Radio Days

Imagine a time when a professor of classics at Columbia University was given a weekly radio show and the only stipulation was that he confine himself to “books of a high standard or else open up some question of broad literary or social interest.” The time was 1952, the professor was Gilbert Highet (1906-1978) and the show was broadcast Tuesday evenings at 9:05 p.m. on WQXR in New York City. It aired on hundreds of stations in the U.S. and Canada, picked up by the Voice of America and BBC, and ran through 1959. Highet edited his radio talks into essays and published them in five volumes: People, Places, and Books (1953), A Clerk of Oxenford (1954), Talents and Geniuses (1957), The Powers of Poetry (1960), and Explorations (1971).

His best known book is probably The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (1949), but the one I remember most fondly is Poets in a Landscape (1957). On an impulse I took the first three volumes of Highet’s radio essays from the library and have been pecking through them in search of subjects that interest me but also trying to project myself into the mind of a radio listener in 1952 (the year I was born) who tuned in to such fare. Even as edited for print, Highet’s essays are conversational, not scholarly. There’s a suggestion of educated folksiness about them, but he never condescends and often makes flattering assumptions about listeners’ literacy that would never work today.

Friday was the first day of summer, so I started with “Summer Reading” from Talents and Geniuses. Without identifying them further, Highet mentions Tolstoy, Mann, Hemingway, Céline, Malaparte, Spengler and Toynbee, among others. All are names most common readers would have recognized in the nineteen-fifties, even without having read their work. I confess the notion of “summer reading” has never made sense to me, but Highet ignores my bafflement. He assumes summer means leisure: “Peaceful evenings. Lazy week-ends. And, sometimes, quite long periods of emptiness. Vacant days,” and so on. I’ve never experienced anything like that in my life.

Highet moves on to an anecdote. He and his wife took a house on Cape Cod one summer, and the only book he packed contained the complete works of “an interesting Roman poet whom I had never really read.” It was a rainy summer and Highet claims he first read 20 years’ worth of Readers Digest he found in the house – all 240 volumes. Who in the book-chat business today would admit such a lapse? Then he took up his Roman poet, whom he read start to finish without explanatory notes or criticism:

“…it is also valuable to push directly through the works of a good author, trying to see them as a single creation, appreciating their wholeness and their uniqueness and leaving the details for later study.”

This is marvelous advice which I have followed only a few times (Shakespeare, Proust). Highet recommends it to his listeners/readers seeking suggestions for summer reading: Choose an “important author” and read all of his or her work. He argues that such a regimen helps readers to “escape from themselves.” As an alternative, he suggests reading about “one single important and interesting subject: for instance, the paintings of the cave men; or the agony of modern music; or the rebirth of calligraphy; or recent theories of the creation and duration of the universe.” Also excellent advice, but I’ve never been able to follow it for long. I get diverted and follow tributaries and leave the Mississippi behind. Here’s his third idea:

“…we might read a large selection of poems and prose passages selected in order to illuminate one single aspect of the world. One such volume would go into a pocket or a handbag and yet last all summer.”

For me, this poses the same difficulty as Highet’s second suggestion. I enjoy a good anthology but I pursue the selections that interest me to the exclusion of others. A dollop of, say, Swift or Coleridge, only stimulates my appetite for more. Highet’s final suggestion:

“…one might decide to spend the summer with a single great or at least a single interesting man. For example, every doctor should know The Life of Sir William Osler by Harvey Cushing, and after reading that fine book he would enjoy himself if he went on to read Osler’s own writings. Osler never tired of complaining that most doctors had minds too limited and too confined to the physical symptoms which they observed in the routine of their practice. He kept trying to enlarge his own mind and spirit, and his books will therefore enlarge the mind and spirit of his readers, whether they are of the medical profession or not.”

I like this idea best. Take note of the grand assumptions, almost unthinkable today, that Highet casually makes: “Every doctor should,” “he would enjoy himself,” “his books will therefore,” and so forth. Highet lived in a happier, healthier world in which scholars could safely assume substantial numbers of common readers sought pleasure and “self-improvement” in the books they read, and that they would find it. My own resolution for summer reading is Osler and Cushing, and we’ll see which tributary I end up following.