Books of the Day

A Bacteriologist Remembers . . .

As I Remember Him. By Hans Zinsser. (Macmillan. r2s. 6d.) DR- HANS ZINSSER, the eminent American bacteriologist, died this autumn. This book purports to be a biography of an intimate friend, whom he calls "R. S.," but various lines of evidence make it clear that it is really Zinsser's autobiography, and that "R. S." is a purely imaginary figure, designed to allow the writer greater freedom and objectivity.

In his previous book, Rats, Lice and History, Zinsser showed that he was an able popular writer. The present volume reveals him as a vivid and many-sided personality. It is also very enjoyable reading, full of good stories alternating with shrewd comments and reflections on science, education, and life in general. He writes as representative of "that rapidly disappear- ing generation whose lives bridged the transition from horses to gasoline, from gaslight to electric bulbs, from Emerson and Longfellow to T. S. Eliot and Joyce, from stock companies to the movies and the radio."

It is difficult to review a book of this type in the ordinary way. Let me try to give a taste of it by means of some quotations. One of his childhood memories is of a mongrel poodle which "had not been ruined by too much social life. Let A dog know too many people and he turns out badly . . . The same principles apply to people, as Newton well knew, because it is said that when he was first asked to join the Royal Society he declined, saying that he was afraid 'it might increase the circle of his acquaintances.'" At a Fremdenschule in Wiesbaden he was much impressed by the British boys' unworried acceptance of caning.

It is not impossible that this habit, early inculcated in the British ruling classes, of knowing when they were licked, taking it with docility on the least vulnerable part of the body, yet remaining un- humiliated thereby and ready to rise when opportunities for resistance were more favourable, has had profound influence on British foreign policy.

Here is a picture of cowboy life in Oklahoma. He was staying at a ranch where two cowboys used to come in courting the daughter. The entertainment consisted in sitting in a circle in the dugout in utter silence. Every now and then, one of the visitors would get up and perform a teat of strength. . . . Between tricks there would be occasional and widely separated remarks, chiefly dealing with cattle, hops, grain, and horses. At night, after a tremendous meal, the cow- boys caught theh horses and rode off.

His father was an agnostic with a passion for Faust. He kept a copy in the pocket of every coat he possessed. "Whenever anyone made any remark which was meant to be clever or original his hand would slip into his pocket and he would say, often with an irtitating grin : 'Das steht alles im Faust,' often insisting on reading the relevant passage."

Enforced association with an ardent psychoanalyst created in him a distrust of that science (or art). At that time

To dream at all was a misfortune; to mention it, indecent; and to reveal the substance, reckless. One of my friends at this time became a veronal addict because he could not overcome his taste for Welsh rarebits after the theatre; and a dear old lady on Beacon Street jumped into the Charles River Basin because she repeatedly dreamt of the Bunker Hill Monument What a psychoanalyst would say to Zinsser's lightheartedness as a boy in sometimes stepping on all the cracks on the pavement, sometimes avoiding them, I don't know. (I was a stepper-on- cracks, which I gather is both unusual and sinister: stepping over cracks is merely sinister.) He ,has a charming chapter on his early loves. "There .was a chestnut girl who lived over the grocery store. In those days I classified girls as chestnut, sorrel, or bay" (he was a great devotee of horses). The tale of how he was prevented from making a fool of himself with this "chestnut girl" by suddenly seeing her resemblance to a calf she was caressing must be read in extenso.

I like his story of President Eliot, who in the last war had stated that the Germans had never produced any man of the first intellectual rank. Owen Wister wrote to ask, "How about Goethe? " The reply he received stated that Goethe could not be accepted as of first rank, "because his relations with women were irregular "!

But there is much of more serious import in this chronicle of a life. We are given a vivid picture of an ardent young mind falling in love with various types of intellectual activity. He first came under the spell of poetry and the Greek spirit, personified by Edward Woodberry at Columbia. Later, owing to some quite accidental circumstances connected with the snow- balling of a professor of anthropology, he took up natural science, and thereby "suddenly entered a new world of wonders rnd revelations" in the Department of Biology under that great teacher Edmund Wilson. American college education may be discursive, but at least it provides young men with these oppor- tunities of becoming acquainted with numerous worlds of ideas, unlike our more specialised English system.

He paints an appalling picture of Russia in 5922, which he visited as a Sanitary Commissioner of the League of Nations during the great cholera epidemic.

He gives an illuminating account of the rapid development of American medicine from small beginnings to the outstanding position it occupies today, and has much to say on American education in general. Elsewhere he gives reasons for believing that art must be the corrective needed to the over-development of science in the present-day world.

His comments on Britain are very pertinent today.

He had always believed England the most efficiently governed country in the world. But he had little faith in her ability to with- stand the strain of the world tempest without profound change. Her liberalism was, as Heine recognised long ago, an historical-intellectual one, built, like sustaining beams, into an old feudal structure. It possessed, to be sure, all the humane safeguards of justice and fair p12.y, but retained, at the same time., toughly persistent inequalities of class and opportunity.. . . Behind its beneficent parliamentary con- stitution there was entrenched a mediaeval, feudal organisation, power- ful and protected by custom and law, and constantly reinforced from the ranks of a financial " parvenu-cracy."

His last chapter is a moving and encouraging one. Looking out of the window after hearing his death sentence by a medical friend who had just overhauled him, Something took place in his mind that he regarded as a sort of compensatory adjustment. In the prospect of death, life seemed to be given new meaning and fresh poignancy. ... From now on, instead of being saddened, he found—to his own delighted astonishment— that his sensitiveness to the simplest experiences was infinitely en- hanced. . . . Thinking of the shortness of the time left him, he reread the books that had meant much to him at the various stages of his life, and found them more moving, more deeply wise, or more hilariously robust according to their natures. . . The only thing that depressed him at all in those days was the thought of horses.

We must be grateful to Zinsser for having employed his last months in writing this record of a full and varied life—full and varied in respect of ideas and emotions as well as of actions.

JULIAN HUxLxv.