Read Online Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Julian Barnes
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part of northern Burgundy. His father, François, was a builder who rose to be mayor of their village, Chitry-les-Mines. He was taciturn, anti-clerical and rigidly truthful. His mother, Anne-Rosa, was garrulous, bigoted and mendacious. The death of their firstborn child so embittered François that he barely concerned himself with the next three: Amélie, Maurice, and Jules. After the birth of the youngest, François stopped speaking to Anne-Rosa, and didn’t address her again for the remaining thirty years of his life. In this silent war Jules—whose sympathies lay with his father—was often used as go-between and porte parole: an unenviable role for a child, if an instructive one for a future writer.
Much of this upbringing finds its way into Renard’s best-known work, Poil de Carotte. In Chitry, many disliked this roman-à-clef: Jules, the red-headed village boy, had gone to Paris, become sophisticated, and written a book about a red-headed village boy which denounced his own mother. More importantly, Renard was denouncing, and helping put an end to, the whole sentimental, Hugolian image of childhood. Routine injustice and instinctive cruelty are the norms here; moments of pastoral sweetness the exception. Renard never indulges his child alter ego with retrospective self-pity, that emotion (normally arising in adolescence, though it may last for ever) which renders many reworkings of childhood fake. For Renard, a child was “a small, necessary animal, less human than a cat.” This remark comes from his masterpiece, the Journal he kept from 1887 until his death in 1910.
Despite metropolitan fame, he was rooted in the Nièvre. In Chitry, and the neighbouring village of Chaumot, where he lived as an adult, Renard knew peasants still living as they had done for centuries: “The peasant is the only species of human being who doesn’t like the country and never looks at it.” There he studied birds, animals, insects, trees, and witnessed the arrival of the train and motor car which between them would change everything. In 1904, he was in turn elected Mayor of Chitry. He enjoyed his civic functions—handing out school prizes, performing marriages. “My speech made the women cry. The bride gave me her cheeks to kiss, and even her mouth; it cost me 20 francs.” His politics were socialist, Dreyfusard, anti-clerical. He wrote: “As a mayor, I am responsible for the upkeep of rural roads. As a poet, I would prefer to see them neglected.”
In Paris, he knew Rodin and Sarah Bernhardt, Edmond Rostand and Gide. Both Bonnard and Toulouse-Lautrec illustrated his Histoires naturelles , while Ravel set some of them to music. Once, he stood as second in a duel in which the opposing second was Gauguin. Yet he could be a sombre presence in such company, unforgiving and bearish. He once said to Daudet, who had been kind to him, “I don’t know whether I love you or loathe you, mon cher maître. ” “ Odi et amo ,” replied Daudet, unfazed. Parisian society sometimes found him unfathomable. One sophisticate described him as a “rustic cryptogram”—like one of those secret marks tramps used to chalk on outbuildings, decipherable only by other tramps.
Renard came to writing prose at a time when it seemed the novel might be finished, when the great descriptive and analytical project of Flaubert, Maupassant, Goncourt, and Zola had used the world up and left nothing for fiction to do. The only way forward, Renard concluded, was through compression, annotation, pointillism. Sartre, in a grand and rather grudging tribute to the Journal, acclaimed Renard’s dilemma more than his solution to it: “He is at the origin of many more modern attempts to seize the essence of the single thing”; and “If he is where modern literature begins, it is because he had the vague sense of a domain which he forbade himself to enter.” Gide, whose own Journal overlaps for many years with Renard’s, complained (perhaps rivalrously) that the
Much of this upbringing finds its way into Renard’s best-known work, Poil de Carotte. In Chitry, many disliked this roman-à-clef: Jules, the red-headed village boy, had gone to Paris, become sophisticated, and written a book about a red-headed village boy which denounced his own mother. More importantly, Renard was denouncing, and helping put an end to, the whole sentimental, Hugolian image of childhood. Routine injustice and instinctive cruelty are the norms here; moments of pastoral sweetness the exception. Renard never indulges his child alter ego with retrospective self-pity, that emotion (normally arising in adolescence, though it may last for ever) which renders many reworkings of childhood fake. For Renard, a child was “a small, necessary animal, less human than a cat.” This remark comes from his masterpiece, the Journal he kept from 1887 until his death in 1910.
Despite metropolitan fame, he was rooted in the Nièvre. In Chitry, and the neighbouring village of Chaumot, where he lived as an adult, Renard knew peasants still living as they had done for centuries: “The peasant is the only species of human being who doesn’t like the country and never looks at it.” There he studied birds, animals, insects, trees, and witnessed the arrival of the train and motor car which between them would change everything. In 1904, he was in turn elected Mayor of Chitry. He enjoyed his civic functions—handing out school prizes, performing marriages. “My speech made the women cry. The bride gave me her cheeks to kiss, and even her mouth; it cost me 20 francs.” His politics were socialist, Dreyfusard, anti-clerical. He wrote: “As a mayor, I am responsible for the upkeep of rural roads. As a poet, I would prefer to see them neglected.”
In Paris, he knew Rodin and Sarah Bernhardt, Edmond Rostand and Gide. Both Bonnard and Toulouse-Lautrec illustrated his Histoires naturelles , while Ravel set some of them to music. Once, he stood as second in a duel in which the opposing second was Gauguin. Yet he could be a sombre presence in such company, unforgiving and bearish. He once said to Daudet, who had been kind to him, “I don’t know whether I love you or loathe you, mon cher maître. ” “ Odi et amo ,” replied Daudet, unfazed. Parisian society sometimes found him unfathomable. One sophisticate described him as a “rustic cryptogram”—like one of those secret marks tramps used to chalk on outbuildings, decipherable only by other tramps.
Renard came to writing prose at a time when it seemed the novel might be finished, when the great descriptive and analytical project of Flaubert, Maupassant, Goncourt, and Zola had used the world up and left nothing for fiction to do. The only way forward, Renard concluded, was through compression, annotation, pointillism. Sartre, in a grand and rather grudging tribute to the Journal, acclaimed Renard’s dilemma more than his solution to it: “He is at the origin of many more modern attempts to seize the essence of the single thing”; and “If he is where modern literature begins, it is because he had the vague sense of a domain which he forbade himself to enter.” Gide, whose own Journal overlaps for many years with Renard’s, complained (perhaps rivalrously) that the
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