Jacques Barzun - RIP

A colleague of Trilling's, had a surprise best seller with From Dawn to Decadence in 2000, which I enjoyed enough (it upsets received notions about women in history and the Middle Ages) to buy a volume of selected essays.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/jacques-barzun-wide-ranging-cultural-historian-dies-at-104/2012/10/26/33a202c4-c5da-11df-94e1-c5afa35a9e59_story_2.html

If you'd picked him in our Dead Pool, you'd have received negative four points.

Remember reading From Dawn to Decadence most of the way through during a very long and boring day serving jury duty. Good read, and while people always quote his baseball line, I was amused that he mentioned Garbage towards the end of said book.

for a long time I thought there was more than one Jacques Barzun because I'd seen someone of that name cover so much in so much depth. And there's not much I admire more than people who show such dedication to and interest in everything into very very old age. So RIP, cool guy.

he was 104. retired in 1975, almost 40 years ago. amazing. here he is on the cover of Time in 1956:

http://img.timeinc.net/time/magazine/archive/covers/1956/1101560611_400.jpg

a reconciliation between The Intellectual and America!

John Simon remembers editing him...

It fell to me to edit this illustrious triumvirate for the magazine, a very different task with each writer. Auden, who was jovially insouciant, handed in smart but sloppy stuff that needed a lot of editing, which he readily and gratefully accepted. Trilling was more difficult. Always by telephone, one went over proposed changes, some of which, after some discussion, he accepted, some not.

Barzun, however, one was not allowed to edit. Everything, down to the last comma, had to be left as it was, even where — an admitted rarity — improvement was possible. When we spoke on the phone, I could conjure up my interlocutor. He was undoubtedly smiling his frosty smile, one part convivial and two parts condescending. Since he was tall, the smile, when delivered in person, would literally descend upon you, accompanying an elegant diction that itself had a sort of smile in it.

His figure and posture were excellent, and he wore his well-tailored clothes with an aura more diplomatic than academic. His accent was upper-class American, without a trace of his French childhood. I always wanted to address him in French, to hear how he would sound in that language, but I lacked the guts to do so.