Jacques Barzun Dies at 104; Cultural Critic Saw the Sun Setting on the West
HarperCollins
Jacques Barzun in an undated publicity photo.
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: October 25, 2012
Jacques Barzun, the distinguished historian, essayist, cultural gadfly
and educator who helped establish the modern discipline of cultural
history and came to see the West as sliding toward decadence, died
Thursday night in San Antonio, where he lived. He was 104.
Donal F. Holway/The New York Times
Mr. Barzun in 1971, at City University of New York’s Graduate Center in Manhattan.
His death was announced by Arthur Krystal, Mr. Barzun’s friend and editor.
Mr. Barzun was a man of boundless curiosity, monumental productivity and
manifold interests, encompassing both Berlioz and baseball. It was a
life of the mind first cultivated more than a century ago in a childhood
home outside Paris that became an avant-garde salon.
Mr. Barzun stood beside Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell and Lionel Trilling as
among the mid-20th century’s most wide-ranging scholars, all of whom
tried to reconcile the achievements of European culture and philosophy
with the demands and tastes of American intellectual and cultural life.
He wrote dozens of books across many decades, demonstrating that old age
did not necessarily mean intellectual decline. He published his most
ambitious and encyclopedic book at the age of 92 (and credited his
productivity in part to chronic insomnia). That work, “From Dawn to
Decadence,” is an 877-page survey of 500 years of Western culture in
which he argued that Western civilization itself had entered a period of
decline.
Mr. Barzun was both of the academy and the public square, a man of
letters and — he was proud to say — of the people. In books and in the
classroom he championed Romantic literature, 19th-century music and the
Western literary canon. He helped design the influential “great books”
curriculum at Columbia, where he was one of its most admired figures for
half a century, serving as provost, dean of faculty and university
professor.
As an educator Mr. Barzun was an important critic of American
universities, arguing in 1968 that their curriculums had become an
undisciplined “bazaar” of miscellaneous studies.
But he was also a popularizer, believing that the achievements of the
arts and scholarship should not be divorced from the wider American
culture. Writing for a general audience, he said, was “a responsibility
of scholars.”
To that end he served as history consultant to Life magazine and as a
critic for Harper’s. His articles appeared in Life magazine and The
Saturday Evening Post as well as The Atlantic, The Nation and The New
Republic. In 1951, he joined Trilling and W. H. Auden in founding the
Readers’ Subscription Book Club, which sought to make serious
scholarship and literature widely available.
His fascinations extended to mystery fiction, which he surveyed in the
anthology “The Delights of Detection” in 1961. Another was baseball, an
American institution he considered with a scholar’s eye. In a 1953
essay, “On Baseball,” he wrote:
“The wonderful purging of the passions that we all experienced in the fall of ’51, the despair groaned out over the fate of the Dodgers, from whom the league pennant was snatched at the last minute, give us some idea of what Greek tragedy was like.”
Unlike many of his colleagues, Professor Barzun showed little interest
in taking overtly political positions. This was partly because he became
a university administrator and had to stand above the fray, and partly
because he approached the world with a detached civility and a sardonic
skepticism about intellectual life.
“The intellectuals’ chief cause of anguish,” he wrote in “The House of Intellect” (1959), “are one another’s works.”
If Mr. Barzun kept the political issues of the day at arm’s length, he
nonetheless developed a reputation as a cultural conservative after the
student protests at Columbia in the late 1960s. He later argued that the
“peoples of the West” had “offered the world a set of ideas and
institutions not found earlier or elsewhere.”
But at the same time, he said, Western civilization had also cultivated
the seeds of its undoing by envying what it renounced and succumbing to
the lure of rebellion. Its virtues and failings, he argued, were in some
respects identical: the freedom to rebel could turn into sweeping
nihilism, resulting in decadence. He saw that happening.
