Bruce Sterling - Essays. Catscan Columns

Nadar's photographic record of his Parisian contemporaries is the most potent and compelling act of social documentation that I've ever seen.

Nadar, and his studio staff, photographed nineteenth- century Parisians by the hundreds, over many decades, first as a hobby, and later as as a highly successful commercial venture. But Nadar had a very special eye for the personalities of his friends -- the notables of Paris, the literati, musicians, poets, critics, and political radicals.

These are the people who invented "la vie de Boheme." They invented the lifestyle of the urban middle-class dropout art-gypsy. They invented its terminology and its tactics. They brought us the "succes de scandale," the now time-honored tactic of shocking one's audience all the way to the bank. And the "succes d'estime," the edgy and hazardous life of the critics' darling. The doctrine of art for art's sake was theirs too (thank you, Theophile Gautier). And the ever-helpful notion of *epater les bourgeoisie,* an act of consummately modern rebellion which is nevertheless impossible without a bourgeoisie to epater, an act which the bourgeoisie itself has lavishly financed for decades in our culture's premiere example of Aldissian enantiodromia -- the transformation of things into their opposites.

The Paris Bohemians were the first genuine industrial-scale counterculture. This was the culture that created Jules Verne. It deserves a great deal of the credit or blame for origination of the genres of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. It has a legitimate claim on our attention and our loyalties.

Jules Verne enjoys a minor role in this book of Nadar's photographs. Verne is on page 230.

One good look at Verne's perceptive portrait by Nadar is enough to make you understand why Jules became an Amiens city councilman, rather than drinking himself to death or dying of syphilis in approved period Bohemian fashion. Verne was a science fiction writer, and a great one. Anyone reading SF EYE possesses big juicy chunks of Verne's memetics, whether you know it or not. But unlike many of Nadar's other friends -- people such as Proudhon (page 171) and Bakunin ( page 175) and Journet (page 127) -- Jules Verne was not a driven maniac. Jules Verne was clearly quite a nice guy. He projects an air of well-nigh Asimovian polymathic jollity. He's having a good time at the Nadar studio; he's had to visit his barber, and he's required to sit still quite a while in a stiff new suit, but you can tell that Verne trusts the man behind the camera, and that he's cherishing a sense of humor about this experience.

This is not a tormented soul, not a man to batter himself to death against brick walls. Jules Verne has the look of a man who has hit four or five brick walls in his past, and then bought a map and a compass and paid some sustained attention to them. He looks like someone you could trust with your car keys.

The perfect complement to Nadar's photography is Jerrold Seigel's *BOHEMIAN PARIS: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life 1830-1930* (published in 1986). Almost every individual mentioned in Professor Seigel's book had a portrait taken by Nadar. Seigel's is a fine book which I have read several times; I consider it the single most useful book I have ever seen for denizens of a counterculture.

Professor Seigel's book has quite a bit to say about Nadar and his circle, and about the theory and practice of Bohemianism generally. Professor Seigel's book is especially useful for its thumbnail summary of what might be called the Ten Warning Signs of Bohemianism. According to Seigel, these are:

1. Odd dress.

2. Long hair.

3. Living for the moment.

4. Sexual freedom.

5. Having no stable residence.

6. Radical political enthusiasms.

7. Drink.

8. Drugs.

9. Irregular work patterns.

10. Addiction to nightlife.

As Seigel eloquently demonstrates, these are old qualities. They often seem to be novel and faddish, and are often denounced as horrid, unprecedented and aberrant, but that's because, for some bizarre and poorly explored reason, conventional people are simply unable to pay serious and sustained attention to this kind of behavior. Through some unacknowledged but obviously potent mechanism, industrial society has silently agreed that vast demographic segments of its population will be allowed to live in just this way, blatantly manifesting these highly objectionable attitudes. And yet this activity will never be officially recognized -- it simply isn't "serious." There exists a societal denial- mechanism here, a kind of schism or filter or screen that, to my eye at least, is one of the most intriguing qualities that our society possesses.

In reality, these Ten Warning Signs are every bit as old as industrial society. Slackers, punks, hippies, beatniks, hepcats, Dead End kids, flappers, jazz babies, fin-de-siecle aesthetes, pre-Raphaelites, Bohemians -- this stuff is *old.* People were living a vividly countercultural life in Bohemian Paris when the house in which I'm writing these words was a stomping ground for enormous herds of bison.

Two qualities about Bohemian Paris strike me very powerfully. First, the very aggressive, expansive and ambitious nature of this counterculture. With a few exceptions, the denizens of Bohemian Paris, though small in number, were not people hiding their light under a bushel. Some of them were obscure, and deservedly so, but there was nothing deliberately hermetic about them; much of their lives took place in very public arenas such as cafes, cabarets and theatres. They feuded loudly in the newspapers and journals, and to whatever extent they could, they deliberately manipulated critics, maitresses de salon and other public tastemakers. They bent every effort to make themselves public figures, and if they achieved fame they used it, to radical ends. Many of them declared themselves ready to take to the streets and literally seize power from the authorities. And thanks to the convulsive nature of 19th-century French politics, many of them actually had the opportunity to try this.

The second remarkable quality about the vie de boheme was its high lethality. This was an era of high death- rates generally, but "living on the edge" before Pasteur was a shockingly risky enterprise. Promiscuous sex was particularly deadly. Bohemia's foremost publicity-man, Henri Murger, died at thirty-eight, complaining weakly of the rotting stench in his room, so far gone from syphilitic paresis that he didn't realize that the stench came from his own flesh. Bohemia's most gifted poet, Charles Baudelaire, was rendered mute by paresis before succumbing at 46. Jules de Goncourt, art critic, journalist, novelist, and diarist succumbed to syphilitic dementia at 40. And then there was the White Plague, tuberculosis, reaping Rachel the great tragedienne as well as the fictional "Mimi," the tragic soubrette of Puccini's opera La Boheme, which was based on the Murger stories, themselves based firmly on Murger's daily life.

If Jerrold Seigel's BOHEMIAN PARIS has a hero, it's Henri Murger, also known as "Henry Murger," who was the first to fictionally treat the Vie de Boheme -- in a series of stories for a radical Paris newspaper marvellously titled *Le Corsaire-Satan.* Nadar also wrote for *Le Corsaire-Satan,* and Nadar photographed Murger in 1854. Murger appears on page 53 as a balding, pop-eyed, bearded and much put-upon chap dressed entirely in black. Besides the syphilis that eventually killed him, Murger also suffered from an odd disease known as purpura which turned his skin quite purple "every week at a regular day and hour." The impact of Nadar's sympathetic portrait is, if anything, intensified by the fact that the collodion surface of the photographic plate has cracked along the bottom, trapping the doomed Murger in a spiderweb of decay.

Murger founded a Bohemian club called the Water- Drinkers. Jules Verne had his own circle, the Eleven Without Women. Victor Hugo led the Cenacle group, and Hugo's disciple Theophile Gautier, a great wellspring of Bohemian attitude, led a successor group called the Petite Cenacle. The Goncourt brothers founded the Magny circle and attended the salon of Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, the premiere aristo bluestocking of the Second Empire. Baudelaire, Gautier and a vicious satirist named Alphonse Karr started the Club des Hashischiens, dabbling in opium and hash in the 1850s.