And some talked horrible things. Jacques Barzun had written a book about him, one that I found informative and engaging. PK:  One of the things we haven’t spoken about, and if I may ask you , you read the papers and you see the news and you see what’s happening in the American political system. In a word, I satisfied myself that he was not only a very great composer but one of the most amazing inventors who ever lived. It’s surely not like your ancestors experienced. And you might tell me what the war years were like, what you were doing and so forth. He always took a great interest in the undergraduates. We had to go into the cellar to avoid the bombardments toward the end of the war. He told me a lot about the significance of myths and symbols, which he showed me were commonplace matters. I think you might be interested in a couple of things, namely, what New York was like when I first came. And with the dollar worth a great many francs, they stayed over there and they learned what European civilization was. Was your most famous quote “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game”. But I thought it had been pacified later on when I wanted to go diagonally to my classes. I went from Hartley Hall to John Jay, which was newly built. Eugene O’Neill and Noel Coward. They were plastic so they could be made into a… soldier, an army, and they went all the other way when we sent over men and women – some of the women were very nice, very able in some line of work here. If you want this website to work, you must enable javascript. Problems generate idiotic proposals of solutions, and when they’re chosen, and some are bound to be good, the implementation is slow or nonexistent. Not ordinary in the bad sense, but usual now. But I imbibed the atmosphere and it stayed with me. I graduated from the college in’27. And he brought me recordings of Japanese music. He was known the world over. The reason I wrote the Naval manual is interesting. He said, “I notice an important discrepancy. And I remember one piece of advice, after I’d been to see him two or three times over various matters, he said, when I was a graduate student, “I can see that you’re going to have a career in scholarship and let me give you a really valuable piece of advice. I was standing alone there. People say and I suppose it’s true, that I put him back on the map. My recollection of my early years up to 1914, were of complete happiness. And then later on, not much later on, there were great big billboards saying, come here or go there – spaghetti and meatballs…on a billboard, $1 or whatever the price was at that time. Cordier had been a diplomat at The United Nations. Well, I hadn’t done it twice before a mounted policeman ambled over toward me and said, “May I ask what you’re doing in the park?” I told him. I sold it – I can’t count the number of years later, for $800,000. It took us actually 28 days. -Jacques Barzun (God's Country and Mine) At this point, that quote is so old that I just sort of assumed Barzun must be dead by now. One time I went camping with my friend, Dwight Miner. So I scorned that and gave some trouble for a while, again, with a suicidal notion, saying it was a useless ploy – a bad ploy to take me away from one place, wherever I went I would commit suicide. We want one short book. And to my great relief and pleasure, he was extremely pleasant to me, and he was not condescending. In this Sept. 17, 2002 file photo, Jacques Barzun sits for a portrait at his home in San Antonio. And, of course, food was very cheap. One night we were waked up by some small but unusual noise. You mentioned that the bus that went up on Fifth Avenue I guess crossed at 110th, but that was a slow bus. But something happened – great senior men on Spectator were absent or unable to perform, and the news came that Harlan Fiske Stone had been nominated to the Supreme Court, and he must be interviewed before he left. But I remember they were sitting around drinking tea and weeping. He wasn’t popular. And for the rest I did pretty well on the exam. In the summers sometimes I went to Europe for 2-½, 3 weeks. JACQUES BARZUN:  My family on the maternal side were all music bound. I was trying to remember about Pearl Harbor and it came back to me the other day. This weblog contains stories of New Yorkers over 90 and their Remembrances of times long gone. What would you do if you met a lady of your acquaintance or of your family’s acquaintance? I also did a good deal of translating. There was the Cubist moment. The war years were very disruptive to Columbia, but it was after the war that a lot of the veterans came back and gave Columbia a sort of mature atmosphere that was very, very good. As I said, perfect happiness. There was such a thing at Child’s. I took the examination, because in those days one had to take an exam to get into Columbia College, and there were some questions I couldn’t deal with, such as geometry. He was not doddering. So I got my Ph.D. in ’31. In those days, all the dormitories – Hartley, Livingston and then ultimately John Jay were very Spartan, small room, one towel, a little wash basin, a little narrow bookcase. And Kirk had been booted out for not handling the situation – when the conversation went back to those days he said, “I made a mistake. I was allowed to circulate among the group. And he raised his hands and he said, “Man proposes and God disposes.”  