The moral that Baudelaire drew from Poe’s life would become a recurring theme in his poetry, finding its most crystalline expression in the sad flappings of his famous seabird:
The Albatross
Often, to pass the time, sailors
Will catch albatrosses, those great seabirds
Which nonchalantly chaperone ships
Across bitter gulfs.
Hardly have they set them down on the deck
Than these monarchs of the sky, awkward and ashamed,
Piteously let their great white wings
Drag at their sides like pairs of unshipped oars.
How gauche and weak becomes this winged traveller!
How weak and awkward, even comical
He who was but lately so adroit!
One deckhand teases his beak with a branding iron,
Another mimics, by limping, the cripple that once flew!
The Poet is like this sovereign of the clouds,
Riding the storm above the marksman’s range;
In exile on earth, hooted and jeered at,
He cannot walk because of his great wings.
In emphasising the dignity and superiority of the rejected ones, bohemia offered a secular counterpart to the Christian account of Jesus’ ostracism and crucifixion. Like the Christian pilgrim, the bohemian poet must endure torture at the hands of the uncomprehending masses, but here, just as in the Christian story, such neglect is in itself evidence of the righteousness of the neglected party. Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand. It is because of his massive wings that the poet cannot walk.
5.
The bohemian belief in the inferiority of the group and its traditions had its corollary in a conviction as to the superiority of the individual and the virtue of splitting off from convention.
In 1850, Gérard de Nerval ceased conforming to existing ideas of suitable pets and bought himself a live lobster, which he led around the Jardin du Luxembourg at the end of a blue ribbon. “Why should a lobster be any more ridiculous than a dog,” he wondered, “or any other animal that one chooses to take for a walk? I have a liking for lobsters. They are peaceful, serious creatures. They know the secrets of the sea, they don’t bark, and they don’t gnaw upon one’s monadic privacy the way dogs do. Goethe had an aversion to dogs, and he wasn’t mad.”
Being a great and original artist became synonymous with surprising or, even better, offending the bourgeoisie. On completing Salammbô (1862), Flaubert declared that he had written his Carthaginian novel in order to“(1) annoy the bourgeois, (2) unnerve and shock sensitive people, (3) irritate the archaeologists, (4) seem unintelligible to the ladies and (5) earn myself a reputation as a pederast and a cannibal.”
In the 1850s, a group of bohemian students in Paris organised a club that they hoped would “offend judges and pharmacists.” Having settled on what seemed to them the most effective way of achieving that end, they named themselves the Suicide Club and issued a manifesto avowing that all members would be dead by their own hand by the age of thirty—or before they went bald, whichever came first. Only one actual suicide was reported among the membership, but the club was deemed a success nevertheless after an outraged politician in the Chamber of Deputies delivered a speech branding it an “immoral and illegal monstrosity.”
Flaubert’s prime ambition for Salammbô was scarcely unique: bohemians have always seen it as their special duty to irritate the respectable classes. In New York in 1917, a group of artists who had decided to secede from bourgeois life called for the creation of a “free and independent republic of Greenwich Village,” dedicated to art, love, beauty and cigarettes. To mark the birth of their breakaway state, the artists climbed to the top of the Washington Square Arch, drank whiskey, fired cap pistols and read out their own declaration of independence, which consisted simply of the word whereas, uttered countless times in rapid succession. Recalling the event many years later, one citizen of the new republic (which lasted until dawn) remarked, “We were radicals devoted to anything—so long as it was taboo in the Mid-West.”
Unfortunately for bohemians, the more they have shocked the bourgeoisie, the less willing or able has been the bourgeoisie to be shocked—which has led to an escalating cycle of increasingly extreme antics, as the history of twentieth-century bohemian movements testifies.
“Intelligent man is now a standard type,” proposed Dada’s founder, Tristan Tzara, in Zurich in 1915,“but the thing we are short of is the idiotic. Dada is using all its strength to establish the idiotic everywhere.” Thus inspired, Dadaists took to entering smart Zurich restaurants and shouting “Dada” at bourgeois diners. The Dada artist Marcel Duchamp painted a moustache on a copy of the Mona Lisa and entitled his work L.H.O.O.Q. (Elle a chaud au cul, or “She has a hot arse”).
For his part, the Dada poet Hugo Ball pioneered a meaningless, multilingual poetry and recited the first example, “Karawane,” in a Zurich nightclub, dressed in a suit made out of shiny blue cardboard, with a witch’s hat on his head.
Looking back at Dada’s goals, the onetime Dadaist painter Hans Richter remembered, “We wanted to bring forward a new kind of human being, free from the tyranny of rationality, of banality, of generals, fatherlands, nations, art-dealers, microbes, residence permits and the past. To outrage public opinion was our basic principle.”
Other groups followed in Dada’s footsteps. In 1924, the Surrealists opened the Bureau of Surrealist Enquiries in the rue de Grenelle in Paris. A dress-shop dummy was hung in the window, and members of the public were invited to bring in stories of coincidences and dreams and any new ideas they might have about politics, art or fashion. These were then typed up and tacked on the walls. Antonin Artaud, the director of the bureau, proclaimed, “We need disturbed followers far more than we need active followers.”
