Footsteps by Richard Holmes
In less than three years this dream would be fulfilled in its own fashion. That is to say, Nerval would actually be in Constantinople making notes on the “Nights of Ramadan”, while Gautier would be safely at home in Paris enjoying the success of his Turkish ballet, La Péri.
Some account of Nerval’s four months in Vienna later appeared in his Amours de Vienne (1852); and one particular episode in a story he wrote, Pandora, halfway between a romantic assignation and a Hoffmannesque nightmare, in which he is seduced by a demi-mondaine beauty with a clinging décolletage “of silk and Levantine purple”, who drives him to distraction with sexual desire and guilt. But in general the visit does not seem to have been either happy or productive, and Nerval returned in March 1840 penniless once again, having to walk the last stage of his journey to Strasbourg because he had insufficient money for the coach. He walked ten leagues a day for four days, “between the hotel du Soleil and the hotel du Corbeau”. Nerval hid this situation from his father, though in several long and eloquent letters he once again tried to defend his career as a struggling writer. These letters seemed to me a classic statement of the writer’s dilemma in the nineteenth century:
Literary men like Lamartine, Chateaubriand, de Vigny, Hugo, all have private incomes or family money, or assured livelihoods from some other source. It is such people who have the most success, and who even earn the most money, because they have it to start with. They have not been constrained to waste all their energies on sterile work like cheap novels and newspapers, which are always attractive because of the ease of execution.
If a young man took up “commerce or manufacturing business” he could expect “all possible financial sacrifice” from his family; and even if he did not succeed at first his family would “complain but go on helping him”. A man who set out to be “a doctor or a lawyer” could expect to work for several years without sufficient clients or patients to support him, and his family would “take the bread out of their own mouths” to keep him going. “But no one considers that the man of letters, whatever he does, however high his ambition, however hard and patient his labours, has need of support just as much in his chosen vocation. Or that his career, which may be eventually as solid in material terms as the others, will probably have—in our times at least—an initial period which is quite as difficult.”
No doubt Dr Labrunie read these appeals with growing irritation: had not his son just squandered a family inheritance of thirty thousand francs, and then gone gadding about through the cities of Europe? What about Nerval’s tiresome friend Théophile Gautier? At least he had published a popular novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), however scandalous it might have been, and now wrote a regular theatrical column in La Presse. Gautier was a thoroughly professional author.
Yet Nerval’s defence, however partial in his own case, carried a wider justification for his own generation. The fate of contemporaries like Henry Murger, who died in poverty and sickness, bore it out; and even successful major writers like Baudelaire and Balzac—the latter the most prolific of all professionals—suffered keenly from material want. Murger himself wrote in the touching Preface to his single masterpiece, Scènes de la Vie de Bohème:
Today, as in all previous times, any man who takes up the arts without other means of existence except the art itself will be forced to start off in the ways of Bohemia … and for the anxious reader or the timorous bourgeois we must repeat this truth in the form of an axiom: Bohemia is a necessary stage of the artistic life, it is the prologue to the Academy, to the State Hospital, or to the public morgue.
Nerval finally put the position, realistically and without sentiment, in terms that even Dr Labrunie might have understood, and that carry conviction even today:
All literary work consists of two kinds. There is literary journalism, which brings a good living and gives a solid, recognised position to anyone who pursues it assiduously; unfortunately it doesn’t lead on to anything higher or more lasting. Then there is the writing of books proper, plays, studies of poetry and so on, which is all slow and difficult work; it inevitably requires long preparatory labour and a certain period of research and study without any immediate fruits. Yet here alone lies one’s literary future: a reputation and a happy and honourable old age.
With an obstinate determination that I found more and more characteristic, Nerval refused to take up a regular column open to him on the Paris newspapers like Gautier or Janin. “I tremble at the idea of having to take up again the yoke of a feuilletoniste.” Instead, he persisted in maintaining his freedom as a travel-writer, and in 1842 planned a grand voyage to the Near East, as he had so often imagined it with Gautier in the golden days of the impasse du Doyenné. He departed from Marseille in December 1842, taking with him a mass of carefully prepared equipment, including camp-beds, cutlery, Arabic guides and dictionaries, a daguerreotype camera complete with glass slides and chemical kit, and even a pair of blue-tinted glasses for the desert.
“Orientalism”, as the French called it (meaning the Near East and North Africa, rather than China and Japan), was much in vogue, and he had chosen an opportune moment. The fashion for the East had been started in France by Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, and the many marvellous accounts that his soldiers had brought home. Both Chateaubriand and Lamartine later made extensive tours there, travelling en grand seigneur with extensive retinues, like Byron in Greece. Delacroix exhibited his Femmes d’Alger at the Salon in 1834.
