Van Loon's Lives
$3.95
BY SIMON & SCHUSTER
THE title enters no claim to the multiplicity of exigences that a reader may easily credit to the protean Mr. van Loon himself, who is by this time not so much a writer as an institution. Rather, it is but a glancing reference, for purposes of condensed description only, to that classic of biography, Plutarch’s Lives — a reference at once amplified in this bulging subtitle: “Being a true and faithful account of a number of highly interesting meetings with certain historical personages, from Confucius and Plato to Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson, about whom we had always felt a great deal of curiosity and who came to us as our dinner guests in a bygone year.” Even the “from . . . to” of this formula understates the span measured by these nearly nine hundred pages, which include at one extreme an introduction to that preConfucian Greatest Inventor who bequeathed us the knife, and at the other extreme a portrait of Nansen, whose death occurred more than a century after Jefferson’s.
Mr. van Loon’s assortment of dinner guests from the bourne of the unreturning is often less obviously congruous than Plutarch’s parallels. His pursuit of the higher congruity brings together such biographical subjects as Beethoven and Napoleon, Emily Dickinson and Chopin, Torqucmada and Robespierre (whom he finds to be startlingly prototypical of Adolf Hitler), not to speak of Saint Francis of Assisi as table companion to Hans Christian Andersen and Mozart. The scheme adopted is one that makes it natural, even inevitable, for its inventor to pour forth about everything that is in his heart and everything that pops into his head.
Mr. van Loon, in these twenty-one chapters ranging from two pages to seventy-odd, gets at the miscellany in his mind exactly as a small boy gets at the contents of his pocket: that is, by turning it inside out. The result is not so much a book as a biographieul-historical-philosophical-literary vaudeville entertainment, with room in it for all manner of generosity and wisdom, occasional touches of cheap-jaekery, some downright silliness, the warmest devotion to a native land and to an adoptive one, a passion for the spirit of liberty, and a sometimes eloquent insistence on matters that are timely today because they are universal in their appeal.
W. F.