Behind the Gas Lamp
Julian
Barnes
§ Novels
in Three Lines by Félix Fénéon, translated by Luc Sante
In
1890, the neo-Impressionist Paul Signac offered to paint Félix Fénéon, the very
coiner, four years previously, of the term ‘neo-Impressionist’. The
critic-subject responded with modest evasiveness, and then a proviso: ‘I will
express only one opinion: effigy absolutely full-face – do you agree?’ Signac
did not agree. Five months later, the best-known image of Fénéon emerged: in
left profile, holding top hat and cane, presenting a lily to an off-canvas
recipient (homage to an artist? love-gift to a woman?) against a circusy
pinwheel of dashing pointillist colour. Fénéon, whether from vanity or critic’s
pique at the artist’s disobedience, strongly disliked the image, commenting
that ‘the portraitist and the portrayed had done one another a cruel
disservice.’ He accepted the picture, however, and kept it on his walls until
Signac died some 45 years later. But neither that event, nor the passing of
time, mellowed his judgment: in 1943 he told his friend and future literary
executor, the critic Jean Paulhan, that it was ‘the least successful work
painted by Signac’.
Worse
for Fénéon, it established a template of profilism. Bonnard, Vuillard and
Vallotton all depicted him in more or less the same pose: leaning forwards –
bent into a near impossible arrowhead in Vuillard’s rendition – at his desk at
the Revue Blanche, with left profile and monkish tonsure on display.
Toulouse-Lautrec and van Dongen followed suit. Fénéon may not have liked it,
but it was the more interesting view. In full face he looks as if he might be
someone else: in old age he resembled Gide. Whereas the profile shot offered
artists much more promising material: a big boney nose, prominent chin and,
beneath it, the flowing tuft of a goatee. Highly individual
and yet also, somehow, generic. This angle made people think of Uncle
Sam or Abraham Lincoln (Apollinaire called him ‘a faux Yankee’); also of the
Moulin Rouge dancer Valentin le Désossé, for whom he was sometimes mistaken.
‘We had, it seems,’ he admitted, ‘analogies that were flattering to neither of
us.’
But
this profilism was also psychologically and aesthetically accurate: a
representation of Fénéon’s obliqueness, his decision not to face us directly,
either as readers or as examiners of his life. In literary and artistic history
he comes down to us in shards, kaleidoscopically. Luc Sante, in his
introduction to Novels in Three Lines, describes him well as being
‘invisibly famous’ – and he was even more invisible to Anglophone readers until
Joan Ungersma Halperin’s fine study of him appeared in 1988. Art critic, art
dealer, owner of the best eye in Paris as the century turned, promoter of
Seurat, the only galleryist Matisse ever trusted; journalist, ghost-writer for
Colette’s Willy, literary adviser then chief editor of the Revue Blanche;
friend of Verlaine, Huysmans and Mallarmé, publisher of Laforgue, editor and
organiser of Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations; publisher of Joyce and
translator of Northanger Abbey. He was invisible partly because he was a
facilitator rather than a creator, but also because of his manner, which was
elliptical, ironic, taciturn. Some found him caustic
and rather frightening; though his actions were often kindly. Valéry called him
‘just, pitiless and gentle’. The Goncourt Journal reports the verdict of
the poet Henri de Régnier: ‘A real original, born in Italy and looking like an
American. An intelligent man who is trying to turn himself into a character and
impress people with his epigrams . . . But a man of heart, goodness
and sensitivity, belonging wholly to the world of the eccentric, the
disfavoured, the down-and-out.’
For
13 years, he worked at the War Office, rising to the position of chief clerk.
