( Preface: I wrote this piece on October 25th, 2018 in New Jersey. Around forty years ago, between October 23rd and November 9th, 1981, Will and Ariel Durant – husband and wife, my favorite historians, passed away within two weeks of each other. In the seventy years they lived together, the Durants wrote copiously and lectured widely. Their magnum opuses were the eleven-volume history (totaling around 10,000 pages and approximately 4 million words) of the Human journey under the title “The Story of civilization”, and the wonderful compendium of Will’s lectures on Western philosophers titled ” The Story of philosophy” – which is still in print and remains the best introduction for the educated layman to the important western philosophers from Socrates onwards in the fourth century BC till John Dewey in the last century. In between writing these magnificent volumes, full of life and wisdom, the Durant’s also found time to publish many shorter works and autobiographies, some of which are currently out of print and may be available on eBay or perhaps at thrift book stores, hidden under layers of forgettable literature. I owe much of my intellectual interests, inspiration, and development to the Durants. Their ideas and writing have always had a positive effect on me. When I suffer from writer’s block, I read a few pages of Durant’s to get the juices flowing; when I need clear thinking, I often read an essay or two by Will Durant to recover from sloppy thinking and inadequate expression. In many ways, they still continue to shape my intellectual life. I wrote this piece from the New Jersey airport lounge, without any specific notes to refer to, except the timelines. I hope you find this story as interesting and exhilarating as much I did writing this.)
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I remember reading Will and Ariel Durant’s essay “Is progress real?” as a required text in my 9th grade. The piece was part of a short compendium of essays along with other standard ICSE books. At this distance of time, I still remember the vivid impression the essay made on me. I confess – I don’t remember understanding the essay at all. At the age of twelve or thirteen, the ideas seemed too complex, too abstract. And add to that the displeasure of studying an obtuse essay like that for an exam. Yet, despite the inconveniences, something about that piece lingered on. The textbook itself contained around 10 such essays, but I don’t recollect any of them, not even the names of the authors, except the Durant’s. There was something about “Is progress real?” that captivated me. When I think back, I realize what struck me was the cadence and style of the language — the sheer effortless beauty of Durant’s way of saying things. Our English teacher Sudhakar – a young man with a deep interest in literature – would read out few paragraphs in class, and I remember sitting spellbound listening to the structure of the sentences, the sound of words, and the soothing effect it had on my nerves. Almost like a piece of music without words. Years later, I could still recollect phrases and sentences from the essay with ease. For instance “.We are the same trousered ape at two thousand miles an hour as when we had legs,” or “ History is so indifferently rich that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances”. There are at least a dozen sentences like these that arrested my attention. Not that I had made any special effort to memorize; they just stuck. It would not be wrong to say that Durant’s kindled in me that initial spark of the love for the English language. The seeds were sown by this two-page essay, and its fruits began sprouting gradually. Around 2003 ( nearly twenty years after my initial encounter with the essay) I formally read the fascinating life story of the Durant’s, and systematically began reading through their works. I am still not done reading. What a life in letters? And what a rich body of work compressed within a lifetime? In the following paragraphs, I will try to trace the arc of this incredible husband-wife duo, and their contributions.
Will Durant was born in New England in 1895 to conservative French-Canadian parents. Not rich, but hardworking, the elder Durants ensured that their children were educated well. With nearly seven mouths to feed and many premature deaths to deal with, life wasn’t easy. It was the hope of the parents that Will durant would enter a seminary as a priest. The boy wasn’t physically strong enough for manual work but compensated with acute mental sharpness. The tug of what he learned at school and his own voracious reading at local libraries inclined his mind towards benevolent atheism, but parental expectation leaned towards accepting the cloak of the priesthood. The Durant’s wished that at least one of their children dedicated themselves to the faith that had sustained them so far. In 1927, Will would publish his struggle with himself in a wonderful autobiography called “The Transition” – a beautiful account of how a young mind intensely grappled with the demands of his loving parents on one hand and the growing disbelief in established religion on the other, and how two years after school, acceding to parental request, Will entered a seminary to be a priest, only to be disillusioned by it, and completely emancipated himself from shackles of orthodox theology to embrace the wings of intellectual and spiritual freedom that would become his life long passion and enterprise. All of this is elegantly chronicled in the “Transition”, whose narrative style even in those early stages of Will’s intellectual journey had all the signs and stamp of linguistic brilliance that would later become a distinctive style in literature. At twenty-six years of age, with all the idealism of youth and learning, Will joined the Ferrer school in Newyork as a libertarian teacher. The school was known for its egalitarian motives, diverse curriculum and it suited Will’s temperament and vocation. Little did Will know, that fate had bought him there for a purpose. In his classroom, the precocious Ida Kaufman – a young girl of fifteen and a Jewish immigrant from Russia was present as a student. A decade ago, she had journeyed with her mother from communist Russia, braving all the challenges that such a journey would take. Onboard a crowded ship, almost losing an eye to an unknown infection, they landed at Staten Island watching the lady of liberty slowly emerging the morning mists Holding aloft the lamp of freedom. Things weren’t easy in the New World, the family lived a life of hardship and hard work. Ida’s mother sold newspapers at Grand central and ensured her children went to school.
