'Favourable Enough for a Writer'

Jules Renard writing in his journal on November 22, 1906: 

“I am in no great hurry to see the society of the future – our own favourable enough for a writer. By its absurdities, its injustices, its vices, its stupidities, it nourishes a writer’s observations. The more men improve, the more colourless man will become.”

 

Renard’s customary skepticism is muted here. He possessed wisdom enough to know that adversity in the right hands can be a writer’s most useful prod. How else explain the embarrassing fact that many of the twentieth-century’s essential books were composed by writers enduring totalitarian regimes? That’s no defense of crime or despots; rather, an acknowledgement of the inscrutable tenacity of talent and genius.

 

So what are the artistic benefits of democracy? Less than a year after the assassination of President Kennedy, Basic Books published Of Poetry and Power: Poems Occasioned by the Presidency and by the Death of John F. Kennedy. God, it’s awful. Few books are so painfully embarrassing to read. The editors assemble seventy-eight poems, many by the big names of the day and all of them wretchedly bad. In their introduction, after noting the flood of poetry written following President Lincoln’s assassination a century earlier, the editors tell us, “If traditional elegiac forms are no longer available, elegiac feeling and expression still are.” For “elegiac feeling” read “self-indulgent posturing.”

 

That’s the problem. Nearly every poem in the collection is not about the assassination but the poet’s reaction to it. The recurrent theme is his or her mournful sensitivity. Pomposity and bathos vie for pride of place. The degeneration of poetry and literary standards in general was already well underway sixty years ago. Momentous public events tend to bring out the flatulent in all of us, poets most of all. Unless your name is John Dryden or Jonathan Swift, you probably ought to stay away from such things.

 

Later in the journal passage cited above, Renard, a wise man, writes: “The saddest moments: when you start to believe that all wisdom is a hoax.”

 

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