Fleeing Dutchman

DAYS OF OUR YEARS--Pierre van Paassen--Hillman-Curl ($3.50).

In the dead eddy of time after the War, a young Dutch ex-divinity student and soldier named Pieter Antonie Laurusse van Paassen found himself in Canada bouncing from job to job. He wrapped department store parcels, peddled magazines, delivered milk, fired locomotives, collected streetcar fares, worked on a blasting gang in gold mines of the Big Dome. Every time he tried a new job, he quickly decided he had missed his calling. Finally, by shutting his eyes and putting his finger down on a list of vocations ranging from accountant to sausage maker, he picked what proved a relatively permanent and permanently restless occupation--journalism.

His excellent memoirs, published last week, showed that perhaps he had missed his calling again. A competent newspaperman, he might have been a better novelist. The light he sheds on world affairs flickers somewhat dimly beside the flashes of Duranty, Gunther, Sheean; but for character vignettes and earthy episodes, he beats the lot. Examples: >The headmaster of his grammar school in Gorcum, Holland, was a tightlipped, frog-eyed, wrinkled Huguenot with the curling fingernails of a Chinese mandarin and the literal severity of a Spanish Inquisitor. He beat a boy to unconsciousness for writing the phrase "snowflakes fluttering from a pitilessly gray heavenly roof." Heaven, it seemed, was never pitiless. After morning prayers he took snuff, which made him sneeze so vehemently that he staggered. This staggering, says the author, was the only physical exercise he ever took. > In Bourg, France, where van Paassen lived for a time, he stopped to chat with a gravedigger, said he was on his way to Paris to write political notes on Laval. From the bottom of a slimy pit, tossing up half-rotten skulls to make room for a new corpse, the gravedigger shook his head and said: "A dirty job, la politique, Monsieur Pierre, a very foul business!"

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