This biographer of Eric Hoffer goes on and on in the biography, The Longshoreman Philosopher, about how mysterious Hoffer is, and disingenuous, disguising and hiding his early life, perhaps because he was an illegal immigrant from Bavaria, and did not want to be deported, a real possibility in those day.
It is almost as if Bethell does not quite understand the great man, the great soul, Hoffer. He wants to go back to his roots and search and search for motivations antecedents and causal. He does not like the reverential, earlier biographers that just took Hoffer at his world about his early life. He is digging, digging, digging for dirt of Hoffer.
Where he came from and what are his motives for me are much less interesting that the brilliant genius of the man, his love of ideas, his love of individuating, his passion for the truth. A man so smart that uncovers the truth about the human condition is an authentic man that is the truth, loves the truth, seeks the truth and tells and writes the truth.
Bethell is off base in searching, searching for what is behind the man. Hoffer's genius and great-souledness are innate attributes, and his actual back story, if he is an illegal immigrant or whatever, or how his father motivated him, are illustrative if true, but are not crucial. Let his life and books reveal his greatness, his kindness, his exceptional insight--that is all the truth that the reader requires.
He may well be self-taught in chemistry and botany. Why not? I think that Bethell does not like him, does not understand him, and seeks to revise him into something else, something that Hoffer never was and will never could be. Bethell should cease seeking dirt on him.
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