Au revoir, Jacques

The world is a little poorer with the death this past week of cultural historian Jacques Barzun. He was 104.

If you’re not part of the academic community you may not know Barzun. That’s sad for you. He was a giant in the humanities, covering subject matter ranging from Berlioz to William James. When I say the man was an intellectual giant I am not being hyperbolic.

I have two of his books, Darwin, Marx, Wagner, from my undergraduate stint, and The Modern Researcher, from grad school. I can’t bear to get rid of either of them, despite them being really kind of ratty from the abuse they took in the scholarly way of things (and all the passing years), because Barzun’s writing was not only astute, it was lovely to behold.

Partly it may because I lean toward the cultural approach to history he embodied: I think everything is connected—economics, art, technology, politics, music, science, popular literature, and all the rest of it. You can’t (to my mind) enucleate any one element from all the others and say, “this is the history part”. So I have an innate affinity for Barzun.

But I met him informally (so to speak) before college, in the pages of Sherlockian criticism, because his inquisitive mind was a natural for the exploration of detective fiction. In fact, he wrote two classic books on the subject, A Catalogue of Crime, and The Delights of Detection. Again—a man after me own heart.

(You might like to read his “Ten Rules for Writing Sherlockian Pastiche.”)

Barzun lived a long and extremely productive life, and; he left an extraordinary legacy to us. If we’re willing to invest the time to explore and learn from it.