Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) (19 page)

Or:

This was to be very much the style of the
Nouvelles en trois lignes
a decade later, even if the political opinions were now to be held back.

‘The original French of the title’, Sante writes, ‘can mean either “the news in three lines” or “novellas in three lines”.’ It would, of course, only have meant 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 the 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, hoaxes and scams of impressive originality:

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: considerable space is given to the mildest happenings in the French navy, often involving small amounts of damage to tiller and hull; and there is a strange but consistent interest 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, or guessable, or inventable. All this in three lines. Sometimes this results in a car-crash of mere names:

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:

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 on 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:

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 into 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:

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 specified the passionate nature of the crime’; another in a fashion 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 8
when the practice began’. Félicie de Doncker, an abortionist, is ‘proficient at quelling the birth rate in Brabant’. Rustic rapists are cast as ‘fauns’, as in:

Or:

Elegant variation shades into ironical euphemism, which shades into dandiacal 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 Stockhausen’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, strikes me as fantastical. So does 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.’

We could, if feeling theoretical, see the
Nouvelles
in terms of the literary crises Sartre described. Flaubert, with whom it all began, found the story of
Madame Bovary
in a provincial
faits divers
. Whether there was an actual cutting or not is beside the point; but as Fénéon might have put it:

From there, the nineteenth-century novel expanded and progressed, until there was nowhere left for it to go, so 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 appropriate: the ‘invisible’ writer had ‘invisible’ influence.

Or we 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, adding a personal stylistic touch while acknowledging that the nineteenth-century fundamentals of narrative and fact-conveying had to be respected. The
nouvelles
are the literary equivalent of the cocktail olive, and Fénéon should be remembered, and admired, for having devised a piquant new stuffing.

I
N
1998 I was one of the judges for the Prix Novembre in Paris: a prize given, as its month implies, late in the literary season. After the Goncourt had got it wrong, and after the stumblebum efforts by other prizes to correct Goncourt’s errors, the Prix Novembre would issue its final, authoritative verdict on the year. It was unusual for a French prize in having a (slowly) rotating jury, foreign judges – Mario Vargas Llosa was also there – and serious money attached: about $30,000 to the winner.

That year the major prizes had all failed to honour Michel Houellebecq’s
Les Particules élémentaires
, and for months
le cas Houellebecq
had been simmering. Schoolteachers had protested at the book’s explicit sexuality; the author had been expelled from his own literary-philosophical group for intellectual heresy. Nor was it just the book that provoked; the guy himself did too. One female member of our jury declared that she had admired the novel until she watched its author on television. The Maecenas of the prize, a businessman whose interventions the previous year had been very low-key, made a lengthy and impassioned attack on Houellebecq. He seemed, at the very least, to be indicating where he didn’t want his money to go.

In the course of a rather tense discussion, it was Vargas Llosa who came up with the best description of
Les Particules élémentaires
: ‘insolent’. He meant it, naturally, as a term of praise.
There are certain books – sardonic and acutely pessimistic – which systematically affront all our current habits of living, and treat our presumptions of mind as the delusions of the cretinous. Voltaire’s
Candide
might be taken as the perfect example of literary insolence. In a different way, La Rochefoucauld is deeply insolent; so is Beckett, bleakly, and Roth, exuberantly. The book of insolence finds its targets in such concepts as a purposeful God, a benevolent and orderly universe, human altruism, the existence of free will.

Houellebecq’s novel – his second – was very French in its mixture of intellectuality and eroticism; it was reminiscent of Tournier in the evident pride it took in its own theoretical bone structure. It also had its faults: a certain heavy-handedness, and a tendency for the characters to make speeches rather than utter dialogue. But in its high ambition and intransigence, it was clearly superior to the other immediate contender for the prize, a novel which was very French in a different way: elegant, controlled and old-fashioned – or, rather, ‘
classique
’, as I learned to say in judges’ jargon.

Houellebecq squeaked it by a single vote. Afterwards I was talking to the president of the jury, writer and journalist Daniel Schneidermann, about the fuss our winner had kicked up in the press and on television. Perhaps, I suggested, it was just that he wasn’t
médiatique –
mediagenic. ‘On the contrary,’ replied Schneidermann (who had voted for Houellebecq), ‘he’s
médiatique
by being
anti-médiatique
. It’s very clever.’ An hour or so later, in a gilded salon of the Hotel Bristol, before literary Paris’s smartest, a shabby figure in a baggy sweater and rumpled scarlet jeans took his cheque and – in the spirit of his novel – declined to wallow in bourgeois expressions of pleasure or gratitude. Not all were charmed. ‘It’s an insult to the members of the jury’, one French publisher whispered to me, ‘for him to accept the prize without having washed or gone to the dry-cleaner’s.’