Jacques Martin Barzun (/ˈbɑːrzən/;[1] November 30, 1907 – October 25, 2012) was a French-born American historian known for his studies of the history of ideas and cultural history. He wrote about a wide range of subjects, including baseball, mystery novels, and classical music, and was also known as a philosopher of education.[2] In the book Teacher in America (1945), Barzun influenced the training of schoolteachers in the United States.
From 1955 to 1968, he served as Dean of the Graduate School, Dean of Faculties, and Provost, while also being an Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College at the University of Cambridge. From 1968 until his 1975 retirement, he was University Professor at Columbia. From 1951 to 1963 Barzun was one of the managing editors of The Readers' Subscription Book Club, and its successor the Mid-Century Book Society (the other managing editors being W. H. Auden and Lionel Trilling), and afterwards was Literary Adviser to Charles Scribner's Sons, 1975 to 1993.
In 1936, Barzun married Mariana Lowell, a violinist from a prominent Boston family. They had three children: James, Roger, and Isabel.[11] Mariana died in 1979. In 1980, Barzun married Marguerite Lee Davenport. From 1996 the Barzuns lived in her hometown, San Antonio, Texas. His granddaughter Lucy Barzun Donnelly was a producer of the award-winning HBO film Grey Gardens. His grandson, Matthew Barzun, is a businessman who served from 2009-2011 as the U.S. Ambassador to Sweden, and from 2013-2017 as Ambassador to the United Kingdom. On May 14, 2012 Jacques Barzun attended a symphony performance in his honor at which works by his favorite composer, Hector Berlioz, were performed.[12] He attended in a wheelchair and delivered a brief address to the crowd.
Barzun died at his home in San Antonio, Texas on October 25, 2012, aged 104. The New York Times, which compared him with such scholars as Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell, and Lionel Trilling, called him a "distinguished historian, essayist, cultural gadfly and educator who helped establish the modern discipline of cultural history".[13] Naming Edward Gibbon, Jacob Burckhardt and Thomas Babington Macaulay as his intellectual ancestors, and calling him "one of the West's most eminent historians of culture" and "a champion of the liberal arts tradition in higher education," who "deplored what he called the 'gangrene of specialism'", The Daily Telegraph remarked, "The sheer scope of his knowledge was extraordinary. Barzun's eye roamed over the full spectrum of Western music, art, literature and philosophy."[14] Essayist Joseph Epstein, remembering him in the Wall Street Journal as a "flawless and magisterial" writer who tackled "Darwin, Marx, Wagner, Berlioz, William James, French verse, Englishprose composition, university teaching, detective fiction, [and] the state of intellectual life", described Barzun as a tall, handsome man with an understated elegance, thoroughly Americanized, but retaining an air of old-world culture, cosmopolitan in an elegant way rare for intellectuals".[15]
Career
Over seven decades, Barzun wrote and edited more than forty books touching on an unusually broad range of subjects, including science and medicine, psychiatry from Robert Burton through William James to modern methods, and art, and classical music; he was one of the all-time authorities on Hector Berlioz. Some of his books—particularly Teacher in America and The House of Intellect—enjoyed a substantial lay readership and influenced debate about culture and education far beyond the realm of academic history. Barzun had a strong interest in the tools and mechanics of writing and research. He undertook the task of completing, from a manuscript almost two-thirds of which was in first draft at the author's death, and editing (with the help of six other people), the first edition (published 1966) of Follett's Modern American Usage. Barzun was also the author of books on literary style (Simple and Direct, 1975), on the crafts of editing and publishing (On Writing, Editing, and Publishing, 1971), and on research methods in history and the other humanities (The Modern Researcher, which has seen at least six editions, and is one of the thousand most widely held library items according to the OCLC[16]).
