Melatonin Up, Civilization Down:
Reading Jacques Barzun This Winter

The winter is long. It pushes you to the breaking point, lets up for a Super Bowl Sunday, then pushes further still. Just to get by, the Office of Applied Studies says you will choose from two categories of drug abuse — Type Lohan or Type Limbaugh — though many cover stories in People magazine will, by implication, warn you not go this way. You'll still have your friends, but they will be too preoccupied with their own pastimes — a new spouse, child, chihuahua or videogame console — to empathize properly. With all the unbearable nights ahead, maybe it's finally time to take on the four dozen-plus books written and edited by bestselling cultural critic and historian Jacques Barzun, who turned 100 on Nov. 30. OxyContin still has your vote? Then maybe a carefully selected sampling of Barzun will do instead.

In 1932, when Barzun published his first book, history was in crisis. One school of thought, let's call them The Scalpels (Barzun calls them the Doctors), argued for a more scientifically rigorous approach to doing history. Their older-school adversaries, The Quills, pushed back with the conviction that one doesn't "do" history, one writes it. So, naturally, it should be pursued as a literary craft.

Barzun entered this fray just as The Scalpels, after half a century on the rise, started beating The Quills handily. In 1929, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre published the first Annales, a French academic journal so influential that its name became the shorthand for a new style of historical method, replacing narrative-driven history with a working out of themes (shopkeeping, celibacy, boredom, rainfall — the more mundane the subject, the more profound its reach.)

In our century, the majority of the history "done" is a tapestry of percentages and statistics: sociological quasi-facts laid out exclusively for other historians. So, in roughly the same time-span that saw artists removing the senses from sensation, and poets removing the meaning from words, The Scalpels of history neatly removed their craft from the richly laid tradition of literary historians, from Herodotus through to Gibbon, Carlyle and Michelet. The cause-and-effect of these events is both Barzun's milieu and his subject.

Though I should be wary of distilling Barzun's thought into an expediently themed best-of, a dignified way to take this on is to search for the shorter examples which cast our genteel French-born, American-educated curmudgeon as the spirited defender of a tradition that he admits is on its way out. The tradition is our modern times, and here, "the times" are defined in centuries, not fiscal quarters or presidential administrations. Its story to date is summarized beautifully in the title of Barzun's most recent bestseller, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present. Below are seven selections, each of which could easily be put away at bedtime. If taken up after drinking the New Year's party dry, Barzun will be sure to chaperon you back to a spring morning waiting with the light on.

"Is Democracy Theory for Export?"
from The Jacques Barzun Reader
Perennial Classics

To answer the question asked by the essay's title: yes, though democratic practice is another question entirely. Barzun's walk through the many dead ends reached when trying to impose a democratic government from outside is notable for the distinctive overlap of his historian and humanist tendencies:

Just as life on Earth depended on a particular coming together of unrelated factors, so a cluster of disparate elements and conditions is needed for a democracy to be born. Among these conditions one can name a tradition of democracy, literacy and a certain kind of training in give-and-take, as well as the sobering effect of national disaster — for example, France in 1870 and Germany in 1945.

The argument is familiar to anyone who followed the build-up to the Iraq invasion. To this debate, Barzun brings his reverence for particularity and its bearing on foreign policy, which is, as every pundit knows, an advance screening of tomorrow's history.

"Bagehot, or the Human Comedy"
from The Energies of Art
Vintage

Barzun turns us on to 19th Century British journalist, literary politician and ironist, Walter Bagehot. In the process, we consider the very Bagehot-esque theme of why creative geniuses are not born leaders, and vice versa. Men endowed with "common opinions allied to uncommon abilities" is how Bagehot described the Members of Parliament whom he came to know intimately as The Economist's second editor-in-chief. There was nothing common in Bagehot, nor is there in Barzun, who clearly recognizes the quiet iconoclasm of his subject and sees a kindred spirit, making for a rare intimacy telegraphed throughout the essay:

Pick up Bagehot anywhere and you soon fall upon a piece of exposition, an argument, or an aside that displays the mind uninhibited by category or convention, by fear of the reader or of being wrong. I say this as it should be said — not as vague, convenient eulogy, but with a passion of sincerity equal to his.

"Introductory Remarks to a Program of Works Produced at the Columbia- Princeton Electronic Music Center"
collected in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (ed. Christopher Cox & Daniel Warner)
Continuum International

Though Barzun is sometimes (mis)labelled a "cultural conservative," he was born into the avant-garde current of fin de siècle France. His father, Henri-Martin Barzun, was a Dadaist poet. At the breakfast table, the earliest conversations Barzun overheard were debates on the art scandal of the day, Cubism. Whatever skepticism the man eventually showed towards the less reasoned factions of the avant-garde was earned through this childhood, but the upbringing also put Barzun in a unique place to parse the excesses of the New and advocate for its more integral parts, as he did in this 1961 lecture at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center:

Ah noise! Noise is the most constant complaint in the hisory of music. In the heyday of music it was not only Berlioz and Wagner who were damned most noisy. Mozart before them and Haydn, and even earlier Lully and Handel. ... The argument of noise is always irrelevant. The true question is: does this noise, when familiar, fall into intelligible forms and impressive contents? To supply the answer takes time. One hearing, two, three, are not enough. Something must change in the sensibility itself, in the way that a foreign language suddenly breaks into meaning and melody after months or years of its being mere noise.

