the times | Saturday November 14 2020 1GR saturday review 19T
here is no such thing as genius,
Jules Renard writes in one of his
earliest Journal entries. There
are only sloggers and slackers.
“What is needed is to pick up the
pen, rule the paper, patiently fill the lines.
The strong do not hesitate. They settle in,
they sweat it out, they keep going to the
end. They run out of ink, they use up all the
paper.” The slacker never even starts.
Renard was a slogger with a slacker’s
inclinations. Born in rural France in 1864,
he became a prolific novelist, journalist
and playwright. Although he is little
known in Britain, the book for which the
red-headed Renard is remembered in
France is Poil de carotte (“Carrot Top”),
published in 1894.
Poil tells the story of his miserable child-
hood and rotten parents. In his introduc-
tion to this selection from Renard’s Journal
Julian Barnes writes that the novelist’s
father, François, “was taciturn, anticlerical
and rigidly truthful. Renard’s mother,
Rosa-Anne, was garrulous, theatrical and
mendacious.”
Renard escaped to Paris where, on
November 2, 1891, he collected his first sou
from writing. “At such a moment, a sou is
worth 50,000 francs.” The journals, which
Renard kept from 1887 until his death in
1910 (he died aged 46), are a mix of pensées,
commonplace book and confession ofLaura Freeman
enjoys a journal full of
witty observations by
a pleasingly philistine
literary figure
literary embarrassments. He cannot resist
saying to a newsvendor: “You see that little
book? I wrote it.” “Really?” the vendor
says. “I’ve yet to sell a single copy.” Renard
regards any bookseller who has not put his
book in the window as a “mortal enemy”.
As a diarist, Renard is genial, unguarded,
egomaniacal (“My name printed in a
newspaper lures me like a scent”) and
thoroughly good company. Jules: Je t’aime.
Renard is pleasingly unpretentious (“I
am of the uncouth sort who, at table, says
thank you to servants and prefers a forkful
of beetroot to a truffle”) and conspiringly
philistine. Pseuds, philosophers and poets
all come in for a pricking. The poet Paul
Verlaine is “frightful”: “A dreary Socrates,
a soiled Diogenes; part dog, part hyena.”
Claude Monet’s Water Lilies are “too
pretty”: “It is painting for women — who
cannot argue with it.” The Swiss artist
Félix Vallotton paints with “the petty
dreariness of an upholsterer”.
After seeing Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, hereports: “What a deal of trivial stuff,
delivered as if to seem profound! Nora’s
bolt for freedom probably merits just a
good spanking.” After Wagner’s Die
Walküre: “Tedium, cardboard and paste,
with the village idiocy of a fireworks dis-
play.” The opera audience is “a rendezvous
of diamonds, décolletages and the deaf,
trying to convince each other that they
can hear”.
He rolls his eyes at the romantic temper-
ament. “You can be a poet and wear your
hair short. You can be a poet and pay your
rent. Even though you are a poet, you can
sleep with your wife. A poet is even
allowed, now and then, to write proper
French.” In a note-to-self he writes: “Keep
their interest! Keep their interest! Art is no
excuse for boring people.” Some of his ire
may be envy. His circle included the sculp-
tor Auguste Rodin, the writers André Gide,
Paul Claudel and Anatole France and the
actress Sarah Bernhardt. In 1890 he served
as a second in a duel; the opposing secondbooks
Unpretentious?
Moi? A most
unusual writer
was Paul Gauguin. Renard was successful,
esteemed (Légion d’honneur, Académie
Goncourt), but not quite a celeb.
The Journal is all rueful resolutions and
goodish intentions. He makes a plan to
write: “No visits, no meals outside, no fen-
cing practice, no walks. Now you can work,
produce something worthwhile. And on to
the wide grey sheet of the day, your mind
projects — nothing.” There is hopeless
pathos in his new-year entries. January 1,
1896: “Wanting this to be an exceptional
year, I start by getting up late, eating too
much for lunch and fall asleep in an arm-chair until three in the afternoon.” January
2, 1899: “On rising I resolve to give up most
things for this year, and make a start at
lunch — by stuffing myself with roast
goose and chestnuts followed by galettes
de plomb.”
Renard dotes on his wife, Marinette, but
is not insensible to beauty elsewhere. “Say
what you like: up to a certain age — I have
yet to discover what age — there is no
pleasure in talking to a woman you cannot
imagine as mistress.” When, however, he
visits Toulouse-Lautrec’s studio he is too
embarrassed to look at the two young,
naked models and casts desperately about
for a place to put his wet coat and leaking
umbrella. He is happier in the kitchen with
Marinette “at once angelic and demonic,
in the midst of her preserving pans”. He
admires “her luminous expression when
she lights a rum omelette”.
