For
the past few years, Jacques Barzun has been dreaming more and more in French.
Sometimes two people are speaking—one in English, the other in French—as
though nothing could be more natural than the cadences of one language summoning
the other. If awakened by the chatter, Barzun isn’t sure whether he has
dreamed in French and incorporated a native English speaker, or vice versa. He
finds these conversations oddly soothing, but he recognizes that they’re a
sign of aging, the tic of a mind seeking a moment when all the world spoke
French.
These days, Barzun doesn’t have much occasion to
speak the language of Flaubert, whose grammar and syntax, by the way, he
considers slovenly. He lives with his wife, Marguerite, in her home town of San
Antonio, Texas, where he retired after spending more than seventy years in New
York, most of them on the faculty of Columbia University. Barzun is usually out
of bed by 6 A.M.
He brews coffee, reads the San Antonio Express-News, exercises for forty
minutes, and heads down the hall to his study. After lunch, he dips into the
manuscripts and books that people send him, answers letters, and takes calls
from family members and friends. In the afternoon, he likes to read in the
sunroom, whose white brick walls and black-and-white tiled floor accommodate
without protest a mélange of armchairs and end tables of no particular style.
But then all the furnishings in the house—including the art: Piranesi
fortifications, Daumier scenes of Parisian life, Expressionist studies by Cleve
Gray, and bright watercolors of flowers and plants by Marguerite—have an
aesthetic compatibility that seems to issue more from accident than from design.
Cocktails are at six-thirty (Barzun favors Manhattans); a light dinner follows,
then a session with the New York Times. Barzun doesn’t watch TV and is
usually in bed by nine-thirty. Not long afterward, someone starts speaking in
French.
Next month, Barzun, the eminent historian and
cultural critic, will turn one hundred. His idea of celebrating his centenary is
to put the finishing touches on his thirty-eighth book (not counting
translations). Among his areas of expertise are French and German literature,
music, education, ghost stories, detective fiction, language, and etymology.
Barzun has examined Poe as proofreader, Abraham Lincoln as stylist, Diderot as
satirist, and Liszt as reader; he has burnished the reputations of Thomas
Beddoes, James Agate, and John Jay Chapman; and he has written so many reviews
and essays that his official biographer is loath to put a number on them.
There’s nothing hasty or haphazard about these evaluations. Barzun’s breadth
of erudition has been a byword among friends and colleagues for six decades. Yet,
in spite of his degrees and awards (he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre
National de la Légion d’Honneur and has received the Presidential Medal of
Freedom), Barzun regards himself in many respects as an “amateur” (the Latin
root, amator, means “lover”), someone who takes genuine pleasure in
what he learns about. More than any other historian of the past four generations,
Barzun has stood for the seemingly contradictory ideas of scholarly rigor and
unaffected enthusiasm.
One of those enthusiasms produced what may be his
most frequently quoted sentence: “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of
America had better learn baseball.” The line, extracted from his book
“God’s Country and Mine,” is inscribed on a plaque at the Baseball Hall of
Fame and routinely trotted out by news anchors and NPR commentators. Sometimes,
Barzun worries that after his books go out of print only those fourteen words
will be remembered. Or so he said one evening not long ago, when I was visiting
him in San Antonio. We had finished dinner and were sitting in the living room.
When he saw me looking at a portrait of his mother by Albert Gleizes, Barzun
remarked that it was the third Cubist portrait ever done. “Not the third
Cubist picture,” he cautioned, “the third Cubist portrait.” He
thinks the first may have been Picasso’s “Woman Seated in an Armchair,”
and the second Gleizes’s “Portrait of Jacques Nayral.” Barzun’s taste
and attitudes were formed at the beginning of the modernist movement—he played
in Duchamp’s studio and attended the orchestral opening of Stravinsky’s
“Le Sacre du Printemps”—and he has yet to come around to the cultural
aftermath.
