Earth Could Be Fair

THERE is magic in Pierre van Paassen’s pen — the kind of magic one does not expect from the usual run of today’s writing. Beauty and suppleness of prose are wedded, in these pages, to rare gifts of observation of human character, a powerful and highly sensitive imagination, humor, and such devotion to human kindness and intellectual integrity as one seldom encounters amid the scurry and rush of post-war publications.

Earth Could Be Fair is, as its author says, “A Chronicle.” In fact, it is the story of Pierre van Paassen’s boyhood and youth in Holland; but, though written in the first person, the narrative is concerned more with the little Dutch town of Gorcum, its picturesque character, and the rich variety of its people, than with the author himself. In a very real sense, also, this volume is a contribution to history — the history of the terrible first four decades of the present century, which began for Pierre and his schoolmates with idyllic days and fantastic adventures, and ended in the terror of the Warsaw Ghetto, in the barbaric isles of the Pacific, in a Europe reduced to shambles.

Gorcum at the turn of the century, Gorcum watching the sweep of history beyond its ramparts as the First World War came and went, Gorcum eyeing the slow approach of the ultimate disaster of Nazi conquest, Gorcum as a microcosm of the civilization of the West, reflecting the pettiness, the nobility, the heroism and the weakness, the failures and the stubborn hopes of a world irretrievably shattered — all this Pierre van Paassen has caught into the pages of Earth Could Be Fair.

Were that all, the performance would merit applause. But this astonishing wayfarer through our contemporary world, who springs from a long line of Dutch clergymen, who migrated to Canada in his young manhood, who fought in World War I, toured the United States, and wandered in far places as a roving newspaperman, observing men and events, probing the dark recesses of diplomacy , war, and human nature, carries with him a blazing torch of conviction.

That faith blazes in every page of his latest volume. It illumines the drab corners of the Gorcum of his boyhood and shines like a conflagration through the ruin of the recent war. For it is a faith not in theorems, but in the essential kindness and spiritual grandeur of the human heart.

JAMES H. POWERS