Books: Dockside Montaigne

THE PASSIONATE STATE OF MIND (151 pp.)—Eric Hoffer—Harper ($2.50).

Eric Hoffer is a pink-faced, hornyhanded San Francisco dock worker who pays his dues to Harry Bridges’ longshoremen’s union and preaches self-reliance more stalwartly than Emerson. He gets up at 4:45 in the morning and spends his days working on the piers of San Francisco’s Embarcadero. Evenings he spends in his room in a shabby McAllister Street lodging-house, bent over a plank desk, writing.

Four years ago Hoffer published The True Believer, an eloquent analysis of the nature of modern mass movements that won critical respect and a considerable following of readers. His new book turns from social to strictly individual themes, and offers, in a series of aphorisms, the insights gained during a hard, roving life.

Born in New York of Alsatian parents, Hoffer lost his sight in a childhood tumble, and though he regained his vision eight years later, he never finished grade school. At 18 he lit out for California and landed on Los Angeles’ skid row. “It was then,” he says, “that I first began to live.” He rode the rails up and down the state, picking oranges, swinging sledges in railroad section gangs, lumberjacking. prospecting. On a gold-digging trip to the Sierras he took along a copy of Montaigne’s essays. “We were snowed in and I read it straight through three times. I quoted it all the time. I’ll bet there are still a dozen hoboes in the San Joaquin Valley who can quote Montaigne.”

Though some of Philosopher Hoffer’s aphorisms are fatuous, The Passionate State of Mind demonstrates again his knack for neat, 17th century-style brooding on 20th century problems. Samples:

¶ “There is in most passions a shrinking away from ourselves. The passionate pursuer has all the earmarks of a fugitive. Passions usually have their roots in that which is blemished, crippled, incomplete and insecure within us.”

¶ “There is even in the most selfish passion a large element of self-abnegation. It is startling to realize that what we call extreme self-seeking is actually self-renunciation. The miser, health addict, glory chaser and their like are not far behind the selfless in the exercise of self-sacrifice. Every extreme attitude is a flight from the self.”

¶ “Some people are born to spend their lives catching up; and they are as a rule the passionate ones.” The aphorism is a lean and literary fugitive that flourished most elegantly in the salons of France’s ancien regime. The mere fact of its reappearance on the San Francisco docks makes this book noteworthy.