Footsteps by Richard Holmes
Photography became a craze, and the Parisian critics began to debate fiercely whether this novelty was really a new art form. Some called it “sun sculpture”, while others like Baudelaire described it as a morbid disease, a kind of narcissism, or else as a there piece of technology, a “science of memory”. I recognised the seeds of a debate that I had already met among biographers. Was their work an art form, like the novel or narrative history? Or was it merely an analytic technique, a social science of compilation and character analysis, skilfully combining personal data with social and political history? There were enthusiasts of photography who spoke of the “alchemical magic of the black box”, its semi-occult powers to freeze time, to divine the inner secrets of personality, to resurrect life after death. The well-known anthropological tale of the Indian or African tribes who believed that the photograph stole away a bit of their souls appeared in the very earliest discussions of photography. And here too I recognised some of my own wilder speculations about twentieth-century biography, and its magical properties.
The first semi-professional photographers in Paris during the 1850s worked much more like biographers than painters. There were those who produced soft-focus landscapes like Adam-Salomon, or ludicrously staged allegorical and historical tableaux, or risqué nude “Academy” poses, or grand tourist set pieces like Maxime du Camp’s studies of the Pyramids taken during the celebrated voyage to the Orient with Gustave Flaubert. But for the most part they were interested in “distinguished personalities”: the politicians, actors, artists and musicians of the day. For the first time in history, they had produced an exact visual record of the entire generation of remarkable and creative men and women of the period. Indeed, they seemed to have altered something about the very nature of history and the past itself. I began to realise this when I discovered the astonishing archives of Felix Nadar, in the Bibliothèque Nationale.
Nadar himself really belongs to the history of publicity. His name is itself an invention, a publicity “logo”. He was born in Lyon in 1820, two years before Shelley’s death, and came to Paris under his real name, Felix Tournachon, to work as a hack journalist and cartoonist. He was a political Romantic, and in 1848 marched with an ill-fated French legion under the name Nadarsky to liberate Poland, where he spent some time in an internment camp. He came back penniless and slept rough in Paris until he was discovered by another journalist with an odd name, who knew the back streets well: Gérard de Nerval.
Nerval introduced him to a successful Republican newspaper editor of the day, Alphonse Karr, who left the following memorable reminiscence of the future photographer:
One day in 1848, Gérard de Nerval came into my office with a sort of giant under his arm: a figure with immensely long legs, exceedingly long arms, extensive torso, and on top of all this a head of shocking red hair surmounted by a pair of large, intelligent, darting eyes, full of wild lights … “This is Tournachon,” announced Gérard, presenting him to me with a theatrical flourish. “He is full of ideas, but he’s a bit simple. You must find him work on Le Journal; he has his mother to support and he adores her. He’s full of mischief, but basically he has a heart of gold and is absolutely honest. The day before yesterday he was Polish; but he’s just resigned his nationality …
Within five years of this eccentric introduction, Nadar had become the most famous cartoonist in the satirical magazines of Paris, and had created his Pantheon Nadar, an enormous lithograph containing three hundred of the best-known literary figures of the day, led by George Sand, Balzac and Victor Hugo. They paraded in a serpentine cortège of grotesque homunculi with enlarged heads and shrunken bodies—not unlike the modern literary cartoons of David Levine.
To complete this lithograph, and to keep it up to date for future editions, Nadar began keeping a special file of sketches and daguerreotypes of all his subjects. The invention of the wet-collodion plate, with its much faster exposure time, allowed him to work in his own apartment, using an upstairs room with skylights as his studio, and preparing and developing his own pictures with a small chemistry apparatus.
Many of his subjects first came to visit him informally, as lunch guests; and Nadar began to produce a particular kind of portrait intime, full-face, searchingly frank, without any of the conventional trappings or drapes or formal costumes. These soon became far more interesting to him than the highly mannered cartoons for which they were originally intended to serve merely as documentation.
