'Art Is No Excuse for Boring People'

One sort of interesting writer is an amateur with professional standards. He is an amateur in the etymological sense, writing out of love, and a professional by being painstaking and ruthless, indifferent to fashion and the market, ready to revise. To cite some out-of-the-way examples: Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Aldo Buzzi, J.V. Cunningham, Lev Shestov. To them I would add the name of Jules Renard, born on this date in 1864, in Châlons-du-Maine in northwestern France. He had a miserable childhood, virtually a writer’s prerequisite in the nineteenth century. His father didn’t speak to his mother for thirty years. Such experiences fueled his best-known book in France -- Poil de carotte (1894), or Carrot Top. The rest of us read his journal, kept from 1894 until shortly before his death in 1910 -- 1,200 pages in the Pléiade edition.

For more than half a century, we relied on The Journal of Jules Renard, translated by Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget, and published in 1964. Now we have Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020). Renard alerts readers to the sort of man he is: “Happy people have no talent.” He is a natural-born contrarian, but no depressive. His sense of dissent is ebullient. His charm is harshness tempered by wit. He has a country man’s pragmatic sense deployed in the big city.  

Renard has an eye and a carefully calibrated whimsical sense: “Goldfinches, dressed like jockeys” and “A sonnet. Fourteen lines in search of one idea.” And this, from April 7, 1894:

 

“To get rid of flies, take off all your clothes and coat yourself head to toe with a gluttonous liquid, mixed with a little honey or sprinkled with sugar, then take a slow walk around your bedroom. The flies flock to you, they stick to your skin, you can pick them off at your leisure. As a procedure it may lack elegance, but is infallible.”

 

Here he confirms one of my oldest convictions: “Inspiration is perhaps merely the joy of writing: it does not precede writing.” And again: “The indignation of satire is unnecessary. It is enough to show things as they are. They are ridiculous enough of themselves.”

 

As the journal proceeds, thoughts of death and dying, without morbidity, grow more frequent. In January 1902 he writes: “I never ask for news about those who are absent: I assume they are dead.” And two days later: “Please, God, don’t make me die too quickly! I shouldn’t mind seeing how I die.” And the linkage of writing and dying:

 

“What is needed is to pick up the pen, rule the paper, patiently fill the lines. The strong do not hesitate. They settle in, they sweat it out, they keep going to the end. They run out of ink, they use up all the paper.”

 

A lesson every writer should memorize: “Keep their interest! Keep their interest! Art is no excuse for boring people.”

 

Don Colacho might be thinking of Renard and other amateur professionals when he writes: “Admiring only mediocre works, or reading only masterpieces, characterize the uncultivated reader.” No one would mistake Renard for a mediocrity or genius. He is something more valuable -- excellent company.