'The Literary Equivalent of Practicing Scales'

Jules Renard started keeping his journal in 1887 at age twenty-three. Few of us at that age have anything of interest to say except to ourselves, and even that is usually tedious. Renard was an unlikely, provincial, self-taught exception. His October 31 entry from that first year: 

“We often wish we could exchange our actual family for a literary equivalent of our own choosing to be able to say to this or that author of a page which has moved us: ‘Brother.’”

 

I wished Mr. Pickwick had been my uncle and Pierre Bezukhov my favorite cousin. Renard takes a common anxiety (suspicion that one is a changeling) and turns it into a fantasy of wish fulfillment. His prose, even in translation, has a rough-hewn sophistication about it, humor that eschews pretentiousness. He is one of literature’s nonpareils, a genuine human novelty. He survived a difficult childhood but has a way of reducing life to essentials and making it sound amusing. There’s a commonsensical, aphorism-like inevitability to what he writes:

 

“Happiness is the search for happiness.”

 

“Taking notes is the literary equivalent of practicing scales.”

 

“I do not venture out into society because I am fearful of not receiving enough compliments.”

 

“There are moments when everything turns out right. Don’t worry: they pass.”

 

“I have reached the point of distrusting distrust.”

 

“Literature is a calling in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.”

 

Renard was forty-six on May 22, 1910, when he died of arteriosclerosis. That year was cruel. It also claimed Tolstoy, O. Henry, Mark Twain and William James.

 

[All quotes by Renard are taken from Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]