The Anarchist as Dandy

...This certainly fits the enigmatic side of Fénéon's character, and one is tempted to acceptance...

...ou le critique, and three years later published an initial collection of Oeuvres...

...So unwilling was Fénéon to court posterity that his whole career might have slipped away into oblivion if it had not been for two people who recognized his central importance as an interpreter of the avant-garde at the turn of the century, and who perceived as well the strangely insistent individuality reflected in his unwillingness to build himself into a literary personage...

...It is the record—as personal as the subject's elusive personality allows—of a life dedicated to the arts and to concepts of justice and human brotherhood whose appeal was essentially esthetic rather than moral...

...Fénéon was in fact there on two charges, for detonators of the type used in anarchist bombs were found in his possession...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock Félix Fénéon was one of the grayest of gray eminences...

...This was a period of high drama in anarchist history, the heyday of propaganda by deed and of the individual assassin, and the Symbolist poets and novelists were fascinated by the high symbolism of anarchist action...

...The Foyot bomber has still to be identified...

...She puts forward the theory that Fénéon was not merely the friend of terrorist bombers, but was himself the dynamitard who planted the bomb in the Restaurant Foyot (a crime still unsolved) that cost his friend and fellow anarchisant writer, Laurent Tailhade, an eye...

...He fostered Symbolism in poetry while editing a series of influential reviews, starting with La Revue Indépendente in 1884, and first published, among other masterpieces, Arthur Rimbaud's Les Illuminations (years afterward he would bring André Gide forward by publishing his Paludes...

...He wrote everything for the moment, refusing to give his production the sense of permanence that publication in volume form would imply...

...With Camille Pissaro Fénéon shared a particularly important role: He represented in a very intimate way the close connection between anarchism and the French literary and artistic avant-gardes that was woven during the 1880s and '90s...

...It was a show trial that lumped together a group of robbers who styled themselves anarchists and genuine anarchist militants, in an attempt to secure a general condemnation for conspiracy...

...the jury acquitted everyone except for the robbers...

...his comments tended to be aphorisms rather than reviews, as if he were developing a style of writing so terse that it verged on silence...

...Fénéon nevertheless remained an anarchist until after the Great War...

...But Fénéon became even more deeply involved than that, working with groups of militants composing and distributing inflammatory leaflets and dodging the police to put up posters at night...

...With a brilliant display of wit and argument he managed to deflect the evidence and win over the jury...

...In Coming Issues Stanislaw Baranczak on Eva Hoffman's "Lost in Translation" Michael Kott on "Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz' George Sirgiovanni on Ross Gregory's "America 1941, A Nation at the Crossroads...

...Given such involvements, it was perhaps inevitable that when the French government staged the Trial of the Thirty later in 1894, Fénéon was one of the defendants...

...He contributed regularly toXod'Axa's flamboyant L'Endehors, the most extreme anarchist literary review, and he also adapted himself to employing the Paris argot that was obligatory in Emile Pouget's fiery working-class sheet, Le Père Peinard...

...Fénéon never publicly condemned his friend's act, as several anarchist writers, like Octave Mirbeau, did...

...The only book bearing his own name that appeared in his lifetime, barely more than an ambitious brochure entitled Les Impressionistes en 1886, introduced Georges Seurat, Paul Signac and other neo-Impressionists whom Fénéon virtually discovered...

...The Pissaros, Vallotton, Signac, and Steinlen regularly contributed drawings and caricatures to such papers, and one of the writers who wrote for them assiduously, as well as for the more literary journals of the Left, was Fénéon...

...Then, inexplicably, he and his friend Paul Signac accepted the revolutionary pretensions of the Communists...

...Intellectually fierce yet personally gentle and generous, he was a man with remarkably few enemies...

...Three years after his death in 1944, the collection took four days to sell at the Hotel Drouot...

...The second was Joan Ungersma Halperin...

...The intervention of Mallarmé, who testified movingly to his honor and personal gentleness, was perhaps decisive in securing his acquittal...

...Of the last 20 years of Fénéon's life, when the symbiosis no longer worked, and of his death she has little to say, respecting his silence...

