The Lamp Magazine | The Love Song of Mortimer J. Adler

When I arrived at Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. in 1967, it was installed in Chicago on two ample floors in the Mandel-Lear warehouse, just east of the Gothic Chicago Tribune building. One floor was given over to its editorial and art departments, the other to its business and sales departments. Founded in Scotland in 1768, Encyclopaedia Britannica had a nearly two-hundred-year history, acquiring along the way such impressive contributors as Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky, Benjamin Franklin, William Hazlitt, Alfred North Whitehead, Marie Curie, George Bernard Shaw, and Helen Wills. Stately in its many volumes, reliable in its factual material, in all respects authoritative, Britannica was easily the leading such reference work in the Anglophone, if not the entire, world.

When I started there, it was run by a hundred or so anonymous members of its editorial and art departments, the former whose job it was to add new and update old articles, the latter to supply photographs and maps to accompany these articles. Unknown soldiers all, they worked sedulously, and for less than grand salaries.

Although I did not know it at the time, I had been hired to undo their work. As Britannica neared its two hundredth anniversary, the feeling was that the time had come for a major revision. What form this revision ought to take had not been decided. I among others was hired to decide. Given that there was no encyclopedia in the household in which I grew up, nor did I own an encyclopedia in my adult life, nor had ever given the matter of encyclopedias the least thought, this was, for me at least, rather a tall order.

One senior editor before me had been hired, a man six or seven years older than I named Robert Hazo. Robert’s family was Lebanese, Maronite Christian. He had gone to St. John’s College in Annapolis, the decisive event in his life as it was in that of everyone who went to this Great Books school. Before Britannica, he had worked for its director, Mortimer Adler, when his office, modestly known as the Institute for Philosophical Research, was in San Francisco. Robert had written a book, The Idea of Love, on one of Adler’s one hundred two “Great Ideas.” An unembarrassed elitist, Robert would on occasion refer to the editors working on Britannica as “Aristotle’s natural slaves.” Since initially there wasn’t much work for either of us to do, we spent long hours smoking and schmoozing in one or the other of our offices, about politics, books, and our fellow employees.

Our assignment was to find a possible theme for what was to be the new Britannica. I decided on the theme of struggle. Life begins with the struggle of childbirth, nations struggle to come into existence, creation of all kinds entails struggle. I was asked to write a paper defending the theme. A useless exercise, really, for an encyclopedia, by definition, is an encirclement of all knowledge, and no single theme can hope to cover so wide a span. Nevertheless I wrote a paper on struggle, and today can only say that I am glad it is lost and hope it never turns up.

Work at Britannica was easy enough. Weeks would go by with our having little or nothing to do. Soon a new editorial arrangement was established that called for a breakdown of the content of the Britannica into ten parts with a senior editor hired for each of them: (1) physics, chemistry, and astronomy; (2) geology, geography, oceanography; (3) taxonomy, molecular and cell biology, physiology, neuroscience, ecology; (4) human evolution, medicine, psychology; (5) politics, economics, education, and law; (6) the arts; (7) the history of technology and the different technologies; (8) religion; (9) history organized by continent and epoch; and (10) the branches of knowledge: mathematics, logic, science, philosophy, humanities, library science.

New editors were hired. Some were failed academics; a few were former journalists. I recall walking with Robert Hazo on our way to lunch behind three of the arts editors, and hearing him remark, “Ah, look at them, enjoying their turgid little ironies.”

One interesting figure among the editors assigned to work on the revision of Britanica, hired on loan from Mortimer Adler’s office, was Charles Van Doren, the son of the Columbia University teacher and poet Mark Van Doren. Charles was of course famous for his appearance on the television quiz show Twenty-One, where he won one hundred twenty-nine thousand dollars (nearly $1.5 million in today’s dollars). He was on the cover of Time on February 11, 1957—Leonard Bernstein was on the cover the week before and Martin Luther King, Jr., the week after—and for a brief stretch may have been the most famous man in America.

When Charles confessed at a congressional hearing in 1959 that he had been fed the answers to the questions he was asked on the show, he soon turned into the most infamous man in the country. The first lunch I went to with Charles I happened to mention that I was, later that day, closing on a house I had bought. “Ah,” he said, “the last time I closed on a house, in New York, I had two jobs, one at NBC and one at Columbia, and the very next day I had neither.” This was his way of clearing the air on his scandal. One never wanted to get into an argument with Charles, for the sad and simple reason that one had too natural an advantage over him, a nationally renowned bullshitter. Growing up in the Van Doren family, Charles had wide learning, but its depth remained a puzzle, at least to me. He seemed to know a lot but believe in little. Had his scandal not been revealed, Charles, who was enamored of the 1960s, might have gone into politics probably as a progressive avant la lettre.

