3.
Christianity did not, of course, ever succeed in abolishing the Earthly City or its values, and yet if we retain some distinction between wealth and virtue and still ask of people whether they are good rather than merely important, it is in large part due to the impression left upon Western consciousness by a religion that for centuries lent its resources and prestige to the defence of a handful of extraordinary ideas regarding the rightful distribution of status. It was the genius of the artists and craftsmen who worked in the service of Christianity to give enduring form to its ideals and to make these real to us through their handling of stone, glass, sound, word and image.
In a world where secular buildings whisper to us relentlessly of the importance of earthly power, the cathedrals that punctuate the skylines of great towns and cities may continue to furnish an imaginative holding space for the priorities of the spirit.
V
BOHEMIA
Lee Miller, Le Déjeuner sur L’Herbe, 1937. A group of Surrealist friends on a picnic in Mougins, France: on the left, Nusch and Paul Eluard; on the right, from top, Roland Penrose, Man Ray and Ady Fidelin.
1.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a new group of people started to attract notice in western Europe and the United States. They often dressed simply; they lived in the cheaper parts of town; they read a lot; they seemed not to care much about money; they were frequently of melancholic temperament; their allegiances were to art and emotion rather than to business and material success; they sometimes had unconventional sexual lives and some of the women wore their hair short before it was the fashion. They came to be collectively described as “bohemian.” Traditionally used to refer to Gypsies (because they were mistakenly thought to have originated in central Europe), the word evolved—especially following the success of Scènes de la vie de Bohême (1851), Henri Murger’s account of life in the garrets and cafés of Paris—to encompass a wider range of people who did not, for one reason or another, fit into the bourgeois conception of respectability.
From the outset, bohemia was a democratic church. Early reporters suggested that bohemians could be found in every social class, age group and profession: they were men and women, rich and poor, poets and lawyers, scientists and the unemployed. Arthur Ran-some, in Bohemia in London (1907), observed,“Bohemia can be anywhere: it is not a place but an attitude of mind.” There have been bohemian enclaves in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Venice Beach, California; bohemians living in grand houses with servants and in huts on the shores of quiet lakes; outwardly conventional bohemians and ones with a taste for bathing naked by moonlight. One can wind the label around a number of different artistic and social phenomena of the last two hundred years, from romanticism to surrealism, from the Beatniks to the Punks, from the Situationists to the Kib-butzniks, and still not break a thread that binds together something important.
In London in 1929, the bohemian poet Brian Howard invited his friends to a party. The invitation card bore a list of his likes and dis-likes—which, for all their peculiarly early-twentieth-century En-glishness, impart some flavour of the characteristic inclinations and fears that bohemians have manifested throughout their history.
What Brian Howard and his fellow bohemians disliked might more succinctly have been summed up in a single term: “the bourgeoisie.” Having come to prominence during the same historical period—in France, after the fall of Napoleon, in 1815—bohemians
J’Accuse
J’Adore
Ladies and Gentlemen
Men and Women
Public Schools
Nietzsche
Debutantes
Picasso
Sadist devotees of
Kokoschka
blood-sports
“Eligible bachelors”
Jazz
Missionaries
Acrobats
People who worry they
The Mediterranean
can’t meet so-and-so
because they’ve got “a
D. H. Lawrence
bad reputation”
Havelock Ellis
The young men one meets
The sort of people who
at boring parties in stuck-up
know they haven’t got
moronic country houses
immortal souls; and are not
xx
anticipating—after death—
xx
any rubbishy reunion,
xx
apotheosis or ANYTHING
nursed a ferocious disdain for almost everything the bourgeois stood for, and took particular pride in heaping extravagant insults on them.
“Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom,” wrote Gustave Flaubert. It was a standard utterance for any self-respecting mid-nineteenth-century French writer, such contempt being as much a matter of professional honour as having an affair with an actress or taking a trip to the Orient. Flaubert accused the bourgeois of extreme prudery and materialism, of being at once cynical and sentimental, of immersing themselves in trivia—so that they might spend an age, for example, debating whether melon was a vegetable or a fruit and whether it should be eaten as a starter (in the French manner) or a dessert (the English way). Stendhal, no fonder of this class, com-plained,“The conversation of the true bourgeois about men and life, which is no more than a collection of ugly details, brings on a profound attack of spleen when I am obliged to listen to it for any length of time.”
What ultimately separated bohemia from the bourgeoisie, however, was not the choice of conversational topics or desserts, but the answer to the questions of who deserved high status and why. From the outset, real bohemians were those who, whether they owned a mansion or squatted in a garret, set themselves up as saboteurs of the economic meritocracy to which the early nineteenth century gave birth.
2.
