Posted on 11/26/2007 12:59:37 PM PST by Borges
One would be hard-pressed to name a living scholar who has been more widely or more justly celebrated than Jacques Barzun.
On the occasion of his centennial, his many students, readers and friends celebrate his life and work once again, not because he needs yet another accolade, but because the world needs the example that he presents to us of a life devoted to learning and teaching, to honesty and tenacity, to beauty and wit, to conversation and friendship.
Even more important than these personal and academic qualities is the wisdom underlying the great themes that run throughout his work. He has been a champion for the values of pluralism and pragmatism, for a mode of thought that balances cold reason with feeling and interest, and for a kind of scholarship that seeks connections across disciplinary boundaries.
Barzun was born on Nov. 30, 1907, in Creteil, near Paris. His father, Henri Martin Barzun, was a prominent French writer and diplomat. The artistic avant-garde was part of Jacques' childhood in the years before World War I — the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, the artists Fernand Leger, Marcel Duchamp and Albert Gleizes. (Gleizes' portrait of Barzun's mother hangs in the living room of his Oakwell Farms home in San Antonio.)
Young Jacques joined his father on a diplomatic mission to the United States and stayed to enter Columbia University at age 15. There, he came under the influence of teachers James Harvey Robinson and Carlton J.H. Hayes, inventors of a new approach to historical scholarship.
"When I saw that history could be conceived as cultural history — which didn't exist, there were no courses in that subject — all my prewar experience of the arts took on a new aspect," Barzun recalled of that time in a 1998 interview with the San Antonio Express-News.
Barzun embarked on a path that would make him one of the world's most eminent and wide-ranging practitioners of cultural history, and America's best-known intellectual: When Time magazine surveyed the role of intellectuals in American life, in June of 1956, Barzun's face was on the cover to represent the species.
By that time he had already produced a dozen books, including "Darwin, Marx, Wagner," a critique of the mechanistic worldview; "Teacher in America," a defense of the teaching profession against the education establishment; "God's Country and Mine," a delicious rumination on Barzun's adopted country; and the magnum opus of the first half of his life, "Berlioz and the Romantic Century," a landmark study that was both a meticulously researched biography of the composer and a closely argued re-evaluation of 19th-century romanticism, which was then far out of fashion.
Still to come were "The House of Intellect," a withering (and still trenchant) critique of the journalistic, educational and scientific establishments of the 1950s; "The Delights of Detection," a guilt-free appreciation of detective fiction; and the best-selling magnum opus of Barzun's later years, "From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life."
Along the way, he managed to serve Columbia University as its provost, and upon retirement he began a second career as a literary adviser to his friend Charles Scribner's publishing house.
In early 1997, Barzun abandoned New York and moved to San Antonio with his wife, Marguerite, a former American studies teacher at Trinity University.
They had met in 1976, when she introduced him to the audience for a lecture at Trinity. They married in 1981, after the death of Barzun's first wife, the former Mariana Lowell of the distinguished Boston family of poets and intellectuals.
It was here that he completed "From Dawn to Decadence," surely one of the fastest 800-page reads in the history of scholarly books.
At the core of Barzun's way of thinking is his use of language. He is an amazing writer — peerless in vigor and clarity, eminently readable even when dealing with the most complex and difficult subjects.
Hardly a paragraph passes without at least one sentence that sings, zings and, sometimes, stings. Far from the stereotype of the dry academic, he is often acerbically funny. Always, his writing is a model of precision, of relevance and of warranted assertability.
No one would accuse him of blandness or absence of fighting spirit. He holds strong and challenging views. He has written stirringly against political correctness, moral absolutism, the use of multiple-choice tests and the elevation of minority dialects over the standard tongue in the schools. Some of his opinions might be considered idiosyncratic: He demotes Brahms and Debussy several pay grades, for example.
One might differ with some of his conclusions, and he does not demand agreement. But if you are going to disagree with Jacques Barzun, you had better arm yourself as he does, with knowledge and common sense — not with clichés or cant or ideology.
Barzun places a high standard in front of us, but he is above all a good teacher, and as a good teacher he lets us know that the standard he sets is neither uncomfortably confining nor impossibly high.
It is because we need that standard, to find liberation and joy in it, and to hope that we can attain it in a community of thought and action, that we thank Jacques Barzun for a long and generous life in our midst.
Umm, who?
A great man who must be saddened to see what is happening to Europe today. Though he predicted it with his theory of rebirth and decadence being cyclical. I just hope the non-decadent rebirth of Europe isn’t Muslim.
One of his mentors, Robinson, founded the New School in Manhattan where a certain former senator who can spot an unusually good liar resides. Should we call the old boy for what he is or just let him enjoy his birthday?
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
What he is...a defender of Columbus and the Western World, standardized English in schools and opposition to Identity politics and P.C. Yeah call him what he is.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
I read “From Dawn to Decadence”. Not a fast read for me.
Not simple and direct enough.
D-to-D is a great book to keep by a recliner and just pick up and read chapters at a time.
You want to ask yourself, “is there any issue in history this fellow can’t comment on at-length and with insight?”
The man is amazing. He's a remarkable voice for mankind and Western Civilization and against determinism.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
I see he has the Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the self.
Barzun ping.
One of the twentieth century’s great conservatives, in the truest sense of the word.
Bon anniversaire, Monsieur le professeur!
LOL...I'm thinking the dude is not down with Google.
I’ve never read “Dawn to Decadence” cover to cover, but I’ve read most of it. Even if you don’t enjoy it as a work of history (as I do), it’s a tremendous bibliography for anyone who wants to study the past 500 years of Western Civ — on almost every topic, Barzun includes the note, “The book to read [on this topic] is XXXXXXXX by YYYYY.”
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