Parnassus, Coast to Coast

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What does it mean to be an intellectual in the U.S.? Is he really in such an unhappy plight as he sometimes thinks--the ridiculed double-dome, the egghead, the wild-eyed, absent-minded man who is made to feel an alien in his own country?

Ever since World War II, U.S. intellectuals have, as never before, been debating these questions. But in the course of the debate, one note has been struck time and time again, and no one has sounded it more clearly than Historian Jacques Barzun of Columbia University. If there is a traditional distrust of ideas in the U.S., says Barzun, the nation's men of ideas have still "won recognition in tangible ways beyond any previous group of their peers." And more important, many have come at last to realize that they are true and proud participants in the American Dream.

Thus, Barzun warns, those who continue to grumble at America are merely singing a worn-out tune. "They forget that the true creator's role, even in its bitterest attack, is to make us understand or endure life better. Our intellectuals do neither when they entice us to more self-contempt."

Whose Fault? The grumblers have not always grumbled without cause. But they have so distorted the picture that it would sometimes seem that the intellectual is America's hopeless Displaced Person. He is not only supposed to be the man that Senator McCarthy is after; he is also supposed to be the man that the rest of the nation persistently chooses to ignore or scorn. Diplomat George Kennan has said: "I can think of few countries in the world where the artist, the writer, the composer or the thinker is held in such general low esteem as he is here in our country."

Such sweeping charges have brought equally sweeping countercharges. French Dominican Raymond-Leopold Bruckberger says that the present plight of the U.S. intellectual is largely "the fault of the American intellectuals themselves . . .

The American intellectual often tends to say that his country has failed him ... I wonder if the contrary is not true. Perhaps the American intellectual has failed his country, and perhaps he is more deeply missed than is at first apparent. When the intellectual turns his back on his country, his place remains empty--while he complains that he has no place at all."

Symbols & Tags. Though almost as old as the nation, the cries of anti-intellectualism from one side and anti-Americanism from the other seem to be dominant themes in the postwar era. If the symbol of the '20s was the disgruntled intellectual who went to live in Europe, the present symbol--to the pessimists, at least--is the disgruntled intellectual who has stayed at home because he has no other place to go. The crusading muckraker, the flamboyant expatriate, the dedicated brain-truster--all these convenient tags are gone. While the European intellectual goes about his traditional business and enjoys traditional respect, the American sometimes feels that he is the forgotten man. He seems to have little to say, and even when he does, he is supposed to be so intimidated that he dare not say it.

To this portrait of the American intellectual in 1956, Jacques Barzun is the living contradiction. If he is not the typical American intellectual--for no such person exists--he represents a growing host of men of ideas who not only have the respect of the nation, but who return the compliment. Born in France into a family of long academic tradition, he has known at firsthand the cultures of both the Old World and the New, and while still a student at Columbia University, he decided to cast his lot with the New. Today, standing in the front rank of U.S. historians, he has also won a reputation as a perceptive commentator on the American scene. As such, he poses a question that sheds light both on the intellectual's strange status in America and on America's position in history. "Can it be true," he asks, "that in attempting to keep open house for all mankind, we have lost our birthright, squandered our intellectual heritage, so that Americanization is tantamount to barbarization? Or is it possible that modern civilization is something new, incommensurable with the old, just like the character of the American adventure itself?"

Protest & Affirmation. That this sense of the American adventure has become something of a preoccupation is a telling characteristic of America's postwar men of ideas. Their 'tone may be subdued, but their apparent lack of passion does not mean any lack of concern for America's destiny. The Man of Protest has to some extent given way to the Man of Affirmation--and that happens to be the very role that the intellectual played when the nation was new. It was such American intellectuals as Jefferson and Franklin who wanted to put the age of reason into political practice. It was Poet Joel Barlow who sang of America: "Sun of the moral world! . . . here assume thy stand / And radiate hence to every distant land." It was Philosopher Emerson who urged the American scholar to fashion something new. "We have listened too long," said he, "to the courtly muses of Europe . . . We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds."

