Best-selling author Barzun sees good in decadence

In this story: 'General destruction' needed Easy to read RELATED SITES

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Cultural decadence usually means more despair than hope, but the 92-year-old author of an uncommon summer bestseller sees decay as a possible source of Western rebirth.

But Jacques Barzun, author of the summertime hit "From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life" (HarperCollins) can afford to take the long view. One of the pre-eminent U.S. intellectuals, Barzun packed a long lifetime's worth of reflection into the critically acclaimed book that ranges from the roots of the Renaissance to rap music.

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He said he was sanguine about the future despite -- or perhaps because of -- such vexations as deadlocked politics, dumbed-down curriculums, the weakening of the nation-state, rampant individualism and highly abstract art.

"People, in a way, are too preoccupied with the sense that things are falling apart to appreciate what may be new," he said in a telephone interview from his home in San Antonio, Texas.

Pointing out that the root of the word "decadent" meant only "falling away," he added, "It's unfortunate that the associations of the word ... suggest that the sky ought to be dark every day."

Barzun, who spent 48 years at New York's Columbia University as teacher and administrator, said Western culture inevitably had to reach a dead end in order to open the way for new ideas.

"The ground has to be cleared on a wide area, much more than that in a single area of culture," he said. "It seems to me it has to be a general destruction, not only of what we do but of memories of the past so that they don't weigh on us and inhibit our creativity."

"From Dawn to Decadence" has become an 877-page standout in a summer book season notable for boy wizard Harry Potter and the usual popular novels and output of TV celebrities. The book, written in longhand with a fountain pen, has spent eight weeks on The New York Times list of nonfiction best-sellers.

Critics have hailed it as a landmark in cultural writing.

Among the torrent of praise, Newsweek's David Gates called Barzun's work "one of the great one-man shows of Western letters, a triumph of maverick erudition like (18th-century scholar Samuel) Johnson's dictionary."

Critics also have delighted in Barzun's easy-to-read features. They include in-text recommendations for further reading and his novelty of highlighting quotations and running them separately near the margins to save space.

An infectious spur to browsing, they range from 16th-century Humanist figure Erasmus ("What a century do I see beginning! If only it were possible to be young again!") to pop artist Andy Warhol ("Art is what you can get away with").

"The whole format is my contribution to historiography," said Barzun, whose more than 30 books include volumes on French verse, crime novels, U.S. education, the poet Lord Byron and composer Hector Berlioz.

The French-born Barzun first thought about writing a cultural history of the West in the 1930s but he was dissuaded by an elderly librarian at Paris' Bibliotheque Nationale who argued the youthful Barzun did not know enough to write something original.

When Barzun asked when he would learn enough, the librarian replied, "'Well, you never feel that you've learned enough, but let's say that you postpone your project until you're 80,"' Barzun said. "Well, I postponed it until I was 85."

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Jacques Barzun
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