The range of this earliest series of portraits, taken between 1854 and 1860, was a revelation to me. Here was the next literary and artistic generation after Shelley and Byron, suddenly brought back to life—their hairstyles, their wrinkles, their buttoned jackets, their scuffed shoes, their watch-chains or necklaces, their pince-nez, their frayed shirt-cuffs, the smile-lines round their eyes, the worry-lines over the brow, their mouths turned up with hope or turned down with disappointment—in a way that made them almost completely contemporary. Moreover, everyone seemed to be there: painters like Corot and Delacroix and Manet; musicians like Verdi and Offenbach and Rossini; writers like Dumas, Hugo, Flaubert, Saint-Beuve, Zola and Gautier. I was dazzled by it all, as I sat in the Cabinet d’Estampes of the Bibliothèque Nationale, or leafed through the files of Roger-Viollet, the famous archives photographiques, just outside the Institute at the bottom of the rue de Seine.
It struck me that from 1850 onwards a wholly new kind of biography might be possible—because of photography. For here was the beginning of the “modern age”: these people would never be lost in “history”. Here they were, alive, like us, flesh and blood, and touched by the marks of life.
Indeed, it was those marks, those imperfections, which made them so human: the thinning hair, the gnarled hands, the lined cheek, the unsightly wart or skin rash. The complexions of nineteenth-century city-dwellers were noticeably bad, a combination of crude sanitation, bad air and unbalanced diet—and this was particularly marked in the writers. These mundane things told a story that no diary or letter would mention. In fact the very process of aging itself—which is the existential equivalent of the biographer’s chronological narrative—was one of the most touching facts of this vast gallery of portraits. Nadar chose as his first subjects friends of his own age (he was thirty-four when he began photography) or people who had already reached a certain eminence in life. The signs of effort, suffering, wear and tear were already upon them. The face of the poet and literary journalist Théophile Gautier was more deeply lined and tracked at forty-five than W. H. Auden’s was at sixty-five. Henry Murger, the author of the carefree, sentimental Scènes de la Vie de Bohème upon which Puccini based his opera, was already bald and hollow-eyed at thirty, his face haunted by anxiety. Only a very few were caught in the first flush of successful youth: Gustave Doré at twenty-two, with a raffish check scarf knotted round his collar, or the teenage Sarah Bernhardt, with a thick mass of dark curls clustering over her naked shoulders.
But it was the ageing of Charles Baudelaire that most impressed me as a piece of biographic evidence. Nadar knew Baudelaire well from the early newspaper days and admired him greatly. They were almost exact contemporaries. Baudelaire was one of his first sitters, in 1854, three years before the Fleurs du Mal was published, after which Baudelaire became famous—or at least notorious. Nadar continued to photograph him regularly over the next eight years, and I found individual portraits taken in 1854, 1855, 1860 and 1862. The story they told of his physical and spiritual decline was unforgettable. In the first photograph, aged thirty-three, Baudelaire is still the young dandy-intellectual, buttoned into a thick topcoat with a high, loose, stylish collar. His face is pale and fresh, the features finely drawn, the long mouth with its beautifully shaped lips set in a determined line. The eyes look out at Paris like a young Lucien de Rubempré (the hero of Balzac’s Les Illusions Perdues), challenging, hopeful, with a glitter of arrogance. The right hand is thrust into the front of the topcoat with a Napoleonic gesture. His hair, cut quite short in the then fashionab
Two years or so later the picture has already changed sharply. Baudelaire lounges back in a decorated chair, with what looks like a cushion behind his head. His hair has been cropped very short, exactly as it can be seen in Gustave Courbet’s picture The Artist’s Atelier in the Louvre—where Baudelaire sits on a table at the extreme right, reading a folio book, while just behind his head can be seen the face of his mistress Jeanne Duval, partially painted out by Courbet for reasons of discretion. The left hand is raised to his cheek in a curiously effete gesture, while the facial skin has become heavier, and the corner of his mouth seems marked by a cluster of skin spots. The exposure of the photograph is much darker, which adds perhaps artificially to the atmosphere of brooding and unease—or disease. Nevertheless there is now something skull-like about the face, and the eyes seem dark and unfocused. One could almost say it was the photograph of an alcoholic or an opium addict.