Mixing pride with blunt arrogance, America's early intellectuals wanted America to set an example for the whole world. And as they spoke and wrote, they themselves sounded the first notes of the theme of anti-intellectualism that was to run through all U.S. history. America, they declared, should be the land of the "common man." "If reason is a universal faculty," said Historian George Bancroft, "the universal decision is the nearest criterion of truth. The common mind ... is the sieve which separates error from certainty." The young nation had little appetite for theory, and the intellectuals had little desire to furnish it. "Books," said Emerson, "are for the scholar's idle times." What America should be concerned with, said Walt Whitman, was "the duties of today, the lessons of the concrete."

"O Remnant Enslaved!" In the land that he helped to build, the intellectual gradually began to feel that he was talking only to himself. The "duties of today" were taken over by the practical men, and the best that the nation could do officially for the intellectual was to send Washington Irving as minister to Spain,

James Russell Lowell to England and Hawthorne as consul in Liverpool. The Robber Barons, who were the modern Medici, imported European treasures by the boatload, but Henry Adams found America "mortgaged to the railways." Henry James fled to Europe, and in 1913 Ezra Pound gloomily wrote of America's artists: "O helpless few in my country, 0 remnant enslaved!"

After World War I some of the enslaved looked for emancipation abroad. "You are all," Gertrude Stein said, "a lost generation." But even the sober homebodies found reason to feel disenchanted. There they were, says Philosopher Arthur E. Murphy of the University of Washington, fighting for The People against the Vested Interests, and the people blandly sent Warren G. Harding to the White House.

It was not until the '303, when the practical men fell from their high place with such a thud, that the intellectual seemed to come into his own. But war and prosperity brought the practical men back, and the nation's band of intellectuals seemed to be tuning up for another song of despair. While Joe McCarthy was running amuck, a few did lose their heads, but the McCarthy flurry only tended to obscure one central fact. Far from repeating the attitudes of the '205, the American intellectual stayed at home and even found himself feeling at home. His perennial problem has been to reconcile himself to a society that has always refused to accord him--or anyone else--the special regard given his European counterpart. "This," says Chairman Leslie Fiedler of Montana State University's English department, "is a period of recapitulation, a summing up. The intellectual is taking stock of himself."

The Sinister Ones. What are some of the problems that the intellectual now faces? The most obvious is the vast complexity of modern knowledge itself. Today's thinkers speak in many tongues, not always understood by each other. This is a part of the intellectual's plight, for, says Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, "if people can't tell what learned folk are up to, they may regard them as sinister." Unlike France, America has no intellectual cafe society, no small "mandarin" coteries to look to. "There is," says Philosopher Theodore Greene, "no headquarters and no head, no corporate momentum or cooperation among intellectuals. We haven't had a philosopher who pretended to know all there was to know since Hegel. The only adequate successor to Hegel would be a committee."

In other nations the problem of communication is not so acute. In England, says British Historian D. W. Brogan, "everybody above a certain level knows everyone else. Perhaps 100,000 people or less hold all the great jobs. They are all intellectuals. There is a unified group at the top. Everyone gravitates to London."

This group--"the establishment"--runs the Commonwealth, and the people seem perfectly willing that it should do so. But not in the U.S. Says Co-Editor Irving Kristol of Encounter: "The Americans don't respect the intellectual the way he is respected in Britain. But then, they don't respect anyone, not even Charlie Wilson. The English, on the other hand, are a deferential society, as Bagehot said. They'll defer to dukes or earls or anyone with the right tie round his neck. So they defer to the intellectual because he has generally got the right tie round his neck."

I Ain't One. Without the proper tie, the American intellectual is hard to identify. He does not gravitate to any one city, nor does he bear the stamp of any particular university or have his roots in any particular country. He may be a maverick genius like Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, or a state Supreme Court chief justice who, like New Jersey's Arthur T. Vanderbilt, especially has devoted his talents to improving the courts. He may be doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief--or a physicist like George Gamow, who will explode: "Intellectual? Intellectualism? I don't know what you're talking about!" Indeed, one of the difficulties in tagging the U.S. intellectual is his own resistance to the tag. It is quite characteristic of America that Nobel Prizewinning Novelist William Faulkner should declare, with a hint of pride: "I ain't no intellectual."

Actually, says Philosopher Sidney Hook, from his point of view, "there is no distinction between being an intellectual and being intelligent." And-it may be fortunate that the intellectuals of America do not form a distinct group. "In the past, resentment against intellectuals was sometimes harbored by ordinary people--directed against the social status of the intellectual, rather than against his function as an independent thinker. I would count lawyers as a class of intellectuals sometimes distrusted by the people. Physicians, on the other hand, were never distrusted because their function came before their social status." Even the intellectual's least controversial role, as custodian of the heritage, is taken lightly in America because, says Poet W. H. Auden, "American cul ture is committed to the future." The fact is, adds Historian Daniel Boorstin of the University of Chicago, that the U.S. has never produced intellectuals in the European sense. "A great deal of the wailing heard is derived from a European notion of the role of the intellectual. Those who attack U.S. culture are really saying: 'Why aren't we more like Western Europe?'' Quite Irrelevant. In the 1950s, the American intellectual began to face one additional problem. If in public affairs the intellectuals seem to have so little effect today, says Social Scientist David Riesman, it is "rather more by their own feelings of inadequacy and failure than by direct intimidation." In the '303, the intellectual had a politico-social program to offer. But the "discontented classes" have risen, and though still discontent, their wants, says Riesman, "are much less easily formulated . . . They must continually seek for reasons explaining their unrest--and the reasons developed by intellectuals for the benefit of previous proletariats are of course quite irrelevant."

To a large extent, therefore, the men of ideas have been merely cultivating their own gardens. Instead of one mission, they have many: they live as both a part of society and apart from it. The artist's fate, says Critic Edmund Wilson, is like that of Philoctetes, the Greek warrior who was forced to live in isolation because of the stench of his wound, but whose comrades kept coming back to him because they needed his magic bow. So it has been with the intellectual to whom the nation goes for the expert's answer, and otherwise tends to leave alone. For what Poet Auden calls an "age of anxiety," the many-tongued intellectuals do not agree on panaceas.

Fall of a Hero. In such an age, is there nothing on which American intellectuals can pin their collective faith? Certainly not on the easy "liberalism" of the past, for this has proved completely inadequate. The U.S., says Leslie Fiedler, has passed through "an age of innocence," when the intellectual, in his role as critic, performed only half his function. "It was easy," says Fiedler, "for intellectuals to criticize the black reactionaries and the Ya hoos, but the intellectual's duty was to do more than that--to criticize the en lightened people, to criticize his own side." The dogma of liberalism was that the liberal could do no wrong, and for some the day of disillusionment came only with the fall of Alger Hiss, when it became "impossible any longer to believe that . . . the liberal is per se the hero."

With that hero gone, a few intellectuals like Historian Russell Kirk have tried to rehabilitate the conservative mind. Others have set to work redefining liberalism. Critic Lionel Trilling attacked the liberal idea that the only true reality is "material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant." It was this idea that kept so many liberals at perpetual war with respectable society, that led them to exalt Theodore Dreiser for his apparent social conscience and to forgive that conscience when he joined the Communist Party. "This is the liberal criticism," said Trilling, "which establishes the social responsibility of the writer and then goes on to say that, apart from his duty of resembling reality as much as possible, he is not really responsible for anything, not even for his ideas."

Meanwhile, other men of ideas found other banners to rally around. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr condemned the liberal reformers for having ignored the fact of original sin, and declared that man's destiny is to "seek after an impossible victory and to adjust himself to an inevitable defeat." In his The Public Philosophy, Journalist Walter Lippmann denounced the "Jacobin heresy" of the modern democracies, which insists that the New Man will be born out of his emancipation from authority. What is needed, said Lippmann, is a return to the idea of natural law, for with the disappearance of this public philosophy--"and of a consensus on the first and last things --there was opened up a great vacuum in the public mind, yawning to be filled."

Of all America's men of ideas, Theologian Paul Tillich is perhaps alone in commanding among his fellow intellectuals something that approaches awe. His has been the most systematic effort to prove that faith and doubt are necessary to each other, and that "to live serenely and courageously in these tensions and to discover finally their ultimate unity in the depths of our own souls and in the depth of the divine life is the task and the dignity of human thought."

Brother Babbitt. Thus have the winds of doctrine blown, each attracting its own set of followers. But for a large number of intellectuals, the outstanding basis of faith, the one standard with a truly universal appeal, is not any school of thought, but America herself. "An avowed aloof ness from national feeling," Lionel Trilling says, "is no longer the first ceremonial step into the life of thought . . . For the first time in the history of the modern American intellectual, America is not to be conceived of as a priori the vulgarest and stupidest nation of the world."

Indeed, says Historian Crane Brinton, the alienation of intellectuals may be a thing of the past. "They really share, at bottom, the faith of their fellows . . . Some of these intellectuals despair--though by no means quietly--simply because they have heard talk of despair. Many of them, if you catch them unawares, look as if they were enjoying themselves, and not merely enjoying their unhappiness. In fact ... it begins to look nowadays in our perspective as if Sinclair Lewis and George F. Babbitt were brothers, under the skin."

This change, says Biographer Newton (Herman Melville] Arvin, was probably inevitable. "The culture we so fondly cherish is now disastrously threatened from without, and the truer this becomes, the intenser becomes the awareness of our necessary identification with it." In any case, says Jacques Barzun, by the end of World War 11 "it was no disgrace, no provincialism, to accept America and admire it ... America . . . was quite simply the world power, which means: the center of world awareness: it was Europe that was provincial."

The Seedbed. Few men have been more eloquent on the subject of America than Jacques Barzun, and he got to his present position by his own intellectual route. The son of the literary scholar, Henri Martin Barzun, he spent his boyhood among some of the foremost artists around Paris. Novelists Jules Romains and Georges Duhamel were constant visitors, so were Artists Fernand Leger, Albert Gleizes and Marcel Duchamp. "It was," says Barzun, "a seedbed of modernism. Apollinaire dandled me on his knee. Marie Laurencin did a sketch of me."

Coming from such a home, young Barzun seemed destined for a scholar's career. He was allowed to read whatever books he could reach in his father's library, and when his school decided to try to solve the World War 1 teacher shortage by using the famous Lancaster system (employing older pupils to teach the younger ones), nine-year-old Jacques got a crack at his first class. "All I remember about it," says he, "is that it had to do with arithmetic and that the room seemed filled with thousands of very small children in black aprons ... It served, however, to apprentice me to my trade."

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 15 1/2. 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."

In all his historical studies, culminating in his massive biography of Berlioz (Berlioz and the Romantic Century-), and in his observations of America-(Teacher in America, God's Country and Mine, Music in American Life) Barzun has never wavered in his refusal to disdain. But his great admiration has been reserved chiefly for the romanticists of the 19th century. These men, said he, were not the sentimental escapists that modern realists have painted, nor were they the children of chaos that admirers of classicism describe.

They were idealists and individualists trying to build a new world after the fall of Napoleon signaled the collapse of the old. "Romanticism . . . implies not only risk, effort, energy; it implies also creation, diversity, and individual genius. This is why America is the land of romanticism par excellence, and why her greatest philosopher, William James, asserted the doctrine in its fullness against all absolute, classical limits."

The Innocents. Like history, says Barzun, America is "many men, many minds." It has neither a permanent social class, nor a definable intellectual class. In a sense, the American intellectual is "a man who carries a briefcase . . . From the progressive schoolboy doing a 'research project' to the Ground Safety Officer of an airbase who has to post accurate warnings about sunstroke and heat exhaustion, we intellectuals . . . are incessantly boning up on something, 'getting the facts,' writing them down, breaking out in print. Parnassus stretches from coast to coast."

Actually, this admiration for facts and the accompanying suspicion of theory is the basis of American anti-intellectualism. But a "deafness to doctrine" has brought its own rewards. "It is attention to practice and indifference to overarching beliefs that guarantee our innocence . . . We are innocent because we have been-we still are--too busy to brood."

The Privileged Crowd. What has America been so busy about? Nothing less, says Barzun, than the creation of a new civilization. It is a civilization of multitudes, for America "was a community enterprise from the start." It is, too, much more than a nation. "We have here a complete Europe--Swedes cheek by jowl with Armenians, Hungarians with Poles, Germans with French ... As for our living philosophy, it is not the metaphysics of sorrow and tragedy but the ethics of equality." While individuals may rise to fame and distinction, privilege in general "has passed to the crowd."

Materialism, bigotry and vulgarity all play their part. But one fact about America is far greater than any of its defects. Its population is all mankind--and so is its mission. "We face all types of misery and misfitness and proclaim that they are all equally entitled to our help, because mankind is what we aim to save." This "is at last moral philosophy in action." But it is also a religious idea--the "inclusive fatherhood of God. The fact that with us 'the people' means everybody is what distinguishes us historically."

Revelation of Hope. And what of the intellectual in a land where privilege has passed to the crowd? The intellectual's true vocation, says Philosopher Sidney Hook, "is critical independence. The intellectual betrays his vocation when he becomes a poet laureate of the status quo. The criterion is neither assent nor conformity . . . My experience has been that most so-called intellectuals are just as conformist to tradition in their immediate circle as the nonintellectuals. Many intellectuals would rather 'die' than agree with the majority, even on the rare occasions when the majority is right." Certainly, says Barzun, the intellectual has little cause to complain: never before has he had quite such a variety of backers--"the museums of modern art, the foundation patronage, the universities eager to be baffled, and the leagues of women armed with print to defend this or that 'ism.' " "There is room in America," adds Philosopher T. V. Smith, "for all kinds of intelligence and for rewards befitting each kind. But those who sit on the Left Bank and howl at the Right neither facilitate the flow of the river nor adorn their own bank as the river flows by. Here, as elsewhere, it is only those who know not what to trust that trust they know not what."

One thing to trust, says Philosopher Mortimer Adler, "is that the most important fact of the 20th century is the industrial revolution in the U.S. It is a most hopeful revolution, even if for the time being, the distraction with production is bad for culture. In the long run, the new industrialization will produce an aristocratic society for the millions. We can produce Rome for the millions, or Athens for the millions. We can make a great intellectual society, or produce circuses if we want to. We have our choice. The intellectual should not be weeping; he should be planning."

But in 1956, it would seem, the intellectual has ceased weeping. He is, in fact, closer than ever before to assuming the role he originally played in America as the critical but sympathetic--and wholly indispensable--bearer of America's message. Scott Fitzgerald, says Jacques Barzun, put that message in an epigram: " 'America is a willingness of the heart.' After his death, a hundred thousand more Europeans, forlorn, fleeing wanderers, found out what he meant. To us who came before them, the meaning is not fainter, though more familiar, and we scarcely need Emerson's gentle reminder and advice: 'The ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are, and if we tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best.' "

-Other Barzun books: The French Race, Race: A Study in Modern Superstition, Of Human Freedom, Darwin, Marx, Wagner, Romanticism and the Modern Ego, Pleasures of Music.

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