Exquisite wit, timeless wisdom – it’s the greatest writer you’ve never heard of
Journal 1887-1910 Jules Renard Riverrun €22 ★★★★★
Has anyone ever written of the natural world with the piercing wit of Jules Renard? ‘A pigeon settles on my window sill, and takes off with a noise like the slap of a shaken napkin.’
‘A swallow, the wind’s favourite toy.’
‘The leaves hold out their tongues to the rain.’
‘The eagle’s beak, a masterpiece of cutlery.’
‘The caterpillar playing a soundless little tune on its accordion.’
These sharp, joyful observations come from the pen of a writer who is, for no good reason, little known to English speakers but revered in France. I’m hoping that the publication of this selection from his daily journal will bring him to a wider readership.
Though he relished the idiosyncrasies of the birds and animals of the French countryside – and also made regular visits to the zoo – he wrote about anything that caught his eye or occupied his mind.
With a few simple words he allows you to see the world from a different angle, or as if for the first time. ‘To faint is to drown in air. To drown is to faint in water.’ Whenever I find myself struggling to settle down to work, I often think of his little snippet of dialogue, sadly not included in this anthology: ‘You are working?’ ‘I am trying to work; which is much more difficult.’
Renard was born in Burgundy in 1864. His father, a peasant farmer, refused to speak to his wife, Jules’s mother, for 30 years. ‘If she came into the room he would pause in midsentence, wait for her to leave, and then continue the phrase,’ writes Julian Barnes in his elegant introduction. His father once sent the young Jules to his mother, to ask her if she would like a divorce. ‘This was an unenviable role for any child,’ observes Barnes, ‘though an instructive one for a future writer.’
The household grew almost comically gloomy. ‘ Papa spent the best part of his later years killing wasps,’ Jules recalled. He eventually took his own life, leaving Jules’s mother alone with her grievances. ‘Maman… has one amusement left: to find fault with her maid.’
But Jules possessed the intelligence and energy needed to transcendhis background.He grewuptobecome a journalist and an acclaimed playwright.
When he went to Paris he mixed with the great and the good, including Toulouse-Lautrec, Rodin, Zola, Sarah Bernhardt and Oscar Wilde, jotting down their words and actions in his journal.
His beady eye missed nothing.
‘Oscar Wilde next to me at lunch,’ he wrote on April 7, 1892. ‘He has the oddity of being an Englishman. He offers you a cigarette, but selects it himself. He does not walk around a table: he moves the table out of the way.
A face worked over by tiny red worms, long cavernous teeth. He is enormous, and carries an enormous cane.’ I love also his description of a grand entrance by the actress Sarah Bernhardt, who was, at that time, one of the most idolised women in the world. ‘When she descends the winding staircase of a grand house, it is as though she were standing still, while the staircase swirls around her.’ When he visits her, he finds her reclining on the pelt of a polar bear. He is tongue-tied in her presence. ‘Sarah drinks from a golden cup. I seem to be incapable of speech, nor of asking for my napkin, which a footman has taken away; so I eat meat with my fruit fork.’
After the meal, one of Sarah’s five pet lions is led in on a chain. ‘Next come two enormous dogs with pink pug noses: either of whom might happily consume a child for its supper.’ At no point in these glamorous surroundings does Renard feel at ease. ‘At the end of the evening I could not find my hat, because it was already on my head, so I calmly walked off with someone else’s hat in my hand.’ Visiting Toulouse-Lautrec in his studio, he is similarly discombobulated. ‘Straight away I notice… two naked women: one
showing her bust, the other her backside… I am in a panic of embarrassment and haven’t the courage to look openly at the two models. I cast about for a place to put my hat, my coat, my leaking umbrella.’ While they are getting dressed, ‘I risk a glance, without seeing anything properly; I seem to feel their defiant looks upon my lowered eyes.’
But most of the entries in his journal arise from his home in the country. He lived with his beloved wife and children in the village of Chitry. Unusually for a writer, he was also an administrator: he became mayor of Chitry in 1904. ‘As mayor, I am responsible for the upkeep of rural roads. As poet, I would prefer to see them neglected.’
Many of the short entries in his journal revolve around these sorts of paradoxes. Taking himself as the model, he sees human beings as ruled by contradictory impulses. And while Renard may feel hampered by his imperfections, but he also delights in them, and often in the same sentence.
‘Do not ask me to be kind; just ask me to act as though I were.’ He suggests that when humans admit their shortcomings, they are also, to some extent, released from them. ‘You do not understand life any more at 40 than you did at 20, but you are aware of the fact, and you admit it. And to admit it is to remain young.’
Well over 100 years later, his writing is still fresh because it retains the tang of curiosity. Unlike so many of his fellow aphorists, Renard has none of the smugness of the know-all. Rather, he is fascinated and amused by his own shortcomings. As an author himself, he is alert to the vanity of authors. ‘To go for a walk on the day your book appears, casting side-glances at the stacks of copies, as though the sales assistant were watching you; then to reckon that any bookseller who has not put it in the window (or who has merely not received any copies yet) is your mortal enemy…’ Authors and booksellers alike will be left with the impression that the ghost of Renard is following them around.
He sometimes comes close to despair or self-pity, but he subverts it with a joke. ‘If they built the House of Happiness,’ he writes, ‘the largest room in it would be the waiting room.’
He died at the age of 46 in 1910, a year after being diagnosed with emphysema and arteriosclerosis. ‘Please, God, don’t make me die too quickly!’ he wrote eight years before, ‘I shouldn’t mind seeing how I die.’
Jules Renard was not perfect, nor would he have wanted future generations to think that he was. Some of his observations tend towards the inconsequential, and others now seem dated and irrelevant. He couldn’t see the point of Dickens or Tolstoy or Mark Twain. He wrote that ‘music bores me’, found Cézanne ‘barbarous’ and Monet’s water lilies ‘girly’. He could be flippant, but often in a funny way. ‘Nietzsche. What do I think of him? I think that there are quite a few unnecessary letters in his name.’
On the other hand, he could also be prophetic. Exactly 130 years ago he predicted that ‘the day is fast approaching when kites in the sky will be enlisted as aids to photography’. And an extraordinary number of his apparently fleeting observations – beautifully translated by Theo Cuffe – remain as true today as they were back then. ‘He believed in the common man,’ he wrote of one contemporary politician, ‘on whom he had never bestowed so much as a glance.’
Though he was dismissive of sculpture, he made an exception of Rodin, saying of a visit to his studio that it was ‘as though my eyes were suddenly forced open’. The same could be said of Renard himself. He writes with such grace and attention that before long you begin to feel his Journals are not just writings about life, but life itself.