Barzun’s declinist
views about Western civilization are no secret. One reason that “From Dawn to
Decadence,” an eight-hundred-page history of Western civilization from 1500 to
the present, which he published at the age of ninety-two, was such an improbable
best-seller (“the damnedest story you’ll ever read,” David Gates called it
in Newsweek) was its contention that Western civilization is winding
down, that “the forms of art as of life seem exhausted.” But, when Barzun
insists that he sees “the end of the high creative energies at work since the
Renaissance,” his tone is less that of someone appalled by what’s happening
than of someone simply recording the ocean currents.
Barzun began to appreciate the transience of
civilization almost as soon as he learned what the word meant. Born outside
Paris in 1907, he was six years old when the First World War broke out. Early
on, he had a sense that, in Paul Valéry’s harsh aperçu, “a civilization
has the same fragility as a life.” The war shattered the world that he knew
and, as he later wrote, “visibly destroyed that nursery of living culture.”
This isn’t entirely a figure of speech. On Saturdays before the war, his
parents’ living room had been a raucous salon where many of Europe’s leading
avant-garde artists and writers gathered: Varèse played the piano, Ozenfant and
Delaunay debated, Cocteau told lies, and Apollinaire declaimed. Brancusi often
stopped by, as did Léger, Kandinsky, Jules Romains, Duchamp, and Pound.
In 1914, when the shells began to fall, the visits
gradually ceased; soon came the names of the dead. His parents tried to conceal
the losses, but the boy became depressed and, as he learned later, began hinting
at suicide. At the age of ten, his parents bundled him off to the seashore at
Dinard, where he immersed himself in Shakespeare and James Fenimore Cooper.
It’s tempting to relate Barzun’s skepticism
about recent cultural developments (he’s inclined to regard the provocations
of later artists, from John Cage to Damien Hirst, as leaves from a tree that was
planted before the First World War) to the intensity of his childhood milieu and
its abrupt disappearance. Barzun readily acknowledges that the accident of birth
is “bound to have irreversible consequences,” but he rejects the idea that
his character or sense of the world derives from any loss that he might have
suffered as a child. In fact, when I broached the possibility that his precise
way of formulating ideas and strict attention to empirical evidence are
distinctive qualities of the civilization that he saw disintegrate before his
eyes, his response was gently quizzical. “Why must you find trauma where there
is none?” he asked. “I grew up a child of a bourgeois family, with
emancipated parents who surrounded themselves with people who talked about ideas.
My views were formed by my parents, by the lycée, and by my reading. How else
should I be?”
With the war over, Barzun’s father, the poet and
diplomat Henri Martin Barzun, offered his only son a choice of completing his
studies in England or in America. Barzun, with visions of Chingachgook dancing
in his head, didn’t hesitate, and in 1920 the family settled in New Rochelle.
Barzun, with the aid of tutors, entered Columbia at fifteen. His student life
presaged his professional one. He majored in history, reviewed theatre for the
daily Spectator, edited the monthly literary magazine, became the
president of the Philolexian Society, and, together with his friend Wendell
Hertig Taylor, kept a running tally of every mystery book that came along. Their
brief descriptions, scribbled on three-by-five-inch index cards, eventually
coalesced into “A Catalogue of Crime,” one of the foremost reference works
in the mystery/suspense genre. He also managed to graduate as valedictorian of
his class, a feat he considers less impressive than having written the 1928
Varsity Show, “Zuleika, or the Sultan Insulted.”
Barzun joined the history faculty a year after
graduating, at a moment when British and American universities, despite a
general dislike of things Teutonic, were in thrall to the ideal of Wissenschaft,
or scientific knowledge. Philosophers such as Wilhelm Dilthey had argued that
history was a succession of conceptual forms and styles, capable of being
classified and studied methodically. (Another German, of course, had maintained
that class struggle was actually the transformative force behind historical
events.) History was now thought too serious to be left to biographers and
storytellers; and even Lord Acton urged his students to “study problems in
preference to periods.” Barzun, though hardly a practitioner of the old
popes-and-princes school of history (his first books examined ideas about race
and freedom), disapproved of attempts to refashion history as a social science.