So I wrote a brilliant article about Stone for the Spectator. JACQUES BARZUN: Yes. Whereas baseball is infinitely more… civilized and complex, and visually much clearer. Men always wore hats. My grandfather played several brass instruments and belonged to, a chamber music group. Bad English, sloppy pronunciation, and of course all this text messaging or massaging or whatever it is, is childishness protracted. It all comes back to me. I was told to play with the children on the beach. I was taken to the concerts given Saturday afternoon by a group from the Paris Symphony for the young. American Council of Learned Societies. She said, “Ah, yes. I had learned English in England, staying with friends of my family there for six months. And they had a very sensible idea. And I found that my Lycee education had gone beyond what college was here in some respects and was behind in others. The very brief transcript provided is of some interest, but of little use in following the recorded interview itself. My recollection of my early years up to 1914, were of complete happiness. PK:  Now, I’m going to move onto a more recent period and ask you – you were still with the university in the late 1960’s. We were living at 1170 5th Avenue, which had become something of a famous building because so many people of note had lived there for a number of years before going to Washington or ambassadorships abroad and so on. I graduated in three years thanks to this extra summer, which gave me the three points or whatever was necessary. But the reason I failed on that question was that Eisenhower was invisible and said that he didn’t understand what his role was. Jacques Martin Barzun was born in Créteil, France, to Henri-Martin and Anna-Rose Barzun, and spent his childhood in Paris and Grenoble. I don’t remember the exact details. It’s a bunch of narrow-minded bureaucrats, who perhaps have a good command of foreign language. He did nothing of what he should’ve done the last two years. He would look at me with compassionate eyes, which said, “You’re trying hard and I’m trying hard but we’ll never get it anyway.”. He said, “Ha, ha, ha!” because he thought it was very funny that we were going to drown. And it was served not on a table, but on a wide arm of a chair. As Barzun approached his 100th birthday in 2007, his friend and student Arthur Krystal ’70GSAS recalled trying to draw him out about his life. So the $300 a month continued, I think, for 11 years, $3600 salary for a starting teacher. [PAUSE] And everybody had to be told – Pearl Harbor, where it was. April 14, 2009 . HE BUILT HIS LIBRARY BY BUYING GOOD HARD COVER BOOKS AT THE DRUG STORE FOR  25 CENTS. [CHUCKLES] And we had a lovely time in the Raquette River, but Raquette Lake, which we needed to cross in order to get to the river, which emptied into the lake, we had a very rough time in a canoe. The academic stars at that time were Raymond Wheeler… Then there was Harrison Ross Steves, English Department; Carlton Hayes in history – he was a national figure, having written a two-volume textbook. So that the reconstruction was done not in the abstract, but in the knowledge of what was awry and what should be let alone. It’s the most simple-minded composition in the repertory.” And she said, “Take the Fifth Movement, ‘The March to the Scaffold,’ just that one line…” And I said, “One line? You know the type of menu they had – this size (HOLDING HIS HANDS WIDE AND HIGH)  Well, it was one of those places, and there were some scattered through the city, and particularly quite a few down at the tip of Manhattan, where apparently they were prepared to serve you any dish on a menu this tall, consisting of just two pages of very thin card, and very small, blue lines with the very low price attached. It was a horse that was munching at our box of cereal. That’s what enabled me to get married, I think – the fact that the rent would be no different whether or not we had two big rooms, a kitchen, and another little cubbyhole where we had breakfast. It changed America from a sort of half-baked state, half colony through young men who had had two years of France or Germany, and some Italy, quite a few in Germany because their ancestors were Germans. And a blue plate was divided into sections, a fairly big one for the main, one for the side vegetable, and perhaps the other for dessert. JACQUES BARZUN: I was born in France November 30, 1907. But Harry Carmen was the one that convinced me to go into academia. Jacques Barzun, Fransız kökenli Amerikalı fikir ve kültür tarihçisi. Oh, and having two tickets was a great advantage with girls. I don’t think I would call it so much a danger as a devaluation of the intellectual element in democracy. He started with a little volume I think, and then went on to write the big History of United States Naval Operations. This is a very strange thing, isn’t it, to have given up hats altogether? I moved to the Eastside quite a bit later, after the Second War. I did was what I consider brilliant, dramatic criticism for the column, “The Suburbs of Columbia.”    I wrote one of the varsity shows. I think it’ll have to hit a lower bottom. And, you know, I used to teach the damned thing.” I wonder what kind of…. JACQUES BARZUN:  Oh, yes, I knew him quite well. social progress that is. He wasn’t being nice to the baby but he gave me a very full account of his career and wishes and plans. And then I began to have lessons with Blanca, the first flute of the Paris Opera, and I became very good on the flute. I took a course in Latin with Moses Hadas.. And then I took Greek with him. It’s a comment on our society and where we are in our progress that Sarah Palin was nominated as a vice presidential candidate of the United States. I will put them together in proper order in an outline.” And that’s how An Introduction to Naval History came to be. And I saw that he was an amazing innovator, I had a two-year fellowship from the ACLS in ’31-’32. JACQUES BARZUN:  Well, I mentioned to you before that as a child I was taken to Saturday afternoon concerts. He said, “Communism and hatlessness!”