'Unforgiving and Bearish'

“The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over the historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.” 

Of the three points made by English novelist Julian Barnes, the first is dubious, the second and third inarguably true. To say someone is not in control of his temperament is usually an after-the-fact excuse for lousy behavior. Only the mentally ill and very young children may have persuasive explanations. The “historical moment” is beyond every individual's control and an aesthetic is a wrestling match between a writer’s gift and his ability to persevere. Even the best writers sometimes disappoint. Titus Andronicus, anyone?

 

Barnes has published fourteen novels. I’ve read his third, Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), which carries the only blurb ever written by Steven Millhauser. The sentence quoted above is from the pages devoted by Barnes to Jules Renard in his 2008 memoir Nothing to Be Frightened Of. He also selected and introduced Renard’s Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, riverrun, 2020). Barnes describes Renard as “one of my dead, French, non-blood relatives.” He recounts the Frenchman’s difficult childhood. His father didn’t talk to his mother for the last thirty years of his life. Jules, one of three children, “was used as a go-between and porte parole [spokesman]: an unenviable role for a child, if an instructive one for a future writer.”

 

Renard’s Journal is laced with familiarities. Reading it seems like reading a diary I kept long ago and forgot. He knew Rodin, Sarah Bernhardt, Rostand and Gide. “Yet he could be a sombre presence in such company,” Barnes writes, “unforgiving and bearish.” Barnes quotes a “sophisticate” who describes Renard as a “rustic cryptogram.” Renard’s father takes his own life with a shotgun – both barrels – in 1897. His brother suffers a fatal heart attack four years later. ("The writer cannot help noting the improvised cushion on which his dead brother’s head is resting: a Paris telephone directory.”) In 1909, Renard’s mother is seated on the brickwork of the village well. She falls in backward and is killed. Barnes writes:

 

“Renard cannot determine whether it was an accident or another suicide; he calls his mother’s death ‘impenetrable.’ He argues: ‘Perhaps the fact that God is incomprehensible, is the strongest argument for His existence.’ He concludes: ‘Death is not an artist.’”

 

Renard would die on May 22, 1910 at the age of forty-six.