Remodeled Ape

MAN: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY (310 pp.)--George R. Stewarf--Random House ($2.75).

Among professors of English, the University of California's George R. Stewart is a rare bird. He can battle with Beowulf in Old English, discuss the drift of allegory in The Faerie Queene, or lecture gravely on the crime of the dangling participle.

His literary interests are as broad as those of a good-sized college faculty. He has written fiction, biography (Bret Harte), popular meteorology (Storm), a fascinating treatise on U.S. place names (Names on the Land). His latest book is a rambling, unconventional history of the Life & Times of Man.

10,000 Centuries. Author Stewart has to ramble at a pretty good clip to cover 10,000 centuries of anthropology and anarchy in about 100,000 words. But why not? "I, Man," says he, speaking for the rest of the race, "am thoroughly tired of the various so-called histories of me. . . . They make a tedious and complicated matter out of what is really a simple one." Author Stewart's readers may find themselves repelled by his materialistic view of man and history, at times bored by his chummy "I, Man" approach. But they may also be amused (or outraged) by breaks from the most widely accepted concepts of history.

Most books of this sort pass lightly over prehistoric times, deal rather with nations, kings and priests, beginning in the "dawn of history" and winding up in the age of the flush toilet. Stewart covers the same territory, but with an eye for different things.

He is particularly interested in what may have happened when Man still lived in trees. He says almost nothing about nations and kings, little about priests. As for culminations of any sort: "I remain, and seem likely to remain, a somewhat altered fish, a slightly remodeled ape."

Men & Events. At that, human life has changed, and to Author Stewart's way of thinking, the epochal events are those which changed it most, not those which made the biggest noise. The rise & fall of the Roman Empire? Probably less significant than the domestication of sheep, for when Man first learned to herd (about 10,000 B.C.) he revolutionized his ways as Roman roads and swords never did. The invention of printing? Important, says Stewart, by now hip-deep in the materialistic approach, but that of the water wheel was probably more important still. The Greeks? "A great deal of nonsense has been written about the Greeks. . . . The Greeks neither made civilization, nor saved it." Says Author Stewart: they came as barbarians from the North, impinging on a very considerable Mediterranean culture, altered it somewhat, were eventually absorbed.

Recent centuries, Stewart concludes, have brought vast changes in Man's control of the world, but no basic change in Man. "The great palace of the modern world" has to be built from "the same old kind of bricks ... no stronger . . . no more adaptable or beautiful. . . . Arguments about the decline of the individual ... I do not take too seriously. . . . When I see some boys cruising in their patched-up jalopy, they seem just as much in harmony with their world as any . . . young savage creeping up on a quail with his throwing-stick."

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