Jacques Barzun - Life

Life

Barzun was born in Créteil, France to Henri-Martin and Anna-Rose Barzun. He spent his childhood in Paris and Grenoble. His father was a member of the Abbaye de Créteil group of artists and writers and also worked in the French Ministry of Labor. His parents' Paris home was frequented by many "modernist" artists of belle epoque France, such as poet Guillaume Apollinaire, Cubist painters Albert Gleizes and Marcel Duchamp, composer Edgard Varèse, and writers Richard Aldington and Stefan Zweig. While on a diplomatic mission to the United States during the First World War, Barzun's father so liked what he saw that he decided that his son should have an American university education. Thus, Barzun was sent to the United States at age 12, first to attend a preparatory school, then Columbia University, where he obtained a broad liberal education.

As an undergraduate at Columbia College, Barzun was drama critic for the Columbia Daily Spectator, a prize-winning president of the Philolexian Society, the Columbia literary and debate club, and valedictorian of the class of 1927. He obtained his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1932 and taught history there from 1928 to 1955, becoming the Seth Low Professor of History and a founder of the discipline of cultural history. For years, he and literary critic Lionel Trilling, ran Columbia's famous Great Books course. He was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1954. From 1955 to 1968, he served as Dean of the Graduate School, Dean of Faculties, and Provost, while also being an Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College at the University of Cambridge. From 1968 until his 1975 retirement, he was University Professor at Columbia. From 1951 to 1963 Barzun was one of the managing editors of The Readers' Subscription Book Club, and its successor the Mid-Century Book Society, (the other managing editors being W. H. Auden and Lionel Trilling), and afterwards was Literary Adviser to Charles Scribner's Sons, 1975 to 1993.

In 1936, Barzun married Mariana Lowell, a violinist from a prominent Boston family. They had three children: James, Roger, and Isabel. Mariana died in 1979. In 1980, Barzun married Marguerite Lee Davenport. From 1996 the Barzuns lived in her hometown, San Antonio, Texas. His granddaughter Lucy Barzun Donnelly was a producer of the award-winning HBO film Grey Gardens, and his grandson Matthew Barzun is a businessman who had served as the US Ambassador to Sweden. On May 14, 2012 Barzun attended a symphony performance in his honor at which works by his favorite composer, Hector Berlioz, were performed. He attended in a wheelchair and delivered a brief address to the crowd.

Barzun died peacefully at his home in San Antonio, Texas on October 25, 2012, aged 104. The New York Times, which compared him with such scholars Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell, and Lionel Trilling, called him a "distinguished historian, essayist, cultural gadfly and educator who helped establish the modern discipline of cultural history". Naming Edward Gibbon, Jacob Burckhardt and Thomas Babington Macaulay as his intellectual ancestors, and calling him "one of the West's most eminent historians of culture" and "a champion of the liberal arts tradition in higher education," who "deplored what he called the 'gangrene of specialism'", The Telegraph remarked, "The sheer scope of his knowledge was extraordinary. Barzun’s eye roamed over the full spectrum of Western music, art, literature and philosophy." Essayist Joseph Epstein, remembering him in the Wall Street Journal as a "flawless and magisterial" writer who tackled "Darwin, Marx, Wagner, Berlioz, William James, French verse, English prose composition, university teaching, detective fiction, the state of intellectual life", described Barzun as a tall, handsome man with an understated elegance, thoroughly Americanized, but retaining an air of old-world culture, cosmopolitan in way rare for intellectuals.