By 1860 something much harder and older has entered the face. Yet it has gained in dignity too, and the self-conscious dandy has almost entirely disappeared. Baudelaire wears a coat with a velvet collar, like a prosperous banker, and the black silk cravat is more tightly and economically tied. The hair has been allowed to grow longer again, but it is now distinctly thin on top and grizzled at the sides, curling over the collar at the back in a dishevelled way that suggests neglect and the life of a lonely bachelor. The mouth has become thinner and harder, the cheeks have the downward lines of suffering and suggest inner struggle, perhaps deprivation. Above all the expression in the eyes has changed; they have become more watchful, distrusting, full of irony. It is the picture of someone who knows the world, and is embittered by it. It is someone who has experienced cruelty, yet retains a kind of nobility. This photograph corresponds to the period after the trial of the Fleurs du Mal for obscenity and immorality, when six poems were condemned, and Baudelaire’s whole career in Paris was jeopardised. He was only thirty-nine, but he looks ten years older.
The final photograph in this moving sequence belongs to about 1862, shortly before Baudelaire embarked on his disastrous lecture-tour to Brussels in search of financial security. It is a portrait of extraordinary inner power, showing a man at bay, turning to face his fate head-on. His jacket is thrown open, his dark waistcoat unbuttoned almost to the waist, both hands thrust fiercely into his trouser pockets with the white frayed cuffs hanging negligently down—no longer dandyish, but disarrayed. The hair is unkempt, and the long mouth now turned down in a stubborn refusal to surrender. There is something pugilistic about the whole stance, like a man challenging a rival to knock him down if he dares. Once again, the eyes are remarkable, staring straight out at the onlooker with a glare of absolute defiance. Here indeed is the poète maudit of later legend, the writer cursed and rejected by society.
Nadar’s camera records it all without rhetoric or exaggeration. The frame is as bare as a police photograph, no chair, no drape, no conventional book or pen; only a thin concentration of daylight on Baudelaire’s broad, high forehead—over which, he will soon write, he heard “the beat of the wing of madness” passing. Ahead lie increasing illness, poverty, the loneliness of hotel rooms and the final onset of general paralysis, until even the powers of speech are denied him, and he is carried back to his old mother, and to Paris, to die at the hydrotherapy clinic of Dr Emile Duval—haunting name—in the rue du Dôme, near the Etoile. I stared at these photographs for hours, transfixed. The old sensations of being drawn into another life began to assail me almost with a sense of fatality.
I shook it off briskly. There was too much I wanted to do and see in Paris, my novel about a group of friends caught up in May ′68 was taking shape, and besides I had met new friends whose interests were forward-looking and who were full of zest for the life around us. I got to know a group of young teachers at the Ecole Normale Supérieure who discussed modern art and politics with Gallic passion; a young woman journalist who wrote profiles of the new feminist generation now making its mark in the media and the professions; a circle of Irish businessmen, romantic republicans all, who had visions of the future of modern Europe—and the insularity of Britain, and “the Brits”—beyond anything I had previously considered. They too were inveterate travellers, but of a new kind, whirling about the big cities of France and Germany clinching deals and setting up new enterprises—cider, salmon, woollen garments, machine parts—with enormous energy and charm. They were the first people I had ever met who made commerce seem almost as exciting as literature.
Moreover, all of these people treated the fact of my being a writer as something perfectly honourable and rational; I no longer felt an aberration, as I so often did in England. On the contrary, they seemed to talk to me with a particular kind of confidence—about their work, about their families or their affairs, about their hopes for the future and, above all it seemed, about their childhood and adolescence. Indeed it was from them that I learned how much everyone needs to talk about their own past, the forces and experiences that shaped them; and how rarely this constant need is satisfied in the competitive, pressurised world, except in moments of emotional crisis.
