Outrage in outline ... Photograph: Chip Simons/Getty
Marcel Proust, for whom gossip was a cardinal pleasure, habitually read the faits-divers before addressing the rest of his morning newspaper. These two or three-line reports, which the author would eagerly relay to anyone in range of his breakfast, have no real equivalent in Anglophone newspapers. No big deal, one might think, but for the fact that one man made an art form of them over the course of a few months in 1906.
Félix Fénéon was linked to some of the most important names in fin de siècle France. He discovered Seurat, edited Rimbaud's Illuminations and published Dédale, the first French translation of Ulysses, while as editor of La Revue Blanche he hired Gide and Debussy as his book and music critics. But outside the 1,220 faits-divers he wrote for Paris daily Le Matin (which called them "nouvelles en trois lignes") and cameos in a profusion of memoirs of the period, he left no other legacy. "I aspire only to silence" was his lapidary response to the offer to publish a collection of his work, and even his painstakingly composed news items would be lost if his mistress hadn't collected them in a scrapbook.
Fénéon's columns, drawn from the news wires and preponderantly concerned with murder, suicide, theft and injury, were a compound of subtly expressed cruelty, anger, dramatic tension and dry humour. Consider these examples:
"Three is the age of Odette Hautoy, of Roissy. Nevertheless, L Marc, who is 30, did not consider her too young."
"The schoolchildren of Niort were being crowned. The chandelier fell, and the laurels of three among them were spattered with a little blood."
"A dishwasher from Nancy, Vital Frérotte, who had just come back from Lourdes cured forever of tuberculosis, died Sunday by mistake."
In his introduction to their first English language edition, Novels in Three Lines, translator Luc Sante writes that although Fénéon did not invent the form, "he perfected it...gave it dynamism and tensile strength, made it an aggressive modernist vehicle." Sante has been extremely free in translating the title, since nouvelles customarily means news - as it did in Le Matin - and only rarely novellas; never novels. But he's right in suggesting there is a fiction-like richness to these tiny sketches. And he's spot-on with "aggressive": there is a rancour fuelling these pieces that makes reading a book's worth of them both an impressive and demanding experience.
Fénéon's outrage is not at all general. Rather it is pointedly aimed at bourgeois society and the state. He was a committed anarchist who was tried and acquitted on charges of bombing a restaurant near the Senate in 1894 (a crime which latter-day evidence suggests he may well have perpetrated). This adds a piquancy to his occasional reports of devices found outside courthouses, while several sardonic pieces concerning mayors reinstating crucifixes in classrooms (France's separation of church and state had been ratified in 1905) give a pointed idea of what he thought of authorities both earthly and spiritual.
It's this anger, coupled with the relentless cataloguing of death, insanity and disaster, that makes Novels in Three Lines so redolent of Thomas Bernhard's The Voice Imitator, a 1978 collection of 104 stories never more than a page in length, and often not much longer than Fénéon's barbed pellets. Bernhard, an Austrian novelist and playwright who died in 1989, was one of the last century's most scathing satirists, and this book represents a concentrated dose of his abiding obsessions.
The jacket of my copy of The Voice Imitator lists 13 instances of lunacy, 26 murders and 18 suicides, among other pitiable events, and Bernhard approaches his subjects with reportorial brevity. Representative of the whole is Hotel Waldhaus, which can be quoted here in its entirety:
"We had no luck with the weather and the guests at our table were repellent in every respect. They even spoiled Nietzsche for us. Even after they had had a fatal car accident and had been laid out in the church in Sils, we still hated them."
And but for its use of the personal pronoun, the still briefer Mail could be a fait-divers from Fénéon's pen:
"For 10 years after our mother's death, the post office continued to deliver letters that were addressed to her. The post office had taken no notice of her death."
I have no evidence that Bernhard was even aware of Fénéon, but it is tempting to think of Novels in Three Lines as the seed from which The Voice Imitator sprouted. Both works share a fascination with venality, murder and misfortune, and prompt questions rather than provide answers. Why did those awful people ruin Nietzsche for Bernhard's narrators?
Existing at the border between ideas in the raw and their imaginative expansion into fuller narrative forms, both books offer opportunities to reflect on which elements of stories, real or fictional, snag our interest, and how a few words can be shaped to suggest so much.