At fourteen, Ariel joined the Ferrer school. She was the naughtiest in Will’s class, and Ariel found Will a mellow and brooding teacher. Very soon, the equations changed. The limpid beauty of the young Russian girl, those dark wholesome eyes oozing intellectual thirst, the sweet rebellion of her character triggered a spasm of attraction in our gentle philosopher teacher. The platonic relationship between the two soon blossomed into mutual attraction, and then inevitably into love. After intense soul searching and moral deliberation, Will durant confessed his love to the young Ida – not yet sixteen — and courageously proposed marriage. She instantly agreed. Will tied the knot quietly and relinquished his job at the Ferrer School in keeping with his principle of not violating the ethics of a teacher. It was at this time the Will started calling Ida Ariel after a Shakespearean character who was “.… as strong and brave as a boy, and as swift and mischievous as an elf..”. Ida Kaufman was happy to be called Ariel, and she legally altered her name to Ariel Durant. So began an association as Husband and wife, as intellectual collaborators, as spiritual partners, as historical companions, as master writers, as adorable parents, as emphatic friends to anyone who came within their radar, and above all, a stunning union of minds that would collectively span the breadth of sixty centuries of human civilization over the next six decades; and condense, extract and write volume after volume with sparkling wit, clarity and elegance about Man’s incredible journey across those ages and the lessons learned from it. By the time they finished their work, a generation would pass, the Durant’s would gracefully age, and the twentieth century would enter its final lap of two decades. In the field of historiography, the names of the Durant’s shines bright even today as one of the greatest synthesizers of thought and exquisite stylists of the English language. History was never told so beautifully and holistically before or after them.
It was a stroke of luck and a series of coincidences that the Durants became rich and popular enough to dedicate their entires lives to the study of civilizations. In 1925, Will durant began lecturing at the Labor Temple( a Presbyterian church which was converted to a community hall) to audiences who weren’t specialists, but curious to know about the progress of ideas. Will gave regular lectures on the Western pantheon of philosophers starting with Plato to Aristotle to Francis Bacon, down to George Santayana. Each lecture would last about two hours, and Will, in his inimitable manner would condense and present the philosophical thesis the ran through the life and times of the philosophers themselves. The halls were often packed, and people from all denominations and walks of life thronged to hear the short, angelic-looking young man expostulate so clearly on difficult philosophical ideas in a mellifluous voice. During one of these talks, E. Haldeman-Julius, a progressive publisher based out of Kansas and known for popularizing knowledge, happened to pass by the Labor temple and heard Will speak. A few days later, he wrote to Will asking if he could convert his lectures into essay form for publication as “Little blue books” — a series of pamphlets the E. Haldeman-Julius published on different topics at five or ten cents a copy. In the headiness of youth, Will wrote back to the publisher that he had “no time” and that he was financially obligated to lecture continuously. But E. Haldeman-Julius was a different breed of a publisher, rare in the modern world. He wrote again to Will, this time around enclosing an advance cheque of 150 dollars to defray the expenses and time needed to write the essay. Will had no choice now, and in between his talks, he worked in polishing his style and narration to suit an essay. Every lecture that Will delivered in 1925 was printed in the form of a Bluebook, and very soon these short pamphlets were selling like hotcakes.
In 1926, Will and Ariel Durant happened to meet Dick Simon and Mark Schuster, two young fiercely passionate upcoming publishers, who urged upon Will to choose and arrange his essays into a book form. E. Haldeman-Julius was gracious to allow Simon & Schuster to take over the rights, and the outcome of all these coincidences was the “The story of Philosophy” — a compendium of nine prominent essays followed by few notes on contemporary philosophers. To say that the book was a literary and financial success would be understating the impact. Never before in the history of publishing had a book on philosophy sold so many copies. HG Well’s two volumes of “outlines of History” or Hendrick van loon’s simple introduction to world history have been bestsellers in the past, but the “Story of philosophy” surpassed all expectations. With this book, the reading public was becoming dangerously educated on philosophy. The names of Plato, Spinoza, Hegel morphed into household terms; tough and convoluted philosophical terms, which eluded the most educated of intellects, suddenly became easy to understand and appreciate. A professor of Philosophy wrote to Will “ I have been teaching Immanuel Kant to students for three decades. I understood the meaning of Kant’s terms for the first time after reading your introduction to Kant”. Within three decades of its release, “The story of philosophy” sold more than two million copies, and translated into several languages. The royalties that came out of this book alone, removed the Durant’s from the stifling grip of financial insecurity forever. It gave them the wings to let their intellects soar, and embrace the passion of their lives – to write an integrated, synchronistic history of Man from the beginnings of civilization. An ambitious effort, never attempted before, matched in scale only by Arnold Toynbee at a future date. Will durant had plans for a minimum of five volumes. The sketches of those volumes had long been incubating in his spacious mind, and now with Ariel beside him, and financial concerns out of the way, the couple could travel the world, find the leisure to read the sources of history in their original, and attempt to write comprehensive volumes on specific periods of history. It was the work of a lifetime, and the Durants plunged into it headlong.
