Félix Fénéon - Novels in Three Lines

FLIX FNON (18611944) was born in Turin (his father was a traveling salesman), raised in Burgundy, and came to Paris after placing first in a competitive exam for jobs in the War Office. He was employed as a clerk there for thirteen years, rising to chief clerk, and was considered a model employee. During this time he also edited the work of Rimbaud and Lautramont, reviewed books and art (he helped to discover Georges Seurat), and was a regular at Mallarms Tuesday evening salon. Fnon was active too in anarchist circles, and in 1894, after the bombing of a restaurant popular among politicians and financiers and the assassination by an Italian anarchist of the French president, he and twenty-nine others were arrested on suspicion of conspiracythough in the subsequent so-called Trial of the Thirty Fnon and most of his co-defendants were easily acquitted. Soon after, Fnon became the editor of the Revue Blanche, where he featured Debussy as his music critic and Andr Gide as his book critic and published Proust, Apollinaire, and Jarry, as well as his own translation of Jane Austens Northanger Abbey. After the Revue Blanche folded, Fnon went to work as a journalist, first for the conservative Le Figaro, then, starting in 1906, for the liberal broadsheet Le Matin, for which he composed the pieces collected in Novels in Three Lines. In later life Fnon sold paintings at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery and for a while ran his own publishing house. In response to a proposal to publish a collection of his own work, he remarked, I aspire only to silence.

LUC SANTE is the author of Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, and, most recently, Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 19902005. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College.

This is a New York Review Book

Published by The New York Review of Books

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Translation and introduction copyright 2007 by Luc Sante

All rights reserved.

Cover image: Flix Fnon, 1894, photograph from the files of the French police Adoc-photos / Art Resource, NY

Cover design: Katy Homans

The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

Fnon, Flix, 18611944.

[Nouvelles en trois lignes. English]

Novels in three lines / by Flix Fnon ; translated and with an introduction by Luc Sante.

p. cm. (New York Review Books Classics)

ISBN-13: 978-1-59017-230-8 (alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 1-59017-230-2 (alk. paper)

I. Sante, Luc. II. Title.

PQ2611.E565N613 2007

843'.912dc22

2007014634

eISBN 978-1-59017-419-7
v1.0

For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

The original French title of this book, Nouvelles en trois lignes, can mean either the news in three lines or novellas in three lines. It was the title under which these itemsthere are 1,220 of them in all; a mere 154 have been omitted here because their significance has fallen into obscuritywere all published in 1906 in the Paris daily newspaper Le Matin. Newspapers in many countries apart from the United States run columns of such brief stories, which in French are called faits-divers (sundry events; fillers are nearly but not quite the samethere is no simple English equivalent). They cover the same subjects as the rest of the papercrime, politics, ceremony, catastrophebut their individual narratives are compressed into a single frame, like photographs. They may suggest, portend, echo, pose questions, present enigmas, awaken troubling memories, but they usually do not have a second act. Cases in which a story runs over into a subsequent item on a later day are rare. People have been clipping and saving such items, for their oddity or their usually unintentional humor, since the fait-divers first made its appearance in the nineteenth century, but they have seldom if ever considered them literary texts, attributable to an author.

These, though, are all the work of one man, a great literary stylist who wrote little and published less, and who occupies a peculiar place in French cultural history. You might say that Flix Fnon is invisibly famous: his name may ring a bell, and a number of his deeds are known and a few celebrated, but not many people could link the man with his accomplishments. Furthermore, he kept himself to himself. What we know of him is largely owed to the devotion of those around him. We know little, for example, about how he came to spend half the year 1906 composing unsigned three-line news items for a mass-circulation daily paper. The only reason we have them today is because Camille Plateel, his mistress for some fifty years, collected them in an album, which was found after both their deaths by Fnons literary executor, Jean Paulhan. Whatever Fnon may have thought of them, he clearly did not stint on their composition. They are the poems and novels he never otherwise wrote, or at least did not publish or preserve. They demonstrate in miniature his epigrammatic flair, his exquisite timing, his pinpoint precision of language, his exceedingly dry humor, his calculated effrontery, his tenderness and cruelty, his contained outrage. His politics, his aesthetics, his curiosity and sympathy are all on view, albeit applied with tweezers and delineated with a single-hair brush. And they depict the France of 1906 in its full breadth, on a canvas of reduced scale but proportionate vastness. They might be considered Fnons Human Comedy.

Fnon made it his business throughout his life (18611944) to remain behind the scenes, and in general he succeeded. He may have been somewhat more famous to his contemporaries than he is to us, but he was no less enigmatic. These days he is best known as the subject of a portrait by Paul Signacwhich he disliked, and lamented for the rest of his daysin which he is shown in profile, proffering a lily, against a background of swirls and stars and patterns and colors that looks like early psychedelia. (It actually alludes to the theories of Charles Henry, a friend of both painter and subject, who sought a scientific basis for aesthetics.) Fnon is as striking as the settingvery tall and very thin, with a goatish chin-beard that made people think of Uncle Sam: he was a false Yankee, according to Apollinaire; a satyr born in Brooklyn (U.S.A.), according to Alfred Jarry; a Yankee Mephistopheles, according to Remy de Gourmont.

His accomplishments all took place away from the limelight, and were frequently in the service of others work. He more or less discovered Georges Seurat, and had a great deal to do with his success and those of other Postimpressionists and Nabis: Signac, Pissarros pre and fils, Maximilien Luce, Flix Vallotton, Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, Vuillard, Maurice Denis. He edited Rimbauds Illuminationshe was responsible for establishing the order of the sections, among other thingsand produced the first public edition of Lautramonts Chants de Maldoror. He founded several magazines and edited several more, including the Revue blanche, arguably the most important literary-artistic journal of its time (18931903). In later life he sold paintings at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery and for a while ran his own publishing house, ditions de la Sirne, where he published, among other things, the first French translation of James Joyce (