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.”
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.”