Jacques Barzun

Who was Jacques Barzun, other than the author of some forty books on history, European and American literature, Romanticism, the English language, French poetry, the science of education, mystery stories, and more, and the translator into English of works by Beaumarchais, Berlioz, Courteline, Diderot, Flaubert, Musset, and others who wrote in German, Spanish, Italian, and Latin—as we know from Pleasures of Music, his great anthology of writings on music from Benvenuto Cellini to George Bernard Shaw?3 For a bibliography of Barzun’s writings through 1975, see Weiner, From Parnassus. For further bibliography, see A Jacques Barzun Reader. He was a genius, for reasons I shall mention. He was professor, dean, provost, and architect of the twentieth-century curriculum at Columbia University. And for some decades, with his Columbia University colleague Lionel Trilling, he was one of New York City’s celebrated public intellectuals. On the personal level, he was modest, even shy, and, like Berlioz, possessed of a fine sense of humor and a touching gift for friendship. In those Pleasures of Music, Barzun does not take credit for the translations: he admitted to their authorship only on being queried. In my copy, he wrote “to Peter Bloom, whose writings would be represented here if he had lived earlier”—one of the many marks I have of the man’s affectionate wit. In fact, wit and mirth, joined to unsurpassed learning, are the hallmarks of his style. When I spoke to Barzun of my productive encounters with Jean-Pierre Angremy, author of the romanticized biography I mentioned at the top of this epilogue, and president of the sparkling new Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Barzun quipped: “Angremy sounds better than his building looks.” The form of this witticism was almost a trademark. In answer to my query about his childhood experience of Debussy, Barzun recalled sitting through a performance of Pelléas et Mélisande: “Though cut, it still felt as long as her hair.”

Jacques Barzun was born in Créteil, a village just southeast of Paris, on November 30, 1907, into a prosperous family that traced its eighteenth-century origins to the commune of Barzun, near Lourdes, in the southwest region of France. As landowners there, the family had the right to use the surname “de Barzun”: “Come the revolution in 1789, one of the sons, Jacques, the younger, as is assumed on probability, shared the advanced ideas and broke with his family, was bought out of his inheritance, went to Montpellier and became a physician. […] During the proscriptions by Napoléon III against intellectuals, the carrier of the name was still a republican plotting in an underground cell. He dropped the name so as not to be deported. It was resumed by my grandfather.”4 Jacques Barzun to Peter Bloom (September 7, 1998). Barzun’s father, Henri-Louis-Martin Barzun, who did at times style himself simply “Henri-Martin,” to the confusion of his son’s biographers, began his journalistic career at Le Soir, in 1905, signing “H. L. Barzun.” Later, in L’Aurore, Le Soir, L’Action, and other newspapers published before and during World War I, we find “H. Martin-Barzun” and “H. M. Barzun.” Barzun père was notably associated with a short-lived artists’ colony known as the Abbaye de Créteil, a Bohemian gathering that included the experimental poets René Arcos and Charles Vildrac, the physician-novelist Georges Duhamel, and the early cubist painter Albert Gleizes, author of the handsome portrait of Jacques Barzun’s mother that now hangs in the McNay Art Museum, in San Antonio, Texas.5 On Henri-Martin Barzun, see Kempton, “The Enigma”; on the portrait, see Sénéchal, L’Abbaye Créteil, 26. By the time of the infant Jacques’s first birthday, the Abbaye de Créteil had come to an end. But the boy would come to know well a circle of avant-garde artists who included the portraitist of his mother, the painter Marie Laurencin, the professor of rhetoric (and teacher of Arthur Rimbaud) Georges Izambard, the art critic Olivier Hourcade, and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire —the “five adult friends of my childhood” to whom the mature scholar would dedicate his Essay on French Verse for Readers of English Poetry.

