I have been reading the Journal of Jules Renard, as translated and edited by Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget. Originally published in 1964, it was reprinted a couple of years ago by Tin House Books. The complete journal runs to more than 1,200 pages. The Tin House edition, at 304 pages, provides a representative sampling.
Renard is probably best-known in the English-speaking world for his autobiographical novel Poil de Carotte (French for “carrot-top” — Renard was a redhead). But the journal has had its admirers, too, among them Somerset Maugham and, more recently, Julian Barnes. It is a mix of literary gossip (“[Goncourt] is moved, and when you shake his hand, it feels soft and wavering, as though filled with the water of his emotion”); self-examination (“Your sole preoccupation is to be sincere. But don’t you find this constant search for sincerity a little false, untruthful?”); shoptalk (“Style means the right word. The rest matters little.”); random musings (“It is, when all is said and done, when faced with the subject of death that we feel most bookish”); and verbal snapshots (“A bird enveloped in mist, as though bringing with it fragments of cloud torn with its beak”).
It is a perfect book to read at bedtime, which is what I was doing the other night, when I came upon this most peculiar entry:
One should operate by dissociation, and not by association, of ideas. An association is almost always commonplace. Dissociation decomposes, and uncovers latent affinities.
This sounds good until you think about it long enough or try to follow through on it. I went back and read it again the next day. In particular, I wondered how one might go about doing it.
The first thing it occurred to me to think about was prose and poetry. I think I was looking for a pair of opposites. Only prose and poetry aren’t opposites. They’re complements. At any rate, they are closely associated with one another.
What I thought of next was Rimbaud’s phrase about “un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens” (a long, immense, and thought-through disordering of all the senses). But that clearly came to mind by association with what Renard had to say about dissociation, which was proving harder to do than it sounded.
What to do? Well, what I did was put it out of my mind completely.
A couple of days later I was sitting in a luncheonette near the Philadelphia Inquirer that serves a very good cheesesteak. While I was waiting for mine I had a cup of coffee and, at the very first sip, had a Proustian moment: The coffee tasted exactly like the coffee that had been served decades before in a diner my grandmother and I used to stop into every morning.
In December 1949, when I was 8, we moved from North Philly to Torresdale, which is as far northeast as you can go in Philadelphia and still be within the city limits. I was in the middle of the third grade at St. Veronica’s and my mother decided I should finish out the year there before switching to St. Katherine’s.
As it happened my grandmother still worked in a factory in our old neighborhood. So every morning my mother dropped her and me off at the trolley loop at Torresdale and Cottman Avenues, where there was this classic, stainless steel diner. That was the place whose coffee the sip I had the other day brought back to my mind.
Of course it brought all sorts of other things, too, mostly memories and the feelings associated with them. One thing that wasn’t associated with any of it, but that came to mind anyway, was that passage in Renard’s journal. I thought of it, I’m pretty sure, precisely because it had no association whatever with those experiences of mine, which was just what I had been on the lookout for. Of course, once I made the connection, some association was immediately established.
So far as I can tell, my mind works exclusively by association. I have a sneaking suspicion everybody else’s does, too, and that what Renard was proposing is impossible. Maybe that’s why he didn’t provide an example of what he was he talking about. I don’t think there are any.
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