"Reckoning with Time and Place"
from The Culture We Deserve
Wesleyan

In this dashing essay, Barzun goes back in time to save time itself. The New Critics, a self-anointed school of the mid-20th century, treated literature as a mausoleum of dead texts. They challenged the "affective fallacy" of critics who, through historical or other interpretative readings, claimed to hear the heartbeat in centuries-old poems. In his defense of using history to understand poetry, Barzun leans on the late Lionel Trilling, quoting his longtime collaborator's own essay on the subject, "The Sense of the Past." In a stark image, Barzun renders his friend's meaning:

One reads a poem as one reads a face — with a great deal of attention, knowledge, and experience of reading. There is only this one difference, that one may stare at a poem. ... All this implies — indeed, defines — the historical sense for it is the sixth sense, as Nietzsche rightly took it to be, which quickly divines conditions and their order of rank.

"The Under-entertained"
from God's Country and Mine
Vintage

Perhaps the best time to be a literate dilettante in the United States was the mid-20th century. Literary history might have been in decline, but a vigorous gang of generalists, great writers all, happily looted from its wares. Edmund Wilson's historiographical tracing of Marxism, To the Finland Station, Gilbert Highet's engaging and sturdy reading of Greco-Roman literature, The Classical Tradition, Arthur Koestler's round-up of key astronomers, The Sleepwalkers, to name only three which are still in print, all took on big subjects with a panache rare for our present, which remains inhibited by specialist-anxiety.

Barzun's God's Country and Mine sits with the meatiest of these reads. Its subject is America, its scope is as grand as American things tend to be, and its rhetoric soars unlike any other in Barzun's bibliography. Most famous in the book is the chapter "The Under-entertained" which, near the end, digresses on the subject of baseball. It begins with the fourteen words which have brought Barzun more Google hits than his other work combined:

Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.

"The Rise of Art as Religion"
from The Use and Abuse of Art
Princeton University Press

If the Culture War that has escalated in the States with the last several national elections was appropriately named, then Barzun's "The Rise of Art as Religion" was one of its key battles. It takes on the erosion of Christianity in modern times, briefly addressing the generational divide of 1968. Our label, as it turns out, is off the mark. The Culture War, as is proven with the warriors who've built impressive careers within it — as reverends, documentary filmmakers, broadcasters and all-purpose politicos — is sub-cultural, its talk guttural. Its issues — wedged between liberals and conservatives, Clintonistas and Bushies, viewers of the Daily Show and viewers of The Factor — are simultaneously too superficial and too deep-rooted to successfully be aired through conversation. And, as Barzun wrote: "The finest achievement of human society and its rarest pleasure is conversation." There is a cultural component to this Lifestyle War or Conflict of Attitudes (to attempt a proper re-branding of the situation), however buried, and its root is tapped in this, Barzun's lecture on the rise of art as a worldview and its fall as, in the words of Harold Bloom, "the proper use of solitude."

"Lincoln the Literary Artist"
"The Permanence of Oscar Wilde"
from The Jacques Barzun Reader
Perennial Classics

In shorter, bedtime-appropriate reading, Barzun's most potent value is often to be found in the fresh (though never simply contrarian) views he brings to figures whowe've learned to take for granted. Two statues Barzun turns back to men with his touch: "Honest Abe" and "Ironic Oscar": Lincoln and Wilde. Barzun's reading of Lincoln's letters, speeches, poems and personal notes does more than most door-stop biographies to give an impression of what it might have been like to share a corridor, even a conversation with this least knowable of well-known men. Barzun's purifying drop in the ocean of interpretation is his recognition of Lincoln's genius as being primarily artistic rather than political:

The artist contrives means and marshals forces that the beholder takes for granted and that the bungler never discovers for himself. The artist is always scheming to conquer his material and his audience. When we speak of his craft, we mean quite literally that he is crafty.

Lincoln's enduring companionability, then, like Wilde's, owed more to his detachment and cunning than to the social gifts that might, in a moment of crisis, turn a personable stranger into a trusted friend. But in a flip of conventional wisdom, Barzun shows Wilde's gifts as grounded in statesman-like reason:

The truth is that Wilde was an extraordinarily tough mind, a quick and far-darting intellect at home in all the realities. Like Byron, he is eminent for common sense, and like him too he only assumed his poses to make a point.