. Jacques Barzun, who died yesterday in San Antonio at 104, had an intellect that was recognized as widely as it ranged. Well, the children on the beach were very young or they wouldn’t have been out of school the way I was. But I learned a lesson there that the spirit of rebellion and complaint was in the air and should have been attended to,  should’ve been dealt with, negotiated, talked over. And nobody’s found an error in it. I even took geology. And the number of weeping women whom I saw and who contributed, I suppose, to my distress . And when my mother took me over to visit them, it was a weeping session. The disruption in ’68 was a disaster due to lack of leadership. PK:  One of the things that we should talk about is baseball. Most of the avenues were two ways. And your book was published about ten years ago. Kirsty Young interviews Matthew Barzun, the US ambassador to the UK. And a woman, a big blousy woman, rushed up to me. Tell me about it.” And she was completely nonplussed. That that was the way to handle that kind of thing. When I read about what the principals of schools are recommending for certain kinds of behavior or misbehavior, I wonder where they come from. He’s one of the greatest melodists, he’s an inventor of incredible rhythms, his harmony was foretelling – practically a century ahead of methods that have become ordinary. I had been told by Americans who had been to Japan that when our sessions came to an end, whether he had had enough or was transferred, he would bring me a gift and I should have a gift for him. So I did six months of tutoring because obviously I needed a tutor who spoke French and English interchangeably about geometry. And that was one of my jobs and one of the jobs I’m particularly proud of – restructuring Columbia after it had been completely torn apart. On Allen Ginsberg, in "The Man Who Knew Too Much: Jacques Barzun, Idea Man", interview with Roger Gathman, The Austin Chronicle ; Bernard Shaw remains the only model we have of what the citizen of a democracy should be: an informed participant in all things we deem important to the society and the individual. We moved to the Eastside, because we found that our friends lived mostly on the Eastside and disliked coming up to the Westside because transportation was so bad. The academics at Columbia considered listening to classical music a childish thing, but I didn’t give it up. My father in the group was the theoretician of the new. There was a science requirement and I had a very good first year physics man, whom I can hear in my mind’s ear. Ambassador to Sweden … “Soft underbelly?” And he began reciting the history of the military operations from ancient Greece to the present time– in the soft underbelly of Europe. It was a co-op. – their own…earmarks. So the summers, Europe, camping with Dwight, and of course many of these things didn’t take the whole summer. He was a delightful man, but no administrator. He was very pleasant, very nice. It’s not for you.” So I said, “What is for me?”. The campus became intolerable because the Marxists had cells and each cell would have the task of making one, two or three new recruits. At any rate, I got a very courteous letter from The Naval Academy, could I give them some advice for the V12 program? And so I really didn’t want to live in that kind of society, hence, the idea of suicide. In the federal government it has to come from the top, but it also has to have those levels below, understanding that they are creating policy. Have they got that?” They just didn’t know to what extent Europe had mechanical amenities. I think Spectator ran special articles on the varsity show. Jacques Barzun Interview. Oh, it was all in disarray. “The Suburbs of Columbia” was strictly downtown. And I think he was right. Because what happened was that he would take anybody who was on the staff who happened to be in his office and delegated to him the task, so that when he was through, the university had no structure whatever. And so he said Oxford or Columbia. I messed up on that, and I’ve had remorse every since. And she had me down for translating from French and German. It was the repeated deaths among those who I had known as older friends. JACQUES BARZUN:  Yes. He said, “That’s absolutely the worst place you could go.” He said, “Now, if you go to Italy – though it probably would be a tolerable place to have a second invasion, because Italy has only a backbone of mountains, but the rest to the east is just – it’s almost a chain of mountains.” And we were all impressed that he, who had only horsemanship at West Point, had somewhere got the whole history of Southeastern Europe. From that, he emerged as a giant of a man in my estimate, one reporting more to me than I had previously forgotten. PK:  One of the things that we haven’t discussed yet is your interest in music and entertainment. In the catalogue of the college it says that Grayson Kirk is the 16th president; in the catalogue of the engineering school it says that he’s the 15th. You’ll be seated at banquets, asked to speak to groups at banquets, banquets will be in your life. And then he and David Truman, who succeeded me as Provost, they’d been holed up in the president’s office, thought they could do things by sending out sheets of recommendations. I remember there was Franz Werfel with his great show – I don’t remember what it was. I lived in the dormitory at Columbia. I decided to take a walk in the park and I was set upon by a gang of roughs and left pretty badly knocked about. I said, “You make policy every time you take care of the little details for which I’m hiring you. PK:  On another subject I read that Fred Friendly, who was Executive Producer of the CBS News tried to persuade you and Lionel Trilling to put the Great Books Colloquium on television. I kept in touch with him until his death. In my time, if one wanted a roommate, one was given just a bigger room but just as uncomfortable as you can imagine. And before that, there would be an alert and we had to go to the cellar because there were German planes over Paris.