It is important to record that Henri-Martin Barzun, born in Grenoble in 1881, was himself a devoted admirer of the composer of the Symphonie fantastique, so much so that he created, in 1908, a Fondation Hector Berlioz, now largely forgotten, but at the time worthy of regular coverage in the press. To bolster his enterprise, the senior Barzun succeeded in bringing together a distinguished group of writers and musicians, among them Alfred Bruneau, Édouard Colonne, Maurice Faure, Vincent d’Indy, Adolphe Jullien, Charles Malherbe, Jacques-Gabriel Prod’homme, and Romain Rolland.6 Letters concerning the Fondation Hector Berlioz are preserved in the Jacques Barzun Collection at Columbia University (box 2). From Toulouse, on November 18, 1908, Camille Saint-Saëns wrote to Barzun to say: “It is with the greatest pleasure that I accept the title of Président d’honneur de la Fondation Berlioz.” And from Garmisch, on December 23, 1908, Richard Strauss wrote to accept (as had earlier his countrymen Felix Mottl and Felix Weingartner) the offer of honorary membership:

Henri-Martin Barzun became an administrator in the Clémenceau governments and in particular a functionary in the department of labor. During the First World War, as head of the French Press Commission, in New York City, in 1917, he participated in the “advertising campaign” that encouraged continuing American support.9 Keylor, “How They Advertised France,” 359. After carrying out that mission, he determined to settle his family in the United States, in 1919, nonetheless keeping up his work as a reporter and, among other things, as an experimental poet, which kept his name in the newspapers. In L’Intransigeant of August 29, 1923, we even find an article noting that “the son of the poet Barzun, who has been living in America for several years, obtained First Honors at the Technical High School in Harrisburg [Pennsylvania].” Indeed, his high school yearbook correctly predicted that “Jack” (“Frenchie”) Barzun would immediately challenge the wherewithal of the professors he was about to encounter, in college, at Columbia University in the City of New York.

Jacques Barzun had begun his musical education “in the manner that Montaigne reports of his own infancy,”10 Barzun, Berlioz and the Romantic Century, 2:459. that is to say, by being one day awakened by his father’s playing of a flute, thus rendering music forever a part of his universe.11 Michel de Montaigne, Essais (1595), book 1, chapter 26. Jacques Barzun’s childhood flute is preserved in the Jacques Barzun Collection at Columbia University. His Berliozian recollections included hearing, at age three, the Marche de pèlerins—played at the Saturday afternoon children’s concerts by the Orchestre Lamoureux—and henceforth feeling ever-drawn to the French composer. When Felix Weingartner came to Paris in 1912, young Jacques heard a performance of the Requiem, at the Trocadero, on April 26. The following year, on April 3, 1913, he was present (as was the President of the French Republic, Raymond Pointcarré) when Benvenuto Cellini inaugurated the sparkling new Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, whose architect, Auguste Perret, was a friend of the family. (Eight weeks later, that new theater was the scene of the riotous première of Le Sacre du printemps.) What is abnormal in all of this is the absence of… Wagner! Most of the modernist poets writing in the aftermath of Baudelaire, the instigator in France of wagnérisme, were Wagnerians of one stripe or another. But that other friend of the family who was Guillaume Apollinaire may have cast lasting aspersions upon the Meister: in his manifesto, “Futurist Antitradition,” of June 29, 1913, using a scatological expletive, he consigned Wagner and Bayreuth (along with Beethoven, Poe, Whitman, Baudelaire, teachers, professors, and Shakespeare!) to the dustbin of history.12 Apollinaire, “L’Antitradition futuriste” (consulted November 13, 2020).

