Frontiers of the Creative Mind

...Murger's play, and Puccini's adaptation of it, for instance, have survived as expressions of middle-class fantasy...

...This became a powerful Parisianmyth, notably among puritanically-bred Anglo-Saxons seeking to escape their staid and respectable upbringing, as well as a notion with its own philosophic implications that many of the most important French writers and painters of the 19th and early 20th centuries considered seriously...

...its sea-coasts are the frontiers of the creative mind...

...Indeed, the phenomenon we now think of as Bohemia embraces something broader and deeper than the artistically ambitious Latin Quarter students and their working-class mistresses of whom Murger wrote...

...once prosperity loomed, he very quickly became the bourgeois judging the Bohemian and transforming him into a fictional type...

...Of course, the Bohemian attitude existed even before it was named...

...Certainly it was from France that the cult of Bohemia as an identifiable phenomenon spread to other cultures—enabling the artist through his way of life to proclaim his defiance of accepted norms, and simultaneously to legitimize his poverty and his indifference to success as it is generally understood...

...Seigel is significantly less successful in portraying genuine and complex artists—Baudelaire and Courbet, Verlaine and Andre Breton—as bourgeois under their Bohemian skin...

...Bohemian Paris is, in fact, an interesting study of the circumstances that resulted in a name with a long shelf life being given to the perennial conflict between the artist and society...

...The conflict began in archaic Greece when the artist, previously an anonymous craftsman, started to emerge as an individual creator and to oppose his values to those of the society around him...

...Such a narrowly social analysis naturally tends to diminish the personal factors contributing to the choice and pursuit of la viede Boheme, and specifically the factors of talent and originality of mind that frequently distinguish the Bohemian from the bourgeois...

...If one accepts Seigel's argument, la vie de Boheme is only one of several manifestations of the individualism that was perhaps the most strongly marked characteristic of the emergent French middle class in the early 19th century...

...But Murger's kind of achievement, and his ultimate identification with the middle-class audience and its equivocal attitude toward the liberties of the artistic life, were the products of his own mediocrity and his essentially humdrum middle-class ambitions...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock In terms of strict definition, Paris is the home of la vie de Boheme...

...Bohemia may have links with other similar ways of life, like those of Gypsies, of impecunious 19th-century students and of rebellious youth in the 1960s...

...Here he fails to take into account the sheer difference of nature that made these men inevitable outsiders in any staid and stable society...

...The apparent "conversions" of young Bohemians into pillars of society, in his view, are simply a logical changing of roles that shows the flexibility of the bourgeois order...

...As Jerrold Seigel concedes at the outset of his Bohemian Paris, "medieval figures like Frangois Villon did share features with modern Bohemians, while poor writers like the young Diderot and lesser 18th-century literary hacks and gutter poets were still closer in character as well as in in time...

...Many non-Bohemians experienced the same ambivalence, but they did not devote their lives to living it out...

...For him the poverty and insecurity of Bohemian life were matters of necessity created by artistic ineptitude...

...Seigel suggests that the clash between the more extreme manifestations of individualism and the Calvinist or Jansenist ethic actually lies at the root of the cult of Bohemia: "...it was the appropriation of marginal lifestyles by young and not so young bourgeois, for the dramatization of ambivalence toward their own social identities and destinies...

...Henry Murger, in his periodical sketches written during the 1840s— which were collected in Scenes de la vie de Boheme and then dramatized in the 1849 play, La Vie de Boheme, the source of Puccini's libretto for his more famous opera—developed the concept of the Bohemian life...

...He lets his stress of the social approach blind him to the autonomy of the creative temperament...

...Other writers and artists from the past could easily be cited—and not only French ones—whose dispositions were certifiably Bohemian: Christopher Marlowe, for example, and several of the English Restoration dramatists, including Aphra Behn, who has a good claim to be regarded not merely as the first professional woman writer but also as the first well-known citizeness of Bohemia...

...People were or were not Bohemian to the degree that parts of their lives dramatized these tensions and conflicts for themselves and others, making them visible, and demanding that they be faced...

...Places remote enough are in Bohemia," as Shakespeare had it...

...Much of Bohemian Paris, however, is devoted to brief biographies of the great Bohemians as the book seeks to define their relationship with the more open and respectable currents, and the sleazier under currents, of French society in la belle gpoque and its neighboring decades...

...For it was in Bohemia alone, where all conventions would ideally be dissolved, that art and life might flow together and become one...

...It has become emblematic of the special way of life creative people often find themselves obliged to follow within a society whose norms they reject...

...Bohemianism, in other words, like the Saturnalia in ancient Rome, or the Holi festival among Hindus, became a safety valve that provided a means of releasing the psychological energies at work in a dynamic society...

...The troubadours, with their Catharist heresies and ambivalent relations with the late medieval nobility of the Languedoc, had most of the characteristics of authentic Bohemians before the domination of society by bourgeois interests was ever imaginable...

...Perhaps its only real parallel with the classic bourgeois world is its recognition of the importance of work, and especially of the work...

...It was there in the 1830s that the free lifestyle of certain artists and students and working girls of the Latin Quarter was equated with that of the Gypsies, called Bohemians because they were erroneously believed to have originated in part of what is now Czechoslovakia...

...But as an image of the existence of the artist it stands apart, a continuing country of the mind possessing its own standards of freedom and its own codes of solidarity...

...This Bohemia still calls for its explorer...

...He builds a quite elaborate case to demonstrate that, although the Bohemians were often associated with currents of political rebellion—in Paris they figured in both the Revolution of 1848 and the Commune of 1871—they retained strong bourgeois links...

...Archilochos, that abrasive poet of the seventh century BC who defied the Homeric concepts of manly valor, may well be regarded as the first of the Bohemians, though eccentric and opinionated traveling bards like the philosopher-poet Xenophanes and the hedonist Anacreon were not far behind...

...The same applies to their contemporaries, the goliards of northern France, noted for their anti-clericalism, hedonism and wandering irregular life...

...Central to Seigel's thesis is the idea that la vie de Boheme was really a kind of licensed folly, a perpetual Saturnalia open to those willing to accept its sacrifices along with its pleasures...

...At the same time, the new class had its ties to the puritanical ideals of work and behavior that sprang out of the earlier doctrinal challenges—whether Protestant or Gallican—to medieval Catholicism...

...In some cases, the attempt to portray the Bohemian as the bourgeoismanqu& is appropriate and successful...

...Nevertheless, it has to be admitted that the Bohemian life was originally identified and christened in Paris, that it flourished as a recognized facet of the French literary and artistic community from the 1830s into the 1930s, and that it survived until it was absorbed into the countercultural movements of the 1960s and became an almost accepted phase in the development of middle-class youth throughout the Western world...