Invitations to Learning

Before television there was, as we all know and as some of us can remember, radio. On the last Sunday in May 1940 (the month Germany invaded France), the Columbia Broadcasting System launched Invitation to Learning—weekly panel discussions of "the Great Books." cbs did not expect the program to attract enough listeners even to earn a Crosley rating, radio's first rating system (Crosley polled people in the morning about the programs they had listened to the night before). Stringfellow Barr, a member of the network's adult-education board, needed more than a year to sell the idea, finally clinching the sale by pointing to the success of Mortimer J. Adler's recent How to Read a Book: The Art of Getting a Liberal Education (1940). (College education did not become universal until after World War ii, subsequently declining into vocational training.) Barr was president of St. John's College in Annapolis, where he and the dean, Scott Buchanan, had established a Great Books curriculum. In the new program he would lead a team of three panelists, occasionally joined by a guest, who each week would discuss a book for a half hour without rehearsal or script; by way of preparation they would only talk together informally for about an hour before going on the air. The object, Barr said, was not to administer "culture pills" or "reach conclusions" or "give the academic lowdown," but "to provoke the listener to read the book"; at the end of each program a panelist would read a passage from the book. For the first broadcasts Barr chose the U.S. Constitution and books familiar to the nation's founders, such as Plutarch's Lives, Plato's Republic, and Cicero's De Officis.

While Barr was on vacation during August, cbs substituted Huntington Cairns, a regular panelist, as the discussion leader. Cairns was assistant general counsel in the U.S. Treasury Department. Joining him in a program on Balzac were two guests: Allen Tate, then resident fellow in creative writing at Princeton, who had participated in several previous broadcasts; and Mark Van Doren, poet, novelist, critic, and professor at Columbia. After two more programs with Cairns in the lead and with Tate and Van Doren, who were longtime friends, cbs executives decided this was the team they wanted for the series and fired Barr, engaging the three for twenty-six weeks beginning October 6.

Their programs were remarkably popular. By November cbs was receiving thousands of letters from listeners. After Katherine Anne Porter appeared as a guest, the black elevator operator at the Murray Hill Hotel in New York told her "how fine [she] sounded on the radio." "It's absurd, simply," she said, "and wonderful." Random House had contracted beforehand to publish the transcripts at the end of the season in April; they were the first actual conversations to be published as a book. They were not discussions of Book-of-the-Month Club selections. Three programs were devoted to Aristotle, to whom the three principals often refer in other programs. (They had attended college when Greek and Latin were commonly entrance requirements.) Programs were devoted to Plato, Pascal, Tolstoy, Proust, Shakespeare, Matthew Arnold, Lucretius, Dante, Leonardo, Tacitus, Hegel, and other authors ancient and modern. If the listener or the reader of Invitation to Learning read each book himself as he was advised to do, he learned more than a college sophomore is likely to learn from a typical survey course.

Although Stringfellow Barr complained that his program was being vulgarized for the sake of the Crosley ratings, the transcripts carry no whiff of condescension—the panelists and guests were more engaged with one another than with the "common listener." Guests participated in eleven of the broadcasts and included R. P. Blackmur, André Maurois, Paul Green, Joseph Wood Krutch, Edmund Wilson (who was handicapped by a bad case of microphone fright), and Bertrand Russell. Guests were usually invited for their special relation to the week's book. The conversations make interesting reading today, confirming or challenging the reader's predilections in a wide range of subjects. In the program on Hegel's...