But Nerval’s plan was to travel as simply as possible, with a single companion, Joseph Fonfrède, from Bordeaux, using a special pass on French ships, and living, eating and even dressing in the style of the local population. He would study local customs and religious festivals and make extensive notes on the literature and mythology of Egypt, Syria, the Lebanon, and Turkey. This long period of research, which lasted for almost a year, resulted in his second major work, a two-volume Voyage en Orient, which was successfully serialised in the prestigious Revue des Deux Mondes between 1846 and 1847, and in various other journals such as L’Artiste and Le National, finally appearing in a definitive edition published by Charpentier in 1851. Overall, the project and the book was to occupy him for a decade.
I now began to consider if I too should leave Paris and embark on an Eastern pilgrimage with Nerval. It would be the most ambitious of all my journeys, and I should finally be adopting the life of a nomad myself.
For some weeks I had plans to take the old Orient Express as far as Istanbul, then cross the Bosphorus into Turkey and Syria. I become increasingly restive in my attic room, and roamed Paris through the perfumed nights of June, smelling the indefinable Arabic scent of nougat, chestnuts, Moroccan wine and coffee that fills the backstreets between the place d’Anvers and the boulevard Montmartre. I woke up on park benches, haunted railway stations, befriended bargemen down by the pont d’Austerlitz and drank at little cafes that stay open between the all-night PTT and the old newspaper offices of La Presse near the place du Caire. Sometimes I posted articles to London to pay for my food and rent, but Françoise said I didn’t eat properly, and my Irish friends took me pointedly to wedding feasts and funeral wakes. “Don’t let the ghosts get you,” they said. Yet always I finished up alone, back in my attic, turning my books and papers under the solitary lamp. An entry in my notebooks asked: “Why is it always 4 a.m.?”
But as I read Nerval’s letters during the year previous to his departure I discovered something that put his whole journey in an entirely different perspective, and tied me more than ever to Paris and the little streets leading up to Montmartre.
Nerval’s friends, like Gautier, had always implied that his madness came upon him slowly, and did not really begin to affect his career until the last years, when from 1851 onwards he more or less regularly sought treatment and shelter in a special asylum run by Dr Emile Blanche at Passy. Gautier specifically made the suggestion that it was the very experiences of his Eastern tour, and the dabbling in Egyptian mythology and Druse religion, which slowl
But his letters revealed something quite different, and far more tragic. Nerval had first “gone mad” in 1841, before he ever set out for the East. He had undergone a violent breakdown during the festivities of mardi gras in Paris in February of that year, been arrested by the night-patrol and interned at a clinic in the rue Picpus. The following month he had a relapse, and after further violent scenes was admitted as a voluntary patient for eight months at the private asylum of Dr Esprit Blanche (the father of Dr Emile) at the rue Norvins, just off the present site of the Sacré Coeur in Montmartre.
In other words, Nerval’s great journey had begun before he left Paris: but it was essentially an inner journey, a voyage à l’intérieur, through the unsettled regions of his own mind and memory. It was this metaphysical pathway that I now determined to pursue: a track that went into the dark places, bordered by a hidden stream that came from a single consciousness. I also felt, obscurely, that this passage from outer to inner travelling marked some vital transformation or watershed in the history of Romanticism. The imagination of the Hero had finally doubled back on itself, and the rivers and mountains, the visions and revolutions had become in this last phase those of a purely internal landscape, or moonscape, the world of dreams. So for the second time I jumped over a low wall into the blackness below.
There was, too, a subtle shift and doubling back on itself of the biographical evidence. For in fact Gautier knew all about this early breakdown, since it was he who had come to collect Nerval from the military station at the place Cadet. I now realised that he had been carefully adjusting and editing the life story of his old friend, to give it a more conventional and acceptable pattern. The literary relationship between the two of them took on a new depth and complexity.
5
What exactly had gone wrong with Nerval? Later French critics and biographers, referring to the pattern of violent outbursts, visual and auditory hallucinations, together with a manic-depressive cycle that ended in suicide, were inclined to label him as a schizophrenic. But British and American psychologists in the 1960s had gone far to discredit the whole concept of schizophrenia as a diagnosis. Instead, writers like R. D. Laing and David Cooper had laid new emphasis on the human surroundings that produced an “unstable personality”, especially through intolerable or contradictory pressures from other members of the family, or close working colleagues. They spoke of “disjunctive relationships”. Laing described the experience of “schizophrenia” in terms of an inner journey, during which the old personality is more or less consciously broken up, in order to find a new identity freed from the contradictions of the former self. It seemed to me that something of this nature was happening to Nerval; and by the end he was himself describing it in such terms: “I compare this series of trials that I have gone through to that which the ancients understood by the idea of a descent into hell.” But such a journey into the underworld did not, unhappily, guarantee either salvation or cure.