...The plan—itself a conspiracy—failed...

...One of these was the French critic Jean Paulhan...

...The laconicism that had always been characteristic of his writing became steadily more pronounced...

...As a definitive biography of Fénéon it is unlikely to be superseded in the foreseeable future...

...I grant that Fénéon could have planted a bomb, but he could not have kept Mallarmé in the dark when he went to give evidence...

...later he played a great part in securing the recognition of Henri Matisse as a major artist...

...In addition, he helped in the editorial offices of both journals...

...in 1945 he wrote a brief study, F.F...

...And he ceased to communicate with the world: "Je n'aspire qu'au silence...

...He was the friend, too, of Emile Henry, that implacable young assassin who in February 1894 placed abomb in the Café Terminus, killing many people, with the remark that in French society of la belle époque there were no innocents...

...The courtroom victory, however, did not regain Fénéon the War Office post on which he depended for his basic existence...

...He dropped willingly into obscurity, into living for and within himself, surrounded by that splendid collection of paintings bought or received as gifts when his artist friends were young...

...Félix Fénéon is actually two interlocking books...

...in 1972 she editedamuch more complete two-volume collection, Oeuvres plus que complètes, and now, in Félix Fénéon, Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-deSiècle Paris, she presents the first biography...

...Yet the evidence is slight and not even secondhand...

...A few photographs and a death sketch suffice to hint the course of those closing decades...

...Moreover, the direction of French anarchism started to change after the Trial of the Thirty, veering away from individual activism toward industrial action and revolutionary syndicalism, and its intimate links with the arts quickly loosened...

...Shuttling between his administrator's desk at the French War Office and the magazine offices and art galleries where hedidhisrealwork,the faultlessly garbed Fénéon seemed tobe known and valued by everyone of interest in the avant-garde circles of turn-of-the-century Paris— from Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec to Alfred Jarry and the exiled Oscar Wilde, from Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine to André Gide, from Edgar Degas and Camille Pissaro to Paul Gauguin and Matisse...

...Kaya Cohen told André Salmon that Fénéon had confessed to her his role in the bombing, and many years later Salmon passed on the tale to Halperin...

...He was a discoverer, not an originator...

...It is a thin cord, and it is not compatible with one's image of Fénéon as a man of exemplary honor...

...Although some of the anarchisant writers and painters were really fellow travelers who remained aloof from anarchist activism, a fair number collaborated in the rich variety of anarchist propaganda journals that flourished at the time, especially in Paris and Brussels...

...Yet clearly Halperin is of the opinion that it is the time of symbiosis between the man and the age that counts...

...How could he sit quietly in court listening to Mallarmé praise his gentleness with the thought of Tailhade's wound in his mind...

...With its abundant illustrations, Félix Fénéon views the turn of the century from a somewhat unusual angle, that of the critic whose own contradictions mirror the confusions of his active life...

...An austere and altruistic dandy, an impeccable critic of literature and the visual arts, a man of live and generative vision, he moved with immense and quiet influence through the world of the arts in Paris from the 1880s to the 1920s...

...Simultaneously, it is a rich study of art and politics at the vital height of la belle époque...

...An approach of this kind was doubtless necessary, given the fact that essentially Fénéon lived not by acting but by reacting, by giving reason for and encouragement to the new trends and new artists of a creative period...

...At one point Halperin permits herself to diverge into an interesting conjecture...

...To earn a living and keep himself occupied, Fénéon intensified his activity in the literary and artistic worlds—editing, criticizing, arranging art exhibitions, and eventually working in the gallery of Bernheim-Jeune, one of the more important Parisian art dealers of the immediate postwar years...

...For several years he wrote threeliner faits divers for Le Matin, and seemed to gain great satisfaction from these dense little arrangements of topical facts that took on the quality of the briefest of short stories...

...AnarchistSymbolist reviews flourished, and painters like Camille and Lucien Pissaro, Maximilien Luce, Signac, Félix Vallotton and Théophile Steinlen were dedicated anarchists...

...Finally, one day in 1924, he said to the Bernheims, "I'm ready for the idle life...