THE MANY-SIDED JOHN MUIR
Otto, Max C.
The Many-Sided John Muir SON OF THE WILDERNESS. The Life of John Muir, by Linnie Marsh Wolfe. Alfred A. Knopf. $3.50. Reviewed by Max C. Otto THIS is an excellently printed and beautifully bound...
...And it too would have been haunted by the mystery of the unexplained...
...It is a good cause...
...Moreover, one gets glimpses, sometimes new glimpses, of many prominent Americans, living and dead, and a fresh appreciation of the struggle it cost to preserve for the American people some of the natural wonders of their country which commercially ambitious people would have ruined forever...
...And no reader of the book, I think, can put it down without the consciousness of knowing more about possible human greatness achieved in the battle to keep all we can of the spirit-nourishing aspects of the natural environment...
...THE complexity of John Muir's psychological makeup—his yearning for the loneliness of nature in the wild and for fireside companionship, his scientific mentality and poetic soul, his practical money sense and outgoing generosity, his hobnobbing with the rich and his lively concern for the deprived many—these are some of the elemental traits laid bare in this biography...
...To some of us there remains always a residue of irreducible mystery in the development of personality and character, and when they are of large mold the mystery is pronounced...
...Not only did she gather documents in great abundance, and consult with members of Muir's family, with his relatives and numerous friends in various parts of America...
...THESE "gleanings east and west," described in the Preface as "an embarrassment of riches," are woven together to present John Muir as a person, rather than as a naturalist...
...The man shows through...
...It is unexciting, not to say dull, to read...
...There is the spiritual, In some it is only a germ, of course, but the germ will grow...
...We sense that mystery in following the trail of this life from Dunbar, Scotland, through the critically formative years in Wisconsin, the university campus with its environment of inland lakes, on to the mountains and great forests of the far West...
...It seems natural enough that this boy from Scotland should have grown into the tireless conservationist, intimately acquainted with forests, glaciers, and mountain ranges, sensitive alike to the beauty of diminuitive flowers, towering pines, and wide-spreading panoramas...
...It takes three pages to list the names of the people to whom she makes acknowledgements for help received, there are 14 pages of notes, and a detailed 16 page index...
...Still, in spite of all her abundance of biographical material, unstinted help from Muir's friends, the inherent drama of an expansive period of American history, and her most industrious application, the biogra-phy lacks life...
...There must be places for human beings to satisfy their souls...
...Devotion to the assumed task is conspicuous from the beginning of the book to the end of it...
...Reviewed by Max C. Otto THIS is an excellently printed and beautifully bound book...
...And the man whose life story it recounts was very exceptional as human beings come, a realistic idealist who gave so good an account of himself that millions of men and women will be in his debt for a long time—unless, of course, greed for possessions and power is speeded up and destroys the human race...
...Food and drink is not all...
...Linnie Marsh Wolfe has spared no pains to produce a biography worthy of the man she writes about...
...I have devoted myself to the cause of the people," John Muir wrote...
...It shows what a publisher can do even under war conditions, if he cares enough and collaborates with workmen who know how to turn out an artistic job...
...It shall ultimately triumph...
...But if he had followed his unusual mechanical bent and had become one of America's outstanding inventive geniuses, that would have seemed natural too...
...This was the request of Muir's elder daughter, and an honest, not altogether unsuccessful attempt was made to carry it out...
...It shall ultimately prevail...
...Evidently one must have more than opportunity and good intention to write a distinguished biography...
...she spent almost a year living in his old Wisconsin haunts, followed his trail into Canada, and into Indiana where memories of him still lingered...
Vol. 9 • October 1945 • No. 40