At the heart of the conflict lay a contrasting assessment of the value of worldly achievement, on the one hand, and sensitivity, on the other. Whereas the bourgeoisie accorded status on the basis of commercial success and public reputation, for bohemians what mattered above all else, and certainly above the ability to pay for an elegant home or chic clothes, was openness to the wider world and devotion, whether on the creative or the appreciative end, to the primary repository of feeling that was art. The martyrs of the bohemian value system were those who sacrificed the security of a regular job and the esteem of society for the opportunity to write, paint or make music, to dedicate themselves to travel or to spend time with their friends and families. They might, because of their commitments, lack the accoutrements, and perhaps even the manners, of outward decency, yet they were still, the bohemians themselves averred, deserving of the highest honour for their ethical good sense and their powers of receptivity and expression.
Many bohemians were prepared to suffer or even starve for their impractical beliefs. Nineteenth-century portraits often depicted them slouched on chairs in the dirty attic rooms of apartment blocks, their countenance gaunt and exhausted. There might be a faraway glint in their eyes and a skull on their bookshelves, and the look on their face might be such as to frighten a factory foreman or office manager—a sign that the bohemian soul was not taken up by the shallow, utilitarian concerns that so obsessed the bourgeoisie.
Such destitution was, for a bohemian, vastly to be preferred to the horror of wasting his life on a job he despised. Charles Baudelaire declared that all occupations were soul-destroying, save for writing poetry and—even less plausibly—being a “warrior.” When Marcel Duchamp visited New York in 1915, he described Greenwich Village as a “true Bohemia” because the place was, he said, “full of people doing nothing.” Half a century later, Jack Kerouac, addressing an audience in a West Coast piano bar, would rail against “the commuters with their tight collars obliged to catch the 5:48 a.m. train at Millbrae or San Carlos to get to work in San Francisco,” and praise in their stead the free spirits, bums, poets, beats and artists w
ho slept late and burned their work clothes so as to become “sons of the road and watch the freight trains pass, take in the immensity of the sky and feel the weight of ancestral America.”
Formerly attributed to Théodore Géricault, now unknown, Portrait of an Artist in His Studio, circa 1820
Gustave Courbet, Portrait of the Artist (Man with a Pipe), circa 1848–1849
If bohemians did not argue that there was any theoretical incompatibility between having an intense life of the mind and owning a profitable law firm or factory, most implied that there might be a practical conflict. In the preface to On Love (1822), Stendhal explained that while he had attempted to write clearly and for a broad audience, he could not supply “hearing to the deaf nor sight to the blind.” “So people with money and coarse pursuits, who have made a 100,000 francs in the year before they open this book, had better close it again quickly, particularly if they are bankers, manufacturers, or respectable industrialists … The active, hardworking, eminently respectable and positive life of a privy councillor, a textile manufacturer or a clever banker reaps its reward in wealth but not in tender sensations. Little by little the hearts of these gentlemen ossify. People who pay 2,000 workmen at the end of every week do not waste their time like this; their minds are always bent on useful and positive things.” Stendhal felt his book would be best appreciated by that rare reader who had a taste for indolence, liked daydreaming, welcomed the emotions sparked by a performance of one of Mozart’s operas and could be catapulted into hours of bittersweet musing after catching just one glimpse of a beautiful face in a crowded street.
The idea that money and workaday occupations must corrupt the soul—or destroy the capacity for, in Stendhal’s words,“tender sensations”—has reverberated down the history of bohemia. It can, for example, be heard no less clearly, nearly a century and a half after Stendhal’s lament, in Charles Bukowski’s poem “Something for the To uts, the Nuns, the Grocery Clerks and You” (1965), which evokes the lives of wealthy businessmen:
with bad breath and big feet, men
who look like frogs, hyenas, men who walk
as if melody had never been invented, men
who think it is intelligent to hire and fire and
profit, men with expensive wives they possess
like sixty acres of ground to be drilled
or shown-off or to be walled away from
the incompetent …
… men who stand in front of
windows thirty feet wide and see nothing,
men with luxury yachts who can sail around
the world and yet never get out of their vest
pockets, men like snails, men like eels, men
like slugs, and not as good.
Just as money cannot purchase honour within the bohemian value system, neither can possessions command it: seen through bohemian eyes, yachts and mansions are merely symbols of arrogance and frivolity. Bohemian status is more likely to be earned through an inspired conversational style or authorship of an intelligent, heartfelt volume of verse.
In July 1845, Henry Thoreau, one of the most renowned bohemians of nineteenth-century America, moved into a cabin he had built with his own hands on the northern shore of Walden Pond, near the town of Concord, Massachusetts. It was his ambition to embark on an outwardly simple but inwardly rich existence, and in the process demonstrate to the bourgeoisie that it was possible to combine a life of material scarcity with one of psychological fulfilment. Proving just how inexpensive subsistence could be once one ceased to worry about impressing others, Thoreau provided a breakdown of the minimal costs he had incurred in building his new home:
“Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind,” wrote Thoreau. Then, in a bid to break, or upend, society’s link between owning things and being honourable, he added, “Man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can do without.”