History wasn’t “a piece of crockery dredged up from the Titanic,” he wrote;
it was, “first, the shipwreck, then a piece of writing.” He demanded,
therefore, that historical narrative include “the range and wildness of
individuality, the pivotal force of trifles, the manifestations of greatness,
the failures of unquestioned talent.” His models were Burkhardt, Gibbon,
Macaulay, and Michelet, authors of imperfect mosaics characterized by a strong
narrative line. As for philosopher-historians like Vico, Herder, and Spengler,
Barzun held that they did not, despite creating prodigious works of learning,
write histories at all: “It is not a paradox to say that in seeking a law of
history those passionate minds were giving up their interest in history.”
In Columbia, Barzun found
a genial host for his far-flung interests. In addition to the broadly conceived
Contemporary Civilization course, Columbia offered a General Honors class—later,
the Colloquium on Important Books—that let a select group of upperclassmen
read the Western classics with instructors from two fields. When Barzun was
assigned to the Colloquium, in 1934, his teaching partner was the English
instructor Lionel Trilling. Among the most influential literary critics to
emerge from the academy, Trilling admitted late in life that he had once stood
“puzzled, abashed, and a little queasy” before the “high artistic culture
of the modern age,” a discomfort no doubt torqued by sitting at a table next
to a man whose mind had been formed at first hand by that culture. The
Colloquium, as the word implies, was a conversation, and in 1934 it became not
merely a conversation between instructors and undergraduates but also a dialogue
between the two men that lasted until Trilling’s death, in 1975.
Dissimilar in many respects, the urbane,
Americanized Frenchman, with his easy manner, and the shy, intense, Jewish
writer-aspirant from Queens, who had only recently renounced his Marxist views,
soon shared their thoughts, showed each other drafts of their work, and
gradually began to carve out a new discipline in American education. They
broadened the critical spectrum to include the biographical and social
conditions attending the creation of any cultural artifact, and rerouted the
notion of individuality or genius toward a busy intersection where various
historical forces converged.
Barzun and Trilling, it could be said, also
broadened each other. One day in the mid-nineteen-thirties, they began talking
about novelists, and Barzun mentioned his admiration for Henry James. Trilling,
who had read only a few of James’s stories, replied that he thought him not
much more than a “social twitterer.” Barzun pressed upon him “The Pupil”
and, as he recalls, “The Spoils of Poynton.” Trilling was duly persuaded,
and marched off to convince Phillip Rahv and William Phillips, the editors of Partisan
Review, that James was a writer to be taken seriously—and within five or
six years he was.
At the Colloquium, books and ideas were thrown open
to discussion; almost every approach was tolerated. “Cultural criticism” was
Barzun and Trilling’s coinage for their lack of method, and it worked so well
that, in the mid-fifties, Fred Friendly, an executive producer at CBS News,
tried (and failed) to persuade the two men to offer a version of the Colloquium
for television. “It was awe-inspiring,” the historian Fritz Stern, a 1946
alumnus of the Colloquium, recalled recently. “There I was, listening to two
men very different, yet brilliantly attuned to each other, spinning and refining
their thoughts in front of us. And when they spoke about Wordsworth, or Balzac,
or Burke, it was as if they’d known him. I couldn’t imagine a better
way to read the great masterpieces of modern European thought.”
The class met on Wednesday evenings, and, as the
decades passed and more specialized approaches to literature emerged, Barzun and
Trilling remained committed to the essential messiness of culture. Neither the
self-isolating pieties of the New Critics, nor the technical proficiency of the
Russian Formalists, nor the class-bound shibboleths of Marxist writers held sway
in their classroom. As a result, they were condemned, as Barzun recalled, “for
overlooking the autonomy of the work of art and its inherent indifference to
meaning; for ignoring the dialectic of history,” not to mention “the
‘rigorous’ critical methods recently opened to those who could count
metaphors, analyze themes, and trace myths.”
