Myth Happens

This is a novella-length nonfiction memoir about the life of a blacksmith of the writer’s acquaintance, living in rural northwestern France. The book is from 2015, but the conversations with the blacksmith must have been at an earlier time, since Trassard recounts that the blacksmith was born in 1902. I bought it almost ten years ago on the strength of the title, but ended up not reading it then, because at the time the colloquial French it is written in and the many provincialisms and agriculture-specific worlds were somewhat too challenging for me. I decided to take it with me now on a January train ride from the Netherlands to the south of France, and read most of the book while being borne at high speeds through various snowy landscapes.

So, I was expecting blacksmithing, but I confess to not having expected the horses: this rural blacksmith, while he also does other work, gets the bulk of his work from shoeing horses. He is referred to in the text both as forgeron, blacksmith, and as maréchal-ferrant, which I think in English is farrier. And through this lens we are given a surprisingly thorough and penetrating analysis of the functioning of the pre-motorization rural economy. Horses are essential not just for plowing the fields and other agricultural work, but also for transport: Trassard tells us that the horses of the post, which had to run on hard roads, needed to be re-shod the most often, up to once per week. Early in his career our blacksmith is maréchal-ferrant in the army for two years as his military service, where the stream of horses needing shoeing was so endless that the job of the farrier was separated from any other kinds of blacksmithing work. The quality of a farmer’s fields, and the wetness of the winter, influence how often his horses need to be re-shod. It is the motorization of agricultural work that means the end of blacksmithing as a ubiquitous profession.

Trassard holds a great affection for this traditional countryside and its technologies, professions, and social rhythms, but he does not in my opinion unduly romanticize it. He shows clearly the ways in which this agricultural life was hard for all involved, the reasons why modernization might be preferable both on small and large scales, and how the old ways of doing things were just plain incompatible with modern labor practices and labor laws, even as he shows us what was lost in these changes and why he regrets that. One of the striking things in the book is that electricity and motorization did not arrive in his region of France until after World War II, and how fast it came when it came. The strength of the book lies in the way he shows just how thoroughly this changed how the economy and rural society functioned.

The book also contains lots of little details about blacksmithing as a craft, which is what I was hoping for when I bought it. Our blacksmith recalls how, in his apprentice days, smiths placed small slivers of cork underneath their anvils, so that the sound would be clearer: “this did not change how well it worked, but a clear sound was a point of pride among us.” He describes the practice of ‘frapper devant’, which is when blacksmith and journeyman work together on a single piece of work, bringing their hammers down in alternation; and how the blacksmith would communicate what he wanted during this, either by turning the piece or by a signalling system of tapping the hammer directly on the top of the anvil. Trassard details different pieces of blacksmithing work: specialty orthopedic horseshoes that the blacksmith made himself, knives that our blacksmith made out of used hoof rasps, and the intense and complicated process of making or adjusting the metal bands around wooden wheels.

To me, Trassard is at his best when he is being factual rather than lyrical, letting his information telling the story for him. The structure of the book is meandering, non-chronological, drifting from topic to topic and coming back in greater detail to ones he already visited, imitating the type of conversation he had with the blacksmith who formed the basis of his story. This worked quite well for me right until the end: I found that the book ended very abruptly, without providing a resolution for various storylines about different episodes in our blacksmith’s life. It’s not like it entirely doesn’t work like this, and the format Trassard has chosen means that he can just leave things open if he wants, but I was really hoping to see how the different episodes were joined together. The way he leaves it gave me the impression that either he didn’t consider his structure as carefully as I thought he did, or that he just stopped writing and turned in what he had at the deadline and hoped that people wouldn’t notice. But in general I thought this book was very good and very interesting: it was both a good memoir about the specific details of a craft, and completely unexpectedly, a brilliant resource on the functioning of the pre-modern economy. It appears that Trassard has written a bunch more books about different aspects of rural life, and maybe at some point when I’m in the library I will check one out.