Frenchly, he managed to combine this with being a committed anarchist, by both
word and deed. He supported the cause as journalist, editor and – almost
certainly – bomb-planter. In 1894, he was arrested in a sweep of anarchists and
charged under the kind of catch-all law which governments panicked by terror
attacks stupidly tend to enact. Part of the evidence
against him was that a police search of his office had turned up a vial of
mercury and a matchbox containing 11 detonators. Fénéon added to the history of
implausible excuses by claiming that his father, who had recently died and was
therefore unavailable to corroborate his evidence, had found them in the
street. His defence was paid for by the artistic Maecenas Thadée Natanson, and
he seems to have enjoyed matching his mind against the lawyers. When the
presiding judge put it to him that he had been spotted talking to a known
anarchist behind a gas lamp, he replied coolly: ‘Can you tell me, Monsieur le
Président, which side of a gas lamp is its behind?’ This being France, wit did
him no disservice with the jury, and he was acquitted. The following year Wilde
was to discover the downside of courtroom wit. Strangely, this was also the
year in which Lautrec painted the two victims side by side – and in profile,
naturally – as spectators at the Moulin Rouge.
The
trial was the high point of Fénéon’s visibility. For the next half-century he
became gradually more elusive. He never published a book, restricting himself
to the 43-page monograph Les Impressionistes en 1886. This came out in
an edition of 227 copies, and he declined all subsequent offers to reprint it.
His journalism proceeded from full byline to initials to total anonymity. A
publisher once invited him to write his memoirs; naturally, he refused. Another
suggested bringing out Les Nouvelles en trois lignes; he replied
angrily: ‘I aspire only to silence.’ A reply on a par with that of his near
contemporary, the Swiss writer Robert Walser, who was once visited in the
lunatic asylum to which he had retreated by a friend who asked how his work was
coming along. ‘I’m not here to write,’ Walser replied, ‘but to be mad.’
Fénéon’s
elusiveness infected the way others wrote about him. The biographical note in
the Pléiade edition of Jules Renard’s Journal takes up more space than
the two entries devoted to him, one of which reads simply: ‘Fénéon’s goatee.’
Mallarmé was a close friend who stood as a character witness at his trial. But
here is the poet writing to his near-miss mistress Méry Laurent immediately
after that event: ‘My poor friend Fénéon (no, he has a
very interesting physiognomy) has been acquitted and this gives me happiness.
The fruit have not yet arrived or been eaten. The ham reigns supreme and
Geneviève considers we put it in its trousers (the bag) too soon after the
meal.’ This is all part of the same paragraph. The great public crisis of
Fénéon’s life is subsumed into the more important matter of food. Though Fénéon
might well have approved, especially of the phrase, ‘The ham reigns supreme.’
The
Nouvelles en trois lignes, here translated into English for the first
time, is not, in any normal sense, a book, if that word implies authorial
intent. In 1906, Fénéon worked for the newspaper Le Matin, and for some
months was assigned to compose the faits divers
column – known in hackdom as chiens écrasés (‘run-over dogs’). He had at
his disposal the wire services, local and provincial newspapers, and
communications from readers. He composed up to twenty of these three-line
fillers in the course of his evening shift. They were printed – unsigned, of
course – and read for a quick smile or breath-intake or head-shake, and then
forgotten. They would not have been identifiable from the general mass of faits
divers had not Fénéon’s mistress, Camille Plateel, dutifully cut out his
contributions – all 1220 of them – and stuck them in an album (his wife
apparently did the same). Jean Paulhan then discovered and published them. It
is an interesting position, to be the literary executor of a writer who aspired
only to silence and resolutely refused publication in his lifetime. Paulhan
duly brought out this unintended, unauthored, unshaped, unofficial ‘book’, and
Fénéon’s underground literary reputation started to go overground.
Sartre,
writing about Jules Renard’s Journal, described the dilemma of the
French prose writer at the end of the 19th century. The great descriptive and
critical project that had been the realist novel – from Flaubert via Goncourt
and Maupassant to Zola – had run its course, had
sucked up the world and left little for the next generation of practitioners.
The only way forward lay through compression, annotation, pointillism. In a
grand and rather grudging tribute to Renard, Sartre wrote that the Journal
‘is at the origin of many more modern attempts to seize the essence of the
single thing’. Gide, whose own journal overlapped for many years with that of
Renard, complained – perhaps rivalrously – that the latter’s was ‘not a river
but a distillery’.
