'Writing for Me, Not for Himself'

“Forty-two years old. What have I done? Next to nothing, and now I  do nothing at all.” 

A typically unfair self-evaluation. Jules Renard speaks for every good minor writer. Like his namesake, Renard (1864-1910) is “crazy like a fox,” cunning when he feigns a provincial rube’s lack of sophistication. He is one of literature’s nonpareils, a genuine human novelty, refreshingly free of pretentiousness. The line above he wrote on his birthday, February 22, in 1906, and he goes on:

 

“I have less talent, money, health, fewer readers, fewer friends, but more resignation.

 

“Death appears to me as a wide lake that I am approaching, whose outlines I begin to make out.

 

“Am I a better person? Not much. I have less energy to do wrong.”

 

He speaks for many of us. Renard’s thoughts are found in Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020). He’s no Racine or Proust, but who would want all of literature to operate at that level of genius? The merely gifted are a gift to the rest of us.

 

When Renard is in his casual literary critic mode, I often find myself in agreement with him. He writes in March 1892: “It is rather odd that I can’t read two pages of Thackeray without yawning, when my humour is supposed to resemble his.” Here he is, in February 1893, on Maupassant. I was told as a kid that the Frenchman was a middle-brow Saturday Evening Post writer, a plot-driven trifler, author of “The Necklace,” a French O. Henry or Somerset Maugham (as though anything were wrong with those wonderful writers):

 

“I like Maupassant because he seems to be writing for me, not for himself. He rarely goes in for confessions. He does not say, ‘Here is my heart,’ or, ‘The truth comes out of my well and no other.’ His books are either entertaining or they are dull. You close them without asking yourself nervously, ‘Was that major? Or middling, or minor? The stormy, excitable aesthetes scorn his name, because it ‘returns no echo.’

 

“It is possible that, having read Maupassant in his entirety, you would not wish to do so again.

 

“But those who wish to be re-read will not be read in the first place.”

 

Renard might be writing about Chekhov or Kipling. He is the opposite of an aesthete. His eyes are on the reader, in his own writing and when he reads others. He alerts us to the sort of man he is: “Happy people have no talent.” He is a natural-born contrarian, 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. 

 

Though accurate when written, some of his aphorisms have lost their truth-quotient: “In art, never do as others do; in morals, act like everyone else.” Today, the latter half of that aperçu would be a prescription for mediocrity and, in some cases, criminality. Renard has a good eye and a carefully calibrated whimsical sense: “Goldfinches, dressed like jockeys.”

Sometimes he manages to sound as sardonic as Samuel Beckett: “Imagine life without death. Every day you would try to kill yourself out of despair.” In 1931, Beckett read the four-volume French edition of Renard’s Journal, and wrote to a friend: “Oh a good name – foxy foxy.” Almost thirty years later, in a January 1, 1957 letter to Richard Roud, he wrote: “Glad you like the Renard. For me it’s as inexhaustible as Boswell.” (The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. III: 1957-1965, Cambridge University Press, 2014).]