Barzun did not disdain popular culture: his varied interests included detective fiction and baseball.[17] His widely quoted statement, "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball." was inscribed on a plaque at the Baseball Hall of Fame.[18] He edited and wrote the introduction to the 1961 anthology, The Delights of Detection, which included stories by G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers, Rex Stout, and others. In 1971, Barzun co-authored (with Wendell Hertig Taylor), A Catalogue of Crime: Being a Reader's Guide to the Literature of Mystery, Detection, & Related Genres, for which he and his co-author received a Special Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America the following year.[19] Barzun was also an advocate
of supernatural fiction, and wrote the introduction to The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural.[20] Barzun was a proponent of the theatre critic and diarist James Agate, whom he compared in stature to Samuel Pepys.[21] Barzun edited Agate's last two diaries into a new edition in 1951 and wrote an informative introductory essay, "Agate and His Nine Egos".[22]
From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun
Jacques Barzun continued to write on education and cultural history after retiring from Columbia. At 84 years of age, he began writing his swan song, to which he devoted the better part of the 1990s. The resulting book of more than 800 pages, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present, revealed a vast erudition and brilliance undimmed by advanced age. Historians, literary critics, and popular reviewers all lauded From Dawn to Decadence as a sweeping and powerful survey of modern Western history, and it became a New York Times bestseller. With this work he gained an international reputation.[23] Reviewing it in the New York Times, historian William Everdell called the book "a great achievement" by a scholar "undiminished in his scholarship, research and polymathic interests," while also scrutinizing Barzun's scant treatment of figures like Walt Whitman and Karl Marx.[24]
The book introduces several novel typographic devices that aid an unusually rich system of cross-referencing and help keep many strands of thought in the book under organized control. Most pages feature a sidebar containing a pithy quotation, usually little known, and often surprising or humorous, from some author or historical figure. In 2007, Barzun commented that "Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing."[25] As late as October 2011, one month before his 104th birthday, he reviewed Adam Kirsch's Why Trilling Matters for the Wall Street Journal.[26]
In his philosophy of writing history, Barzun emphasized the role of storytelling over the use of academic jargon and detached analysis. He concluded in From Dawn to Decadence that "history cannot be a science; it is the very opposite, in that its interest resides in the particulars".[27]
In 1993, his book "An Essay on French Verse: For Readers of English Poetry" won the Poetry Society of America's Melville Cane Poetry Award.
On October 18, 2007, he received the 59th Great Teacher Award of the Society of Columbia Graduates in absentia.
On March 2, 2011, Barzun was awarded the 2010 National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama, although he was not expected to be in attendance.[31][32] On April 16, 2011, he received the Philolexian Award for Distinguished Literary Achievement in absentia.
The American Philosophical Society honors Barzun with its Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History, awarded annually since 1993 to the author of a recent distinguished work of cultural history. He also received the Gold Medal for Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, of which he was twice president.
Works
1927 Samplings and Chronicles: Being the Continuation of the Philolexian Society History, with Literary Selections from 1912 to 1927 (editor). Philolexian Society.
1932 The French Race: Theories of Its Origins and Their Social and Political Implications. P.S. King & Son.
1937 Race: A Study in Modern Superstition (Revised, 1965 Race: A Study in Superstition). Methuen & Co. Ltd.
1939 Of Human Freedom. Revised edition, Greenwood Press Reprint, 1977: ISBN0-8371-9321-4.
1974 Clio and the Doctors. Reprinted University of Chicago Press, 1993: ISBN0-226-03851-3.
1974 The Use and Abuse of Art (A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts) . Princeton University Press. ISBN0-691-01804-9.
1975 Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers. 4th ed, Harper Perennial, 2001: ISBN0-06-093723-8.
1976 The Bibliophile of the Future: His Complaints about the Twentieth Century (Maury A. Bromsen lecture in humanistic bibliography). Boston Public Library. ISBN0-89073-048-2.
1980 Three Talks at Northern Kentucky University. Northern Kentucky University, Dept. of Literature and Language.
1982 Critical Questions: On Music and Letters, Culture and Biography, 1940–1980 (edited by Bea Friedland). University of Chicago Press. ISBN0-226-03864-5.
1982 Berlioz and His Century: An Introduction to the Age of Romanticism (Abridgment of Berlioz and the Romantic Century). University of Chicago Press. ISBN0-226-03861-0.
1983 A Stroll with William James. Reprint University of Chicago Press, 2002: ISBN978-0-226-03869-8.
1986 A Word or Two Before You Go: Brief Essays on Language. Wesleyan University.
1989 The Culture We Deserve: A Critique of Disenlightenment. Wesleyan University. ISBN0-8195-6237-8.
1991 An Essay on French Verse: For Readers of English Poetry. New Directions Publishing. ISBN0-8112-1158-4.
1991 Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning. University of Chicago Press. ISBN0-226-03846-7.
^"Author and teacher Jacques Barzun has written an authoritative introduction". B. Williams, "A Complete Guide for all lovers
of horror" (Review of The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural. The Courier-Mail, January 31, 1987.
^From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present, Jacques Barzun, Harper Perennial, 2001.
^The Later Ego. Consisting of Ego 8 and Ego 9. Introduction and notes by Jacques Barzun, Jacques Barzun, Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, 1951.
^William R. Everdell, "Idea Man", review of From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present by Jacques Barzun, New York Times, May 21, 2000.
