ON The Journal of Jules Renard

CHESTON KNAPP

The task of the writer is to learn how to write.
—Jules Renard

I didn’t know I would ever want to be a writer when, at seventeen, I started to keep a journal. And my early entries reveal nothing but the insanity of that dream. I transcribed poems by my then heroes, Dickinson and Eliot and Frost, and practiced explicating them. Observe my inchoate insight: “In this poem it occurs to me now that Dickinson seems to maybe be concerned with death.” It wasn’t long before I was writing lengthy descriptions, full of dashes, of my solitary walks through snowy Virginia woods, peppered with phrases in Latin, a language I never studied. I composed metered lines about stars and the moon that used the word sublunary as though I’d bought it at cost. Then there were the girls, my nauseating desire for, my persistent lack of success with—their names light as sundresses: Lindsey, Katie, Kristine, Ginny, Cara. Reading back through these entries now gives me a sensation something like when you put your hand up against another person’s and massage the twinned middle fingers, a charge of the familiar and the utterly mysterious. That is and cannot be me.

 

These notes are my daily prayer.
—Jules Renard

 

Jules Renard, a French novelist, poet, and playwright, started keeping a journal in 1887, when he was about twenty-three years old. This was roughly two years after the death of Victor Hugo, which sounded a threnodic tone of finality more resonant than that simply for one life. Hugo’s passing marked the end of an era of French literature and culture. And what followed was a renaissance that combined, say, the economic boom of our Jazz Age and the experimental creativity of the sixties. The French call it la belle époque. It’s when Alfred Jarry waddled the streets of Paris as his creation Ubu Roi, with a pair of six-shooters slung from his hips; when Rousseau was painting his primitive paintings and Picasso was turning perspective on its head. Understanding this historical context is important because despite the staggering number of revolutionary artistic movements, surely exciting for a young artist, Renard remained unfazed.