Basically, Barzun and Trilling cast themselves in
the Arnoldian mold of relating culture to conduct. Matthew Arnold believed that
judging books “as to the influence which they are calculated to have upon the
general culture” would help realize man’s better nature and, thus,
eventually improve society itself. Trilling and Barzun were less dreamy about
the critic’s power, but, like Arnold, they saw no fissure between moral and
aesthetic intelligence. They interpreted books liberally and wrote about them
with a fluency and a precision befitting R. P. Blackmur’s definition of
criticism as “the formal discourse of an amateur.”
For all that, Barzun was never a “New York
intellectual.” He occasionally fraternized with the Partisan Review
crowd, but he avoided the sectarian wars that seemed to fuel their lives and
work; he appears only marginally in most accounts of the literary figures who
rotated around the magazine. Yet, when a mid-century issue of Time came
out with a lead article entitled “America and the Intellectual,” it wasn’t
Edmund Wilson, or Lionel Trilling, or Sidney Hook, or Mark Van Doren whose
likeness appeared on the cover (though all were mentioned inside); it was that
of a man who hadn’t even been born here.
Around 1941, Barzun took on a larger classroom,
becoming the moderator of the CBS radio program “Invitation to Learning,”
which aired on Sunday mornings and featured four or five intellectual lights
discussing books. From commenting on books, it was, apparently, a short step to
selling them. In 1951, Barzun, Trilling, and W. H. Auden started up the
Readers’ Subscription Book Club, writing monthly appreciations of books that
they thought the public would benefit from reading. The club lasted for eleven
years, partly on the strength of the recommended books, which ranged from
Kenneth Grahame’s “The Wind in the Willows” to Hannah Arendt’s “The
Human Condition,” and partly on the strength of the editors’ reputations.
Barzun’s public
reputation had been made with the appearance of “Romanticism and the Modern
Ego” (1943), which defied prevailing opinion by arguing that the difference
between the ostensibly unruly Romantic movement and the ostensibly neoclassical
Enlightenment was fundamentally social and political, not aesthetic. “The
Romanticists’ point was in fact not an emotional point at all,” Barzun
claimed, “but an intellectual point about the emotional life of man.” It was
a bold statement to make at a time when Eliot’s condescensions to the
early-nineteenth-century poets dominated literature departments, and perhaps it
took a historian to recognize that Eliot’s distrust of personality and
radicalism caused him to misjudge the Romantics’ debt to, among others,
Rousseau and Kant. As Barzun laid it out, Romanticism was no aberrant aesthetic
movement but reflected an intellectual sensibility perfectly suited to a hectic
and idealistic age. In short, he helped make Romanticism respectable.
Although Barzun’s influence on literary studies
is difficult to assess, there’s little doubt about his role in the revival of
Hector Berlioz. Barzun had heard Berlioz’s “Rakoczy March” at a
children’s concert in Paris when he was four or five, and, nearly forty years
later, when putting the finishing touches on his biography of the composer, he
noticed that the French and German scores of “Roméo et Juliette” contained
a small discrepancy. (The placing of mutes on the strings at one point in the
Love Scene was different.) He happened to mention this to Toscanini’s
assistant, and a few days later he was having tea at Toscanini’s house in
Riverdale, discussing music in general and Berlioz’s instrumentation and
harmonics in particular.
Toscanini was one of a small number of musicians at
mid-century who admired Berlioz. The rest of the music world, along with
“conservatives, clerics, liberals and socialists,” Barzun wrote, “all
joined in repudiating” the Romantic style. But, where others heard in Berlioz
disorder and bombast, Barzun discerned exuberance, vividness, and dramatic flair.
When he listened to Berlioz, Barzun heard “Gothic cathedrals, the
festivals of the Revolution, the antique grandeur of classic tragedy, the comic
force of Molière and Beaumarchais, and the special lyricism of his own Romantic
period.” Barzun didn’t just like Berlioz’s music; he liked the mind that
made the music, and his two-volume “Berlioz and the Romantic Century” (1950)
not only spurred revisionist studies of Berlioz but also brought his music back
into a general repertoire. “When I left school, I had to educate myself, and
Jacques Barzun was part of my education,” the British conductor Sir Colin
Davis told me. Davis had lobbied for Berlioz’s music in England and in 1969 he
conducted a magnificent performance of “Les Troyens” in London that
eventually led to his recording all Berlioz’s major works.
