Jacques Barzun, a pioneering cultural historian,
reigning public intellectual and longtime Ivy League
professor who became a best-selling author in his
90s with the acclaimed "From Dawn to Decadence,"
has died. He was 104.
Barzun, who taught for nearly 50 years at Columbia
University, passed away Thursday evening in San
Antonio, where he had lived in recent years, his
son-in-law Gavin Parfit said.
Praised by Cynthia Ozick as among "the last of the
thoroughgoing generalists," the tall, courtly Barzun
wrote dozens of books and essays on everything
from philosophy and music to baseball and
detective novels.
In 2000, he capped his career with "From Dawn to
Decadence," a survey of Western civilization from
the Renaissance to the end of the 20th century. The
length topped 800 pages, and the theme was
uninspiring — the collapse of traditions in modern
times — yet it received wide acclaim from
reviewers, stayed on best-seller lists for months
and was nominated for the National Book Award
and the National Book Critics Circle prize.
Even the Rolling Stones' Keith Richards said he was
reading it.
"The whole thing is a surprise, because scholarship
is not exactly the thing people run after these days,
or perhaps at any time," Barzun told The
Associated Press in 2000.
Along with Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald and
others, the French immigrant was a prominent
thinker during the Cold War era, making occasional
television appearances and even appearing in 1956
on the cover of Time magazine, which cited him as
representing "a growing host of men of ideas who
not only have the respect of the nation, but who
return the compliment."
In 2003, President Bush awarded him a Presidential
Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian
honor, praising Barzun as "a thinker of great
discernment and integrity. ... Few academics of the
last century have equaled his output and his
influence." In 2010, he received a National
Humanities Medal.
Barzun had first-hand knowledge of much of the
20th century and second-hand knowledge of a
good part of the 19th century. His great-
grandmother, born in 1830, would give him
chocolate and tell him stories, an experience that
helped inspire him to become a historian.
A scholar's son, Barzun was born in Creteil, France
in 1907 and grew up in a household where
Modernism was the great subject and visitors
included Jean Cocteau, Ezra Pound and Guillame
Apollinaire, upon whose knee he once sat. But
World War I drove the family out of the country and
across the ocean to the United States.
"The outbreak of war in August 1914 and the
nightmare that ensued put an end to all innocent
joys and assumptions," Barzun later wrote. "By the
age of ten — as I was later told — my words and
attitudes betrayed suicidal thoughts; it appeared
that I was 'ashamed' to be still alive."
Reading consoled him, especially "Hamlet," but he
never recovered his early "zest for life." In 1990, he
defined himself as a "spirited" pessimist, explaining
that he retained a "vivid sight of an earlier world,
soon followed by its collapse in wretchedness and
folly."
Having learned English in part by reading James
Fenimore Cooper, Barzun entered Columbia as an
undergraduate at age 15 and was in his early 20s
when the school hired him as an instructor in the
history department. He remained with Columbia
until his retirement, in 1975, and would be long
remembered for the "Colloquium on Important
Books" he taught with Trilling, with one former
student calling Barzun "a towering charismatic
figure who aroused the kind of fierce loyalties that
the medieval masters must have."
Allen Ginsberg, another Barzun student, once
joked that his former professor was a master of
"politeness."
Barzun's greatest influence was on the writing of
cultural history; he helped invent it. As a student at
Columbia he was among the first to integrate the
narration of wars and government with the
evolution of art, science, education and fashion.
"It was partly my upbringing, being among a group
of artists of every kind," he told the AP. "When I
became interested in history, it seemed that social
and cultural elements were perfectly real things
that existed as forces. Diplomacy and force of arms
were treated as the substance of history, and there
was this other realm missing."
"From Dawn to Decadence," summing up a lifetime
of thinking, offered a rounded, leisurely and
conservative tour of Western civilization, with
numerous digressions printed in the margins.
Barzun guided readers from the religious debates
of the Reformation to the contemporary debates
on beliefs of any kind.
"Distrust (was) attached to anything that retained a
shadow of authoritativeness — old people, old
ideas, old conceptions of what a leader or a
teacher might do," he wrote of the late 20th
century.
Barzun told the AP in 2003 that he remembered
coming to the United States after World War I and
finding a country that lived up to its own happy,
informal reputation. "It was openhearted, amiable
and courteous in manner, ready to try anything
new," he said. "But many of those things have gone
to pieces, for understandable reasons."
He contributed to such magazines as Harper's and
The New Republic and he published more than 30
books, notably "Teacher in America," a classic
analysis of education and culture. In the early
1950s, he and Trilling helped found the Readers'
Subscription Book Club, a highbrow response to
the Book-of-the-Month Club that lasted 12 years.
Barzun also edited many books, including a
compilation of short detective stories, and wrote a
memorable essay on baseball, in which he advised
that "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind
of America had better learn baseball." Those words
eventually made it to the Baseball Hall of Fame in
Cooperstown, N.Y., for which Barzun later
autographed a bat celebrating his 100th birthday.
Barzun had three children with his first wife,
Marianna Lowell, who died in 1978. He married
Marguerite Davenport two years later. He also is
survived by 10 grandchildren and eight great-
grandchildren, according to his daughter, Isabel
Barzun.
"He was a gentleman. He was a scholar. He was
refined, he was kind. He was enormously generous
in spirit," said Parfit, his son-in-law. "He was one of
a kind."
___
Associated Press writers Michelle L. Price in Phoenix
and Nicole Evatt in New York contributed to this
report.
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