Eyewitness accounts say that Nerval’s first breakdown took the form of a violent outburst late at night in the café Lepeletier, during which “chairs and a mirror” got broken. Nerval himself later said that he was overcome by the excitement of the mardi gras carnival, had delusions of “mystical systems” which he could control, and walked off down the boulevard following a star in the East, and throwing off all his clothes. It was at this point that he was first arrested.
The soldiers treated him kindly, put him in a camp-bed and hung up his clothes to dry, while someone was despatched to find Gautier in the rue de Navarin nearby. They may well have thought that Nerval had simply drunk too much during the festivities. However, further outbursts at the clinic, and obsessive talk of astrology, numerology, mythological identities—in one hospital note Nerval signed himself “Napoleon”—convinced Dr Blanche that his patient was deeply ill. Writing to Dumas’s wife in November, at the end of his treatment, Nerval himself said that the doctors had defined his sickness as “Theomania or Demonomania”. One of its most worrying aspects was that Nerval at first would not accept that he was ill at all. In March he wrote that his sickness was “nothing very extraordinary”, and that he had “already experienced for a long time previously quite similar attacks of nerves”. Certain odd episodes on his journeys in Belgium, Germany and Austria might indeed be explained by this. Yet Gautier always insisted that there was nothing in his published writing that suggested the least irrationality, and he always considered Gérard to be the ideal travelling companion.
Knowing as I did by now something of Nerval’s purely literary fascination with mythology and “mystical systems”, it seemed to me that the “theomania” that must have astounded his doctors, was purely symptomatic. His mind was naturally, and as it were professionally, stocked with such materials. The question was, what made it all bubble over in such violent and manic confusion?
One answer seemed to me, simply, the extreme difficulty of his professional situation—continually in debt or penniless; under constant pressures from editors; having repeatedly failed in the theatre; yet having to live out the image of the insouciant, romantic traveller dashing off brilliant copy in distant cities between amorous assignations—as Gautier and other friends wanted to think of him. Nerval was constitutionally a “loner”: he loved travel and poetry and solitude, and found regular newspaper work a bore and an anxiety. But he had very little psychological or emotional support for the kind of life he was trying to lead: no doting parents like Gautier’s, no faithful wife like Murger’s, no exotic lover like Baudelaire’s, no attached sister like Wordsworth’s. He was a deeply isolated personality, and many writers have taken to alcohol, drugs or lunacy under similar pressures.
Added to all this were the contradictions of the French society in which he was living: a society which increasingly idealised the “pure” unworldly artistic personality, the bohemian in his garret or attic studio, and yet which set enormous store by material achievements, popular success, public honours, high incomes. It took a prolific genius like Victor Hugo to encompass such contradictions, by being the leader of the Romantic rebels and at the same time receiving a pension from the King in 1822 and being created a peer of France in 1845.
So much of Nerval’s sense of isolation and guilt seemed to be expressed in his relations with his father. At one level Dr Labrunie—the doctor, the soldier, the old Napoleonic campaigner—represented the judgment of society itself on a wayward son; at another, he was Nerval’s most intimate friend, his confessor, the person who represented all the warmth of hearth and home. The first letter that Nerval wrote from the rue Picpus—“my dear Papa, at last I am permitted to read and write”—was to Dr Labrunie. It is a moving document, full of love and reassurance, but at the same time deeply reproachful. “Among so many people who have shown kindness towards me,” he writes, “you appear to be the only one (and I say this only to you) who has continued to blame me for my behaviour and to doubt my future.” He begs him at least to disguise this disapproval from his friends, his doctors and the people who can help him in his literary career:
I cannot tell how far my dislike for the profession of a doctor may have lowered me in your esteem, but I believe that the evil (if it is one) is irreparable by now, and we have had words on the subject so often that surely the matter should be closed. I can imagine the disappointment you must have felt about it, a dozen years ago, but all such griefs wear themselves out in time, and I was surprised during my illness (for I was always perfectly conscious, even when I could not speak) to hear you telling people about them in such detail, when they had no real need to know these things.
It is a revealing picture: the silent, “crazy” son and the voluble, stern, complaining father. The missing figure is, of course, the gentle, mediating mother: mamma mia, medicate…
In many ways, Nerval’s breakdown actually brought into the open those contradictory or “disjunctive??