Twice Thirty: Short and Simple Annals of the Road
by . New York and London: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1925. Large 8vo. viii+539 pp, $4.50.
THE biography of a successful man is as a rule so full of cheer and common-sense that one leaves it deeply depressed, longing for a nice gloomy and insane Russian novel to reëstablish one’s equanimity. Before I began to read Twice Thirty, I was afraid that I had a period of depression before me and, for perhaps two hundred pages, the fears did not seem entirely groundless. But gradually — especially after the biography was about over and the little essays began — I felt more cheerful. It is almost impossible for a successful man to write his life without waiting about his successes, of course, and it would perhaps be unreasonable to expect him to; nevertheless, it was when i came upon the author’s description of his feelings during his first public lecture that responsive chords began to vibrate within me; and from that point on I read with increasing interest, until at the end I was even ready to grant that he deserved the success he had achieved. This is an admission that we are not often willing to make.
Twice Thirty is not really a biography at all. It is a series of footnotes or addenda to the Americanization, which expand or comment upon incidents or subjects merely noticed there, or supply the thoughts and opinions that ripened in the author’s mind during the process of living. It also contains many impressions of noted men and a series of chapters dealing with the greatness of Mr. Bok’s native land, the Netherlands, of which one, entitled ‘Well, I Did n’t Know That!' readers of the Atlantic will remember with particular pleasure. The contents of the book are so various, indeed, that only by consulting the index can one gain any notion of how various they are.
Some of the essays are amusing, some curious; many are of great value to the youthful reader and a few of real importance to the reader of experience. Of these last, the account of the founding and administration of the Philadelphia Forum is one of the most interesting and most characteristic. That the organization seems hardly to be a forum, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, and that it seems to differ in no essential respect from the long-established Brooklyn Institute, does not detract from Mr. Bok’s credit for establishing it; and his comments on the ‘it can’t be done’ type of mind are significant, because they suggest the basis of the optimism that has made failure almost unknown to him. ‘The American public,’ says he, ‘always instantly senses a straight, direct effort to give it the best, and will invariably respond to it, if it is placed within its reach, and human nature invariably responds to its better self if rightly appealed to.’ The success of the forum was a reward of such faith, and who can say that the American Peace Award, with the same faith behind it, may not eventually meet with the same success?
On the last page of the book appears the following announcement: ‘By the same Author: To be published in 1954: Thrice Thirty.' Mr. Bok will then he ninety years old. It is what is known as a ripe old age, but if he has made up his mind to publish this sequel I for one have no doubt that he will live to do it.
R. M. GAY