His own stature as a public intellectual was undisputed. He was made a
chevalier of the Legion of Honor, France’s highest award, established by
Napoleon Bonaparte, and awarded the Medal of Freedom, the United
States’ highest civilian honor, by President George W. Bush. His
friendships embraced poets and scholars, and he continued often
argumentative correspondence with friends into the 21st century. An
authorized biography, “Jacques Barzun: Portrait of a Mind,” by Michael
Murray, was published in 2011.
In 1996, he also made a seemingly unlikely move from New York to San Antonio, where he lived until his death.
“After being boxed in by man and his constructions in Europe and the East, the release into space is exhilarating,” he wrote in The New York Times in 1982 about his repeated visits to Texas. “The horizon is a huge remote circle, and no hills intervene.”
Jacques Barzun was born on Nov. 30, 1907, in Créteil, a suburb of Paris,
the son of Anne-Rose and Henri Martin Barzun. His father was a diplomat
and writer with artistic interests. The Barzun home became an
avant-garde salon, which Mr. Barzun once called “a seedbed of modernism”
and “an open house for hotheads.” Regular visitors included the writer Jean Cocteau and the painter Albert Gleizes. (Gleizes’s portrait of Mr. Barzun’s mother hung in Mr. Barzun’s house.)
“By the time I was 9,” Mr. Barzun said in an interview with The Times in 2000, “I had the conviction that everybody in the world was an artist except plumbers or people who delivered groceries.”
Mr. Barzun studied at the Lycée Janson de Sailly, only to find himself,
he said, teaching there at the age of 9. After World War I broke out in
1914, many teachers were drafted into the military, and older students
were inducted to teach the younger ones.
With friends and acquaintances killed in the fighting, Mr. Barzun found
the war a “shattering experience.” In 1917, his father went to the
United States on a diplomatic mission. Then, at age 11, he “experienced a
very deep depression,” Mr. Barzun said in the New York Times interview
in 2000. He contemplated suicide.
In 1920, with the French university system decimated by the war and
young Jacques still in despair, it was decided that he would travel to
the United States, accompanied by his mother. To improve his English, he
read “Gulliver’s Travels.” Mr. Barzun’s first thoughts about America,
he said, were of a people almost as exotic as Gulliver’s Yahoos and
Brobdingnagians.
“I had read a lot of books about the Indians,” he explained. “I thought that I would come here and see Indians galloping across the plains.”
Instead he went to Columbia, where he was exposed to the work of the
most important critics and historians of the time, including F. J. E.
Woodbridge, John Dewey, Mark Van Doren and Mortimer Adler. He became a
drama critic for the university newspaper; wrote lyrics for a campus
show, “Zuleika, or the Sultan Insulted”; and helped create Ghosts Inc., a
tutorial service.
He graduated in 1927 as valedictorian and that summer taught his first
course at Columbia in contemporary civilization. He stayed there until
his retirement in 1975, having received his master’s degree there in
1928 and his Ph.D. in 1932, with a thesis on Montesquieu, the French
Enlightenment political philosopher, in which Mr. Barzun attacked the
popular notion of “the French race.” He came to be so closely associated
with the university that he redesigned its academic robes.
In 1931 he married Lucretia Mueller; they were divorced in 1936. That
year he married Mariana Lowell, a distant cousin of the poet Robert
Lowell (and the niece of the poet Amy Lowell), who died in 1979. In 1980
he married Marguerite Davenport, a descendant of a founder of the
Jamestown colony and a scholar of American literature. She survives him,
as do 3 children from his second marriage: James, Roger and Isabel
Barzun; 10 grandchildren; and 8 great-grandchildren.
A turning point in Mr. Barzun’s academic career came when he was exposed
to the developing discipline of cultural history, which relates
culture, the arts and ideas to historical events unfolding on the larger
public stage. At Columbia, Mr. Barzun assisted the historian Carlton J.
H. Hayes in preparing the textbook “A Political and Cultural History of
Modern Europe.” With the book he was, as he put it, “launched.”
