Life of Van Loon

REPORT TO SAINT PETER (220 pp.)--Hendrik Willem van Loon--Simon & Schuster ($3).

When he died at 62 (TIME, March 20, 1944), Popularizer Van Loon left this fragment of an autobiography. He began it, he said, partly as a response to letters from servicemen who wanted a plain account of "what this world is all about." Readers may get a few of Van Loon's notions on that subject in the avuncular Van Loon style (history as kiddy talk), but they will learn from this autobiography very little about Van Loon. It appears to have been designed for a leisurely, Montaignesque 700 pages and unfortunately ends just when it begins to warm the heart.

Little Hendrik was born in Rotterdam in 1882 a few hours after Richard Wagner had finished Parsifal (the events had no bearing on each other, he whimsically explains). After recording this fact the author supplies six successive childhood memories, each followed by a digression in genealogy, i.e., the story of mankind. As achievements in gentle claptrap these sections are all too imitable, as were the sections of Van Loon's previous books which they imitate. Example: "[The ice age] was the period during which the human race went to school, for it was a question of invent or perish. And, as nobody likes to perish (the experience is so uncomfortably drastic and final), people began to use their brains and became great inventors."

Report to Saint Peter brings the young Van Loon, heir to all the ages, as far as his twelfth year. At this point he found his boyhood hero in the story of a medieval minnesinger. "I never quite got over the feeling that all women . . . longed to be the heroines of one of those romantic episodes which were common incidents in the lives of the medieval troubadours. It was only a great many years later and at cost of a terrific wear and tear upon my emotions and upon my bank account that I learned that the troubadour business had indeed gone out with Guiraut Riquier (who died in the year 1294). . . ."

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