'A Landscape in One Word!'

“When, in the course of a day, a man has read a newspaper, written a letter, and not wronged anyone, that is more than enough.”

Enough for what? Probably to have established a minimum standard of decency and contentment. Jules Renard (1864-1910) is no stuffy moralist. There’s always something relaxed about his understanding of the world. He professes no ideology. He has not so much hates as irritations, people and situations that irk him, and irksome is not the same as detestable. Renard adds a tincture of irony to every observation. I love his journal because his persona is Everyman – well-read but not pedantic, a little cranky but with a personality leavened by the inability to take himself entirely seriously.  

It has just occurred to me that Renard brings to mind his contemporary Peter Altenberg (1859-1919), the Viennese miniaturist championed by Karl Kraus and Robert Musil. In 2005, Archipelago Books published Telegrams of the Soul, a selection of his prose translated by Peter Wortsman. Clive James says Altenberg could craft “a world view in two sentences.,” His pieces are always brief, a mélange of essay, fiction, aphorism and feuilleton. I know of nothing quite like them in English. Here’s one of his elusive exercises in self-definition from “Autobiography”:

“I’d like to capture an individual in a single sentence, a soul-stirring experience on a single page, a landscape in one word! Present arms, artist, aim, bull’s-eye! Basta. And above all: Listen to yourself. Lend an ear to the voices within. Don’t be shy with yourself. Don’t let yourself be scared off by unfamiliar sounds. As long as they’re your own! Have the courage of your own nakedness.”

Like Renard, Altenberg could never have comfortably fit into any organization, whether a newspaper's editorial board or a political party. Both men were anarchists sans theory. Clive James described Altenberg as “everybody’s favourite scrounger, saloon barfly and no-hoper” and “a Falstaffian scholar gypsy.” Renard was no drinker but James is close to capturing his peculiar charm.

I've always liked the idea of feuilletons, brief essays, columns or sketches without airs. The word is French (from feuillet, the leaf of a book) but I associate it with German-language writers – Altenberg, Alfred Polgar, Joseph Roth. "Little things in life,” Altenberg writes, “supplant the ‘great events.’ That is their value if you can fathom it!” Unpolluted by politics, gracefully learned but without an axe to grind, often comic but never merely whimsical, the feuilleton is perhaps too delicate a species to be successfully transplanted to the too, too earnest New World. [The Renard passage at the top is dated November 18, 1900. You’ll find it in Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]