Free Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

latter’s was “not a river but a distillery”; though he subsequently admitted reading it “with rapture.”
    Do you want a distillery or a river? Life rendered as a few drops of the hard stuff, or as a litre of Normandy cider? These are choices for the reader. The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over the historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic. Distillation was both Renard’s response to the literature that had gone before, and an expression of his unexpansive nature. In 1898, he noted: “It may be said of almost all works of literature that they are too long.” This remark occurs on page 400 of the thousand-page Journal , a work which would have been half as long again had Renard’s widow not burnt those pages she did not wish outsiders to see.
    In the Journal , he attends to the natural world with intense precision, describing it with an unsentimental admiration. He attends to the human world with the same precision, describing it with scepticism and irony. But he also understood, as many do not, the nature and function of irony. On 26 December 1899, just as the century which would most need it was about to begin, he wrote: “Irony does not dry up the grass. It just burns off the weeds.”

Chapter 14

    Renard’s friend Tristan Bernard, playwright and wit, once flagged down a hearse as if it were a taxi. When the vehicle stopped, he airily enquired, “Are you free?” Renard had been within hailing distance of death several times before his own came at the age of forty-six. Here are the occasions when he attended to it most carefully:
    1) In May 1897, his brother Maurice removes their father’s revolver from his bedside table on the pretext of cleaning it. A family row ensues. François Renard is unimpressed both by his son’s action and his excuse: “He’s lying. He’s afraid I’ll kill myself. But if I wanted to, I wouldn’t use an instrument like that. It’d probably just leave me crippled.” Jules’s wife is shocked: “Stop talking like that,” she protests. But the Mayor of Chitry is unrelenting: “No, I wouldn’t mess around. I’d take my shotgun.” Jules suggests sardonically, “You’d do far better to take an enema.”
    François Renard, however, knows or believes himself to be incurably ill. Four weeks later, he locks the bedroom door, takes his shotgun, and uses a walking stick to press the trigger. He succeeds in firing both barrels, just to make sure. Jules is summoned; he breaks down the door; there is smoke and the smell of powder. At first he thinks his father must be joking; then he is obliged to believe in the sprawled figure, the unseeing eyes, and the “dark place above the waist, like a small extinguished fire.” He takes his father’s hands; they are still warm, still pliant.
    François Renard, both an anti-clerical and a suicide, is the first person to be buried in the cemetery at Chitry without benefit of clergy. Jules judges that his father has died heroically, showing Roman virtues. He notes: “On the whole, this death has added to my sense of pride.” Six weeks after the funeral, he concludes: “The death of my father makes me feel as if I had written a beautiful book.”
    2) In January 1900, Maurice Renard, a seemingly healthy thirty-seven-year-old clerk of works in the Highways Department, collapses in his Paris office. He has always complained about the steam-driven heating system in the building. One of its main pipes runs just behind his desk, and the temperature often rises to 20 degrees. “They’ll kill me with their central heating,” the country boy would predict; but angina proved the greater threat. Maurice is about to leave his office at the end of the day when he faints at his desk. He is carried from his chair to a couch, has trouble breathing, doesn’t utter a word, and is dead in a couple of minutes.
    Jules, in Paris at the time, is again summoned. He sees his brother lying athwart