Liberal Conservative

As I REMEMBER HIM--THE BIOGRAPHY OF R. S.--Hans Zinsser--Little, Brown ($2.75).

It is clear that "R. S." and his old friend Hans Zinsser (Rats, Lice and History--TIME, Feb. 11, 1935) are one and the same man. Thanks to this adroit device, Dr. Zinsser eats, has and hands out whatever cake he pleases. As R. S. he shoots off his mouth to his heart's content.

As Biographer Zinsser, he gives R. S.

brakes and a steering wheel. In the end, treating himself to an autobiographer's rarest pleasure, he describes his own peaceful death.

R. S. was a doctor, but As I Remember Him is not another doctor book. Zinsser is interested in R. S. as "a noticeably average representative of that educated middle class . . . nostalgically conservative, yet trying hard to fall in with the spirit of the times. . . ." By writing his life and, still more, his opinions, he hoped to give an image of a class, a generation and an age, "more or less as Henry Adams wrote about himself." The result is an ingratiating hodgepodge of reminiscence, ironic sentiment, anecdote, medical history, opinionation, earnest philosophy. As such the book is an excellent portrait of an aging, humane, liberal conservative.

When he studied at Columbia University, R. S. expected to become a writer.

But one day he hit an anthropologist on the ear with a snowball. Later, feeling guilty, he took a course with him. The professor opened to him the world of science and, though he continued to write sonnets, he worked in that world from then on.

To his early romantic experiences R. S.

devotes two shyly ironic chapters. Once, in shocked compassion, he gave a prostitute $15 to take the night off from her dreadful trade. In no time at all she turned up at the same bar with another man. As a young doctor his thoroughness drove patients out of their wits and his office. It was a relief when at last he got to laboratory work, where he wanted to be and spent most of his life.

"Medicine," as the blurb sings, "has taken R. S. to the four corners of the earth": to Serbia (typhoid epidemic), France (World War I), Russia (famine and cholera), Mexico, China. In Serbia he met a Bishop who entertained himself each morning by taking shots at an old rabbit on the hillside. He wouldn't let R. S. shoot; he was afraid R. S. might hit the rabbit. On the boat to Mexico he made friends with Hart Crane, "a generous, warmhearted person, obviously drinking hard because of intense unhappiness." R. S. loved liquor, France, poetry, music, ribald talk, the division of his life between teaching and research, and the sound of his own voice. He profoundly admired Herbert Hoover for his relief work--"It is too bad he became only a President later on." He bitterly despised Soviet Russia: ". . . The governing mob cared little in those days about a hundred thousand lives more or less . . .

if only they could attain the noble ideals of Marxian theory." Of his two years in World War I he never cared to talk; the thought of the far greater sufferings of others always shamed him.

Best anecdote: Absentminded, R. S. leaves, under a hotel bed, in a self-addressed paper bag, a dead syphilitic baby.

In his preface Hans Zinsser takes heart in a remark of Sainte-Beuve's: "Nothing is so painful to me as the disdain with which one often treats writers of the second rank, as if there were room only for those of the first." Considering the number and excellence of the second rank, As I Remember Him may belong, rather, to the third. But for any book half as abundant and a tenth as likable, there is room and welcome.

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