Brilliance on Darkness

How TO READ A BOOK--Morfimer J.

Adler--Simon and Schuster ($2.50).

Mortimer Jerome Adler never graduated from high school. He never got a B.A. degree. In 1917, when he was 15, he quit high school in Manhattan because the principal had taken pardonable annoyance at Adler's efforts to run the school as well as the school paper. After two years on the New York Sun, Adler went to Columbia, finished the four-year course in three as top man in his class. At that time a graduate of Columbia had to be able to swim. Adler neither swam nor learned to swim. He got no degree until he had taught at Columbia for six years, finally taking a Ph.D. in Psychology in 1929.

When President Robert Hutchins brought him to the University of Chicago in 1930, Mortimer Adler was a very, very bright young man of 28. At first Hutchins put him in the Philosophy faculty, where his colleagues soon proved ungrateful for his presence. He then went to the Law faculty. As associate professor of Law and co-teacher with Hutchins of the famous course in Philosophy of Education (reading and discussion of great books), as a writer of philosophic essays respectful of St. Thomas Aquinas, Adler became one of the most scintillating, least adored, thinkers in the U. S. How to Read a Book should establish him as one of the most persuasive.

Long-nosed, lustrous Professor Adler wrote it in 16 days last summer, a chapter a day. (Each night he went to a movie, taking in 16 movies.) It is not a slight book (371 pages), but it is the first of Adler's writings in which he has spoken expressly to the man in the street. For people who think they know how to read, he has a clarifying question: "What things would you do by yourself if your life depended on understanding something readable which at first perusal left you somewhat in the dark?" After pondering that one, most honest readers will follow the argument that: 1) intelligent reading, i.e. reading for understanding rather than merely for entertainment or information, is a complex skill; 2) U. S. schools and colleges no longer give as much time to developing it as they once did; 3) it is extremely desirable, especially in a democracy, since all communication depends on it; 4) it can be learned or improved by following certain practical rules.

This sensible thesis is given by Adler with almost stainless clarity and with only an occasional glitter of that acerbity by which dull students at Chicago remember him. Adler admits that he has an ulterior motive: to appeal over the heads of conventional and progressive educators to the great reading public, to, show them what education might be and" is not. Putting first things first, competence in reading is a prerequisite to understanding nine-tenths of what men have known.

And understanding an author, Adler points out, must always precede criticizing or judging him. Understanding means analysis and interpretation. The good reader must train himself to state briefly what a book is about, to see its major parts and how they are organized, to locate the principal problems the author was trying to solve. Besides X-raying a book's structure, the reader must "come to terms" with the author by figuring out his use of words, picking out his important statements, seeing how these statements form an argument, or movement of thought. For reading fiction or poetry, there is a corresponding technique of imagination, equally clear and capable of being cultivated.

No mere manual of "mind-training," Adler's book provides not only the rules but a pleasurable discussion and application of them. Professional readers (lawyers, editors) know the rules, but even professionals may welcome a reminder.

As for nonprofessionals, the evidence is overwhelming that they live in a dangerous state of darkness so far as real literacy is concerned. Many readers, says Adler, "seem to want to keep a book as, according to William James, the world appears to a baby: a big, buzzing, blooming confusion." Mortimer Adler's position is uncompromising: the fundamentals are the fundamentals. Like the strokes in tennis, they have to be mastered separately before the game itself can be well played. Like tennis, good reading is an effort. But unlike tennis--or swimming in the case of the Professor--skill in reading is not something an adult can afford to take or leave.

It has its rewards. Adler argues eloquently that the great books, past and present, are the most readable; they were "intended for beginners"; their "conversation" is one that any skilled reader may enter. He appends a list of 131 great and readable writers and their books, from Euclid to Thomas Mann.

Adler's book is, in a sense, a revitalization of an ancient discipline. Probably few readers will be aware that its order and ease and luminosity are themselves products of an art known to Abraham Lincoln as to Aristotle as the art of Rhetoric. Publishers' Weekly, which has no illusions, calls it "a natural for the self-help trade." But How to Read a Book is not only that; it is also the most widely useful, least toplofty work yet produced by the classicist movement which Adler represents.

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