That Charlie (as I came to know him) found a job with Mortimer Adler after his scandal broke is testimony to the strength of what I came to think of as the Columbia network, or intellectual mafia. Mark Van Doren, Jacques Barzun, Clifton Fadiman, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Mortimer Adler all fed each other work over the years. In 1943, when Robert Wood, chairman of Sears, Roebuck and Co., divested his company of some among its many holdings, he donated the Encyclopaedia Britannica to the University of Chicago. Robert Hutchins, then president of the university, in turn passed it along to his vice president for public relations, the former advertising man William Benton (of Benton & Bowles), for a minimal sum, with the arrangement that Benton would return a royalty on all sets sold to the University of Chicago.

Hutchins would later bring on Mortimer Adler, who brought along his Columbia compatriots Van Doren, Barzun, and Fadiman to work on Britannica. Clifton (or Kip, as he was known) Fadiman’s story was that he had hoped to go to graduate school in English at Columbia, but was told that the English department there already had accepted Mr. Lionel Trilling, its way of saying that the graduate student quota for Jews was filled, thank you very much. The story, told by Fadiman, was that, denied the chance of a life of scholarship, he went for money, and a fairly powerful moneymaker he turned out to be. He had earlier achieved fame as the host of a much-listened-to radio show called Information Please that ran from 1938 to 1951, he helped found the Book of the Month Club and stayed on as one of its panel of judges, and he worked as a consultant on Britannica for the impressive (for that day) annual salary of sixty-three thousand dollars. Earlier he had been one of the main book reviewers for the New Yorker.

Kip Fadiman had a Jewish problem, and not only with the Columbia English department. Born in Brooklyn in 1904, the son of a druggist and a nurse, he expressed his discomfort with his Jewishness through the novel mode of extreme pretension. At a meeting about the reorganization of Britannica, he composed a rubric for the new table of contents that ran: “The beginning of cinema: the curious confluence of an emerging technology and a surgent entrepreneurial ethnic group.” When this was read aloud in one of our many editorial meetings, Robert Hazo passed a note to me that read, “I think he means the Jews got there first.”

I once heard Kip say, “What’s left for me: a few wines, certain cheeses.” He was sixty-three at the time. His daughter, Anne, wrote a book called The Wine Lover’s Daughter, about the inordinate importance he placed on fine wine. Fran Lebowitz has said that there are three kinds of people: ordinary people who talk about other people and current events, highly cerebral people who talk about ideas, and stupid people who talk about wine.

I was put in charge of a stable of eight or nine writers, a few hired by Warren Preece, the rest by me. Among them were a poet who had previously worked at Time named Mark Perlberg; Ralph Tyler, Jr., whose father worked at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto; a young black novelist named Ron Pair, whom when I hired I asked what he was expecting in the way of a salary, to which he casually answered, “Eleven, twelve thousand.” I offered him thirteen thousand dollars, when I could have paid him as much as eighteen thousand dollars, and felt guilty ever after.

I was also able to hire Peter Jacobsohn, an old acquaintance from the New Leader days. Peter was perhaps twenty years older than I. He was the business manager at the magazine and handled its paucity of ads. He had gone from the New Leader to the publishing firm of W. W. Norton, from which he had recently been laid off. Peter was the son of Siegfried Jacobsohn, a theater critic and editor of Die Weltbühne, or The World Stage, an important cultural magazine during the Weimar era in which he praised the work of Bertolt Brecht, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, and others, and whose last issue was published in 1933, when it was banned by the Nazis. Siegfried Jacobsohn died in his mid-forties.

With the rise of Hitler, Peter and his mother immigrated to England. When the war broke out, Peter, interned by the British, was sent off to Australia, where his chief memory was of rolling out and marking off the lines on clay tennis courts. Peter, who spoke with a slight German accent, never became entirely acclimated to America, even after decades of living here. I remember him asking me, during the New Leader days, how much a baby costs, for his wife, Annette, also a German émigré, was pregnant with what would be their only child, a son, Nicholas. I cited the bill charged by my wife’s physician and by the hospital for her stay there during her delivery of our second son. “No, no, no,” Peter said. “I mean, how much is it likely to cost for the life of the thing.”