Between 1929 and 1975, a period of 46 years, Will and Ariel wrote ten massive readable volumes of the story of civilization. Beginning with the classic “The oriental age” and ending with the time of Napoleon, the colossal work consumed most of their adult life. One shudders to imagine the discipline, commitment, passion, and the energy needed to keep at such a task for so long without losing an iota of the rigor in the presentation of the material or the beautiful prose style in which it was clothed. Each volume covered a definitive period of human civilization from all angles – social, economic, political, art, science, religion, and literature. Specialists may scorn the breadth of coverage, but Will believed the human lives are not lived in isolation. An economic man is not separate from an artistic man. The diverse social forces operate together in any given age, and therefore to understand a period of history it is important to look at Man from different angles. To study, assimilate and synthesize such a broad area needs astute minds capable of perceiving the arch of history from a unique vantage point, and the Durant’s by nature, training, and vocation possessed the mental and emotional equipment necessary for such a task. Interestingly, in the first six volumes, the name of Will durant alone appeared on the covers as principal author, though Ariel was an intimate part of researching each book. But from the sixth onwards, Will and Ariel appeared as joint authors. Her name couldn’t be left out anymore. Ariel’s ability as a researcher and critique, and her gift of writing clear, hard-hitting sentences in lucid prose, often resulted in refining and channelizing the digressive exuberances of Will’s narrative. Will realized that and acknowledged Ariel’s effort in his introduction to the sixth volume.
In 1968, The ninth volume “Rousseau and the Revolution “was awarded the Pulitzer prize, and in 1977 both Husband and wife were honored with the Presidential medal of Freedom by President Gerald Ford. As the 1980s commenced, Will was nearing ninety-six and Ariel just over eighty-three years of age. A lifetime of work had been achieved, and their status as one of the greatest living historians was firmly established beyond dispute. In October of 1981, Will was admitted to the hospital after complaining of pain in the chest. Surgery was successfully performed, but he remained bedridden. Ariel stopped eating once she realized the Will was dying and lost her incredible zest. On the morning of October 23rd, 1981, she preceded him to death. The family deliberately kept the news of Ariel’s death from Will, but he sensed her absence acutely and knew something was amiss. On November 9th, 1981, Will succumbed to a heart attack. Within a span of two weeks, the couple who met as a teacher and student seventy years ago, fell in love, married, and shared an amazing intellectual, romantic and emotional journey that lifted them from the relative obscurity of Newyork’s lecture halls to the orbits of Presidents prime ministers and intellectual stalwarts as advisers on social, economic, political and cultural issues, were no more.
I started this essay with a personal reminiscence, and I conclude by stating that the life and work of Will and Ariel Durant have come to define my own intellectual passions. The eleven volumes of Story of civilization, the magnificent essays in the “The story of philosophy”, the life and time of the Durants captured in their ‘Dual biography” and the “Transitions”, the slim volume of “the lessons of history”, its sweeping inductions, and more importantly, the insatiable thirst of the Durant’s to understand life holistically and not compartmentalized int social, economic or political personas – all of that has become part of my approach to studying the world around me. It is to them I owe my love of literature, history, art, and the sciences. Above all, I owe my love of the written word, and how, even if the meaning of the words is initially lost ( as it did for me when I read Will Durant’s essay as a young boy), the lilting cadence, the choice of words, and the structure of a well-written sentence can linger long enough to find real pleasure in history when the time is ripe.
Some of Durants books continue to be printed and available on Kindle too. I am sure their work will continue to attract the attention of curious minds in every age. Like a flower brimming with honey waiting patiently for the right bee, the pages of these books will find the right reader. When that happens, a burning flame is transmitted, and the Durants will perhaps smile a paternal smile from their eternal abode and rest happy that one more seeker has joined the stream of learning.
God bless…
yours in mortality,
Bala