With Walden, Thoreau tried to reconfigure our sense of what a lack of means might indicate about a person. It was not, as the bourgeois perspective tended more or less subtly to suggest, always a sign that one was a loser at the game of life; instead, it might simply signify that one had opted to focus one’s energies on activities other than making money, thereby enriching one’s life in other ways. Dissatisfied with the word poverty as a descriptor for his own condition, Thoreau preferred simplicity, which he felt conveyed a consciously chosen, rather than an imposed, material situation. After all, he reminded the merchants of Boston, people no less noble than the “Chinese, Hindoo, Persian and Greek philosophers” had once pursued, of their own accord, a simple way of life. The tenor of the message that Thoreau took away from his stay on the shores of Walden Pond, and later delivered to the burgeoning industrialised society of the United States, would have been familiar to almost every bohemian who came before and after him. As he put it, “Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.”
Title page of the first edition of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, 1854
3.
One acute insight that may be attributed to bohemia is that one’s ability to maintain confidence in a way of life at odds with the mainstream culture will be greatly dependent on the operative value system of one’s immediate environment, on the kinds of people one mixes with socially and on what one reads and listens to.
Most bohemians recognise that their peace of mind may be only too easily shattered, and their commitments brazenly challenged, by conversing for a few minutes with an acquaintance who feels, even if he or she does not say so explicitly, that money and a public profile are ultimately estimable. The same disruption may result from reading a newspaper or magazine that, by reporting exclusively on the feats of bourgeois success stories, insidiously undermines the worth of any alternative ambitions.
Bohemians in consequence tend to take particular care in choosing their companions. Some attempt, like Thoreau, to escape the corrupting influence of society altogether. Others assiduously create communities of congenial spirits, refusing to indulge in the kind of socialising that the rest of us so readily fall into with whoever happens to be on hand—usually an assortment of characters with whom we are thrown together at school, in our families or at work.
The photographer Lee Miller and her friend the model Tanja Ramm, in Miller’s studio in Montparnasse, Paris, 1931
In the world’s large cities, bohemians are apt to cluster in the same districts to ensure that their daily contacts will be with genuine friends rather than with status-concerned acquaintances. The history of bohemia is punctuated by the names of places rendered famous by the friendships formed there: Montparnasse, Blooms-bury, Chelsea, Greenwich Village, Venice Beach.
4.
Bohemia has also carefully redefined its understanding of the word failure.
In the bourgeois lexicon, any financial or critical failure in business or the arts rises to the level of a significant indictment of an individual’s character, given the bourgeoisie’s ideological assumption that society is essentially fair in distributing its rewards. Bohemians, however, refute this punitive interpretation of outward failure by pointing out how often the world is governed by idiocy and prejudice. Human nature being what it is, they reason, those who succeed in society will rarely be the wisest or the best; rather, they will be the ones who are able to pander most effectively to the flawed values of their audiences. There may indeed, bohemians hint, be no more damning marker of a person’s ethical and imaginative limitations than a capacity for commercial success.
Such a perspective explains the interest and respect accorded by many nineteenth-century bohemians to political, artistic and literary figures whose lives could only have been described as failures according to the bourgeois scale of values. The most celebrated of these was the minor English poet Thomas Chatterton, who committed suicide in 1770, at the age of eighteen, worn down by poverty and the rejection of his work by his patrons.
Alfred de Vigny’s play Chatterton, first performed in Paris in 1835, turned the young poet into a mouthpiece for all the values that bohemia held dear. The play championed personal inspiration over tradition, kindness over financial advantage, intensity and madness over rationality and utilitarianism. De Vigny’s message was that talented, delicate men of letters were all but fated to be driven to despair and even suicide by the crass tastes of their bourgeois public.
Henry Wallis, The Death of Chatterton, 1855–1856
The myth of the misunderstood artist—the outsider who is nevertheless, despite critical failure, superior to the insider—reflected or shaped the lives of many of the greatest heroes of bohemia. Gérard de Nerval, a poet more talented than Chatterton but no happier, hanged himself in 1855, destitute and mad at forty-seven. Summing up the history of his generation of sensitive brethren, whose talents and temperaments had made them ill suited to the rigours of the bourgeois world, de Nerval wrote: “Ambition was not of our age … and the greedy race for position and honours drove us away from spheres of political activity. There remained to us only the poet’s ivory tower where we mounted ever higher to isolate ourselves from the crowd. In those high altitudes we breathed at last the pure air of solitude; we drank forgetfulness in the golden cup of legend; we were drunk with poetry and love.”
After his death in 1849, at the age of forty, Edgar Allan Poe was likewise absorbed into the bohemian legend of noble failure. In an essay on Poe’s life and works, Charles Baudelaire characterised his fate as typical of that awaiting any gifted man compelled to dwell among brutes. Baudelaire cursed the tenor of public opinion in democratic societies such as the United States, warning that no charity or indulgence could be expected from that quarter. Indeed, he asserted, poets “cannot hope to fit in, either in a democratic or an aristocratic society, in a republic or an absolute monarchy… . Illustrious unfortunates, [they are] born to suffer the harsh apprenticeship of genius amidst the crowd of mediocre souls.”
Status Anxiety Page 18