Читать книгу The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter - Henri Murger - Страница 4

THANKS to the opera La Bohème (1896), Rodolfo and Mimi have entered the pantheon of our culture’s most famous lovers, alongside Paolo and Francesca and Romeo and Juliet. But if we’ve grown accustomed to imagining the nineteenth-century French poet as a portly Italian tenor, and his garret as a soaring stage set, the dimensions of the original text on which Puccini based his opera were far more modest. In Henry Murger’s depiction of the struggles of a group of bohemians, as poor intellectuals in the Latin Quarter of Paris were beginning to be known, we discover a grittier picture of what it meant to be an artist—or to love one—in Paris in the 1840s. Before he became Puccini’s Rodolfo, Murger’s Rodolphe incarnated the dreams and disappointments of a generation of Parisian writers and artists who would be the first to attempt to live by their pen or brush. On the border between late Romanticism and early Realism, Murger’s novel—really a collection of stories—did much to implant the myth of the artist in modern culture.

Henry Murger (1822–1861) originally published the stories comprising The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter (Scènes de la vie de Bohème) between 1845 and 1849 in one of the small satirical journals that proliferated in Paris during the July Monarchy (1830–1848), Le Corsaire-Satan (called Le Corsaire after 1847). Like the characters he portrayed, Murger at first remained obscure and penurious, appreciated only by a small coterie of like-minded young artistic laborers. Not until he reworked his stories into a play in 1849, and then into a novel in 1851, did he achieve anything like popular success: Murger was awarded the Legion of Honor in 1858, and became a well-known figure during the early years of the Second Empire (1852–1870). Nevertheless, and despite the fame he gained from his portrait of Bohemia, Murger was never destined to escape from it: the novel earned him only 500 francs, and he died alone in a hospital (a fate reserved for the poor) at the age of thirty-eight, much like his character Jacques, the lovelorn and penniless sculptor.

Though more realistic in its description of the hardships faced by this group of artists struggling to pay the rent while remaining true to their creative impulses, Murger’s novel is no less mythologizing than Puccini’s opera. Indeed, Murger is largely responsible for creating the myth of Bohemia. “Bordered on the North by hope, work and gaiety, on the South by necessity and courage; on the West and East by slander and the hospital,” Bohemia, as Murger charted it, is a land where the ideal meets the real, where dreams of glory confront the hard fact of modern materialism. Populated by poets, painters, musicians, and philosophers (all male), and by the women who share their lot, Bohemia has its own language, customs, and mores. Sustained more by fellowship than food, speaking a witty slang, dressing in ragged or outlandish costumes, the bohemians look forward to a great future but never know where their next meal will come from. Staring out at Parisian rooftops from their attic rooms, trying to stay warm by burning their furniture and even their manuscripts, Murger’s characters embody all that is joyful about youth, and also all that is tragic for those who fail to outgrow it. For, as Murger warned, Bohemia is the “preface to the Academy, the Hospital or the Morgue.”

In his original preface to the novel, Murger argued that Bohemia has existed “everywhere and always” and traced its illustrious origins to Greek poets and to minstrels of the Middle Ages. The word itself was originally used in French to designate Europe’s nomadic peoples who were believed to come from a province of what is now the Czech Republic (in English, the term “gypsy” refers to a no less fanciful Egyptian origin). According to historian Jerrold Seigel, the modern use of the term “bohemian” to refer to artists dates to a text by Félix Pyat from 1834, which drew an analogy between the unconventional lifestyle of nomads or gypsies and the bizarre costumes and comportment of the young denizens of the Romantic movement. But despite Pyat’s text, the term took time to gain currency. Romantic followers of Victor Hugo from the generation of 1830, such as Théophile Gautier and Gerard de Nerval, would later refer to their group living in around the rue du Doyenné, near Notre Dame Cathedral, as the “First Bohemia.” But they did not apply that term to themselves at the time. It was Murger’s sketches from the 1840s, and especially his later play and novel, that succeeded in implanting the term in the public consciousness.

Literary critics and historians have spent much energy hunting for the keys to Murger’s characters, and have identified many of the models in the writers and artists haunting the cafés of the Latin Quarter (including the real Café Momus) in the years leading up to the Revolution of 1848. The members of this “Second Bohemia” included such well-known figures as the photographer Nadar, the writer and critic Champfleury (who for a while shared rooms with Murger), and the poet Baudelaire. Murger’s characters, however, are based on lesser figures from the time. Jacques, the sculptor, is modeled on Joseph Desbrosses (1819–1844); the musician Schaunard is Alexandre Schanne (1823–1887); the painter Marcel is Léopold Tabar (1818–1869); the philosopher Colline is a composite of Jean Wallon (1821–1882) and Marc Trapadoux (1822–?). According to Loïc Chotard, the journalist Charles Barbara (1817–1866) never forgave Murger for his unflattering depiction as the slightly ridiculous Carolus Barbemuche. Rodolphe, of course, is a portrait of Murger himself.

