Jules Renard - Journal 1887–1910

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Jules Renard ( 1864 1910 ) was born in the Nivre, a poor, rather scrubby part of northern Burgundy. His father Franois, a peasant farmer who followed the plough, rose to become a builder and then mayor of the village, Chitry-les-Mines. He was taciturn, anti-clerical and rigidly truthful. Renards mother, Rosa-Anne, was garrulous, theatrical and mendacious. The death of their first-born child so embittered Franois that he barely concerned himself with the next three: Amlie, Maurice and Jules. The father stopped speaking to the mother, and didnt address her directly for the next thirty years: if she came into the room he would pause in mid-sentence, wait for her to leave, and then continue the phrase. In this silent war Jules whose sympathies lay with his father was often used as go-between and porte-parole: once Franois sent him to ask Rosa-Anne if she would like a divorce. This was an unenviable role for any child, though an instructive one for a future writer.

Much of this upbringing finds its way into Renards best-known work, Poil de Carotte ( 1894 ), which remained a standard text in French schools until the 1960 s. In Chitry, many disliked this roman clef by a red-headed village boy clever enough to escape to Paris, where he became sophisticated and wrote a book about a red-headed village boy which denounced his own mother. More broadly, Renard was decrying the whole sentimental, romantic 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 which makes many reworkings of childhood fake. For Renard, the child was a small, necessary animal, less human than a cat. This remark comes from his masterpiece, the Journal which he kept from 1887 until six weeks before his death in 1910 .

He began in a small way as a poet and journalist, then became a dramatist, a kind of novelist, and a private diarist. His material, themes and images overlap constantly from one genre to the next; so do his techniques. For instance, he imported into his novels the playscripts blunt way of setting out dialogue (thus avoiding fictions repetitive he-said-she-said, followed by that over-familiar adverb to indicate tone). Renard was rightly proud of this innovation, until as is often the fate of writers who imagine they have made a formal advance he discovered its previous use in the writings of the Comtesse de Sgur. As well as being a happy overlapper, Renard was a cheerful recycler: he pillaged his occasional writings (and the Journal) for the nature notes he gathered as Histoires Naturelles. He also turned his prose writings into plays: so Poil de Carotte made his theatrical debut in 1900 . At that time the stage was the equivalent of Hollywood today, a source of fame and money. But true success depended on a full-length play and Renards were only ever one or two acts long. In his Journal, he wondered sardonically if he would have remained a socialist if he had been able to manage a third act.

To the outward eye, Renards life and career might seem almost entirely successful. At twenty-four he met and married the seventeen-year-old Marie Morneau, who brought with her a considerable dowry. Her sturdy and supportive nature allowed Jules as happy a marriage as his bearish, pessimistic self would permit; while her money allowed him to become co-founder and majority shareholder of the soon-fashionable magazine Le Mercure de France. They had two children, Jean-Franois and Julie-Marie, who feature in many clear-eyed but doting entries in the Journal (where they are rechristened Fantec and Bae, while the Renard family name is changed to Lepic). His work was praised; he was awarded the Lgion dHonneur, whose ribbon he wore proudly, indeed aggressively, as several incidents in the Journal confirm; and he was elected to the Acadmie Goncourt. His social circle in Paris included writers, actors, poets, painters and politicians: Edmond Rostand, Alphonse Daudet, Edmond de Goncourt, Mallarm, Rodin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, Sarah Bernhardt, Jean Jaurs, Lon Blum, Gide, Claudel, Anatole France; among foreign celebrities he met Little Tich, Loie Fuller (on a bus), and even the exiled Oscar Wilde. His closest friends were the playwrights Tristan Bernard and Alfred Capus, and the actor Lucien Guitry (father of Sacha). In 1890 he served as second in a duel in which the opposing second was Gauguin. It would be easy to imagine Renard following the standard path of the provincial who succeeds in the capital: acquiring sophistication, charm and mistresses, while learning the arts of flattery and hypocrisy.

But, luckily for us as readers, his nature and principles forbade any easy satisfaction with life: as he self-fulfillingly told his Journal in 1894 , Happy people have no talent. And in 1899 , If they built the House of Happiness, the largest room in it would be the waiting-room. When Histoires Naturelles came out in 1896 , the novelist and critic Lucien Muhlfield said to him, Theres something of the priest about you, Renard. You can never forget your first communion. You are on the side of morality, chastity, duty. Renard replied, That is correct. I am fed up with our literature, which is about nothing except cuckolds. In the Paris of the day, Renard was despite temptations noted in his diary an incongruously faithful husband. In 1896 , he wrote: At a sign from Sarah Bernhardt I would follow her to the ends of the earth with my wife. And when he was away from Marie, he wrote to her every day. They divided their lives between Paris and the Nivre; in 1896 they rented, and later bought, a large presbytery in nearby Chaumot; in 1904 he took the sash as mayor of Chitry. He enjoyed exercising his civic duties, handing out school prizes and marrying the locals. In a letter to his wife, he wrote jauntily, My speech made the women cry. The bride gave me her cheeks to kiss, and even her mouth; it cost me twenty francs. (In his diary, he seems to have been more truthful.) He also found the job could provoke a piquant bifurcation of response: As mayor, I am responsible for the upkeep of rural roads. As poet, I would prefer to see them neglected.

Though capable of such geniality, Renard was known in both city and countryside as farouche and quarrelsome. One sophisticate called him a rustic cryptogram like one of those secret marks tramps used to chalk on outbuildings, decipherable only by other tramps. The harshness of the Nivre, and of his strange, emotionally bleak upbringing, never left him. But if Renard was a fierce judge of human foible especially Parisian foible he was a fiercer judge of himself. The Journal is filled with self-rebuke and self-contempt. In November 1888 , when his career has scarcely begun, he announces to himself You will come to nothing a lacerating judgement which he repeats five times in the same entry. He is dismissive of his own work: at best, he might amount to a pocket Maupassant (and his opinion of the full-sized version was pretty mixed). His character and temperament disappoint him just as much; he doubts himself constantly, and falls into bitter depressions. His wit, his grasp of the dark comedy of human existence, and his need to put it all into words are the saving of him. Samuel Beckett, in a letter of January 1957 , wrote of the