To Peter, at Britannica, I was always “the colonel.” Our understanding, never spoken of directly, was that I was to protect him on the job, which I was pleased to do. At one point I wrote a review of Peter Gay’s Weimar Culture for the New Republic under his name. One wanted to do things for Peter. He had charm, but of an unusual kind: people wanted him to like them. This, I thought, was owing to his immitigable Europeanness. These were still the years when in America true culture was viewed as European culture, and to be liked by Peter Jacobsohn was, in effect, to have been approved by Europe. Not that Peter was in any way cruel or harsh in his judgements, for he had no side to him whatsoever.

Britannica had a small number of interesting characters walking its halls. A Greek named Alexis Lladdas, who bore the title “vice president international,” was said to have faced and somehow survived a Nazi firing squad in Greece. In his mid-fifties, he was married to a woman in her twenties, and had a mistress in her mid-fifties. When asked to explain this strange reversal of the standard procedure­—older wife, younger mistress—he claimed that, with a wife only in her mid-twenties, he needed someone to talk to.

Another impressive character at Britannica was a man roughly my age named Martin Self. Martin was a New Yorker, a lawyer by education, though one who failed to pass the bar and never retook it. On Britannica he worked on legal articles, though not all that efficiently. He was smart, subtle, in every way an original. He dressed like a European, but of no known country. He made a meal of the lung-ripping Gauloises cigarettes he smoked. He kept his own hours, coming in late, staying after hours. Martin had gone to Bard College, where his mentor was Heinrich Blücher, the husband of Hannah Arendt. He once told Blücher that he was going to take his life because he could think of no reason to go on living. “Don’t take your life,” Herr Blücher told him, “We’ll find you a reason.”

Martin took especial pleasure in taking the measure of others. He once referred to a member of the editorial staff as a communist. I told him I thought this was nonsense; the man was no communist. “You don’t understand,” he replied. “If it were the 1930s and the American Communist Party still throve, he would have been in it.” He, Martin, had an impressive detachment. If he had a politics, I was never able to determine what it might be. My best guess is that he thought the most interesting things in life were above and beyond politics, which is of course true. During those days, when anti–Vietnam War protests were rife, a young woman in the office wearing a protester’s black armband asked Martin if he was going to that afternoon’s protest march. “No, Naomi,” he said, “afternoons such as this I generally spend at the graveside of George Santayana.” Like no one else I have ever known, Martin, in manner and in cast of mind, fit in nowhere. He didn’t last long at Britannica, for one early evening, after everyone had apparently gone home, he decided to inspect the contents of the editor in chief’s desk drawers and filing cabinets, and was caught at it by his secretary, who, unbeknownst to him, had also stayed late. He likely did so as much out of curiosity as out of any personal motive. The editor in chief fired him the next day.

In 1968, in a surprise move—surprising to those of us who worked there—Warren Preece was removed as editor in chief of Britannica and replaced by Sir William Haley. Then sixty-seven, Sir William had been director of the Manchester Guardian, director general of the BBC, and then editor of the London Times. Only the job of editor of the Oxford English Dictionary was missing to make his résumé perfect. Sir William was hired by William Benton, doubtless to commemorate the two hundredth anniversary of the encyclopedia, which was celebrated in England, by having a superior Englishman at its helm. Benton, a coarse man, who claimed a close relation with Adlai Stevenson and Hubert Humphrey, longed for distinction, and William Haley was hired to bring it.

Along with his editorial and broadcasting jobs, Sir William had published a collection of essays, Talking of Books, under the name of Oliver Edwards. He was part of the intellectual aristocracy of English life of that day, an aristocracy that included such figures as H. R. Trevor-Roper, Isaiah Berlin, Anthony Quinton, Gilbert Ryle, D. S. Carne-Ross, Michael Oakeshott, Hugh Lloyd-Jones, and John Sparrow. It is an intellectual aristocracy that seems to have disappeared in our day, leaving those doleful knights Sir Mick Jagger and Sir Elton John as representative Englishmen in a country sadly losing its intellectual distinction.

