s one of the worst books ever written. If we brought our boyfriends home, they would read it just to impress us.”