As much as he wrote about
music and literature, Barzun was no unworldly aesthete, and his practical and
political side was put to the test in 1958, when he assumed the inaugural post
of provost and dean of faculties at Columbia. He remained provost for ten years
and is generally credited with extricating the university from its financial and
administrative woes. He also replaced the music played at graduation with the
march from “Les Troyens.” Barzun returned to teaching the history of Western
civilization just as it was coming under attack by various Continental theorists,
whose repudiation of hierarchical structures and determinate meaning challenged
everything that Barzun believed in. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties,
Barzun became a symbol of the Old Guard, a mandarin scholar futilely defending
the works of dead white males. Even as late as 1990, he had a walk-on in Henry
Louis Gates, Jr.,’s smart, hardboiled spoof of the canon wars, dressed in
evening clothes and packing a .38 Beretta, holding forth on standards and errors
of usage.
In truth, Barzun looked the part of someone who
embodied tradition. He stood a straight-up six feet two inches and wore clothes
that, if not expensive, looked expensive on him. His hair was silver, his
forehead high and broad, and his nose long and straight, with a slight dip at
the end. He looked ambassadorial, and possessed an air of authority that had
less to do with giving orders than with the expectation that he would be
listened to. Carolyn Heilbrun, one of the first female professors in
Columbia’s English and Comparative Literature Department, remembers that she
felt patronized by Trilling and other male faculty, but she wrote about Barzun
almost reverently:
No
picture of him I have seen, whether rendered by a photographer or by an artist,
captures either his physical or his inner qualities. Obvious to the mere
observer or the frightened student were his aristocratic way of carrying himself,
suggesting arrogance, his impeccable clothes, his neat hair, his studious, exact,
but never hesitant speech, his formidable intelligence. I have known history
students tempted for the first time in their lives to plagiarize a paper because
they could not imagine themselves writing anything that would not affront his
critical eye, let alone satisfy him.
When I first encountered
Jacques Barzun, in January of 1970, he was sixty-two and I was twenty-two. He
was the University Professor of History at Columbia; I was a first-year graduate
student in the English and Comparative Literature Department. He lived on upper
Fifth Avenue; I lived in the Bronx, near Kingsbridge Avenue. He attended the
opera; I hung out at revival movie theatres. He wore bespoke suits; I didn’t
own a suit. He said “potato”; I said “pot.” Perhaps because we didn’t
really know each other (to me, he was just a name following the introduction to
my Bantam edition of “Germinal”; to him, I was just another student in a
green Army jacket who smoked filterless Camels), Barzun and I hit it off.
After I began to read his books, I noticed that the
historian and the critic had distinctive voices. When Barzun is compressing
great batches of information, his prose races across spatial and chronological
vistas, delivering facts, their causes and implications, in a strictly
utilitarian, almost rat-a-tat manner. When he’s addressing an artist’s work,
however, the prose becomes redolent, more capacious, its syntactical flourishes
a tacit reflection of real appreciation. Very few historians could so
confidently gauge a writer’s mind:
Shaw
knows at any moment, on any subject, what he thinks, what you will think, what
others have thought, what all this thinking entails. . . . Shaw is perhaps the
most consciously conscious mind that has ever thought—certainly the most
conscious since Rousseau; which may be why both of them often create the same
impression of insincerity amounting to charlatanism.
Not everything that Barzun wrote struck me with
equal force, and some years later, when I edited a compilation of his essays, I
made so bold as to tinker with his style. The editorial process led to a spate
of letters, highlighting our asynchronous temperaments. During one exchange, I
suggested that the importance of what he was saying warranted heightened
language. His reply came so fast that I thought he’d bounded across Central
Park and put the letter in my mailbox himself. “You are a sky-high highbrow,”
he wrote. “Me, I suspect highbrows (and low- and middle-) as I do all
specialists, suspect them of making things too easy for themselves; and like
women with a good figure who can afford to go braless, I go about brow-less.”
