[The Cunning Tower by Wilfrid: March 24, 2008]
This damn election isn't close to over yet, is it?
Scroll down for the supposed original Bohemians (NYRB)...
But anyway, this story isn't about the election - not really; it's not even about Barack Obama. It's about the press coverage, such as it is, of the Obama campaign.
A long time ago, when a couple of dozen Republican and Democratic contenders were circling around the possibility of a presidential candidacy, a liberal friend of mine was ranting to me about the stupidity and arrogance of having a President (Bush - remember him?) who made policy decisions based on faith and prayer.
Whatever I happened to think of Bush, what really struck me was that the coming idol of Democratic Party, Barack Obama - not yet even conceivably the front-runner in the nomination race - had spoken in much the same terms about the importance of prayer and his church in his life. I wasn't sure - I'm still not sure - why this was bad for a Bush but okay for an Obama. (In fact, for formal logical reasons I'll leave for another day, policy-making based on prayer makes no sense for anyone - God or no God.)
Anyhow, the discussion led me to google Obama's Trinity United Church of Christ, and I was mildly surprised by what I found. The congregation appeared to be far from diverse - but that's hardly unique. Nevertheless, I was surprised at the exclusive tone of the language on the web-site, for example:
"We are a congregation which is Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian... Our roots in the Black religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting and permanent."
It didn't read like anybody who happened not to be black was being encouraged to show up and worship. Maybe the church has many non-black members; I have no idea; I am simply referring to what's on their web site. Go and browse around. I did wonder - and this was a long time ago - whether the apparent exclusivity amounted to separatism, and how this would sit with Obama's new politics.
Now, I am not a political journalist, so I clicked no further. Had I continued clicking and searching, perhaps I'd have come across the materials the church was selling which have been so widely broadcast over the past week or so. As far as we know, no journalist covering the story of Obama for the mainstream media for the last year or so bothered clicking and searching either.
It's not my purpose to comment on the Reverend Wright's lively goddamn-it-all pulpit message, or even to evaluate the Obama campaign response. I just wanted to point out the discrepancy between the media's exceptionally high self-esteem, and its continuing tendency to buy an unexamined bill of goods, so long as it is sold to them with the right kind of charm and rhetoric.
The best explanation would be that the media knew about these materials all along, but regarded them as unimportant. On the contrary, they seem now to be regarded as very important indeed. Journalists just didn't know about them, and the fact that they are available at this late stage of the nomination contest shows print and broadcast journalists asleep at the wheel again.
Just as they were when Bush's prayers told him to invade Iraq.
The Lost Bohemians in the NYRB
Regular readers will know that I need little excuse to lecture on the history and culture of artistic "Bohemias" - those small communities of writers, painters, musicians and hangers-on which I identify as an essentially urban tradition within the avant garde from 1830s Paris right through to 1970s London and New York (not that the story is necessarily over).
So it was with interest that I stumbled over a piece in the New York Review of Books which identified a fictional Bohemia created many years in advance of Henri Murger's Scènes de la Vie de Bohème. In his article, Robert Darnton describes the action of an extremely rare novel, Les Bohémiens, written in 1790 by the Marquis de Pelleport, incarcerated in the Bastille at the same time as the more renowned Marquis de Sade.
The obscurity of this subject matter makes one conscious that the article is dated April 3 - about as close to April Fool as I suppose the NYRB's publication schedule allows it to get. But if a spoof, it's an elaborate one, as the translator of a purportedly forthcoming English edition, one Vivian Folkenflik, even has a web-site. His translations from Madame de Stael are real enough.
So, taking Darnton's lost masterpiece at face value, what does it do to the theory that Bohemia derives from a small circle of Victor Hugo's young fanatics in the third decade of the nineteenth century?
Certainly, it's a useful corrective to be reminded that "Bohemians" - the term - has a longer history. For Pelleport, it certainly referred to free-spirited, vagrant artists. According to Darnton, the group of boozy libertines who stumble through a series of picaresque adventures in this two volume novel represented a large sub-class of impoverished writers which flourished in and around eighteenth century Paris; the equivalent of the journo-bums of London's Grub Street.
The term "bohemian" is derived from an inaccurate descriptor of roaming "gypsies", applied in turn to artists and writers who lived on the street and by their wits. But bohemianism as it went on to manifest itself in the history of modern art is not simply reducible to a state of creative poverty. The denizens of Elizabethan Grub Street were not bohemians. Dr Johnson was hard-pressed for money; but he was not a bohemian. The Marquis de Sade was pursued by the law and lost his estate in the Revolution; but he was not a bohemian.
Even the apparent libertinage of Pelleport's heroes does not make them bohemian in the sense the term has come to be understood. Darnton mentions polymorphous perversity in their sexual pursuits on a Sadeian scale. But promiscuity does not amount to bohemianism.
I've tried to identify the key elements in an artistic or literary bohemia. A consciously experimental lifestyle - news ways of dressing, talking, walking. A conscious use of stimulants for artistic purposes - alcohol, drugs or both. And an experimental attitude to sexuality. Most bohemias have been, to at least some extent, intertwined with gay milieus.
And although the original connotation of the bohemian artist certainly included the idea of wandering country roads and sleeping under the stars - see Rimbaud's "Ma bohème" - the other requirements of bohemianism have generally required an urban, inner city setting.
Darnton's presentation of Pelleport's work seems to place it in the tradition of Cervantes or Fielding rather than Gautier or Petrus Borel. One can't be sure - not, at least, until the Folkenflik version is published - but I am not yet persuaded that Pelleport did much more than stumble across a happy application of the "bohemian" epithet. Credit for the creation of bohemianism itself rests still with Gautier and Borel, Nerval and - above all - Baudelaire.
Anyone interested can find Darnton's article here. Apparently, there's no finding the Pelleport book; Darnton says he has only been able to unearth six copies in six different countries.
