Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Apollo does not wear fancy dress: so a distinguished poet used to assure us during the far-off days of Georgian Poetry, just before he himself developed an unexpected interest in bright silk waistcoats and broad-brimmed Spanish hats. He was right, certainly, about many of his great precursors. We can assume that there was nothing to distinguish Shakespeare from his sober-suited fellow citizens: the adult Milton was a square-toed Puritan scholar: Pope dressed like a contemporary man of the world and, preparatory to writing verse, would always put on his most formal clothes: even Keats, though perhaps a little untidy, wore perfectly conventional coats and trousers. Bohemianism and its by-product literary dandyism were the off-spring of the French Romantic movement. There had, of course, been earlier bohemians; but the word ‘bohemian’, as applied to writers and artists whose appearance, vocabulary and social attitude advertised their fierce contempt for bourgeois standards, was not adopted until the eighteen-thirties when Balzac, in Un Grand Homme de Province à Paris, employed it to describe a small group of daring spirits that included Théophile Gautier, Chassériau, Arsène Houssaye and the eccentric visionary Gérard de Nerval, who at length committed suicide on the threshold of a doss-house with the help of ‘the Queen of Sheba’s garter’.

     Gérard de Nerval, incidentally, has left us a vivid account of the background of the Romantic heyday. ‘We were living at that time (he wrote in Sylvie) in one of those strange periods which usually follow a revolution or the downfall of some mighty empire . . . composed of activity, diffidence and inertia, of splendid utopian dreams, of philosophic or religious aspirations and vague enthusiasms, the whole interpenetrated by certain instincts of renewal . . .’ The collapse of the Napoleonic empire had been succeeded by a period of political stagnation and repression; young men — particularly young writers — felt that, through no fault of their own, they had been brutally cut off from active life; and, denied the satisfaction of taking a share in the dramas of the outer world, they began to look inward and look back into the past, where their ambitions, dreams and enthusiasm could be realized at second hand. Simultaneously, they donned a distinctive costume: Gautier, Nerval and their friends fought the battle of Hernani, on February 25, 1830, wearing the apparatus of mediaeval courtiers, Gautier in a crimson pourpoint that dazzled and daunted the hostile bourgeois audience. Ten years later, Baudelaire followed suit: his youthful dandyism was a high-spirited protest against the humdrum squalor of the age in which he lived. Today, comparatively few writers are thoroughgoing bohemians, and still fewer are deliberate dandies; but it is interesting to note that dandyism has now re-emerged among the younger generation of the urban proletariat. They, too, apparently suffer from a sense of exclusion, of social and emotional deprivation: they, too, express their revolt by assuming odd mediaeval modes — trousers that sheathe the leg, and ‘winkle-pickers’ with spiked toes that suggest fifteenth-century footwear.

     The idea of Bohemianism, then, as a form of literary protest, originated about 1830; but the legend of the Vie de Bohème was finally established during the late forties. It was in 1845 that Henry Murger, ambitious but penniless son of a dour Parisian conçierge, launched a long series of narrative sketches, originally entitled Scènes de la Bohème, describing the adventures of himself and his companions, the proudly styled ‘Buveurs de l’Eau’, who cultivated the arts, without benefit of alcohol, on a diet of crusts of bread and thin soup. Unlike Gautier, Nerval, Baudelaire, none of these minor bohemians had any touch of real genius; but Murger was a brilliant popularizer who soon grasped the possibilities of his subject and understood that, although the militant bohemians of the ‘thirties had offended and alarmed the bourgeois public, modern middleclass readers were now much more kindly disposed towards romantic waifs and strays. Bohemians had become harmless: they were positively endearing. Better still, the curious lives they led, and the picturesque, ill-fated love-affairs they conducted in their gloomy attic chambers, provided an enjoyable relief from the ordinary money-making round. Serial publication of Murger’s Scènes de la Bohème continued until 1849; when an enterprising young playwright named Théodore Barrière agreed to recast them in dramatic shape. Rodolphe and Mimi appeared on the boards, exulting and weeping, tremulous with cold and passion; while the future Emperor of the French applauded from a stage box.

     Murger had arrived — so far as he would ever arrive; his worldly success was never quite complete. For, although he presently renounced and denounced Bohemianism — it was the destruction of promise, he said, and the grave of youthful hopes — he could not altogether shake off his bohemian ways and until his death remained a desperate struggler. True, he snatched at the joys of the present; but he clung to the delusive memories of the past; and, wherever he wandered, above the head of his bed hung the dusty bouquet and ancient velvet mask, relics of some happy Opera Ball that he had attended many years ago, commemorating his ill-starred attachment to the first of many different Mimis. Each of these transistory favourites came from the Parisian working class; and as a rule the young women he adored would seem to have been equally plain and faithless.

     ‘He started from the idea (observed a caustic acquaintance) that man is nothing but an animal that loves. He considered himself obliged to turn his heart . . . into a cushion into which feminine hands drove pins. He would doubtless have preferred those hands to be clean; he would have raised no objection if the pins had been gold pins with diamond heads . . . But, since he came across nothing but red hands and muddy pins, he sang their praises . . . I have never met a man endowed with such a capacity for idealization. He was the idealizing animal par excellence.’

     Yet through his romanticism and his gift for idealization ran a vein of sober realism; and the charm of his books is their peculiar blend of romantic and realistic feeling. Murger himself was a likeable personage, though physically not at all attractive — bald and heavily bearded, with a habit, in emotional moments, of ‘sniffing, curling his upper lip, and stuffing his wet moustache into his nostrils’. Apart from the jealous and cantankerous Goncourts, most contemporary writers enjoyed his company — ‘he was naturally kind, gentle and affectionate’; and they were pleased when the last of his Mimis settled down with him in pseudo-wedlock.

     A remarkable character; and Mr Robert Baldick, who has already given us valuable studies of Huysmans and Frédérick Lemaître, has made him the hero of an entertaining volume. It is not, however, very well written: Mr Baldick seldom shrinks from a familiar epithet or a dog-eared phrase, and has comparatively little to say about Murger’s value as a novelist. ‘What he elucidates is the origin of a legend — one that, a hundred years after Murger’s death, has not completely lost its power. Murger created that legend; Barrière dramatized it; and Puccini added a saccharine finish. Mr Baldick traces its fortuitous development from the splendours and miseries of an individual life.