Undeterred, I offered to rewrite the passages in question. My changes were
acknowledged with fitting tribute. “To put it in a nice, friendly,
unprejudiced way,” he responded, “your aim as shown in your rewritings of
the ‘objectionable’ sentences strikes me as patronizing, smarmy, emetic!”
My heart swells when I contemplate that exclamation point, as he seldom resorts
to one.
Barzun doesn’t often emote on paper and is even
less inclined to do so in person. When you talk to people who know him, the same
adjectives pop up: “composed,” “distant,” “removed,” “reserved.”
It’s not that friends find him cold or unhelpful; it’s just that Barzun
exudes a formality that inhibits the exchange of intimate confidences. He
doesn’t jabber. He won’t gossip about his friends or discuss his marriages (there
have been three) or family (he has three children). After all, what does any of
this have to do with his work? When I raised the prospect of talking to him
about his life, he sighed and said, “It’s not a subject I’m interested
in.” Still, I thought, he must confide in some people. So I asked
Shirley Hazzard, whose husband, the French scholar Francis Steegmuller, was in
the same class as Barzun at Columbia, if Barzun had ever revealed anything about
his private life to her. Her reply was almost a reprimand: “If you know
Jacques, you know that he doesn’t talk about those things.”
And yet Barzun is not all genteel restraint,
something that Sir Colin Davis touched on when we spoke about Barzun’s
appreciation of Berlioz: “Such an interesting figure, Berlioz—so intelligent
and self-conscious, but also volatile and passionate. I rather think Jacques is
like that—his internal life, I mean, not his personal life.”
Barzun’s prose may not give off much heat, but over and over one finds paeans
to pure feeling, to the sensuous response to experience. Like William James (his
favorite philosopher), Barzun believes that feeling is at the root of all
philosophy and art. “The greatest artists have never been men of taste,”
Barzun wrote, with Berlioz in mind. “By never sophisticating their instincts
they have never lost the awareness of the great simplicities, which they relish
both from appetite and from the challenge these offer to skill in competition
with popular art.” Because Barzun is so coolly analytical in his own work, one
might infer that he would be drawn to poets of fine discrimination, to ingenious
symbolists like Mallarmé and Valéry, and yet it’s the rude vitality of Molière
and Hugo that engages him.
Obvious emotionalism is not the point; it’s the
courage to be emotional that matters. Barzun has observed that “the vulgarity
of mankind,” in the sense of the common man’s intense awareness of
life—life with all its brief pleasures and bruising shocks—“is not only a
source of art but the ultimate one.” It’s easy enough to understand why
people don’t immediately see this side of Barzun, and pass over, without
notice, sentiments such as “And when will art cease to be something so
exclusively for nice people?” or “Reading history remakes the mind by
feeding primitive pleasure in story.”
Barzun always seemed to
know everything you had ever read or thought about reading one day, and he
seemed just as comfortable talking about German architecture as about Venetian
politics. “He was terrifying,” Steven Marcus, a former dean of Columbia
College, recalled about the experience of being his student. “He would
disgorge an absolutely enormous amount of information during his lectures, more
than anyone could possibly remember, and what you felt was—you felt you
couldn’t compete. I mean, you could imagine maybe one day writing something on
the order of Trilling—maybe. But how could you ever know as much as Barzun did?”
The charge against Barzun, accordingly, was that he spread himself too thin. As
Marcus explained, “I think his natural reserve and the variegated subject
matter have caused him to be taken less seriously by the intellectual crowd that
runs literature departments and literary quarterlies.”
Barzun, though, never intended to write for that
crowd. Instead, as he put it in a letter to me, he wanted “to write for a
quite different, less homogeneous group: academics in other departments than
English, people with a non-professional interest in the arts (doctors who play
music, lawyers who read philosophy) and a certain number of men and women in
business and philanthropy, in foundations and newspapers or publishing houses.”
In writing for a general audience, Barzun was taking sides in an old debate
about the relationship between the intellectual writer and the reading public.