The themes of his first books were related to the political world of the
1930s. (He became a United States citizen in 1933.) His 1937 book,
“Race: A Study in Modern Superstition,” grew out of his dissertation. In
1939, on the eve of World War II, he wrote “Of Human Freedom,” attacking absolutism and tracing the intellectual origins of democracy.
These issues reflected a broader concern that preoccupied him throughout
his career as he championed 19th-century liberalism, with its ideals of
individualism and liberty, and opposed intellectual and political
traditions that he felt to be rigid, deterministic or aristocratic.
Mr. Barzun came to associate liberalism with European Romanticism as it
was reflected in poets like Wordsworth and Goethe and composers like
Berlioz and Beethoven. His two-volume study “Berlioz and the Romantic
Century” (1950) was credited with restoring Berlioz’s reputation as a
great composer. Romanticism, Mr. Barzun later wrote, “implies not only
risk, effort, energy; it implies also creation, diversity and individual
genius.” In Time magazine in 1956, Mr. Barzun argued that America was
“the land of Romanticism par excellence,” thus linking the nation’s
possibilities with the intellectual tradition he most admired.
Against that Romantic vitality, Mr. Barzun pitted anything “systematic”
or “absolute,” particularly the “scientism” that he saw as modernity’s
unjust revenge against Romanticism. In another seminal book, “Darwin,
Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage” (1941),” he argued that
20th-century thought had been skewed by the influence of those three
major figures — harmful influence, he concluded. Darwin, Marx and
Wagner, he wrote, had each created a variety of “mechanical
materialism,” in which all that is human and variable is subjected to
domineering systems. Mr. Barzun associated those systems with the
scientific worldview, extending its power over religion, society and
art.
This was to become a recurring theme; Mr. Barzun even considered science
to have had a deleterious effect on university education. While he
maintained that modern science was “one of the most stupendous and
unexpected triumphs of the human mind,” he attacked, again and again,
any hint of “mechanical scientism,” which he said had baleful
consequences.
In 1964, in his book “Science: The Glorious Entertainment,” Mr. Barzun
offered ironic praise for science’s “all-pervasive energy.”
“It is,” he wrote, “at once a mode of thought, a source of strong emotion and faith as fanatical as any in history.”
This view of science and his attempts to associate its supposed
mechanistic qualities with Darwin or Wagner now seem to be among his
weakest and most dated speculations. But Mr. Barzun may have been most
influential in his arguing for a form of Romantic liberalism in American
education. He believed that the mission of the university should have
nothing to do with professional training or political advocacy. The
university, he wrote, should not be a “public utility”; rather it should
be a “city of the mind” devoted to the intellectual currents of Western
civilization.
That was the thinking behind his curriculum of classic literary and
philosophical texts, still required of all Columbia freshmen. And with
Trilling he taught one of Columbia’s most renowned courses, “Studies in
European Intellectual History and Culture Since 1750,” familiarly known
as “the Barzun-Trilling seminar.”
In books like “The American University: How It Runs, Where It Is Going”
(1968), Mr. Barzun raised questions that still roil the academy and
intellectual life: What is the purpose of a university education? What
should the relationship be between the elite artistic traditions of
Europe and the democratic popular culture of the United States?
His positions on many issues inspired controversy. So fervent was his
advocacy of Berlioz that Auden, writing in The New York Times Book
Review in 1950, said that Mr. Barzun “sometimes seems a fanatic to whom
Berlioz is the only composer who ever lived, against whom the slightest
criticism is blasphemy.”
In 1945, reviewing his book “Teacher in America,” The New Yorker said
that “everybody in the teaching profession ought to read Mr. Barzun, if
only to be able to argue with him.”
But his admirers were legion. In 1959, Daniel J. Boorstin wrote in The
Times that Mr. Barzun’s book “The House of Intellect” was “the most
important critique of American culture in many years.”
In that book, Mr. Barzun argued that egalitarianism, which he celebrated
in the political sphere, had no place in the university. He objected to
educational “philanthropy,” which he defined as “the liberal doctrine
of free and equal opportunity as applied to things of the mind.”
