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A rare and winning combination: a serious person who seldom takes himself seriously. He keeps his ego a little off to the side, muffled, away from the business at hand. It never disappears. It grows dormant, like some cases of tuberculosis. Jules Renard is such a man and writer, an aphorist and wit with the soul of a peasant. Often, he thinks like a farmer – practical, focused, unsentimental – while writing like a satirist. Here is Renard in his Journal, bargaining with fate on October 17, 1899: “Of all that we write, posterity will retain a page, at best. I would prefer to choose the page myself.”  Renard writing as a commonsensical critic, September 6, 1902: “A great poet need only employ the traditional forms. We can leave it to lesser poets to worry themselves with making reckless gestures.”   More writerly common sense, November 27, 1895: “Keep their interest! Keep their interest! Art is no excuse for boring people.”   A lesson for “cancel culture, August 1896: “We always confound the man and the artist, merely because chance has brought them together in the same body. La Fontaine wrote immoral letters to his womenfolk, which does not prevent us from admiring him. It is quite simple: Verlaine had the genius of a god, and the soul of a pig. Those who were close to him must have suffered. It was their own fault! – they made the mistake of being there.”   Renard sounding like the premise of a story by Maupassant, September 29, 1897: “Some men give the impression of having married solely to prevent their wives from marrying other men.”   On why some of us become writers, May 9, 1898: “Inspiration is perhaps merely the joy of writing: it does not precede writing.”   Renard was born on this date, February 22, in 1864 and died of arteriosclerosis in 1910 at age forty-six. With Montaigne and Proust, he is the French writer I most rely on.   [All quoted passages are from Renard’s Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]

It is tempting, because we make everything we make with everything we are, to take our creative potency for a personal merit. It is also tempting when we find ourselves suddenly impotent, as all artists regularly do, to blame the block on a fickle muse and rue ourselves abandoned by the gods of inspiration. The truth is somewhere in the middle: We are a channel and it does get blocked — it is not an accident that the psychological hallmark of creativity is the “flow state” — but while it matters how wide and long the channel is, how much… read article

In the “Prologue” to his 1962 prose collection The Dyer’s Hand, W.H. Auden borrows a conceit from Lewis Carroll and divides all writers – “except the supreme masters who transcend all systems of classification” – into Alices and Mabels. In Alice in Wonderland, the title character, pondering her identity, says “. . . I’m sure I can’t be Mabel for I know all sorts of things, and she, oh! she knows such a very little. Beside she’s she and I’m I.” The categorization recalls Sir Isaiah Berlin’s Foxes and Hedgehogs. Of course, all of humanity can also be divided into those who divide all of humanity into two categories and those who don’t.  Leading the list of Auden’s Alices is Montaigne, followed by the names of eight other writers, including Andrew Marvell, Jane Austen and Paul Valéry. Like Alice, Montaigne knew “all sorts of things” – he is among the most learned of writers -- even while asking “Que sais-je?”: “What do I know?” Montaigne begins his longest essay, “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” (1576) with these words:   “In truth, knowledge is a great and very useful quality; those who despise it give evidence enough of their stupidity. But yet I do not set its value at that extreme measure that some attribute to it, like Herillus the philosopher, who placed in it the sovereign good, and held that it was in its power to make us wise and content. That I do not believe, nor what others have said, that knowledge is the mother of all virtue, and that all vice is produced by ignorance. If that is true, it is subject to a long interpretation.”   Montaigne distills skepticism, which isn’t the same as nihilism or know-it-all-ism. It’s closer to the absence of naiveté, credulity and mental laziness, coupled with an open mind and curiosity. Montaigne was a benign skeptic and a Roman Catholic who lived through the French Wars of Religion. Auden wrote “Montaigne” in 1940, the year France fell to the Germans.   “Outside his library window he could see A gentle landscape terrified of grammar, Cities where lisping was compulsory, And provinces where it was death to stammer.   “The hefty sprawled, too tired to care: it took This donnish undersexed conservative To start a revolution and to give The Flesh its weapons to defeat the Book.   “When devils drive the reasonable wild, They strip their adult century so bare, Love must be re-grown from the sensual child,   ‘To doubt becomes a way of definition, Even belles lettres legitimate as prayer, And laziness a movement of contrition.”   “Death to stammer” is no exaggeration. In the sixteenth century, speech defects were often equated with possession by the devil. The final stanza is a writer’s credo. Auden was born on this day in 1907. He shares a birthday with my youngest son, David, who turns twenty-two today.     [The Montaigne passage is from The Complete Essays of Montaigne (trans. Donald Frame, Stanford University Press, 1957).]

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