Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) (18 page)

It’s true that the school of architect-restorers brought into existence by Mérimée and his Commission did not always follow his careful and properly austere precepts. At Blois the architect Duban, ‘seeking a public success’, commissioned an equestrian statue of Louis XII, plus all sorts of balustrades, ornaments and window framings – rank embellishments and inventions. Viollet-le-Duc – especially after 1860, when Mérimée’s direct influence waned – increasingly produced fully reinvented medievalism: the brand-new old. Knowledgeable tourists of a later generation, like Henry James (in 1882) and Edith Wharton (in 1908), loathed much of what he did. They much preferred evocative and crumbling old piles. As Wharton wrote: ‘How much more eloquently these tottering stones tell their story, how much deeper into the past they
take us, than the dapper weather-tight castles – Pierrefonds, Langeais, and the rest – on which the arch-restorer has worked his will, reducing them to mere museum specimens, archaeological toys, from which all the growths of time have been ruthlessly stripped!’

Mérimée was well aware of the dangers of reinventing the past, though he sometimes kept a diplomatic silence. Viollet-le-Duc had made his name by saving Vézelay and restoring Carcassonne in a way that pleased even Edith Wharton; but increasingly he tended to rely on his own imagination. The chateau of Pierrefonds was given a ‘riotous treatment’ by Viollet at the command of the Empress Eugénie, who later asked Mérimée what he thought of it. ‘It is a piece of work’, he replied, ‘before which I feel utterly crushed.’ The Empress, not reading the ambiguity, replied, ‘Thank you, you are a true friend.’

In the 1840s, Mérimée wrote that ‘the job of an inspector of Historic Monuments is to be a voice crying in the wilderness’; but his voice resounded through that century and beyond. A French critic of the 1920s noted the paradoxical turn of his life. He had been ‘a young man who had put everything into trying to write like Voltaire and dress like Beau Brummell, yet who became the most diligent of bureaucrats and the most zealous of archaeologists’. A further paradox was that this convinced atheist, who had not even been baptised, was responsible for saving large numbers of ecclesiastical buildings – first from falling down, and then from the bright decorative vandalism of know-nothing restorers and proprietorial clergy. Paul Léon, summing up Prosper Mérimée’s achievements, wrote that ‘Thanks to him the cathedrals of Laon and Vézelay and the Abbey of Saint-Savin are still standing, and towns like Caen, Avignon, Cunault, Saulieu and Narbonne are still dressed in their finery of great monuments’. Modern tourists, seeing that distant spire pointing to the heavens, spotting the glisten of pepper-pot towers half lost in woodland, or gazing up at
the ribbed vaulting of an airy abbey, should pause and give thanks to the man without whom one French town after another might have ended up looking like Carpentras.

And yes, I have been to Carpentras. And all I can remember is the pizza I ate there.

I
N
1880,
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 model 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 Félix 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 forty-five years later. But neither that event, nor the passing of time, mellowed his judgement: 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 bony nose, prominent chin and, beneath it, the flowing tuft of a goatee. Highly individual, 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 gallerist Matisse ever trusted; journalist, ghostwriter 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
; translator of both Joyce and
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 thirteen 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 eleven 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 in 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 the
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,’ replied Walser, ‘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 the event: ‘My poor friend Fénéon (no, he has a very interesting physiognomy) has been acquitted and this gives me happiness. The fruit has 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
, now 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 1,220 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 Renard’s
Journal
, described the dilemma of the French prose writer at the end of the nineteenth 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 Renard’s, 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 haikus; 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 in
Le Matin
under the subheads 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
, with cheeky and whimsical definitions of cultural notables. Later, as an anarchist journo in the 1890s, he had directed his sarcasm at more serious targets: