Jacques Barzun, man of letters, fixer.

Poking around the internet following a Jacques Barzun string, I stumbled across this Austin Chronicle interview with Barzun back in 2000 on the occasion of the success of his magnum opus, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life: 1500 to the Present. The headline of the interview is “The Man Who Knew Too Much.” Check out this amazing little factoid about his Columbia University undergraduate student Allen Ginsberg. It gives that headline a slightly ominous ring:

“Allen Ginsberg was a student of Lionel [Trilling]’s, and of mine, not in our joint course, but separately. But we joined together to save him from the penalties of the law, because he was involved in a very bad affair with an older man who seduced him sexually and used him to help dispose of the corpse of a man that this fellow had killed. Poor Allen, aged 17 or 18, helped to dump this body into the Hudson River. Well, was he in trouble there! With the help of the dean of the college, who also knew Allen, the dean, Lionel, and I waited on the district attorney who fortunately was a Columbia graduate and we said, ‘This youth is really innocent, although he committed an awful blunder and he’s also very gifted in the English Department.’ We didn’t say he was a poet or that might have queered his chances! And that it would be a catastrophe to turn him over to a criminal court and put him in jail. We had to go again to a judge in Brooklyn, I think, because Allen came from Brooklyn or something. Anyway, the district attorney wasn’t enough, so we went to a second hearing, which was much more sticky. But Allen was let off.”