Jacques Barzun: Portrait of a
Mind
By Michael Murray
(Frederic C. Beil, 302 pages, $26.95)
Jacques Barzun, still going strong at 105, wrote recently of a
study of his friend Lionel Trilling that the important thing about
a critic was ultimately not the personality but the work. That
stance is unfashionable in our personality-driven age: every writer
with a book has a blog and an agent, pouring out every unsolicited
thought. Buzz too often substitutes for the work.
The focus for Barzun, as for Trilling, was different. Each
had, in their own ways, strong personalities — Barzun cool Gallic
intelligence, Trilling perhaps more tentative, seemingly more
accessible — but their work, although a product of their
personalities, is separate from them. Through their forty-year
collaboration, they sought linkages among objects, ideas, and
movements as a way of making sense of politics, literature, and
history. This intellectual stance is now called “cultural studies,”
and has something of a radical air about it, thanks to several
decades where it was used as an all-purpose term for a variety of
anti-intellectual and political ideologies. Barzun and Trilling
were not radicals, at least not in a contemporary sense. Unlike
many current practitioners of the genre, they were unafraid to
apply judgment, to discriminate among various cultural objects and
determine the worth among them, and how they fit together. And they
were united that culture and art break ideological boundaries and
cannot be restricted to rigid formula. Barzun, therefore, was no
New Critic; he understood that cultural objects occur within a
culture, and that although they may have lasting value, that value
derives in part from its connections with other objects. And it is
the job of a critic to explain those connections.
As Michael Murray shows in this, the first full-length
biography of Barzun, that capacity to judge has been central in all
of Barzun’s writing. Murray, a bibliographer and editor of a Barzun
reader as well as biographies of Albert Schweitzer and Marcel
Dupré, highlights Barzun’s “fine
discrimination among ideas,” evident, for example, in his
bestselling From Dawn to Decadence. That book did not
display the gloom of many conservative diatribes, nor did it
celebrate the fragmentation of Western culture and embrace of the
“other,” as many liberals fantasized. Rather, Barzun made a nuanced
but ultimately compelling case for the contemporary Western culture
as a period of decline leading to relative quiescence. However,
this need not be a permanent circumstance, but need last only as
long as it takes new ideas to germinate. Decadence “implies in
those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent or moral
sense. On the contrary, it is a very active time, full of deep
concerns, but peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of
advance. The loss it faces is that of Possibility.”
Barzun was a child of intellectually-engaged parents and
was raised in France until 1920, and he was raised among poets,
artists, and writers, including Apollinaire. His education in
France was the classic lycée tradition,
and ever after his work bears the clean prose and logical structure
on associates with that tradition. He and his family lived through
the harrowing years of World War I, and the images of broken young
men — some of them Barzun’s teachers — coming back from the front
was to stay with him lifelong.
He came to Columbia in 1923 as an undergraduate, after
some years boarding with an American family for last years of high
school. Murray treats these years with characteristic (and
sometimes perhaps too-exhaustive) detail, and shows how Barzun’s
years with the Swope family in Harrisburg helped form him as an
American by introducing him to “an insider’s knowledge of American
middle-class customs.” Some years later, Barzun would repay the
kindness of his adopted land in God’s Country and Mine
(1954); more directly, as Murray recounts, Barzun repaid Miss
Swope, who secretly helped pay for his college career. Barzun
remained at Columbia for five decades, eventually becoming provost.
After retiring from Columbia, he spent another two decades as an
editor at Scribner’s.
The wide scope of From Dawn to Decadence
reflects, in some sense, the work of a lifetime; indeed, as Murray
discovers, Barzun was taking notes for the book since his graduate
school days. And long before that work, Barzun was a household name
if not a leader of an academic school; he had appeared on the cover
of Time as early as 1956. His previous books stretch
across fields and time period, including books on baseball,
detective fiction, and more serious studies of race, Darwin, and
the scientific mindset, as well as penetrating essays on subjects
from baseball to music, of which he was an especially astute
critic. Unlike many of the critics of that generation, whose
intramural disputes seem dated, Barzun’s work speaks still to
enduring questions of art, culture, and history.
Murray plumbs unpublished material, such as letters and
diary entries, as well as extensive access to Barzun himself, in
crafting this life story. But that story is, as Barzun would wish,
firmly rooted in the work.