It was a question not of how much the reading public could bear but of who
constituted that public. When Dr. Johnson wrote, “I rejoice to concur with the
common reader,” he could count on that reader to actually read or hear about
his rejoicing. He was speaking, after all, about a relatively small number of
educated Brits who owned businesses or property and could afford to buy books.
When Barzun began writing, the size and diversity of the reading public
discouraged such assumptions.
Barzun wanted to do on the page what he did in the
classroom: help the reader “carry in his head something more than the
unexamined history of his own life,” not because knowledge is inherently good
or makes one a better person but because it fosters an independence of mind. The
more one learns about the course of civilization, he believed, the more one can
appreciate its achievements. After a while, if you learn enough, you can argue
that, say, Shaw’s mind more closely resembles Rousseau’s than Voltaire’s—and
you may actually enjoy doing it. Consequently, there’s nothing Hegelian,
Heideggerian, or hermeneutic about his work; no nihilistic or existential angst
livens things up. Nor does he proffer any grand theory or unifying design that
would explain the past in the categorical manner of Spengler’s organic cycle
of regional growth and decay, or Braudel’s emphasis on broad socioeconomic “structures.”
For Barzun, these systematic models of cause and effect run counter to the
temper of history, which is intuitive, concrete, beholden to time and evidence:
History,
like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris; it is full of
live and dead things, some destined for resurrection; it mingles many waters and
holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils. Anything may
become part of it; that is why it can be an image of the continuity of mankind.
And it is also why some of its freight turns up again in the social sciences:
they were constructed out of the contents of history in the same way as houses
in medieval Rome were made out of stones taken from the Coliseum. But the
special sciences based on sorted facts cannot be mistaken for rivers flowing in
time and full of persons and events. They are systems fashioned with concepts,
numbers, and abstract relations. For history, the reward of eluding method is to
escape abstraction.
Barzun’s approach to
history is, in a word, pragmatic. He is temperamentally in tune with William
James’s self-assessment: “I am no lover of disorder, but fear to lose truth
by the pretension to possess it entirely.” Among the things that drew Barzun
to James was James’s conviction that every request made in good faith incurs
some moral obligation in the claimant. A few weeks shy of his hundredth birthday,
Barzun is still pressed to read manuscripts, give talks, and attend affairs in
his honor. He tries to accommodate everyone, but there is simply less of him to
go around. He’s five inches shorter than he used to be, a decrease due to
aging and spinal stenosis, which causes pain and numbness in the legs. He relies
on a cane or a walker to get around, and, as one might expect, he is alert to
the irony of aging: when time is short, old age takes up a lot of time. There
are doctors’ visits, tests to be suffered, results to wait for, ailments and
medications to be studied—all distractions from the work. “Old age is like
learning a new profession,” he noted drily. “And not one of your own
choosing.”
Before I left San Antonio, Barzun called my
attention to what he slyly referred to as his “most notable accomplishment.”
It was a book lying on a coffee table in the sunroom and titled “Introduction
to Naval History: An Outline with Diagrams and Glossary.” I turned it over in
my hands and looked inside: it was, as promised, a point-by-point synopsis of
seafaring events, designed for the education of naval officers. It turns out
that, during the Second World War, the U.S. Navy commissioned Barzun, an
associate professor at the time, to write it. And why not? It was always risky
to assume that any topic was beyond Barzun’s ken.
Shirley Hazzard learned this one evening, in the
mid-nineteen-seventies, when she and Barzun found themselves standing in a
storage room on East Seventy-ninth Street, up to their necks in books. They had
been asked by the head librarian of the New York Society Library to help him
weed out superfluous and out-of-date volumes. “There we were,” Hazzard told
me, raising her arm, “books stacked this high, and I thought, We’re really
in for it. We’ll never get through these. Then Jacques reached into a pile,
glanced at the title—it didn’t matter which book it was—and said, ‘This
one’s been superseded by another; this one is still valid; this one can stay
until someone or somebody finishes his new study,’ and in a couple of hours we
were done. It was a very impressive performance, because, you know, he wasn’t
performing at all. It’s just Jacques.”