Age of Reason.(Jacques Barzun)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 22-OCT-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

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 melange 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 Legion 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...

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