This is a trim and spirited selection. You
could get away with a shorter book still. A
“Jules’s Jewels of Wisdom” to keep by the
loo in honour of the man who admitted: “It
is perhaps in the privy that, out of tedium,
I have written my best thoughts.” An aper-
çu a page perhaps? “I like the common-
place flower and the rare compliment”; “I
hate work, but I love my study”; “Vanity is
the spice of life”. At this time of purposeless
lockdown there is comfort in Renard’s
reminder that “life is neither long nor
short: it has its longueurs”, and that even in
self-isolation there are small pleasures.
“Solitude — a place where you can finally
blow your nose with enthusiasm.”‘There is no pleasure
in talking to a
woman you cannot
imagine as mistress’
CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGESdear diary The writer
Jules Renard c 1905Journal
1887-
by Jules Renard,
trans Theo Cuffe,
intr Julian BarnesRiverrun, 381pp; £paperbacks
fiction
nonfiction
Starve Acre by Andrew Michael
Hurley
John Murray, 256pp; £8.
This “folk-horror” novel has
the best closing line of any novel
recently published. It’s a creepy tale
of a grief-stricken couple who have
moved to the Yorkshire moors.
Their five-year-old son has died, but
we learn that he was an unusually
violent boy. Could Starve Acre, with
its barren soil, the site of a former
gallows tree, somehow be the
cause of his disturbance and their
unhappiness? The Times reviewer
James Walton was struck by the
ability of Andrew Michael Hurley,
author of the prizewinning The
Loney, “to create a world that’s
like ours in many ways and really
not in many others”. He went on tosay: “Starve Acre, leaner and perhaps
even more unsettling than its
predecessors, may well be his
best novel so far.”Tender is the Flesh by Agustina
Bazterrica
Pushkin, 219pp; £8.
In a near-future dystopia all
animals have become carriers of
GGB, a virus fatal to humans, and
have been destroyed en masse.
Committed carnivores only have
only one option: human flesh. The
first victims of cannibalism are
immigrants and the poor, then (after
lobbying from the defunct meat
industry) cannibalism is legalised,
with humans bred for consumption.
Marcos, the main character in
Tender is the Flesh, works at a human
processing plant. He’s sickened by
what happens there, but must keep
working to pay for his demented
father to stay in the best nursing
home in the city. One day, something
happens that makes him snap. The
Argentine writer Agustina Bazterricapulls no punches in describing the
breeding and slaughtering of the
“heads”. There’s an almost puckish
delight in making us squirm, but
there is nothing described that isn’t
done to livestock. The Times
reviewer Siobhan Murphy wrote that
“it’s not an elegant read, but it’s
grimly engrossing, with a sucker-
punch ending. And it may well put
you off that bacon sandwich.”week in cash from his manager
for much of his career, yet had an
insatiable desire for expensive cars
and designer clothes; who was
prone to suicidal bouts of despair,
yet blessed with supernatural
luck. He shows how this
complex, troubled man’s
drive to be the best guitarist
of all time — and to sleep
with as many women as
possible — came from a
deep-rooted insecurity and
sense of abandonment.
The Times rock critic
Will Hodgkinson
comment
ed that
“despite
everything,
you end up liking
Clapton, and
feeling as if you
know and
understand him.
It is proof that
Norman’s
biography has done its work.”a mixed-race child and his dejection
at missing out on an international
cap as a player are particularly
moving. As for the World Cup
campaign, he admits he almost
got it right, but not quite.Slowhand: The Life and
Music of Eric Clapton
by Philip Norman
Orion, 448pp; £10.
Philip Norman, who has
written biographies of
John Lennon, Paul
McCartney and
Mick Jagger, has
captured the
contradictions
of Eric Clapton,
right, in style.
He brings
alive a man
whose lack
of interest in
money is such
that he was
happy to live
off £200 aMy Life and Rugby by Eddie Jones
Macmillan, 448pp; £9.
Published with commendable speed
a mere fortnight after his England
side’s crushing defeat in the final of
the rugby union World Cup last
year, Eddie Jones’s autobiography is
refreshingly self-critical for a man
not usually associated with a deficit
of confidence. Jones, indeed, emerges
as a more complex character
than he had led us to believe. The
sections on the racism he suffered as