Renard
– who also features in Bonnard’s drawing of the Revue Blanche offices –
distilled; Fénéon went further, and barely bottled a drop. Sante calls this ‘an
aggressive silence, as charged, dense and reverberating as Malevich’s black
canvas. It affirms that all writing is compromise, that conception will always
trump execution, that ego and politics are everyone’s co-authors. It may be
rooted in despair but it grows in the direction of transcendence. It wishes to
free poetry from books and release it into daily life.’ These rather grand
claims provoke two immediate responses: first, that Malevich’s black canvas did
at least exist; and second, that if such was indeed the intention behind the
writer’s silence, then what is the quality of disobedience in the actions,
first of Paulhan, and then of Sante?
In
1914, Apollinaire started a wider awareness of the Nouvelles en trois lignes
by claiming, in a newspaper column – appropriately anonymous – that they had
‘invented’ the ‘words at liberty adopted by the Futurists’. Their clandestine
reputation and significance has, over the century, become an idée reçue.
Here it is, as related by Hilary Spurling in her biography of Matisse: ‘For
years [sic] he also wrote a national newspaper column, consisting
entirely of more or less offbeat items collected from the press and retailed
with a terse, disconcerting wit which raised the news round-up to a
proto-Surrealist art form.’ Sante has further claims: that the Nouvelles
‘depict the France of 1906 in its full breadth’; that they have the perfection
of haikai; that they are ‘Fénéon’s Human Comedy’; that they have the
same essence as the pointillists’ adamantine dots; that they are like random
photographs found in a trunk; that they parallel Braque and Picasso’s use of
newspaper in Cubist collage; finally, that they ‘represent a crucial if
hitherto overlooked milestone in the history of Modernism’. The publishers, for
good measure, throw in Andy Warhol.
To
begin at the beginning: they are ‘nouvelles en trois lignes’. The news in three
lines, laid out – as a page of Le Matin reproduced here shows – under
the sub-heads of Parisian Suburbs, Départements (i.e. provincial stories) and
Foreign. These attributions are not maintained in Sante’s edition; but then
they were probably not evident from Camille Plateel’s scrapbook. Fénéon had
previous experience of forms demanding compression and permitting irony. In
1886 he had been one of four co-authors who produced – in three days flat – a Petit
Bottin des lettres et des arts, a cheeky and
whimsical lexicon of cultural notables. Later, as an anarchist journo in the
1890s, he had directed his sarcasm at more serious targets:
Dead
sick of himself after reading the book by Samuel Smiles (Know Thyself),
a judge just drowned himself at Coulange-la-Vineuse. If only this excellent
book could be read throughout the magistracy.
Or:
A
policeman, Maurice Marullas, has blown out his brains. Let’s save the name of
this honest man from being forgotten.
This
was to be very much the style of the Nouvelles en trois lignes, even if
the political opinions were now to be held back.
‘The
original French title,’ Sante writes, ‘can mean either “the news in three
lines” or “novellas in three lines”.’ It would, of course, have meant only the first
when the newspaper named the column; and nouvelles normally means ‘short
stories’ in French. Even allowing for the slipperiness of fictional taxonomy,
it’s a considerable stretch to make it mean ‘novellas’, and a completely
impossible stretch to make it mean ‘novels’. But Novels in Three Lines
is a more sexily paradoxical title. If ‘all writing is compromise,’ what does
that make publishing?
Most
of the thousand or so items here (Sante has omitted 154 on grounds of
obscurity) tell of violence in one form or another. Here are murder, suicide
and rape; anarchist bombs and acid attacks; theft, arson and poisonings; the
discharge, accidental or deliberate, of a wide range of firearms; runnings-down
by train, carriage, horse, automobile and bus. Suicide – sometimes in pact form
– may come by hanging, poisoning, incineration, railway line, river or well.
Rabies attacks the human body, while strikes attack the economic and social
body. There are weird eccentricities, bathetic failures, sly hoaxes and scams of
impressive originality:
‘Ouch!’
cried the cunning oyster-eater. ‘A pearl!’ Someone at
the next table bought it for 100 francs. It had cost 30 cents at the dime
store.
