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'A Company of Readers' Edited by Arthur Krystal

Intellectuals found fellowship in an elite book club

Sunday, August 12, 2001

By Bob Hoover, Post-Gazette Book Editor

	A Company of Readers By Edited by Arthur Krystal The Free Press $26.00

Edited by Arthur Krystal.

. $26.

In 1951, Gillman Kraft, a Columbia student, had an idea -- a book club for intellectuals. In those days before Joe McCarthy hit full stride, intellectual was not a pejorative. The proposal was pitched as the thinking reader’s alternative to the middlebrow Book-of-the-Month Club.

Luckily for Kraft, one of his professors was Lionel Trilling, who loved the idea and enlisted two friends -- W.H. Auden and Jacques Barzun -- to oversee the new club’s selections.

With friends like that ...

The result was the Reader’s Subscription. The trio selected the titles and shared the writing of the reviews, which appeared in the members’ monthly announcement, The Griffin.

“The body of a lion and the head of an eagle is perhaps an apt description of the species Critic,” said Barzun, who writes the forward to this collection of commentaries that ran until 1963, when the enterprise folded. At that point, it had changed owners and name to the Mid-Century Book Club.

Arthur Krystal, who edited Barzun’s “The Culture We Deserve,” compiled this selection of the trio’s writing, and the result is an elegantly composed perspective of a rarefied literary life before TV extended its stranglehold on American culture.

These are wonderful matchups of critic and writer.

Auden on Robert Graves: “His poems are short, their diction simple, their syntax unambiguous and their concerns, love, nature, the personal life, matters with which all are familiar and in which all are interested.”

Trilling on Jane Jacobs: “The intention of Mrs. Jacobs’ book [‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities’] may be described as that of substituting actualities for pieties, and she goes about her job with a vivacity and gusto which match her cogency.”

Barzun on George Bernard Shaw: “He remains the most astonishing mind in two centuries. ...We tend, of course, to like our literary masters more specialized and less lucid. We think the revelation greater in proportion as it is less revealed and we nurse the illusion that the mind we read easily is superficial.”

“A Company of Readers” is a charming little companion to the reading of books about ideas and art. It’s a bit discouraging as well, for today, writing like this is not easily found, and certainly not sought, in the business of popular culture.