Contradicting his claim that Bohemia is universal, Murger argued in his preface that it cannot exist outside Paris. Indeed, the imprint of the French capital is everywhere apparent in Murger’s universe. A densely populated place, in which poor artists live alongside pretty seamstresses in garret rooms on the fifth and sixth floors of apartment houses, Bohemia necessitates an urban setting in which boulevard strolling, or flânerie, encourages random encounters. The unique sociability of Murger’s world reflects the distinctive forms of Parisian urbanization. Although London, Vienna, and New York may have had artistic subcultures, Murger’s Bohemia is a product of the specific geographic and even climatic features of the Parisian landscape. In Murger’s Bohemia it is always winter, always cold and gray, and there is never enough wood for the fire. It would be hard to imagine the romance of Rodolphe and Mimi kindling in the more temperate climes of Rome or Naples.

The specifically Parisian nature of Murger’s Bohemia is also a function of deeper historical forces. Walter Benjamin termed Paris the “capital of the nineteenth century” for the way it starkly embodied the social trends of the entire era, and we find many of these trends at work under the glittering surface of Murger’s novel. The notion of Bohemia itself is intimately connected to the triumph of the middle class, or what is known in France as the bourgeoisie. Already an important force in the eighteenth century, this class had asserted its claims to political authority during the Revolution of 1789, but did not really come into its own until after 1830. By the time the Revolution of 1830 decisively wrested political power away from the declining aristocracy, the nascent Industrial Revolution had begun to reinforce bourgeois economic dominance. The supremacy of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century would have important ramifications for artists and writers, who formerly had relied for financial support on aristocratic patronage.

The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter bears witness to the painful process by which intellectual laborers had to submit to market forces to earn their keep. At the same time as nineteenth-century artists and writers found themselves forced to appeal to a nouveau riche bourgeoisie with more money than education, they also found themselves faced with increased competition. In the early decades of the nineteenth century in France, a more democratic educational system and rising literacy, coupled with an entrenched gerontocracy blocking career routes in administration and business, pushed increasing numbers of young men into the literary and artistic professions. In Murger’s work—as in Balzac’s Lost Illusions and Flaubert’s Sentimental Education—we see the effects of this process in the typical plot of the young man arriving in Paris from the provinces, armed with paintbrush or poem but little in the way of financial support from his family. Whereas some of the great writers of the period, such as Flaubert, were from the upper middle class and enjoyed a private income that alleviated the pressures of the market, freeing them to pursue their idiosyncratic visions, others, like Murger himself, the son of a concierge, were forced to live off an art that barely offered a living.

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has described how the new market system proved liberating for those artists able to exploit it, but alienating for those who failed to succeed in either flattering the bourgeoisie or imposing their talent. Some members of this latter group expressed their alienation through the philosophy of l’art pour l’art, art for art’s sake, a radical notion of artistic autonomy that valorized exactly those aesthetic features (hermeticism, difficulty) least likely to prove accessible to a wide audience. We see this refusal of the market reflected in Murger’s Water Drinkers, the ascetic bunch who look down on Jacques when he consents to sculpt funerary monuments in order to pay for a tomb to his beloved Francine. Like Jacques, other alienated artists formed a new intellectual proletariat, selling their services in exchange for a meager existence. Most of Murger’s characters fall into this latter category, including Rodolphe, comically forced to write a manual for his uncle, a stove manufacturer, who locks his flighty nephew in an apartment and takes away his clothes in order to make sure that the poet will finish the work as ordered.

The middle decades of the nineteenth century were a time of intense artistic ferment in France. Big debates raged: the artistic scene was divided between Classics and Romantics, while partisans of “art for art’s sake” opposed proponents of a more socially committed or realist artistic practice. We find few echoes of these conflicts in Murger’s novel, however. Although, after overhearing the boisterous bohemians holding forth at the Café Momus, Barbemuche declares that he shares their tastes, we never learn what these tastes might be. The few glimpses Murger provides of the work produced by his characters—such as Schaunard’s “imitative symphony” for the piano, entitled “The Influence of Blue in Art,” or Marcel’s painting “The Passing of the Red Sea,” which he is willing to transform into a Napoleonic battle picture if it will gain him entrance into the Salon—verge on outright parody of Romantic tastes. A great deal of the novel’s comedy, and perhaps its pathos as well, derives from the reader’s suspicion that despite all the noble suffering for the sake of their art, Murger’s bohemians are really third rate.

Indeed, this novel is more about money than about art. The reader learns almost nothing about the aesthetic philosophy of the Romantic movement, but gains all sorts of insights into the cost of living in Paris in the 1840s, when an attic room rented for 25 francs a month and 40 sous (2 francs) bought bread, wine, cold cuts, tobacco, candles, and firewood. (Not the least interesting aspect of the novel’s financial focus is the evidence it provides of an economic gender gap: if a moderately successful play earned its male author 40 francs, a woman making artificial flowers, as Mimi does, had to work two days in order to purchase a single issue of a poetry journal in which her lover’s verse was printed. The poor remuneration of women’s work explains why the female characters in novels from the time are so dependent on men.) The plot of nearly every story centers around efforts to beg or borrow enough money to pay the rent, have dinner, buy some flowers, or consult a doctor. Whereas Murger’s characters seldom speak of their actual art or ideas, they dwell obsessively on material objects, food foremost among them. These bohemians are more moved by the sight of a dinde truffée in a caterer’s window, its pink skin affording “visions of the Périgord tubercles with which it was stuffed,” than by all the paintings on display at the Salon.