After studies at the Lycée Janson de Sailly and, in the United States, at that high school in Harrisburg, Barzun entered Columbia University, in 1923. Upon graduation, in 1927, when he was not yet twenty, his alma mater immediately offered him a teaching post in the department of history. There, during his nearly fifty years of professorial life, he defended the cause of “the great books” and the grand principles of a classical education. As an administrator, he managed, among other things, to have academic processions accompanied by the Marche troyenne! His educational philosophy is manifest in all of his writing: that history is a branch of literature; that enlightenment is the result of debate; that prejudice—directed not at women or Jews or Belgians or Blacks, but at any group whatsoever—is intolerable; that mechanical thinking is to be challenged; that received ideas are to be resisted. It is not for nothing that he was the translator of Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues. As Dominique Catteau has put it, with regard to Berlioz, to fix a place for him is to lessen his importance; “to classify him is to belittle him.”13 Catteau, Hector Berlioz ou la philosophie artiste, 2:229. That is what Barzun came to understand during the two decades of research that preceded the publication in 1950 of his two-volume summa—a work that shuns hagiography while remaining admiring of its subject, and that offers the cultural history of a century. “Admiration,” Barzun wrote in 1990, “makes one want to amend careless posterity and draw fresh attention to the forgotten or misknown.”14 Barzun, “Toward a Fateful Serenity,” in A Jacques Barzun Reader, 7.

The “misknown” included Berlioz according to Boschot. Barzun’s second volume devotes eight pithy pages to Boschot’s errors and inadequacies, large and small.15 Barzun, Berlioz and the Romantic Century, 2:312–320. Of the latter: In a letter of January 1, 1832, Berlioz refers amicably to Hiller as a “gros scélérat,” a “big scoundrel”; Boschot picked up the expression and ran with it each time he mentioned Hiller, thus falsely implying that Berlioz had employed it, behind the fellow’s back, as a kind of personal insult, and, worse, that Berlioz was not immune to that kind of backbiting, that he could be an unworthy friend. This stuck in Barzun’s craw. Far more problematical was Boschot’s treatment of the documents of Berlioz’s life—the articles, the letters, and especially the Mémoires—as though they were “Euclidian theorems” subject to rational proof. Such a false assumption allowed Boschot to take pleasure, or so it seemed, in tracing Berlioz’s own misrememberings, misstatements, and mistakes. Boschot, in Barzun’s ultimately devastating assessment, found it necessary to “belittle his subject in order to bring it within his grasp.”16 Barzun, 2:320. That Boschot’s overall style troubled Barzun is not surprising. Barzun became a master of not only French, accomplished early on by reading the classics and, he told me, by doing themes in a French lycée, but of English, too, by learned application and native intelligence. In the United States, Barzun came to be seen as the embodiment of an American Robert, Larousse, and Grévisse. In 1966, he published Modern American Usage, a guide left incomplete by its author, Wilson Follett, and edited and completed by Barzun. In 1975, he published a rhetoric for writers, Simple & Direct, defending Cartesian clarity of expression, and the sanctity of the sentence and the word. For thirty years, the author of the “On Language” column in the New York Times, William Safire, would, for lexical clarification in extremis, turn to Jacques Barzun. Gifted like Berlioz with an astonishing memory, Barzun, at age ninety-three—writing at home, and without a library—was able to complete his ultimate masterpiece, From Dawn to Decadence, 1500 to the Present—500 Years of Western Cultural Life, a volume of almost nine hundred pages that in America became an unlikely best seller.

Jacques Barzun followed closely the efforts made by members of the Comité International Hector Berlioz, in the run-up to the 2003 anniversary, to have Berlioz honored with a berth in the Panthéon. Unbeknownst to most members of the committee, Barzun, in his great book of 1950, had urged, with the hint of a smile, that if you wish to celebrate Berlioz, “there is a spacious public building in Paris upon whose pediment is written ‘aux grands hommes, la patrie reconnaissante’”; “exhume Berlioz and place him in the Panthéon with his peers.”19 Barzun, Berlioz and the Romantic Century, 2:325–236. When, for the political reasons I have outlined in the Prologue, the decision was made to forgo the panthéonisation of the composer of the Fantastique, Barzun’s reaction was cheerful disappointment: “France has lost its way; Berlioz ought to have better chosen the country of his birth.”