What
there is very little of – unsurprisingly, given the tradition of the faits
divers column – is normality (and therefore breadth, Balzacian or
otherwise). Only two areas suggest this: regular space is given to the mildest
happenings in the French navy, often involving small amounts of damage to
tiller and hull; and a strange but consistent interest is shown in the election
of May queens.
There
are certain givens to this journalistic format. You must mention names, places,
ages and, if possible, professions; summarise the newsworthy event; and
indicate motive, if known, guessable or inventible. All this
in three lines. Sometimes this results in a car-crash of nomenclature:
A
case of revenge: near Monistrol-d’Allier, M. Blanc and M. Boudoissier were
killed and mutilated by M. Plet, M. Pascal and M. Gazanion.
Trades
and professions – especially if far from those of the newspaper’s readers –
provide points of colour: here are chestnut vendors, ragpickers and
resin-tappers. Sometimes, these opposing trades clash:
In
the military zone, in the course of a duel over scrawny Adeline, basket-weaver
Capello stabbed bear-baiter Monari in the abdomen.
Had
the bear-baiter stabbed the basket-weaver, it might have been less unusual;
that it happened in the military zone makes it more piquant; that the surnames
imply the hot blood of the south, and that Adeline was scrawny – whether she
was or not in reality is almost beside the point – make it into a miniature
story.
Only
very occasionally do these stories join up to create a thread of narrative (in
one item, a group of naval gunners contract diarrhoea from spoiled meat; a few
paragraphs later, there is a correction – it was the heat, not the meat).
However, a couple of running themes emerge, which may or may not represent
Fénéon’s personal interests: it remains unclear whether he was under editorial
guidance in the selection of items. The first concerns the regular theft,
throughout the country, of telegraph and telephone wires. Time after time, vast
lengths are snipped and silently removed. The culprits are rarely apprehended,
until, close to the end of his stint, Fénéon is able to report:
People
were beginning to think the telegraph-cable thieves were supernatural. And yet
one has been caught: Eugène Matifos, of Boulogne.
The
second near-theme is the continuing battle between church and state over the
display of crucifixes and other religious paraphernalia in schools. A mayor is
relieved of his duties ‘on account of his zeal at keeping Jesus in the
schools’; others ‘for having put God back in schools or having prevented his
being removed’; ‘once again, Christ is on the walls . . .’;
four more mayors are suspended for wanting ‘to keep the spectacle of the death
of God in the sight of schoolchildren’; others want to ‘restore to classroom walls
the image of divine torture’. The sequence finds a comic narrative conclusion
in:
This
time the crucifix is solidly bolted to the wall of the school at Bouillé. So much for the prefect of Maine-et-Loire.
As
can be seen, elegant variation is one of Fénéon’s favourite techniques. What
new way can be found of describing the latest violent yet sadly repetitive
crime? One victim is mutilated in a way that is ‘permanently cancelling his
virility’. A father kills his sexually active daughter for being ‘insufficiently
austere’; a day-labourer admits that ‘he often substituted for his wife his
daughter Valentine, 14, who was eight when the practice began’. Félicie de
Doncker, an abortionist, is ‘proficient at quelling the birthrate in Brabant’.
Rustic rapists are cast as ‘fauns’, as in:
Mme
Olympe Fraisse relates that in the woods of Bordezac, Gard, a faun subjected
her 66 years to prodigious abuses.
Or:
M.
Pierre de Condé was arrested at Craches for rape. Alcide Lenoux, who was also
implicated, fled. The two fauns are 16 and 18.
