It seemed possible—and it was, for Adler did it. The Synopticon of Great Books of the Western World required eight years to complete. Some of it was great fun; for example, the choice of the 102 Great Ideas (from Angel to Love, from Man to World) that were the canonical set of common notions of our heritage. (Adler later admitted that he had left at least one Great Idea out: Equality.) Most of the time it was slogging, stoop labor, for the books had to be read again and again, each time with higher and broader and more certain thought-maps in the minds of the readers.
Adler knew an index alone would not be all that beguiling. Each of the 102 Great Ideas, besides having a list of all the places in the Great Books where it was discussed, also needed a discursive account of the idea’s origin, scope, and nature, and an explanation of why it was important and how it fit with and was related to the other 101. This task Adler set himself to perform. Starting with Angel, and working through at the rate of one a week to World, he wrote 102 longish essays, each on a Great Idea, that together, I believe, constitute one of the major intellectual achievements of our time.
In such books as his well-known Six Great Ideas and others that followed it, Adler expanded on what he wrote in the Synopticon (as he called his enormous study of 102 Great Ideas) on ideas like Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, and Equality, Freedom, and Justice. Often, these later treatments are preferred by Adlerians, and by Adler himself, as the definitive account of a given idea. But the vast gamut of circling thought that is the Synopticon will never be replaced by these individual treatments, no matter how accurate and insightful they are about individual ideas. The essence of the Synopticon is in its completeness, its totality. The work stands as a monument to the efforts of critical philosophy in our century that will long endure.
I wrote that sentence twenty years ago, and I no longer believe it is true, although it should be. Adler died in 1998. We talked on the phone a few weeks before (we had talked steadily for thirty years before that). I recall the deep sadness that accompanied his statement in that last conversation to the effect that everything he had worked and fought for throughout his life had failed. I said, “No, no!” but the statement was in large part correct. The idea of a great consortium of thinkers who constituted an enduring intellectual tradition is no longer credible. The great men Adler admired and whose works he knew so well and loved so much have been consigned to the dump heap of intellectual history, to be replaced by … what?
That, of course, is the problem. The critics, calling themselves “Deconstructionists,” who brought down that great edifice have nothing, really, to put in its place. They wander in a fog of—well, I can’t say ignorance because many are very knowledgeable about this or that part of the tradition. But they do not see or understand it as a whole. I’m not sure that Adler’s vision will ever be seen again, and I think we have lost something rich and beautiful.
JOHN STEINBECK
1902–1968
The Grapes of Wrath
Travels with Charlie
John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, in February 1902. He attended Stanford off and on and moved to New York, where he worked as a newspaper editor and a bricklayer. Returning to California, he worked as a caretaker and wrote his first three novels, which didn’t do well. Tortilla Flat, however, published in 1935, became a bestseller and was sold to Hollywood. Of Mice and Men, his celebrated allegory of self-determination and need, won prizes both as a book and a stage play.
At the time, Steinbeck was traveling with several migrant workers on their way to California from Oklahoma. The book he wrote about the Joad family and their journey from the Dust Bowl occasioned a shocked reaction comparable to that produced by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Appearing at the end of the Depression of the 1930s, The Grapes of Wrath, with its biblical reference and its reference to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” brought to the fore all the feelings, fears, and anger that the Depression had produced. The book won a Pulitzer Prize and was made into a prize-winning film.
Only one honor remained to be won by John Steinbeck, and that was the Nobel Prize for Literature. He won it for a curious book, Travels with Charlie. Published in 1962, it was an apparently relaxed account of his journey around the United States with his dog, whose name was Charlie. But it ended with an account of his coming almost by accident upon one of the most moving scenes in American history, when one small African-American girl was conducted by state police into a public elementary school through a crowd of infuriated white folks who cursed her and spat on the pretty white dress that her mother had made for the occasion. Steinbeck’s description of the scene is … Well, I can’t say anything other than to tell you that tears are running down my cheeks as I write these words. He died in New York six years later, in 1968.
GEORGE ORWELL
1903–1950
Animal Farm
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name, George Orwell, was born in India in 1903 into a family of prosperous civil servants. He was sent back to England, to Eton, to be educated, and he served as an assistant district superintendent in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922 to 1927. But while still at Eton he had begun to be troubled by restless thoughts about the role of Britons in the world, thoughts confirmed and magnified by his experiences in the Burma police force. In 1927 he broke away from his family and his past, returning to Europe to live as an impoverished socialist and rebel in London and Paris.
He wrote two graphic autobiographical books about his experiences during the thirties, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and The Road to Wiggin Pier (1937). From the first of those books I shall never forget Orwell’s description of his weeks as a busboy immured in the dark, cheerless cellars of the Hotel Crillon in Paris—a hotel that he might have been staying at as a pampered guest if he had not elected to change his life.
In 1938, he went to Spain to fight in the Civil War; it was there, like many others fighting with the Communists against Franco’s Fascist troops, that he became a fierce anti-Communist. He felt, as did others, that the Communists had betrayed the Spanish revolution, and he never forgave them or the Soviet Union from which they primarily came. His book Homage to Catalonia (1938) was about his experiences in Spain.
All of these books were interesting and had attracted a small following, but they gave no promise of the perfect small work that Orwell published in 1945. Animal Farm is a political fable; indeed, it is the political fable, for as such it has no equal in literature. The story, as befits a fable, is simple. The animals on a farm revolt and take over the farm; they will now run it for their own good and according to their own lights, not those of the farmer. Their principles are purity itself, and they erect a banner across the farmyard: ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL. The horse is the strongest animal and the hardest worker, and he doesn’t object when the pigs, who seem to be the smartest of the animals and the most competent managers, take over management of the farm and tell the horse when and where to work. But he and the other workers become troubled when it appears that the pigs are not after all doing their share of the work yet are receiving more than their share of the farm’s produce. Subtle changes occur, and heartless cruelties masked by sententious rhetoric from the pigs; and one morning the animals are surprised to see that the banner across the farmyard has been taken down and another erected in its stead. The new banner reads: