Jacques Barzun turned 103 years old a few days ago, on November 30.
Yes, that was not a typo: one hundred and three. He was born in 1907 in Créteil, France, the son of Henri-Martin and Anna-Rose Barzun. His father was well-connected with the modernist artists of that epoch, so Jacques knew as a child Guillaume Apollinaire, Albert Gleizes, Marcel Duchamp, and others of that rank.
I've paid tribute to him before: back when his age could still be stated with only two digits, and I'll just lnk to that now.
One of the better features of Leo Wong's "Barzun 100" website, created for such tributes, is the constant scrolling of Barzun quotes across the top of the home page. Some of these are clerihews, brief poems of four lines, with the AABB rhyme scheme, offering an incident from the life of a famous person. The first line of a clerihew is usually the name of that person.
Barzun is very fond of the form. One of his clerihews, scrolling past regularly, is as follows:
Henry James
Names no names
But Bostonians knew
Who was who.
Adding a link was my idea.
All the best to the birthday celebrant -- may Barzun continue to shatter conventional notions of the human life span!
Showing posts with label Henry James. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Henry James. Show all posts
04 December 2010
26 September 2010
Emerson on Nature
Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous essay on nature begins thus:
"Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes . Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.
Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?"
You can read the whole text here.
There is a paradox in quoting those famous words at this distance. If I take them to heart, if I ask you to take them to heart, then I am violating the counsel they offer. For why is Emerson not to be regarded by now as one of those sepulchred fathers he was telling us to ignore?
Still, the flow of thought is lovely, and the confidence is inspiring. "Undoubtedly, we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable." Who is it who does not at times doubt that undoubtable point?
The passage reminds me that Emerson was a frequent guest in the James home when William and Henry were boys there. Indeed, Emerson was William James' godfather. If we are going to see that connection as philosophically significant, we might look to these words: The everyman "acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth."
"Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes . Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.
Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?"
You can read the whole text here.
There is a paradox in quoting those famous words at this distance. If I take them to heart, if I ask you to take them to heart, then I am violating the counsel they offer. For why is Emerson not to be regarded by now as one of those sepulchred fathers he was telling us to ignore?
Still, the flow of thought is lovely, and the confidence is inspiring. "Undoubtedly, we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable." Who is it who does not at times doubt that undoubtable point?
The passage reminds me that Emerson was a frequent guest in the James home when William and Henry were boys there. Indeed, Emerson was William James' godfather. If we are going to see that connection as philosophically significant, we might look to these words: The everyman "acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth."
13 August 2010
Henry James about Robert Browning
Casually leafing, recently, through a volume of the critical writings of Henry James, I came across a review he wrote in 1875 of Browning's book, THE INN ALBUM.
An "Inn Album" is a nearly forgotten institution. In days of yore one would be kept in the lobby of an inn, and visitors would write their thoughts therein, or in moments of leisure leaf through the thoughts of earlier visitors.
Anyway, if you would like to read Browning's poem yourself click here.
It was not, evidently, one of Browning's more successful works. James begins his discussion in the center of things: how did Browning fail?
"This is a decidedly irritating and displeasing performance. It is growing more difficult every year for Mr. Browning's old friends to fight his battles for him, and many of them will feel that on this occasion the cause is really too hopeless, and the great poet must himself be answerable for his indiscretions. Nothing that Mr. Browning writes, of course, can be vapid; if this were possible, it would be a much simpler affair. If it were a case of a writer 'running thin,' as the phrase is, there would be no need for criticism; there would be nothing in the way of matter to criticize, and old readers would have no heart to reproach. But it may be said of Mr. Browning that he runs thick rather than thin, and he need claim none of the tenderness granted to those who have used themselves up in the service of their admirers."
I love that! James praises with faint damns here. He praises Browning's career by the manner in which he is displeased at the recent falling-away -- he praises a talent still evidently all too evident even in damaged form -- and he works through the contrast between "thick" and "thin" that necessarily reminds me of the changes his older brother used to ring on the same terms.
An "Inn Album" is a nearly forgotten institution. In days of yore one would be kept in the lobby of an inn, and visitors would write their thoughts therein, or in moments of leisure leaf through the thoughts of earlier visitors.
Anyway, if you would like to read Browning's poem yourself click here.
It was not, evidently, one of Browning's more successful works. James begins his discussion in the center of things: how did Browning fail?
"This is a decidedly irritating and displeasing performance. It is growing more difficult every year for Mr. Browning's old friends to fight his battles for him, and many of them will feel that on this occasion the cause is really too hopeless, and the great poet must himself be answerable for his indiscretions. Nothing that Mr. Browning writes, of course, can be vapid; if this were possible, it would be a much simpler affair. If it were a case of a writer 'running thin,' as the phrase is, there would be no need for criticism; there would be nothing in the way of matter to criticize, and old readers would have no heart to reproach. But it may be said of Mr. Browning that he runs thick rather than thin, and he need claim none of the tenderness granted to those who have used themselves up in the service of their admirers."
I love that! James praises with faint damns here. He praises Browning's career by the manner in which he is displeased at the recent falling-away -- he praises a talent still evidently all too evident even in damaged form -- and he works through the contrast between "thick" and "thin" that necessarily reminds me of the changes his older brother used to ring on the same terms.
20 September 2007
HJ on Flaubert
I know nothing about Flaubert, but I find this comment intriguing.
Henry James Jr., my intellectual mentor's bright kid brother, wrote a review of
"The Temptation of Saint Anthony," in 1874. Although he began with that book, he quickly turned his attention to the whole arc of Flaubert's literary career.
Although he acknowledged that Madame Bovary was a great work, HJ expressed disappointment with the rest of the curve, and especially with the work before him as its culmination.
"M. Flaubert and his contemporaries have pushed so far the education of the sense and the cultivation of the grotesque in literature and the arts that it has left them morally stranded and helpless. In the perception of the materially curious, in fantastic refinement of taste and marked ingenuity of expression, they seem to us now to have reached the limits of the possible."
Who is that "us" in the final clause? Henry was simply employing the privilege of reviewers to speak in the first person plural, "we, the arbiters of taste who understand these things...."
The review interests me precisely because this isn't "just" a critic. This isn't Pauline Kael writing about Alfred Hitchcock. This is the 19th century literary equivalent of John Ford writing about Hitchcock.
Tolstoy's screed against Shakespeare is analogous, except that Tolstoy was past the peak of his own powers at the time, a former artist turned eccentric sage.
Was there justice in James' complaint that Flaubert had cultivated the grotesque to an extent that left him "morally stranded and helpless"?
I end as I began -- I have no idea. I'd be happy to hear from those who know about Flaubert's post-Bovary writings though.
Henry James Jr., my intellectual mentor's bright kid brother, wrote a review of
"The Temptation of Saint Anthony," in 1874. Although he began with that book, he quickly turned his attention to the whole arc of Flaubert's literary career.
Although he acknowledged that Madame Bovary was a great work, HJ expressed disappointment with the rest of the curve, and especially with the work before him as its culmination.
"M. Flaubert and his contemporaries have pushed so far the education of the sense and the cultivation of the grotesque in literature and the arts that it has left them morally stranded and helpless. In the perception of the materially curious, in fantastic refinement of taste and marked ingenuity of expression, they seem to us now to have reached the limits of the possible."
Who is that "us" in the final clause? Henry was simply employing the privilege of reviewers to speak in the first person plural, "we, the arbiters of taste who understand these things...."
The review interests me precisely because this isn't "just" a critic. This isn't Pauline Kael writing about Alfred Hitchcock. This is the 19th century literary equivalent of John Ford writing about Hitchcock.
Tolstoy's screed against Shakespeare is analogous, except that Tolstoy was past the peak of his own powers at the time, a former artist turned eccentric sage.
Was there justice in James' complaint that Flaubert had cultivated the grotesque to an extent that left him "morally stranded and helpless"?
I end as I began -- I have no idea. I'd be happy to hear from those who know about Flaubert's post-Bovary writings though.
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