Books: The All-Academe List

THE LIFETIME READING PLAN (318 pp.) —Clifton Fadlman—World ($3.75).

Critic Clifton Fadiman, the Schweppes-man of belles-lettres, thinks that everyone’s mind is dreadfully underdeveloped. He is right, of course. A load of guilt equivalent to the combined weight of Dr. Eliot and his “Five-Foot Shelf” rests upon nearly all college-exposed Americans, by whom too many of the great books are unread or unremembered.

Fadiman’s attempt to remove this onus by main force is neither so precisely measured as Eliot’s invention nor so massive as the Robert Hutchins-Mortimer Adler set of Great Books. Fadimaa. has drawn up a similar list of 100, but ‘he provides only an introductory pep talk about each book’s contents and author. If he sounds like a real estate agent when he assures his readers that they may take up to 50 years to complete the plan, it probably does not matter.

Some omissions or inclusions may be debated, the author concedes willingly. He leaves out Aristophanes, for instance, because of translation difficulties (although the Eugene O’Neill Jr. translation is delightful), and includes Aldous Huxley while snubbing both Camus and Sartre. No Eastern literature makes Fadiman’s All-Academe list because, he confesses, it does not appeal to him. But he includes a volume (No. 100 of the great books) that does appeal to him: An American Anthology, by Clifton Fadiman.

Still, the core of the list is the heart of the West’s wisdom and genius. And the information in Fadiman’s bibliography and introduction is helpful. Unfortunately, the sheer pomposity of any such program of cultural pushups is enough to send many readers scuttling to the pages of Agatha Christie. Perhaps Fadiman should have totted up an auxiliary list of 100 works that are MERELY GOOD (Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Pope’s Essay on Man—) and another of volumes FRIVOLOUS BUT CHARMING (Petronius’ Satyricon, Cummings’ Collected Poems}.

Dissenters will find another complaint: Fadiman paints the glories of the written word in a style that is as flat and as patronizing as a high school history text.

There are a few flashes of wit (“Malraux is Hemingway grown up”) and polemic (“the liberal temperament’s besetting weakness is parochialism”). More typically, though, he writes of Thucydides n words that might have come from the Pentagon itself. Later he asserts that ‘Tolstoy is a very large man. When we read him we too must enlarge ourselves.” It looks like a very large 50 years for literature.