By the 1960s, he wrote in “The American University,” the university was
being mistakenly expected to “provide a home for the arts, satisfy
divergent tastes in architecture and social mores, cure cancer, recast
the penal code and train equally for the professions and for a life of
cultural contentment.”
He also objected to attempts to politicize the academy, whether in
support of governmental policies or in opposition to them. In the 1968
student demonstrations at Columbia, for example, protesters took over
administration buildings and held a dean hostage, objecting not only to
the Vietnam War but also to the roles the university played in the
defense establishment and in its own Upper Manhattan neighborhood. In
his critique of the protests, Mr. Barzun accused the faculty of failing
in its educational responsibilities and commitments to students. And the
protesters, he wrote, were guilty of “student despotism.”
After Mr. Barzun retired from Columbia, he became an adviser to Charles
Scribner’s Sons, the publishing house. Mr. Barzun’s engagement with
Western civilization continued into his last years. According to his
biographer, Michael Murray, he began a book called “Janus” in 2001, that
“was to have been a view of present-day culture by an archaeologist of
the thirtieth century.” In 2008, dissatisfied, he put it aside.
In his 2000 book, “From Dawn to Decadence,” he argued that one of the
great virtues of the West was its character as a “mongrel civilization”:
over the course of its development, it was resiliently constructed out
of dozens of national cultures.
He traced periods of rise and fall in the Western saga, and contended
that another fall was near — one that could cause “the liquidation of
500 years of civilization.” This time the decline would be caused not by
scientism and absolutism, he maintained, but by an internal crisis in
the civilization itself, which he believed had come to celebrate
nihilism and rebellion.
And yet, in the cycles of history, he believed another renewal would come.
“It is only in the shadows,” he wrote, “when some fresh wave, truly
original, truly creative, breaks upon the shore, that there will be a
rediscovery of the West.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 26, 2012
An earlier version of this obituary misidentified Arthur Krystal as the executor of Mr. Barzun’s estate. He is actually Mr. Barzun’s friend and editor.
******
Cultural Historian Jacques Barzun Dies At 104
Enlarge Eric Gay/AP Pioneering
cultural historian Jacques Barzun was the author of dozens of books and
essays on everything from philosophy to music to baseball. He died
Thursday in San Antonio at the age of 104.
In an interview 12 years ago on All Things Considered, Barzun said he believed history is driven by emancipation. "It is getting rid of whatever constraint at the moment seems intolerable," he said, "that of class, government — and now it seems to be against clothing."
If that smacks of a kind of intellectual get-off-my-lawn-ism, well, Barzun was a thinker of uncompromisingly high standards and some degree of sarcasm. He was born in Paris, the son of a diplomat. French universities had been decimated by World War I, so he attended Columbia in New York. Barzun taught there the summer after graduating and helped design its Great Books program; he later lamented that his approach was disappearing from universities.
"School today, if it achieves anything at all, aims at socialization rather than intellectual span and grasp," he said.
Barzun's own intellectual pursuits ran from editing Ellery Queen mysteries to championing the work of composer Hector Berlioz. Barzun also wrote about baseball — and perhaps his most famous quote is inscribed on the walls of that sport's Hall of Fame: "Whoever wants to know the heart and soul of America had better learn baseball."
Jacques was the Babe Ruth of Romanticism.
"He saw the great value in reaching a larger public than just his friends," Graff says. "He read everything. ... I don't know anybody who had such a Renaissance mind — a mind that I don't think I will ever encounter anywhere again."
At the age of 94, Barzun wrote From Dawn to Decadence, a survey of Western culture, which he argued is currently in decline. "It sounds alarming but it isn't," he explained. "It's simply the clearing of the ground for the basis being laid of a new culture." A new culture less dependent on its European roots in the 1500s. One more global and complex. It's a shame that Barzun won't be around to critique it.
From Dawn to Decadence: Western Culture from 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life by Jacques Barzun San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2000 (877 pages; $36.00, cloth).
