Cloudy Olympus

EXPERIENCES by Arnold Toynbee. 417 pages. Oxford. $8.75.

An autumnal memoir by the great chronicler of flowering and unflowering cultures would seem to merit some sort of special accolade for the author--perhaps rifled from the language of one of the cultures he described in his greatest days. The Chinese term for sage (chih-jen) might do. Arnold Toynbee, at 80, with some 70 volumes behind him, is certainly a man "in whom moral virtue and learned accomplishments reach their highest points." Experiences, in some sense, does indeed suggest a chih-jen at work--reflective, confident, comforting, sometimes imperative.

Unhappily, the authority of great age is accompanied by a certain waywardness and windiness. Along with Toynbee's earlier book, Acquaintances, this one proposes to perform the office of autobiography. Too often it consists of lumbering opinions delivered ex one of the century's best-earned cathedras about everything from religion, war and death to "The Social Price of the New Technology of Farming in Iowa."

Saved by Dysentery. There are fine passages when pontification yields to personal memory. Toynbee tells how Winchester and Oxford--where it was held that history and literature ended with Demosthenes and Juvenal--turned him into a Greek and Latin scholar. As a result he never quite ceased, despite his own determined efforts, to look at the history of all mankind through the eyes of a Balliol classicist. Half of Toynbee's contemporaries died in World War I, and the fact made him a lifelong pacifist. He had been lucky enough to pick up dysentery which disqualified him for military service and thus possibly saved his life. The resulting mixture of guilt and gratitude marked Toynbee deeply. "I have always felt it strange to be alive myself," he writes, "and the longer I have gone on living since then, the stranger this has come to feel. Death seems normal to me; survival seems odd." The thought recurs in Experiences like the tolling of a bell.

Yet a long life, even in so bloody and changeable a period, has its compensations. "As a member of the Western middle class," Toynbee wrote in a letter to American friends, "thinking in terms of personal comfort, I would have chosen a Victorian 80 years that just missed both the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War. But a time that is uncomfortable for a bourgeois is interesting for an historian. I am both an historian and a bourgeois, but I am an historian first and foremost."

As a historian, Toynbee labored simultaneously for 20-odd years on two great works. On one, begun in 1924, he did have the collaboration of Veronica Boulter who later became his wife (his first wife, Rosalind Murray, is mentioned here only once, in connection with her remarkable ability to communicate extrasensorially with her father, the Greek scholar Gilbert Murray). Their joint undertaking was the production of Survey of International Affairs, a running record of world events. In 1927 he began unaided A Study of History, which in twelve volumes describes and attempts to explain the dynamics of human civilization from man's beginning on earth. His account of the harrowing regimen necessary to pursue such work is typically modest and practical, studded with such advice as "Don't waste odd pieces of time" and "Write regularly." One point that he might have stressed more is the need for persistence, which his own literary practice dramatically illustrates: in 1913, he began taking notes for a book, Hannibal's Legacy, got around to writing it in 1957, and published it in 1965.

Red Fists. Toynbee's Olympian tone almost makes palatable a set of contemporary prejudices that has become familiar enough from other writings. Among them: the U.S. is "trying to build up a colonial empire of the traditional kind"; Madison Avenue is an abomination; Israel and the U.S. are the only two powers left in the world that believe in war.

Toynbee is a touch old-fashioned to find disciples among today's aggressively youthful revolutionaries. But one point comes through as fresh as angry red fists in Harvard Yard. "A human being will insist on being treated as a person," he writes, "even if the only way he can secure personal attention is to get himself knocked on the head by a policeman's truncheon." The enemy, in Toynbee's view, is not simply the Establishment or the Kremlin or the Pentagon but "competitive Individualism, bee-like or antlike Communism, and tribal-minded Nationalism." Such things, Toynbee argues, are responsible for creating "a Boyg-like smog of impersonal relations." Readers of Ibsen's Peer Gynt are expected to recall that the great Boyg is a shapeless cloud "neither dead nor alive; all slime and mistiness." There is really no way to get at Boyg; he "doesn't strike" and prefers to "get all he wishes by gentleness." Ibsen's folk hero Peer is softly enveloped and nearly driven mad. "Oh, for claws and teeth that would tear my flesh!" Peer shouts like an overpaternalized student rebel. "I must see a drop of my own blood flow!"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.