A GOOD GOSSIP

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 531, 26 August 1949, Page 18

A GOOD GOSSIP

REPORT TO SAINT PETER, by Hendrik fe age van Loon; Harrap. English price, VAN LOON is already something of a myth. His range of the widest kind of historical knowledge, his indefatigable industry, and his power as an expositor put him on the plane of the mildly extraordinary, where myths flourish. The academics/ cry him down as a_ mere popularizer; certainly he is ‘simple enough to be read by children, and his judgments are a little too clear-cut to please the complex mind of the scientific historian, but a popularizer who does not lower his standards or deliberately write down to what he considers

is the level of public intelligence is a valuable member of the community. In this fragment of autobiography van Loon, besides digressing amiably on everything from childhood. dreams to socially nice diseases, puts dgwn some good sentences. The successfu autobio- | graphy, he says, is not written by extroverts like the Greeks, "who carried their hearts on their sleeves and who kissed their girls right out on the steps of the Acropolis (but), by an introvert who lives molelike in the dark recesses of his own soul, and who kisses his girl on the sly and then makes himself believe he did it because it was good for her health." So he gossipped along, ponderously flippant at times, with a flavour of H. L. Mencken, genial, hopeful, undismayed; until the good of his own health left him, cutting jshort his autobiography. But not before he had written an epitaph which should please the. most austere and retiring scholar. "The things I have thought belong to the world in general, but the life I have lived is the private property of myself and those who have shared my adven-

tures with me."

G. leF.

Y.