I found a new role as a listener, often aided by the very fact of linguistic difference, which makes questions seem natural and subtly forces people to clarify exactly what they are saying, or what they really feel or mean. I slowly realised that what I was getting from these new friends was a kind of living, spontaneous biography: they were showing me the patterns in their own lives, and by the act of telling—and the confidential rhythm of question and answer—were re-enacting the very process that I had first known as a lonely act of the imagination. Perhaps this was partly the old magic of Paris; or perhaps it was that I myself was beginning, at long last it seemed, to grow up and have something like my own identity.
It taught me at least two things. First, that the past is not simply “out there”, an objective history to be researched or forgotten, at will; but that it lives most vividly in all of us, deep inside, and needs constantly to be given expression and interpretation. And second, that the lives of great artists and poets and writers are not, after all, so extraordinary by comparison with everyone else. Once known in any detail and any scope, every life is something extraordinary, full of particular drama and tension and surprise, often containing unimagined degrees of suffering or heroism, and invariably touching extreme moments of triumph and despair, though frequently unexpressed. The difference lies in the extent to which one is eventually recorded, and the other is eventually forgotten.
Hence the constant paradox of biography as a literary form: that everyone would like to be fully understood and appreciated, but few people want their privacy invaded, even by an imagined posterity. Sometimes I would think that everybody should have their official biographer, just as they should have their own doctor, or accountant, or priest; but this of course was a delusion of grandeur, confusing the writer with the Recording Angel. I was also reminded of Stevenson’s wry observation that anyone who married had “domesticated” the Recording Angel; so the writer should not be confused with a spouse, either.
Nothing I did in Paris, and nobody I met, could drive away the images of Nadar’s photographs however. The generation that reached their maturity in the 1850s—the Baudelairian decade, one might say—haunted me with their interesting, careworn, complicated faces. I wondered if, without being drawn in too far, I might write a biographical group portrait, using Nadar and his camera as the point d’appui, an innocent eye observing the progress of his friends. This idea of finding a central but relatively neutral or unfamiliar figure to tell the story of a famous group or circle has often struck me since as a promising new way for biography to proceed. It is something like the “central consciousness” that Henry James su
Certainly this was the case with Nadar, who besides being a cartoonist and photographer turned out to have had an almost fabulous career in Second Empire Paris. He became successively involved with the Impressionist painters, the great newspaper and magazine editors of the day, the scientists and inventor-eccentrics who pioneered aeronautics, the early balloonists like the Godard brothers, and the men who organised the first airmail post during the Siege of Paris using an early form of microfilm.
One of his greatest friends was the science-fiction writer Jules Verne, who finally put him into a novel, De la Terre à la Lune (1865), as one of the three astronauts who were to “carry into outer-space all the resources of art, science, and industry”. Verne brilliantly changed Nadar’s name, by inspired anagram, into “Michel Ardan”: a Phaeton with replaceable wings, as he put it, and a boyish enthusiast who had “not yet outgrown the Age of Superlatives”. The chances of keeping such an effervescent personality in the margins of a group biography came to look increasingly unlikely.
Moreover, there was something in the buoyant optimism of Nadar’s temperament, the endlessly cheery egoism, the very naivety which so appealed to Verne, which curiously denied the reflective, questioning mood I found in his photographs, and which seemed to me essential to the 1850s. This was not really an age of superlatives at all, but one poised between the collapse of a religious culture and the rise of a scientific or materialist one: an age of doubt and scepticism which shadowed the more obvious achievements of capitalism, industry, exploration and empire. It was this shadowy world, half dying, half waiting to be born, that fascinated me. I remembered what Nadar’s friend Gérard de Nerval had said of the photographer: he’s full of ideas, but a bit simple.