#299. JULES RENARD, COUNTRY AND TOWN.   In French, the word histoire can mean either story or history, and the title of Jules Renard’s charming and memorable little book Histoires naturelles contains an amusing and immediately visible allusion to Buffon’s great, multi-volume eighteenth century work on natural history.  Renard’s book is a series of short sketches—true prose poems, really, a form finely at home in the French language—on the animals and plants and seasons of French rural life.  The pieces run from single lines to a full page to a few pages; the sentences are terse, brightly observant, and remarkably free of sentiment and the anthropomorphism we know so well from English children’s stories or, for that matter, Colette’s Dialogues de bêtes and the wily fables of La Fontaine.  Julian Barnes called Renard “a confirmed countryman”: he was mayor of a tiny village in central France, and, for all the time he spent in Paris hobnobbing with the theatrical and literary greats, that perspective never entirely left him.  The rural perspective is not common in the largely court and city literature of France; even village novels are classified as “provincial,” and in them, so many times, one can feel the characters’ (and, as often, the writers’) eyes being drawn to that magnetic metropolis, Paris.  In Histoires naturelles, Renard gives his subjects their closely-seen due, with a deal of mordant and puckish humor thrown in; nothing flossy, nothing gaseous.  In his journal Renard wrote, “Buffon described animals in such a way as to please humans.  Whereas I want to please the animals themselves.  I would like my book, if they could read it, to make them smile.”   In this creaturely catalogue we have birds and fish, insects and reptiles and kine, farm animals and wild, and the way a family of trees can interrupt the plainer flat landscape and become a character as acutely seen as Tolstoy inspecting an unhappy family.   In the few pages of one chapter, “Partridges,” he captures the emotional and moral complexity of the experience of bird hunting as I imagine no city-bred writer ever could.  I read its final pages, “Autumn leaves” as an October light was getting a little darker every afternoon, and in those lines Renard gives over fully to his lyric affection for the countryside, the reverse of Daudet’s cry “Paris! Paris! Toujours Paris!” which ends his Lettres de mon Moulin. Philip Larkin in his poem “Church Going” wrote “someone will forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious,” and Renard chimes in with this:

    Our true inner life is beginning. The unexpected shiver—cause

unknown—fluttering briefly from one tree to the next, penetrates

into the human heart, and suddenly, we become serious, for a

long, long time to come…..

    My last walk was an act of gratitude.  I was saying “thank you”

to the trees, to the streets, to the fields, to the canal and to the

river, to the tiles on the roof of my house. 

    That’s where I’m living as I’d like to live.

    And when I leave our wild brothers to go to Paris with

Gloriette, I’ll be leaving more than half of me behind.

      Of course, Renard, being a novelist and playwright by profession, does go to Paris, and the result was what most people hail as his masterpiece, even above his incomparable and acerbic evocation of a desperately unhappy childhood (Renard’s very own literary unhappy family) in his novel Poil de carotte.  This is the thousand-plus pages of his journal, that unclassifiable compendium of reflection, epigram, observation (mostly of humans, this time), moral castigation of everyone, himself included, memory, and sentences unrolling in curt, perfect phrasing, the tip of the pen just sharp enough to break flesh.  “The unvarnished truth sends one into raptures,” he wrote, and his unvarnished bits of truth are apt to go off like firecrackers—absolutely delightful, if you let go of them in time not to burn your hands.  He is gruff with any form of falsity or decoration:  “Baudelaire: ‘The soul of wine was singing in the bottle.’  A perfect example of that false poetry which concerns itself with substituting what is not there for what is there.  For the true artist, wine sitting in a bottle is truer and more interesting than the soul of wine or the soul of a bottle, since there is no need to bestow a soul upon an object which is getting along perfectly well without one.”  “There are no synonyms.  There are only the right words, and a good writer knows them.”  He records much unhappiness—his account of his father’s suicide is pretty harrowing, and of his mother he writes, “A great actress, to whom life only gave bit parts.”—but there is always that care for thought, the curt phasing, that cantankerousness mixed with integrity (how often the two keep company) that keeps it miles away from, say, the listless misery of Fernando Pessoa’s own similar whatsit, The Book of Disquiet.  “I don’t give a straw for my country, taken as a whole; but my local patch moves me to tears.  The German emperor cannot take this blade of grass from me.” To his son Fantec, he says “Death, it’s like that little bird which you never saw again.”  “Every man has in his heart a barrel organ which refuses to stay quiet.”     The Journal is Renard’s decades-long conversation and argument, his lover’s quarrel with the world.  Of the hedgehog, he wrote, “You’ll have to take me as I come.”  Done deal. 

     There are many editions of Histoires naturelles in French, and Project Gutenberg has a free online text.  In English, New York Review Books has published it as Nature Stories; the translation, by Douglas Parmée, sounds a little more mannered than Renard’s French, but it’s good, and this edition includes Pierre Bonnard’s illustrations.  Renard had fantastic luck with illustrators: Toulouse-Lautrec and Felix Valloton and several others did illustrated editions of Histoires naturelles; Valloton also illustrated Poil de carotte.  Toulouse-Lautrec’s editions of Histoires naturelles is one of the most famous livres d’artiste of the period; why oh why hasn’t Dover reprinted it?

      For the Journal, there are several one-volume selections in French, and two complete one-volume editions, a paperback from Robert Laffont in the Bouquins series, and of course the end-all critical edition published by Gallimard in the Pleiade series, if you’re swimming in bucks.  Happily for the monolingual, oh happily, Julian Barnes has edited a terrific one-volume selection in English, Journal 1887-1910, splendidly translated by Theo Cuffe and published by riverrun editions/Quercus.  Treat yourself.