Elegant
variation shades into ironical euphemism, which shades into dandaical
detachment. Flaubert, in despair at the Franco-Prussian war, and trying to
maintain the primacy of art, commented that in the long run, perhaps the only
function of such carnage was to provide writers with a few fine scenes. So
here, the function of the octogenarian Breton woman who hangs herself, or the
75-year-old man who dies of a stroke on the bowling lawn (‘While his ball was
still rolling he was no more’), or the 70-year-old who drops dead of sunstroke
(‘Quickly his dog Fido ate his head’) is to provide a sophisticated Parisian
with a witty paragraph. As an aesthete-anarchist, Fénéon had always cultivated
a detached gaiety of tone: a bomb became a ‘delightful kettle’ and the manner
in which it killed six people showed ‘intimate charm’ (we are not far from
Henze’s quickly retracted description of the World Trade Center attacks as ‘the
greatest artwork ever made’). So with the Nouvelles: are
they a Modernist’s evocation of a harsh and absurd world, a subtle
continuation of propaganda by word; or are they simply a classier expression of
the press’s traditional heartless sensationalism? Though they could, of course,
be both.
Clive
James once cruelly rebuked an Observer subeditor who had sought to
sharpen his prose style and improve his jokes with the remark, ‘Listen, if I
wrote like that I’d be you.’ Félix Fénéon might be the perfect
counter-example: the sub who wrote better than the newspaper’s main
contributors. He knew how to shape a sentence, how to make three lines breathe,
delay a key piece of information, introduce a quirky adjective, hold the
necessary verb until last. Just fitting in the requisite facts is a
professional skill; giving the whole item form, elegance, wit and surprise, is
an art.
But
how much of an art, and of what resonance?
The Futurists, despite Apollinaire’s suggestion, didn’t acknowledge Fénéon’s
model, quite possibly because they were utterly unaware of it. Sante quotes
what they meant by parole in libertà: ‘Literature having up to now
glorified thoughtful immobility, ecstasy and slumber, we wish to exalt the
aggressive moment, the feverish insomnia, the running, the perilous leap, the
cuff and the blow.’ That there was a great deal of daft windbaggery about the
Futurists, this quote confirms; that Marinetti’s words are proof of ‘a common
essence’ with Fénéon’s nouvelles, as Sante claims, is pushing it. So is
the notion that they are ‘a proto-Surrealist art form’.
Posterity
likes to see itself predicted; Modernism needs modernists
avant la lettre, even if the facts have to be fitted. Fénéon helped establish
neo-Impressionism, and was the first owner of Seurat’s Bathing at Asnières
(when a dealer offered him a large sum for it, he replied: ‘But what could I do
with all that money, except buy it back from you?’); he supported Matisse and
bought a Braque. But he was also the art critic who, when Apollinaire took him
to see Les Demoiselles d’Avignon at the Bateau-Lavoir in 1907, turned to
Picasso and said: ‘You should stick to caricature.’
You
could, if feeling theoretical, see the Nouvelles in terms of the
literary crisis Sartre described. Flaubert, with whom it all began, found the
story of Madame Bovary in a provincial fait divers
(whether there was an actual cutting or not is beside the point): ‘Delphine
Delamare, 27, wife of a medical officer in Ry, displayed insufficient
austerity. Worse, she ran up debts. To avoid paying them, she took poison.’
From there, the 19th-century novel expanded and progressed, until there was
nowhere left for it to go, whereupon it folded itself back into the form it had
come from, the Nouvelles en trois lignes, waiting for the opportunity to
unpack itself again. That might be one reading, and the fact that when fiction
recovered its vitality it acknowledged no more debt to Fénéon than the
Futurists did was, you could say, appropriate: the ‘invisible’ writer had
‘invisible’ influence.
Or
you could say that Fénéon, highly intelligent and ironical, found himself at a
certain point in his life set to a task of journalistic drudgery. Over the long
evenings at his desk at Le Matin, he made things as much fun for himself
and his readers as was compatible with the needs of the slot. He took a
long-established form and tweaked it, giving it a personal stylistic touch
while acknowledging that the 19th-century fundamentals of narrative and
fact-conveying had to be respected. The nouvelles were the journalistic
equivalent of cocktail olives, and Fénéon devised a new piquant stuffing.
Either way, Luc Sante has been bravely undeterred by Robert Herbert’s view that
‘Translating Fénéon would be tantamount to rendering a Sung landscape in
department-store plastic.’ He has well conveyed the taut, sprung wryness of the
original French.
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