My life at present involves much to-ing, the logical consequence of which is an equal amount of fro-ing. And as my own not inconsiderable infirmities render me unfit to operate my own car safely, I have become something of an expert in cadging rides whenever possible and trying to game the Uber ap when cadging fails. The Stonebridge medical facility where Joan is currently residing is a mere seven miles away, but the ruthless algorithm by which the Uber-masters operate severely limit my options. And while I am in the free-form moment of this essay, I ought to say I actually deplore the misuse of the word “algorithm”, an example of which is prominent in the foregoing sentence, but what the hell? Go with the flow.
There are few things to do while riding in the backseat of a car as it drives through repetitious landscape, but one thing you can do is read. Ordinarily one does not choose one’s current reading because of the small format in which it is published, though that was the motive behind the invention of the small-format paperback also known at the pocket book. If you do a lot of travelling in the back seat of a car and you also like to read books, it is useful to have a product that can minister to both needs. But I don’t really like paper covers on my books, especially on books that I am going to be reading intermittently, with much intermittent putting them in and pulling them out of pockets or bookbags. Such books soon become ragged and lumpy. Reading a ragged paperback is very annoying to me. Hence I regard the cultural contribution of book-binders to rival that of book-printers. Fortunately I have a fair number of small-format hardbacks on my shelves. The backseat book that I plucked from a shelf almost at random and have been consuming in intermittent small draughts with pleasure, is the autobiography of Ernest Renan, the nineteenth-century French orientalist: Memories of Childhood (Souvenirs d’enfance, 1883). Some controversy surrounds this book. And certainly some opprobrium lurks about my particular copy of it. It was formerly in the possession of the Porter Library of the Kansas State College of Pittsburg, where it bore the identifying call number 848.8 R29s. In that institution, likewise, it was powerfully if coarsely repaired with black Monster Tape. There is however no evidence that anybody ever checked it out. Its “Due Date”, though hoary, is virgin. What is indisputable in that my edition is six and a half by four and a quarter inches in format, in other words, perfect size-wise.
But Imagine a cultural world in which a British publishing house could profitably publish an extensive list of books in the French language. For such was the “Collection Nelson”, published by an eminent Edinburgh publisher whose Paris office joined with other similarly eminent French houses (in this instance that of Calmann-Levy) to bring out a series of French classics. This collection began in an age when it was simply assumed that an educated English person would read French as an educated French person would read English. This was the world reflected in my essay three weeks past, “The Man in the Red Coat.” Renan’s most famous book by far was a tender but non-mythological biography of Jesus, a book that has remained in print continuously since its publication in 1863. The Pope called Renan “the master blasphemer of Europe”. I take some comfort in the fact that this papal opinion was possibly antecedent to that on papal infallibility. The Académie called Renan an “immortal”. You pay your money, and you take your choice.
Many readers are partial to literary biographies, including that special branch of the genre that we call autobiography. This perhaps is because though very few of us are likely ever to be the subject of a biography, each of us possesses a more or less structured autobiography in our minds. At least it is difficult for me to imagine that there lives a man with soul so dull as never to contemplate at some level the interstices of at least one life—his own, of course. To examine the contours of one’s own life is no easy task. The easiest form of deception is self-deception, and usually one of the most comforting forms. But the biographical mode offers models of description and explication which most of us can recognize as having relevance to our own lives, sometimes as admonition and at others inspiration. One of the very first poems I was introduced to as a child was Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life.” Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime, and departing leave behind us footsteps in the sands of time. It is also of course possible to leave only some muddy footprints on the oriental rug instead.
Renan was an honest man of the most ruthless sort, which means a man honest about and to himself. Born into modest material and cultural circumstances in the sticks of Brittany in the first generation after end of the Revolution, he was well along in a course leading to the priesthood when his philological learning proved superior to his religious training and eventually to his basic Christian faith. In some ways he transferred the patterns of his discarded religious belief to the notions of nationality and nationhood itself. Having spent most of my own life in allegedly exalted academic spheres, I am well aware that there is such a thing as stultifying secular dogma that can be quite as oppressive and blinkering as the religious sort. But I would be misrepresenting the spirt of his autobiography if I failed to emphasize its modesty and geniality. Though his Life of Jesus was destined to be the source of much cultural conflict, the author as revealed in his autobiography was gentle and genial. The history of scholarship is replete with a certain kind of rags-to-riches narrative in which people of modest birth found recognition and preferment based on intellectual capacity and energy. That is, learning has always been to some extent a realm of meritocracy. Not every disadvantaged scholar was a Jude the Obscure. In the thirteenth century John Pechkam, born in a peasant’s cottage, became the learned primate of England. Ernest Renan, this hick from the sticks, was from the same mold.
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