In 1932, no less keen to offend the bourgeoisie, the Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti published The Futurist Cookbook, whose stated purpose was to revolutionise the way Italians ate by weaning them from their nineteenth-century tastes—in particular, their fondness for pasta (the author identified maccheroni al ragù and tagliatelle alla bolognese as the very epitomes of bourgeois anachronism). But anyone who bought the cookbook hoping for culinary guidance must soon realise that Marinetti was—no less than Gérard de Nerval or Antonin Artaud before him—out to confound expectations. Among the recipes included were
Strawberry Breasts:“A pink plate with two erect feminine breasts made of ricotta dyed pink with Campari and nipples of candied strawberry. Further fresh strawberries under the covering of ricotta make it possible to bite into an ideal multiplication of imaginary breasts.”
Aerofood:“Composed of a slice of fennel, an olive and a kumquat, together with a strip of cardboard, on which should be glued, one next to the other, a piece of velvet, a piece of silk, and a piece of sandpaper. The sandpaper is not to be eaten. It is there to be fingered with the right hand while one sucks on the kumquat.”
Cubist Vegetable Patch:“1. Little cubes of celery from Verona fried and sprinkled with paprika. 2. Little cubes of fried carrot sprinkled with grated horseradish. 3. Boiled peas. 4. Little pickled onions from Ivrea sprinkled with chopped parsley. 5. Little bars of Fontina cheese. N.B. The cubes must not be larger than one cubic centimetre.”
6.
The excesses of bohemia are hardly difficult to discern. It is only a short step from valuing originality and emphasising the nonmaterial aspects of life to feeling that almost anything that could surprise a judge or a pharmacist—from crustacean-walking to strawberry-breast-cooking—must be important.
To cite only one example of excess: so keen have many bohemians been to place spiritual concerns at the forefront of their lives that their indifference to practical affairs has become nearly obsessional. This has on occasion had the paradoxical effect of reducing their existence to an all-consuming struggle merely to survive—leaving them with less time to contemplate matters of the
spirit and a greater need to consider problems of the body than even the busiest or most materialistic judge or pharmacist.
In rural Massachusetts, in 1844, a confederacy of utopianbohemian artists established a communal farm that they named Fruitlands. They flatly stated that they had no interest in money or in work as an end in itself; they wanted only to grow enough to feed themselves so they could turn their energies to more important pursuits—namely, poetry, painting, nature and romantic love. The founder of the community, Bronson Alcott, announced that the mission of the new farmers was “to be, not to do.” He and his fellow members subscribed to a set of ambitious ideals characteristic of bohemian communities both before and after theirs: they wore no cotton clothes (for cotton supported the institution of slavery), consumed no animals or dairy products and kept to a peculiarly strict vegetarian diet, eating only those things that grew high up in the air and shunning carrots and potatoes because they pointed down into the ground, rather than aspiring to Heaven in the manner of apples and pears.
Predictably, the community did not last long. The farmers’ reluctance to engage with practicalities forced them, after their first summer at Fruitlands, to wage an urgent battle merely to keep body and soul together—which did not afford them much leisure to read Homer and Petrarch, as they had planned. Emerson, who had met Alcott in Boston a few years before the founding of the farm, recalled of the commune’s members,“Their whole doctrine was spiritual, but they always ended up saying, ‘Could you please send us some more money?’ ” Just six months after Fruitlands’s high-minded inauguration, the community dispersed in acrimony and despair, adding a new chapter to the familiar bohemian tale of idealism gone sour thanks to an unbending refusal to submit to even minimal bourgeois disciplines.
It would be both senseless and very unusual for anyone to feel anxious over the bourgeois conception of status if this class were truly as misguided and as unimpressive as bohemia is wont to make out. Even granted that many good ideas may be shocking to Midwesterners, it by no means follows that everything that shocks them will be outstanding. It is only because judges and pharmacists do most things extremely well that certain other aspects of their behaviour and mentality come to seem, by contrast, so troublesome—and so tempting to dissent from.
7.
Which is in no way to urge universal restraint in this area. Whatever the excesses of the outer wings of bohemia, the movement’s enduring contribution has been to pose a series of well-considered challenges to bourgeois ideology. The bourgeoisie has stood accused of failing to understand the role that wealth should play in a good life; of being too hasty to condemn worldly failure and too slavish in venerating signs of outward success; of placing too much faith in sham notions of propriety; of dogmatically confusing professional qualifications with talent; of neglecting the value of art, sensitivity, playfulness and creativity; and of being overconcerned with order, rules, bureaucracy and timekeeping.
To sum up its significance in the broadest, most comprehensive terms, one might simply suggest that bohemia has legitimised the pursuit of an alternative way of life. It has staked out and defined a subculture in which values that have been consistently underrated or overlooked by the bourgeois mainstream may finally be granted their due authority and prestige.
Like Christianity, for which it has in some sense functioned as an emotional substitute—having first emerged, after all, in the nineteenth century, around the very time when Christianity was beginning to lose its grip on the public imagination—bohemia has articulated a case for a spiritual, as opposed to a material, method of evaluating both oneself and others. Like Christianity’s monasteries and nunneries, bohemia’s garrets, cafés, low-rent districts and cooperative businesses have provided a refuge where that part of the population which is uninterested in pursuing the bourgeoisie’s rewards—money, possessions, status—may find sustenance and fellowship.
Furthermore, the good standing of a number of bohemians past and present has helped to reassure those in doubt—that is, those made most anxious by the dominant status system—that such eccentricity has a long and occasionally distinguished history, stretching from the poets of nineteenth-century Paris to the light-hearted subversives of the Dada movement to the picnicking Surrealists.
A way of life that might in the wrong hands have seemed wayward and absurd has instead, thanks to the most gifted of the bohemians, come to seem serious and laudable. To the role-models of the lawyer, the entrepreneur and the scientist, bohemia has added those of the poet, the traveller and the essayist. It has proposed that these characters, too, whatever their personal oddities and material shortfalls, may be worthy of an elevated status of their own.
8.
A mature solution to status anxiety may be said to begin with the recognition that status is available from, and awarded by, a variety of different audiences—industrialists, bohemians, families, philosophers—and that our choice among them may be free and willed.
However unpleasant anxieties over status may be, it is difficult to imagine a good life entirely free of them, for the fear of failing and disgracing oneself in the eyes of others is an inevitable consequence of harbouring ambitions, of favouring one set of outcomes over another and of having regard for individuals besides oneself. Status anxiety is the price we pay for acknowledging that there is a public distinction between a successful and an unsuccessful life.
Yet if our need for status is a fixed thing, we nevertheless retain all say over where we will fulfil that need. We are at liberty to ensure that our worries about being disgraced will arise principally in relation to an audience whose methods of judgement we both understand and respect. Status anxiety may be defined as problematic only insofar as it is inspired by values that we uphold because we are terrified and preternaturally obedient; because we have been anaesthetized into believing that they are natural, perhaps even God-given; because those around us are in thrall to them; or because we have grown too imaginatively timid to conceive of alternatives.
Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attempted, rather, to institute new kinds of hierarchies based on sets of values unrecognised by, and critical of, those of the majority. While maintaining a firm grip on the differences between success and failure, good and bad, shameful and honourable, these five entities have endeavoured to remould our sense of what may rightfully be said to belong under those weighty and dichotomous headings.
In so doing, they have helped to lend legitimacy to those who, in every generation, may be unable or unwilling to comply dutifully with the dominant notions of high status, but who may yet deserve to be categorised under something other than the brutal epithet of “loser” or “nobody.” They have provided us with persuasive and consoling reminders that there is more than one way—and more than just the judge’s and the pharmacist’s way—of succeeding at life.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Special thanks to: Simon Prosser, Caroline Dawnay,
Nicole Aragi, Dan Frank, Rahel Lerner, Michael
Ledger Lomas, Michael Port, Dominic Houlder,
Tom Graves, Felicity Harvey and Austin Taylor.
PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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12
AP Photo; p.
16
Mary Evans Picture Library; p.
18
Stapleton Collection, UK/Bridgeman Art Library; p.
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The Hoover Company; p.
21
Reprinted by arrangement with Sears, Roebuck and Co. Protected under copyright. No duplication permitted; p.
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GURSKY Andreas Gursky/DACS London 2003, Courtesy Gallery Monika Sprueth, Cologne, 2003; p.
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Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice/Bridgeman Art Library; p.
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The British Library, London; p.
49
Corpus Christi College, Oxford/ Bridgeman Art Library; p.
50
Musée Condé, Chantilly/Bridgeman Art Library; p.
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Bettmann/Corbis; p.
81
Punch Ltd.; p.
136
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC/Bridgeman Art Library; p.
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Ashmolean Museum, Oxford/Bridgeman Art Library; p.
140
National Museum and Gallery of Wales, Cardiff/Bridgeman Art Library; p.
141
Museum Oskar Reinhart am Stadtgarten, Winterthur; p.
142
Kunstin-dustrimuseet, Copenhagen/photo: Pernille Klemp; p.
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Nivaagaards Malerisamling, Denmark; p.
157
Musée Condé, Chantilly/Bridgeman Art Library; p.
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Musée de la Ville de Paris, Musée Carnavalet, Paris/ Bridgeman Art Library; p.
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Louvre, Paris/Bridgeman Art Library; p.
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Courtesy of the Warden and Scholars of New College, Oxford/ Bridgeman Art Library; p.
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Courtesy of the Warden and Scholars of New College, Oxford/Bridgeman Art Library; p.
167
Punch Ltd.; p.
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The New Yorker Collection 1995 Peter Steiner from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved; p.
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