Just before World War I, Jacques Barzun — roughly rhymes with “parson” — used to play marbles with the great French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who died in 1918. When, in 1920, Barzun’s parents decided to emigrate to America, their 12-year-old son began to improve his elementary English by reading Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” and by carrying a pocket dictionary with him wherever he went. Seven years later, he graduated from Columbia University at the top of his class, Phi Beta Kappa with a major in history, winner of the William H. Fox Memorial Prize and the Philolexian Prize in essay and oratory, the class valedictorian of 1927. Barzun was all of 19 years old.
He is now 104.
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Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World and the author of the memoir “An Open Book” and of four collections of essays: “Readings,” “Bound to Please,” “Book by Book” and “Classics for Pleasure.”
During the intervening 85 years or so, Barzun has been, for decade after decade, one of America’s leading cultural historians and men of letters. For many years he taught “Great Books” at his alma mater — often in tandem with his friend the literary critic Lionel Trilling — and later became Columbia’s provost. He lectured at universities around the country, translated occasionally, appeared on radio and TV programs, and served as president of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He reviewed for every major magazine and periodical, becoming chief book columnist for Harper’s in the late 1940s and one of the founders and judges of the Mid-Century Book Society in the 1950s. Following his retirement from Columbia in 1975, Barzun took up still another job as a literary adviser and consultant to Scribners. At age 92, he capped his career by producing the mammoth “From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life” (2001).
But even that late summa, a surprise bestseller, scratches only the surface of Barzun’s intellectual range. Consider just a handful of his other book titles: “Race: A Study in Modern Superstition” (1937); “Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage” (1941); “Teacher in America” (1945); “Berlioz and the Romantic Century” (1950); “Music in American Life” (1956); “The Modern Researcher,” with Henry F. Graff (1957, with many later editions); “Follett’s Modern American Usage” (1966); “A Stroll With William James” (1983); and “An Essay on French Verse for Readers of English Poetry” (1990).
Michael Murray discusses all these books, often in considerable detail, in his intellectual biography “Jacques Barzun: Portrait of a Mind.” As the subtitle suggests, the more personal aspects of his subject’s life are only lightly sketched in. Murray does stress, however, that after a broker absconded with the family’s funds, a very young Barzun assumed the main financial responsibility for his parents. This, in part, accounts for all the outside literary activity: He needed the money. We learn, too, that in person Barzun loves our national game — “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball” — and every kind of pun, that his intellectual heroes and models include Samuel Butler, Bernard Shaw, Montaigne and, most of all, William James, and that he is in public urbane and courteous, even courtly, although sometimes seeming cold and aloof.
These books offer keen insights into leadership and management challenges, which on a day-to-day basis can bring their own dramas, twisting plot lines and, in this city, political intrigue.
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