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Two-Way Exodus. In 1917, Henri Martin Barzun came to the U.S. on a diplomatic mission, but when the time came to go home he decided to stay. While America's lost generation looked for a spiritual home abroad, scores of French scholars and artists sought refuge in America from the wave of cynicism sweeping over Europe. After a stay in Britain, young Jacques arrived in the U.S. "in ridiculous short pants and ignorant of baseball." But he was ready to enter college at 15½. The college he chose was Columbia. "To anyone from Europe, Columbia was the American university. Nicholas Murray Butler had made that quite clear to Europe."
It was a golden age on Morningside Heights. There was the vigorous historian, Carleton Hayes, F.J. E. Woodbridge with his "angry impersonations of the world's philosophers," John Dewey with his "bagpipe drone," John Erskine with his "princely introductions to the poets"—as well as a cluster of such talented younger men as Mark Van Doren, Mortimer Adler and Irwin Edman. To help pay his bills, Barzun and some friends ran a "perfectly legal and honest tutoring mill" called Ghosts Inc. "No subjects were barred. If a retired minister came who wanted to read Hamlet in Esperanto (one did), we supplied an instructor who spoke the language like a native." In 1927, at the time of his graduation, Barzun stood at the top of his class.
Least Luxurious Club. He has stayed at Columbia ever since, rising through the Ph.D. treadmill ("The most expensive and least luxurious club in the world") and then through the ranks to his present position as dean of the graduate faculties. A tall, slender, willowy man of 48, he remains what he has always been—a brilliant, courtly, unruffable scholar whose whole life seems to be his work. Few besides his most intimate friends have met his wife, the former Mariana Lowell of Boston, or been inside his book-filled apartment in Manhattan's East 80s, or met his nine-year-old daughter Isabel, or two sons, James 16, and Roger 14. A prodigious reader and prolific writer, Barzun has seen fit to arrange his routine with an almost classic precision. But this is something of a paradox, for Barzun's chief interest as a cultural historian has been not classicism, but romanticism.
It was in William James that he found the pluralistic philosophy that has guided him all his life. To James, says Barzun, "something is true, not because it has been repeated often, not because someone in authority has said it ... not because it has been deduced from an infallible generality; but because it leads as accurately as possible to the kind of result that we have in mind." But there was another aspect to James, the romantic pragmatist, that Barzun also adopted as his own. "Real culture," said the philosopher, "lives by sympathies and admiration, not by dislikes and disdains."