Books: History as a River

THE RENAISSANCE (776 pp.)—Will Durant—Simon & Schuster ($7.50).

The notion of writing a history of civilization first occurred to Will Durant in Damascus in 1912. He had come down with dysentery and had dredged out of his well-stocked memory the recollection that famed Historian Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-62) had died of the same disease* in the same city. What Buckle had never lived to do, 27-year-old Will Durant decided to do himself some day.

Several other occupations—teacher, anarchist fellow-traveler, popularizer of philosophy—claimed Will Durant’s attention first. But last week, sitting in his comfortable Hollywood home, just a step from his own swimming pool, successful Historian Durant scribbled away, well beyond the halfway mark, at the job he marked out for himself in 1912. The Renaissance is the fifth fat volume in Will Durant’s story of civilization, and like its predecessor volumes it is a highly readable and informative popular survey.

“The history of civilization,” Historian Durant once said in definition of his method, “is a river on whose waters soldiers and politicians are fighting and shedding ballots and blood; but on the banks of the river, people are raising children, building homes, making scientific inventions, puzzling about the universe, writing music and literature.” In The Renaissance Durant pays just enough mind to the soldiers and politicians to establish the drift of the times, then quickly joins the builders on the banks.

Medicis in Action. The Renaissance, as he lays it out, “first of all … took money—smelly bourgeois money”; and he growls for good measure a byword of the 19th century materialism that shaped his attitude: “Money is the root of all civilization.” Following this economic predilection, Durant gives the clearest description in any one-volume history of the age of the fiscal and political hotbed of Florence, where those hardy perennials, the Medici, first reared their brilliant heads. Item: he recites with delight how the fiscal-minded Florentines won a war against Venice and Naples by calling in so many loans that the rival cities were thrown into a financial panic. In spiritual things as well, Durant does a truer set on his subject than many a more academic historian. He catches gracefully “the integral spirit” of the age in aptly chosen quotations and lets the earthy irreverence of the era bubble up too, as it does in the credo of Luigi Pulci, a favorite of Lorenzo the Magnificent.

I don’t believe in black more than in

blue,

But in fat capons, boiled or maybe

roasted;

And I believe sometimes in butter, too,

In beer and must, where bobs a pippin

toasted;

But mostly to old wine my faith I pin,

And hold him saved who firmly trusts

therein . . .

Careful palates may protest sometimes at Will’s beer, for all the pippins bobbing in it, but Will himself, who in grammar school literally had to be tied to his bench, can understandably be pleased with his intellectual achievement.

Scholar in Progress. Notwithstanding a certain obstreperousness, Will Durant was always a bright student, so bright that the Jesuits at St. Peter’s College in Jersey City early marked him as a boy with a priestly vocation. At 18, Will read Darwin and became an atheist. A Jesuit father won him back and Will went on to the seminary, but in his second year he quit school and turned atheist again.

Will plunged into the anarchist movement, but not long after was somewhat shaken in his radical sympathies by a bomb, designed by one of his friends to separate John D. Rockefeller from his millions, which exploded prematurely in Will’s room. Three young anarchists were killed, but Will got away with a whole skin. At 27, after his journey to Damascus, Will began to feel a surfeit of lost causes, got married to a girl of 15, and settled down to a slow drift back to the right.

In 1926, after winning his doctorate in philosophy at Columbia, Will Durant published his lectures as The Story of Philosophy. It was a runaway bestseller then, and it is a pretty vigorous one now—in 27 years it has sold more than 2,000,000 copies. The author still enjoys its royalties and takes the justification of his work from what famed John Dewey said of his first book: “This is not popularization. It’s humanization.”

Will was a natural celebrity. While he labored in silence on the early volumes of his history, he expounded enthusiastically on anything reporters cared to ask him. People? “Most men ought to die at 35.” America? “American civilization may collapse unless it stops breeding from the bottom and dying from the top.” As for polygamy, he said a word for it “on eugenical grounds.”

At 67, white-thatched Will sits quietly at his writing desk eleven hours a day, leaving it only to eat, sleep and putter in the garden or dip in the pool. At this rate he finishes a volume about every five years. Two more volumes and, he says, the job will be over. “In ten years I will be 77 years old and not mentally fit to deal with the 19th century. I’ll complete the project by bringing it up to Napoleon . . . I’ll end up with a big splash, all sorts of blood spurting around.”

* A case of slightly faulty memory, since Buckle died after an attack of typhoid fever.