People, Places, and Books

by Gilbert Highet

Commentaries on the motivations, methods, and styles of authors and their books

Genres: Essays, Books About Books

277 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1953

About the author

Critic and classical scholar, Gilbert Highet was born in Scotland, educated at Oxford, and taught at Oxford and Columbia for forty years. Married to novelist Helen MacInnes. Best known for teaching in the humanities in the UK and USA.

Reviews

[Grady · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I visited my parents about two months ago, the title on the spine of this book - a small, blue hardback with no jacket - caught my eye. Sure enough, it consisted of essays about books and authors. Actually, the chapters are the uncut essays written by Highet as the scripts for a one-year series of radio broadcasts on culture in 1952, published the following year. Inside the back cover of this copy is pasted a list of 39 titles, all published within two or three years of this book; and a rotation list, with 39 names to advance a title to the next person on the list some 16 times during the year (so, roughly every three weeks). This was my grandmother's book club, which chose a different slate of books each year, and then rotated them, with each member apparently reading less than half the year's books. This was on the rotation for 1956-57. So reading this has offered a special pleasure, to imagine as I read what my grandmother thought of each essay 60 years ago, only slightly younger than I am now.

While I'd not known his name before picking up the book, Wikipedia tells me that author Gilbert Highet was the husband of thriller-writer Helen MacInnes, and was a much admired academic and teacher of the humanities. In these essays, he writes with a tone that I associate with the 1950s - confident, knowledgeable, judicious - with no shred of ambiguity. The style is direct and muscular. It's easy to hear these pieces in the mind's ear as they might have sounded over the radio, accessible and warmly humorous, but also casually erudite in a way that would mark the author as a member of the cultural elite. But tone aside, Highet has interesting insights to offer about his subjects: Robinson Jeffers, Edmund Wilson, John Masefield, Charles Dickens, Shakespeare's sonnets.

The essays in the last section of the book consist of discussions of then-recent publications in various categories, such as 'crime fiction', 'translations of classic Greek or Roman works', and 'history'. These have worn less well. Most of the books Highest mentions are not now well remembered, and these essays cover too much ground to offer the insights that characterize his sketches of specific authors. Still, even these survey essays aren't bad, and they showcase Highet's fairly catholic tastes, ranging from true crime to the Great Books to poetry, drama, novels, and science writing. He must have been an interesting person to know.

[Tina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this 1953 collection of essays on literature at a used book sale, knowing nothing of the author. Gilbert Highet, a classical scholar who hosted a radio program about literature and culture, was very much of his time: a public intellectual with much faith in--but willing to interrogate--western culture. He's opionated, but more open-minded than I expected. Many of the essays are thought-provoking. They're not at all dry, and often he's jaunty and even funny.

I've been reading several books of essays from the early to mid-20th century, and the authors (all male, some newspapermen, some academics) all share a masculine postwar humanist attitude and style--confident, insightful, rational, wide-ranging, well-crafted, elevated in tone, rooted in history and classicism, sometimes amused. Their faith in human rationality (and, often, American traditions) seems a little quaint, but I'm more cynical than they allow themselves to be.

I don't share all Highet's opinions (he really dislikes James Joyce, for example), but he's generally reasonable and interesting. Some of the essays seem dated, but not upsettingly so. His thoughts while unwrapping his set of The Great Books are quite entertaining. I really enjoyed his ruminations on satire, on Dickens, and on playwright Christopher Fry.

He occasionally uses a term (Leo Lerner also used it in his book of Chicago newspaper columns) that I think is underappreciated these days: "sorehead." I mean, that describes SO MANY PEOPLE. I thank him for bringing the word back into my person lexicon.

Some of his radio programs are available online, so I look forward to sampling them.

[Maria Hrickova · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.6

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

READ THIS THREE YEARS AGO AND ALL I WROTE AT THE TIME WAS THAT I LIKED IT FOR THE PEOPLE SPOKEN OF IN IT. I do not remember more.