Sir William was taciturn, but one straightaway sensed his gravity. Here was a man I could much admire, and I could easily imagine working with him for a decade or however long it took to revise the Encyclopaedia Britannica under his stewardship. At one of the rare editorial meetings he called, he asked one of the arts editors, a man named Robert Loescher, to describe what he thought might be a fit form for a biographical article in Britannica on a visual artist. Loescher set out his description of his notion of such an article, feeling no need to go into intricate detail and instead ending several of his sentences with “blah, blah, blah.” After the meeting, Sir William called me into his office. “Mr. Epstein,” he said, “we must see to it that nothing Mr. Loescher writes goes out of this office without our first checking it.”

The hiring of Sir William interrupted the work on the great revision of Britannica. The engineer of that revision was Mortimer Adler. An indexer in philosopher’s clothes, Adler in his Syntopicon had produced two volumes with roughly one hundred sixty-three thousand references to the thirty-two thousand pages of the Great Books of the Western World, also published by Britannica. Reviewing this vast work in the New Yorker, Dwight Macdonald in a strong attack referred to it as “the Book of the Millennium Club.” Mortimer believed that everyone was educable, and that the study of the great books was the first step to becoming educated; he felt that these books, soon to be supplemented by an Encyclopaedia Britannica of his design, would complete the job of providing all the world with the means to an education. Mortimer’s intentions were of the highest; his grasp of reality of the lowest.

Mortimer was high on the past century’s list of savant idiots, or intellectually dazzling figures who get all important things wrong. I came to view him as an essentially comic character. Endless are the anecdotes about his misperceptions. At one point he was courting a woman to whom he attempted to write love poems. Writing on a yellow legal pad, he tore up page after page. When he went off to lunch, his curious secretary entered his office and found, atop a fresh page, the single word “Whereas.” A pity Aristophanes had died millennia before, for he would have found a rich subject in Mortimer.

Mortimer favored a Rube Goldberg sort of encyclopedia, divided into three main parts: one part devoted to longish articles on grand subjects to be known as the Macropaedia; one given over to brief articles on merely factual subjects to be known as the Micropaedia; and, finally, a vast combined table of contents and index for which he invented the neologism Propaedia. He began with the novel notion of creating an index, which he referred to as “the table of intents,” before supplying the actual content.

Sir William was not in the least interested in Mortimer Adler’s notions of how Britannica might be revised. His own, simpler program was to improve the contents of the set by bringing in the most brilliant contributors he could find, but generally to let it stand in its present, simple alphabetical organization and format. I was myself wholeheartedly a Haley man. I gave him a copy of Dwight Macdonald’s book Against the American Grain, which contained his essay on Adler’s edition of Great Books of the Western World and which he returned to me with a single word: “Devastating.” No two men were more unalike: Sir William, modest, suave, intellectually sophisticated; Mortimer, vain, coarse, intellectually crude. They presented a genuine choice, a choice the outcome of which put the destiny of the great Encyclopaedia Britannica at stake.

The decision—Adler or Haley?—was ultimately in the hands of Robert Hutchins. William Benton entrusted most intellectual matters to Hutchins, especially those having to do with the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which, after all, Hutchins had originally bestowed upon him. A great man in some ways, one of Hutchins’s failings was his tendency to be loyal to the wrong people, Mortimer Adler among them. My friend Edward Shils remarked about this friendship that “at least Prince Hal had the good sense, once he became king, to get rid of Falstaff.” Doubtless out of loyalty to Adler, Hutchins favored his plan for the new Britannica over Sir William Haley’s, which forced Haley, after scarcely more than a year on the job, to depart the editorship and return to his home in the Channel Islands. Staying on under Adler was not my notion of how I wished to spend my life. When I, not too long after, left Britannica, Sir William, with whom I had begun to correspond, wrote to me: “I am glad that you have left the Britannica. The people there worship different gods than we.”

After the fifteenth, or the Mortimer Adler, edition of Britannica was published, readers began to complain about the want of traditional index, finding that his Propaedia didn’t do the job, and two traditional index volumes had to be added. Later, Bill Gates proposed to take Britannica online, but the president of the company, an Englishman named Peter Norton, himself a salesman, saw little point in Gates’s proposal, feeling that door-to-door sales were the only road to the company’s continued success. A fatal decision, as it turned out.

The last printed edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica came out in 2010. It is still in business online, but a shadow of its old self, its prestige and authority leeched away. The once grand Encyclopaedia Britannica is gone.

This essay is adapted from Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life, Especially If You’ve Had a Lucky Life (Free Press, 2024).