Arts and Letters

Of Shakespeare Flaubert said: "There are great men in him, whole crowds, whole countries." Of Jacques Barzun there are also "great men in him... whole countries"—at least, two countries, the United States and France; in everything he writes are aspects of one or the other or of both these countries, the governments of which honored him with their highest awards: he was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor by France and received the Medal of Freedom, the highest United States civilian honor.

Jacques Barzun was born November 30, 1907 in Créteil, a suburb of Paris. His father was a diplomat and a writer who had a great interest in the arts. His home became an avant-garde salon, what he once called "a seed bed of modernism" and "an open house for hot heads." Among the regular visitors were Jean Cocteau, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Apollinaire's friend Marie Laurencin. "I had the conviction," Barzun said once in an interview, "that everybody in the world was an artist except plumbers and the people who delivered groceries." His blissful childhood ended when some of the artists began to return from the First World War. He studied at the Lycée Janson de Sailly and because many of the teachers there had been drafted he was called upon himself at the age of nine, being one of the older students, to teach the younger ones. At the age of thirteen, in a state of absolute depression, he crossed the ocean with his mother to join his father who was already in the States. He had read many books about Indians and expected to see them galloping across the Plains. His father had been invited to teach at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and he found a place in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania for his son to continue his studies and to be privately tutored in American History. Jacques entered Columbia University in 1923 and was Valedictorian of his class when he graduated in 1927, and taught his first course on contemporary civilization there that summer. He stayed at Columbia until his retirement in 1975, having received a Masters in 1928 and a PhD in 1932. He had no sooner left the classroom than he began to publish his books, several of which had already appeared in 1947 when I met him at a party given at the apartment of my first wife Barbara Howes to celebrate our wedding on the eve of my departure for Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.

Barbara had been editing a literary magazine Chimera, which the original editors at Yale had abandoned when they went off to war. Barbara had consulted Jacques, who had advised her about an issue she was planning on the detective story, one of the many subjects that interested Jacques. He later edited a collection of detective stories, TheDelights of Detection (1961). After Barbara and I returned from three years in England and Italy we were again in touch with Jacques, who assisted me in finding a position as Professor at Williams College and who became a close friend who always treated me as if I were one of the visitors to his father's salon in Paris.

Because Jacques Barzun paid particular attention to style in all his many studies of cultural life, let me first examine his own style.

Here are two of my favorite passages, both dealing with trains for which Jacques had an early passion, the first from the opening of God's Country and Mine in 1954 and the second, forty-six years later, from his final book From Dawn to Decadence:500 Years of Western Cultural Life; 1500 to the Present, 2000.

The way to America is from a lower berth about two in the morning. You've just left a station—it was the jerk of pulling out that woke you—and you raise the curtain a bit between thumb and forefinger to look out. You are in the middle of Kansas or Arizona, in the middle of the space where the freight cars spend the night and the men drink coffee out of cans. Then comes the signal tower, some bushes, a few shacks and—nothing. You see the last blue switch-light on the next track, and beyond is America—dark and grassy, or sandy, or rocky—and no one there. Nothing but the irrational universe with you in the center of trying to reason it out.

Multiform danger on the track had to be guarded against from the start. Employing a man on a horse to wave a flag ahead of the train had a comic implication and did not last long. But for a quarter-century the risk of accident was ever-present and multiform. One of the early catastrophes occurred on the Paris-Versailles line a dozen years after the English inaugural journey. It was doubly shocking, doubly fatal, because the passengers had been locked in “for safety.” When the axle of the leading of two locomotives broke and the momentum piled up the second and the cars behind, fire broke out and made a funeral pyre of the injured and the dead—upward of 50. The locking in which persisted for many years on the Continent… testifies to the mental disturbance caused by mankind hurtling through space in a box.

The conclusion calls to mind the following words of Yeats which Barzun quotes in Simple & Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers:

The correcting of prose is endless because it has no fixed laws; a poem comes right with a click, like a box.

It looks almost as if Barzun is trying here to combine prose and poetry: the box can be heard clicking at the end.

Jacques Barzun reacted more strongly than most writers to the sloppy use of language which seems in our digital age to be getting worse by the minute. In 1964 he was named to the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. The Dictionary had sent him, as the oldest living panelist, a special questionnaire. When Barzun died in October the Dictionary’s editors thought they would never get the questionnaire back. But his daughter found it in a pile of unfinished business on his desk and sent it to them. His role as a usage panelist, he wrote, was “to hold back the urge (general, not mine) to make all constructions valid.”

Jacques was equally severe in his judgment of translators from the French, of which he was a major practitioner. In a letter to me he wrote:

It is really pitiful how little of Europe's historic recent output of poetry, drama, and prose, is actually known—let alone the world's.

But it takes persistence and judgment, as well as literary talent, to offer one's own country the products of another in acceptable guise, and most persons so endowed want to write original works rather than toil on other's finished work.

At the moment (it may surprise you) I am promoting efforts to get a decent translation made of Tocqueville's Democracy in America. I am too old to do it myself, but with a subsidy in prospect, I hope to get a translator of some experience to work under supervision; someone, that is, who will not write ‘superior instruction’ when the meaning is ‘higher education.’ For 150 years Tocqueville in English has been a collection of similar absurdities.

Jacques had great praise for the translation of Richard Wilbur. In a letter to him he wrote,

“You have translated my favorite Molière farce (The Misanthrope) and how superbly, I need not tell you for you know from your readers and from all the reviewers of your productions that you are the master of verse translation from the French. I salute you and thank you.”

Then in another letter to Wilbur he wrote,

“I was delighted with your willingness to consider Les Plaideurs as your next large translation. As you and I know it will take a good deal of equivalence work, but in your hands it should make a first-rate farce.”

Wilbur dedicated his translation of Les Plaideurs to Jacques Barzun. And American readers then had proof that Racine could handle comedy every bit as well as tragedy.

I saw Jacques Barzun for the last time in 2000 just after he had completed his final book, From Dawn to Decadence, in San Antonio, Texas, where he had settled eight years earlier. Marguerite Davenport, his widow, told me on his death that he was still working and had left behind on his desk several essays. Perhaps his biographer Michael Murray will find a place for them in the book he produced in 2002, A Jacques BarzunReader. They will surely all be further examples of the simple and direct style that he championed in his book about writing. The Barzun Reader concludes with a series of clerihews, a verse form that is hellishly difficult to bring off with flourish as Jacques does in this one:

René Descartes
Murmured: “For my part,
If I cogitate, it must be clear
That I am here.”

And it is also very clear that these carefully composed and constantly captivating pages will await readers in many countries for years to come.