pure enjoyment
Great selection of subjects. Orifinal insights, well substantiated. Above all, beautifully phrased. Not one pompeous sentence and yet, elegance that is enviable. Any and all essays may be read and reread with renewed pleasure. Inherent are recommendations for further reading. In bed, during flight, waiting at the doctor's, spending an evening with a glass of wine. With Barzun you have company and time extremely well spent.
Yawn
Jacques Barzun is sort of the social sciences' equivalent of Harold Bloom, albeit less personally and intellectually noxious. He is, however, the quintessential living `Dead White Male' scholar whose knowledge about his subject matter is very broad- he can write seemingly convincingly on opera, politics, baseball, Paris in the 1830s, and Raymond Chandler, but whose depth of wisdom about any one thing is paper-thin. His 2000 opus called From Dawn To Decadence was an ill wrought stereotypical `old man's lament', which unwittingly did more to show how wholly out of touch the man- born in 1907, was with modern life than bolster his argument that society was, of course, `in decline'. Of course, all of the arts nowadays- literature (poetry and prose), criticism, painting, music, film, television, theater, are in a collective slump. Call it the bane of PC. But, history shows it is just a matter of time before a rebound occurs. Culture is cyclical by nature, not an arrow in ascent nor a boulder in declension.
In 2002 HarperCollins released an omnibus of a few dozen of what they considered the best of Barzun's decades of essays, called A Jacques Barzun Reader, to cash in on the unexpected bestseller status the earlier book achieved. This was also done because, despite initially favorable reviews, many mainstream critics started rightfully taking Barzun to task for the reasons mentioned above. The over 600 page book has a few good moments of insight and prescience, but the truth is, the book only further strengthens the case that Barzun may know alot of historical facts, but has not a clue of how to put them in coherent and logical orders. In short, he doesn't know much, and doesn't know how to express it well. His whole academic and literary career is a testament to the power of connections and networking- the very ills he ironically, yet cluelessly, laments as aiding culture's descent.
The best essay in the book is from 2000, called The Word `Man', where Barzun starts off brilliantly and logically defending the specific (as in species) use of the word against PC revisionists who prefer desexualized terms like councilperson to councilman. Barzun argues the point as well as anyone could. Then the essay implodes midway, as the old man tries to be a `hepster', and parody the argument with an ill-advised bolster that claims teenagers are far more oppressed than women, and thus should be considered in such ontological and cultural revisionism. It does not work, and trashes the earlier brilliance of the piece, which is, in microcosm, all that is wrong with Barzun as a thinker and a writer- he simply does not have a clue when he is `on' nor `off'. Similarly, the essay How The Romantics Invented Shakespeare while historically correct, and skewering many of the points asserted by Shakespeare apologists like Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler, still goes on far too long, and gives no real insight into the push to canonize the Bard, only how it occurred. A similar problem of vacuity and over-length plagues The Permanence Of Oscar Wilde, which also bogs down in length and obscurantism. The opposite problem plagues his essay Lincoln The Literary Artist, which proffers the 16th President as a writer of stature, and fails. Yes, the Gettysburg Address and a handful of other speeches are well written, and contain `art', but are not in and of themselves art. There is any irony in that Barzun fails in his understanding of art's nature from both perspectives.
Yet, in a sense, these rhetorical and intellectual lapses are all that can be expected from books like this, where old men look back at their lives and inevitably see `the good old days' through the golden haze of senescence. Thus, even such ills as Nazism, Jim Crow, Vietnam, and religious intolerance, do not seem quite as nasty as they really were, and thus render most of his writings pointless, as he is lacking in insight, and out of touch, no matter how earnest in his preachments. His rigid bloviations make one want to bitchslap some sense into the man, but then, most old men are predictable in their opinions, and such books are only read for the wisdom that falls through the crannies of their egos, not for any grand wordplay. Unfortunately, Barzun lacks both- critical wisdom and the beauty of artistic craft. And, since art is far more grounded on beauty than truth, because beauty is more objective, enduring, and always pleasures, whereas truth is often subjective, facile, and more often pains, his often generic writing too often matches his failure as an objective historian, and that fact no amount of rhetoric can deny.
A complete college education in one volume. Wow!
The breadth of subject matter, and the consistent intelligence with which it's handled, is just dizzying. You might not agree with a given position that Barzun stakes out in his galaxies of subjects, but he's always interesting, humane, thoughtful, and informed. Plus he's a lucid, vigorous, coherent writer of English prose -- you could use this book just as a style manual in learning to be a better writer!
Ideal for young people and students, who will find here a vast treasure-trove of necessary cultural reference. (So now you know who Berlioz was!) A place to begin building your humanities education, and your intellectual character, as it seems many of our colleges are no longer up to the task. It's one of those books that'll make you a better person. No fooling.
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