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James Fenton
copyright © 2007
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Originally published
in The Guardian
8 September 2007
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Here is an unexpected train of thought, taking
us from Wilfred Owen to the American photographer Weegee. In
the summer of 1914, Wilfred Owen was in France, staying with
a family in Bagnères-de-Bigorre. He was 21, good-looking
and the object of a certain interest among the women in the
household. But he also made a very big hit with a visiting celebrity
and family friend, the poet Laurent Tailhade. Tailhade was 60,
and his ill health, according to Owen's biographer Dominic Hibberd,
showed the effects of many years of over- indulgence in drugs
and absinthe.
Owen was clearly excited to meet a famous poet,
and couldn't resist telling his mother that Tailhade "received
me like a lover ... He quite slobbered over me. I know not how
many times he squeezed my hand; and, sitting me down on a sofa,
pressed my head against his shoulder." Two illegible lines
have been very thoroughly crossed out. Owen's mother, Susan,
later quoted another letter, which has since been destroyed.
The surviving quotation reads: "The poet Tailhade calls
my eye 'so very lovely' etc and my neck 'The neck of a statue!!!!
etc' - because he is a poet and appreciates in me, not the appearance
of beauty but the Spirit and temperament of beauty, Tailhade
says he is going to write a Sonnet on me."
Tailhade influenced Owen in many ways. He himself
was speaking up in favour of the war as France's defence of
"this tongue of Rabelais and Voltaire, Bossuet and Montesquieu,
Michelet and Renan". Owen said in December 1914 that the
only thing that would keep him going in battle would be the
thought that he was fighting for the language that "Keats
and the rest of them wrote". Hibberd tells us that, for
at least the next year, "Wilfred's thoughts about the war
were to be based on Tailhade's ideals". Tailhade gave Owen
two key books: Flaubert's Temptation of St Anthony and Renan's
memoirs. Undoubtedly some of the decadent tinge in Owen's work
comes from his reading of French poetry and Tailhade's influence.
And it is hard to believe he was unaware that he had made a
sexual, as well as an artistic, hit.
Tailhade had been an anarchist, as had the
mysterious writer Félix Fénéon, whose newly
translated Novels in Three Lines I have been reading. According
to Luc Sante's introduction, during a series of anarchist bombing
activities in Paris, a man called Ravachol planted bombs intended
to kill two judges in a recent case. Although no one was killed,
Ravachol was guillotined. In 1893 Auguste Vaillant threw a bomb
into the Chamber of Deputies. Again no one was killed, but Vaillant
went to the guillotine, where he predicted his death would be
avenged. The prediction was fulfilled in an incident at the
Café Terminus near the Gare Saint-Lazare: one killed,
20 injured.
Tailhade notoriously remarked on this occasion:
"Qu'importent quelques vagues humanités, si le geste
est beau?" Sante's translation: "Of what importance
are a few vague people if the gesture is beautiful?" It
is one of those lines that seem to sum up an epoch, and Tailhade
paid for this observation - as Sante says - "with unimprovable
irony", by losing an eye, as the sole victim of the next
major bombing. A bomb had been left on the windowsill of the
restaurant where he was dining with his mistress.
The person who left the device in the restaurant
was never identified; clearly he, too, would have been guillotined
if he had been. The writer Fénéon was among those
arrested in the aftermath, and had to explain how a search of
his office cupboard turned up a vial of mercury and a matchbox
containing 10 detonators. Fénéon claimed in court
that his recently deceased father had found them in the street.
The prosecutor suggested this was unusual.
Fénéon's reply gives us a flavour
of his sly wit and insolence: "The examining magistrate
asked me why I hadn't thrown them out the window instead of
taking them to the Ministry [where he worked]. So you see, it
is possible to find detonators in the street." Mallarmé,
among those who came to Fénéon's defence, said:
"You say they are talking of detonators. Certainly, for
Fénéon, there are no better detonators than his
articles."
Usually remembered as a perceptive early advocate
of Seurat, and as the inventor, in 1886, of the term "neo-impressionism",
Fénéon - in addition to (most probably) planting
that bomb - edited the great Revue Blanche, in which he published
Proust, Apollinaire, Jarry, Paul Claudel, Charles Péguy,
and Maeterlinck (among other names listed by Sante) and had
Debussy as his music critic and Gide as his book critic. In
1906 he worked for Le Matin, where he wrote the faits divers
column. This was published under the heading "Nouvelles
en trois lignes", which means both "news in three
lines" and "novellas in three lines", and Fénéon
was admired at the time for the deadpan presentation of incidents
from daily life.
Sometimes faintly amusing, but more often simply
poignant, these three-line stories were exercises in compression.
"On the bowling lawn a stroke levelled M André,
75, of Levalloi. While his ball was still rolling he was no
more." "After he had been knocked out, Bonnafoux,
of Jonquières, Vaucluse, was placed on a railroad track,
where a train ran him over." "Caged, tortured and
starved by their stepmother, the three little daughters of Joseph
Ilou, of Brest, now rescued, are skeletal." This last illustrates
the attention paid to word order. "An unidentified maker
of paste jewels from the third arrondissement was fishing in
a boat with his wife at Mézy. She fell. He dived. Both
gone."
Sante, who translated this extraordinary collection
(published by New York Review of Books), is fascinated by the
New York underworld (he wrote Low Life and advised on the film
Gangs of New York), by the old police photos he found in an
archive and published in Evidence, and by photographers such
as Weegee. In Fénéon's work he has found the literary
equivalent of Weegee. He says: "It is a dry bundle of small
slivers of occurrence that lie beneath history, but it represents
the whole world, with all of its contradictions."
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