A particularly telling chapter, “Floods of Pactolus,” begins with Rodolphe receiving the princely sum of 500 francs. “I have not trafficked in my pen,” he assures a suspicious Marcel; the gold was given to him “by a generous hand” to allow him to gain an honorable position from his writing. “Sheltered from the material embarrassments of life, I shall set to work seriously,” he declares. Rodolphe’s first resolution is to renounce Bohemia. He will dress in a black frock coat like everybody else. He will husband his resources. Rodolphe and Marcel begin their existence as honest gentlemen by going out to dine at a good restaurant, for by dining well they save the added expense of supper afterward. Instead of paying to cross a toll bridge, they take a free but less direct route and are then obliged to hire a cab to get to their appointment on time. Pennywise and pound foolish, they hire a manservant to relieve them of domestic chores, but waste all day arguing with him and are unable to work. Within a week, all the money is gone. A hilarious scene of accounting ensues, and amid all sorts of ridiculous expenses, they discover that their servant has committed the unpardonable sin of paying the landlord. Their fortune squandered, the artists return to bohemian life.

This parody of bourgeois economy reflects the aristocratic pretensions of Bohemia. In their aversion to thrift, the bohemians practice a regal art de vivre that defies the frugal shopkeeper mentality that had come to define the nineteenth century. But despite their allergy to bourgeois proprieties, Murger’s bohemians are just as obsessed by money, just as materialistic, as their landlords. The opera, which was actually based on Murger’s play, ends on the pathetic note of Mimi’s death. The novel, however, strikes a different note. In the last story, written expressly for the novel, the characters renounce their bohemian ways once and for all, finally entering the “official world” of bourgeois convention. Marcel is accepted by the Salon and pays his debts by selling his pictures. Schaunard and Rodolphe likewise gain fame and fortune (one assumes by adapting their art to bourgeois tastes). In the last exchange of the novel, Rodolphe proposes returning to their old haunts, but Marcel refuses. “I no longer care for anything but what is good and comfortable,” he declares.

Are the bohemians hypocrites? Was Murger? In his first published poem, entitled “Apostasy,” Murger attacked a revolutionary who renounced the cause, but by the late 1840s the writer had moved away from radical politics. He wrote the last chapter of the novel in 1850, after the further disillusionment of the Revolution of 1848. (In an additional story, not included in the novel, entitled “His Excellency Gustave Colline,” Murger mocks the Revolution of 1848 by having the bohemians use it as a pretext for not paying their debts, and by showing Colline winning a post as ambassador for the revolutionary government on a bet.) Given his own mostly unsuccessful attempts to establish himself as an upstanding bourgeois, there is little doubt that Murger, like his characters, saw Bohemia as a stage, and one best left behind. Those who dally too long in its depths, whether through pride or poor luck, risk winding up in the Hospital or the Morgue rather than the Academy. Despite his own warnings, Murger would be one of Bohemia’s victims.

Perhaps, though, the opposition between bohemian and bourgeois is a false one. As Seigel explains, Bohemia is the place where members of the bourgeoisie work out their ambivalent relation to their own class status. Bohemians are not just financially dependent on the bourgeoisie, they are the bourgeoisie: the mysterious origins of Rodolphe’s 500 francs, along with his uncle the stove manufacturer, attest to the poet’s privileged social status. Through nonconformity, young bourgeois gentlemen like Rodolphe tested the limits of individualism, a notion as central to modern capitalism as to modern art. Murger betrayed Bohemia not because his characters sold out to the bourgeoisie, but because he exposed the material basis underpinning the ideologies of art in modern culture. The philosophy of art for art’s sake, and the entire bohemian subculture, turned out to be a myth hiding the artist’s link to economic reality. That his bohemians learn this lesson in the course of the novel earns Murger’s text a place alongside those other great nineteenth-century novels of education, such as Balzac’s Lost Illusions and Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, in which the would-be artist eventually comes to terms with the social world.

To the extent that our own world is still “modern,” still defined by the political, economic, and social realities that first took shape in nineteenth-century Paris, Murger’s novel remains relevant. Today, big business coopts alternative art almost as soon as it is produced, and artists and corporate CEOs might shop in the same stores and listen to the same music. But this is only the latest manifestation of the ambivalent relation between bohemian and bourgeois that stretches back a century and a half. Long before David Brooks described the “bourgeois-bohemian” or “bobo,” Murger realized that these seeming opposites were in fact two sides of the same coin.