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).]
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