SU的 關於J. Barzun資料
我兩年多前寫一篇介紹大陸翻譯的《從黎明到衰落：西方文化生活五百年 1500至今》( Jacques Barzun From Dawn to Decadence:1500 to the present, 500 years of Western Culture Life , Harper Collin 2000)(林華譯，北京：世界知識出版社，2002)
現在知道台灣版本還得一獎：「巨大的挑戰
謝謝金鼎獎設置翻譯人獎，這是對所有譯者的肯定與鼓勵。
《從黎明到衰頹》是一項巨大的挑戰，原著作者的知識高度，高不可及。但是他也表明：這本書──「是為喜歡閱讀藝術、思想、風俗、道德、宗教，以及其社會背景的讀者而寫」。
譯者便是將自己定位成這樣一位「普通讀者」，享受其中每一分閱讀與知識的樂趣，更藉由身為譯者之便，向作者直接請益，盡力將同樣的樂趣分享給每一位這樣的讀者。
但是文本「可譯」，譯本也永遠「可議」，文本的真相，常常Lost in Translation。翻譯，永遠有改正與進步的空間。
謝謝巴森先生寫了這部巨著，謝謝余英時先生推薦這部巨著，謝謝陳穎青先生的勇氣與信任，謝謝貓頭鷹編輯團隊，謝謝家人友人永遠做我後盾，謝謝評審。這個獎，獻給母親。」
一年多前一篇 Barzun《古典的，浪漫的，現代的》一段：
現在可以稍微更清潔
Barzun, Jacques], 1907–, American writer, educator, and historian, b. Créteil, France, grad. Columbia (B.A., 1927; Ph.D., 1932). Barzun moved to the United States in 1919. A student of law and history and one of the founders of the discipline of cultural history, he began teaching history at Columbia in 1928. He was appointed professor in 1945, became dean of the graduate faculties in 1955, and was (1958–67) dean of faculties and provost. For eight decades Barzun has written and edited critical and historical studies on a wide variety of subjects. They include The Teacher in America (1945), Darwin, Marx, Wagner (rev. 2d ed., 1958), The House of
Intellect (1959), Classic, Romantic, and Modern (2d rev. ed., 1961), Science: The Glorious Entertainment (1964), Race: A Study in Modern Superstition (rev. ed. 1965), The American University (1968), Berlioz and the Romantic Century (3d ed. 1969), The Use and Abuse of Art (1974), and Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning (1991). His massive, sweeping, and critically acclaimed historical survey, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present (2000), was a surprise bestseller.
See M. Murray, ed., A Jacques Barzun Reader (2002).
Jacques Barzun, Science the Glorious Entertainment. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964).
「首先，這番偏向學術性的事業或翻譯，可以更謹慎和更有系統地作些紮根和服務讀者的事，即，應該作些基本功，譬如說，附索引 如此方便作/談"學問 編索引(方便查閱並了解交叉引用等關係)-- 這要堅持--《走向封閉的美國精神》和去年盛舉：《從黎明到衰落：西方文化生活五百年 1500至今》( Jacques Barzun From Dawn to Decadence:1500 to the present, 500 years of Western Culture Life , Harper Collin 2000)(林華譯，北京：世界知識出版社，2002)的索引從缺，而《巨人與侏儒：布魯姆文集》可能開始就沒這打算。再說，類似這種博學的書，索引也有學問、功力，甚至有去或不可或缺（As is often the case with such books, the fun is in the index. ）世界知識出版社的漢譯本，許多人名未附原文，也無原書的人物和主題兩索引（Index of Persons p. 829-52和 Index of Subjects p.853-77）；同樣的，"參照說明（Reference Notes p. 803-28）中未附原文，前後 約兩頁未譯（最後可能附加） 。我們舉一例，說明其索引作得多仔細、層次分明（黑體字表示主角，提到Holmes的頁用"quoted"表示）
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr.(1809-94),584-6,611; quoted 505」
『 Jacques Barzun《古典的，浪漫的，現代的》一段
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