'Long the Butt of Jokes of His Workmate'

“M. Abel Bonnard, of Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, who was playing billiards, put out his left eye falling on his cue.”

I like my news straight, without attitudinizing, just the facts ma’am. As someone who has written thousands of newspaper stories about traffic fatalities, murders, suicides, thefts, rapes, fires, guilty and not guilty verdicts, even, sorry to say, election results, I know how tough it can be to achieve concision, precision, clarity, fairness, even a little stylistic flourish in a limited number of column inches and under the pressure of a deadline. Once you master old-fashioned journalistic form (not to say formula), writing will never again feel onerous.

 

I heard from my old friend and former newspaper colleague Tim Roberts, a reporter-turned-photographer. He read my October 29 post and wrote:

 

“When I read your post titled ‘It Is Too Long’ I thought of the French writer Félix Fénéon whose book Novels in Three Lines I would like to recommend to you. Fénéon was an art critic, journalist and anarchist in Paris in late 19th and early 20th Century Paris. In 1906 he began to write what I think we would call the regional news for Le Matin. He got just three lines for each story and wrote them in a very vivid style, so vivid that a photography bookstore in Santa Fe includes the book among its volumes. It was there that I discovered it.”

 

It was Tim who introduced me to the novels of Barbara Pym and Robert Fitzgerald's translation of The Aeneid almost forty years ago, so I pay attention to his suggestions. I borrowed from the library a copy of Novels in Three Lines (New York Review Books, 2007), translated by Luc Sante, and read it this week. Fénéon’s precise intentions are obscure, and his tone is probably compromised in translation, but reading these 1,220 three-line squibs reinforces my conviction that we are an absurd species. Each is like a compacted joke, complete with set-up and punchline. Polonius reminds us of the brevity/wit linkage, and it’s true that most of these news items would not be funny if treated at customary length. Novice journalists are taught to compress available information into a “lede.” Fénéon’s ledes are the entire story. As with haikus, their brevity probably makes them appear easy to write. Imagine the backstory to this report:

 

“Distinctive indicators on an unknown bod brought up at the Bezons dam: a fused ankle, an infantryman tattooed on the right arm.”

 

Who did Fénéon talk to in order to glean the details? A cop might notice the tattoo without being able to diagnose a corpse’s “fused ankle,” whatever that is. A medical examiner or coroner, if there were such people in suburban Paris in 1906? Here is Fénéon’s variation on the Joe-Blow-doesn’t-beat-his-wife strategy: “It is true that the mayor of Saint-Gervais, Gironde, has been suspended, but not that he has been sent to jail.” Without context, many of Fénéon’s mini-stories read like Robert Benchley’s parodies of newspaper writing. What to make of this?: “A gas explosion, which reduced the bounty of the butcher’s shop to a dark sludge, burned the thighs of the butcher, Cartier of Argenteuil.”

Or this: “For fun, Justin Barbier was scattering pistol shots in all directions, in Stains. Jules Courbier, a roofer, caught one.”

One more: “Long the butt of jokes of his workmate Boissonnet, Canet, of Saint-Cloud, brained him with a soldering iron.”

People are at least as crazy today as they were in 1906. Surrealism has nothing on reality.