In a dun-colored mansion in the Hollywood Hills, removed a scant two miles in space but at least two centuries in spirit from Hollywood and Vine, Will Durant, 79, and his wife Ariel, 67, are hurrying toward completion of their grand 40-year educational project: squeezing the essence of 110 centuries of civilization into ten books. Driven by a sense of their own mortality and the teacherly obsession to share all that they can learn, the Durants have completed Volume IX, The Age of Voltaire, to be published in November, and have rushed ahead of schedule on their final work, Rousseau and the Revolution, set for 1968.
Despite the magnitude of The Story of Civilization, the sprightly Durants hold a modest view of its aim. "We hope that we simplify the task of the young college student who wants to get a perspective of history," says Will. While their writers' fondness for his tory's more colorful characters and odd anecdotes sometimes blurs perspective, the Durants, with tireless scholarship and eloquent prose, have earned the respect of academicians even while challenging the minds of millions. Durant's 1926 The Story of Philosophy has sold 3,000,000 copies; the first eight volumes of The Story of Civilization, printed in nine languages, have each sold 200,000 copies. Few historians have ever en joyed that kind of readership.
Advantages of Hooky. Although naturally gregarious, the Durants have largely withdrawn into their work, shunned most attempts to chronicle their own uncommon story of growth as a team. Ariel, born in Harlem of Russian immigrant parents, disliked public school and "mostly played hooky." Playing hooky one day in 1910, she spotted a school class in Central Park whose teacher "talked with the children, laughed with them, put her arm around them." Ariel followed them into their brownstone building, thus became a contented pupil in the experimental Francisco Ferrer School. One day a substitute teacher took her class. "He had some pimples and he talked through his nose." Ariel mimicked him in class, was ordered to stay after school—and met the new teacher, Will Durant.
Instead of scolding her, Durant pleaded that a substitute teacher needed cooperation, not ridicule. His French Canadian parents, neither of whom had ever attended school, had sent him to a Jesuit seminary. There he found Spinoza's Ethics in the library. "I hid it under books by St. Thomas Aquinas and other theologians and clandestinely read it," Durant recalls. Its pantheistic philosophy turned him against a clerical life. His prophetic first try at a public lecture, entitled How History Should Be Written, impressed a wealthy patron of the arts named Alden Freeman, who asked Durant to "meet me in Moscow" for a year's tour of Asia and Europe, helped finance his studies in philosophy and biology at Columbia University.