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Life Imprisonment. In his study in a handsome, Spanish-style home in Los Angeles, Historian Durant, 75, writes 1,000 small, neat words every day, using a 39¢ ballpoint pen that he throws away when it runs dry. He has been doing it since 1929, and neither depression nor war has slackened or speeded his pace. For him and his wife, Durant notes, "it's been a life imprisonment, and we'll be with it until we or civilization die."
One of seven children of an immigrant French Canadian, Durant was born in Massachusetts, educated in parochial schools, but left the Roman Catholic Church in his null — thus achieving, he says, "a certain detachment toward the religious issue." He has never belonged to a church since, calls himself an agnostic. Durant started out to be a reporter on the New York Journal, but found the life too strenuous, and settled down to teaching Latin, French, English and geometry (he has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University). He got the idea for his huge project in 1912 when he was in Damascus. Ill with dysentery, he recalled that famed Historian Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-62) had also fallen ill in Damascus and had died there before he could launch his own cherished story of civilization. At 27, Durant decided to complete what Buckle had not lived to do. The Story of Philosophy, which since 1926 has sold a phenomenal 3.000,000 copies, gave Durant the money to retire from a career as a popular lecturer and teacher at 42 and to launch into Volume I. Our Oriental Heritage, of The Story of Civilization.
All Fouled Up. In order to get civilization on paper. Durant has been forced virtually to retire from it. He works "all the time except for meals and sleep." keeps at it seven days a week. He rarely goes out except for a daily mile-long walk and an occasional evening's concert. Says he: "I think cocktail parties are one of the things Americans should be particularly ashamed of—such a waste of time and liquor." A small (5 ft. 5 in.'), silver-haired man with a bristly mustache. Durant settles at 8 in the morning into a rocking chair (for sluggish circulation) with a drawing board in his lap and a supply of peanuts at hand (for quick protein—he is a vegetarian). After a light supper at 6. he reads and takes notes, is in bed by 10. He reads a minimum of 500 books for each volume he turns out, averages about one completed volume every six years.
From the start, Durant has been assisted in research by his wife Ariel, now 63. a former student of his whom he married when she was only 15. Durant knows just how Gibbon felt when he yearned to have a few years left after The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In 1965. when he is 80. Durant expects to complete his last volume. -'Then." says he. "we're going on a spree.'' Even if "the Reaper stays his hand," adds Durant, the history will not be pushed beyond Napoleon: "I would not be mentally fit to deal with the igth century."
In his long contemplation of civilization, Durant has arrived at only one general conclusion: "The world situation is all fouled up. It always has been. It always will be. I see no reason for change."