Bruce Sterling - Essays. Catscan Columns

A kind of SF folk tradition surrounds the founding figure of Jules Verne. Everyone knows he was a big cheese back when the modern megalopolis of SFville was a 19th-century village. There's a bronze monument to him back in the old quarter of town, the Vieux Carre. You know, the part the French built, back before there were cars.

At midnight he stands there, somewhat the worse for the acid rain and the pigeons, his blind bronze eyes fixed on a future that has long since passed him by. SFville's citizenry pass him every day without a thought, their attention fixed on their daily grind in vast American high-rises; if they look up, they are intimidated by the beard, the grasped lapel, the flaking reek of Victorian obsolescence.

Everyone here knows a little about old Jules. The submarine, the moon cannon, the ridiculously sluggish eighty days. When they strip up the tarmac, you can still see the cobbles of the streets he laid. It's all still there, really, the village grid of SFville, where Verne lived and worked and argued scientific romance with the whippersnapper H.G. Wells. Those of us who walk these mean streets, and mutter of wrecking balls and the New Jerusalem, should take the time for a look back. Way back. Let's forget old Jules for the moment. What about young Jules?

Young Jules Verne was trouble. His father, a prosperous lawyer in the provincial city of Nantes, was gifted with the sort of son that makes parents despair. The elder Verne was a reactionary Catholic, given to frequent solitary orgies with the penitential scourge. He expected the same firm moral values in his heir.

Young Jules wanted none of this. It's sometimes mentioned in the SF folktale that Jules tried to run away to sea as a lad. The story goes that he was recaptured, punished, and contritely promised to travel henceforth "only in his imagination." It sounds cute. It was nothing of the kind. The truth of the matter is that the eleven-year-old Jules resourcefully bribed a cabin-boy of his own age, and impersonated his way onto a French merchant cruiser bound for the Indies. In those days of child labor, the crew accepted Jules without hesitation. It was a mere fluke that a neighbor happened to spot Jules during his escape and informed against him. His father had to chase him down in a fast chartered steam-launch.

This evidence of mulishness seems to have thrown a scare into the Verne family, and in years to come they would treat Jules with caution. Young Jules never really broke with his parents, probably because they were an unfailing source of funds. Young Jules didn't much hold with wasting time on day-jobs. He was convinced that he was possessed of genius, despite the near-total lack of hard evidence.

During his teens and twenties, Jules fell for unobtainable women with the regularity of clockwork. Again and again he was turned down by middle-class nymphs whose parents correctly assessed him as an art nut and spoiled ne'er-do-well.

Under the flimsy pretext of studying law, Jules managed to escape to Paris. He had seen the last of stuffy provincial France, or so he assumed: "Well," he wrote to a friend, "I'm leaving at last, as I wasn't wanted here, but one day they'll see what stuff he was made of, that poor young man they knew as Jules Verne."

The "poor young man" rented a Parisian garret with his unfailing parental stipend. He soon fell in with bad company--namely, the pop-thriller writer Alexandre Dumas Pere (author of _Count of Monte Cristo_, _The Three Musketeers_. about a million others). Jules took readily to the role of declasse' intellectual and professional student. During the Revolution of 1848 he passed out radical political pamphlets on Paris streetcorners. At night, embittered by female rejection, he wrote sarcastic sonnets on the perfidy of womankind. Until, that is, he had his first affair with an obliging housemaid, one of Dumas' legion of literary groupies. After this, young Jules loosened up to the point of moral collapse and was soon, by his own admission, a familiar figure in all the best whorehouses in Paris.

This went on for years. Young Jules busied himself writing poetry and plays. He became a kind of gofer for Dumas, devoting vast amounts of energy to a Dumas playhouse that went broke. (Dumas had no head for finance--he kept his money in a baptismal font in the entryway of his house and would stuff handfuls into his pockets whenever going out.)

A few of Jules' briefer pieces--a domestic farce, an operetta--were produced, to general critical and popular disinterest. During these misspent years Jules wrote dozens of full-length plays, most of them never produced or even published, in much the vein of would-be Hollywood scriptwriters today. Eventually, having worked his way into the theatrical infrastructure through dint of prolonged and determined hanging-out, Jules got a production job in another playhouse, for no salary to speak of. He regarded this as his big break, and crowed vastly to his family in cheerful letters that made fun of the Pope.

Jules moved in a fast circle. He started a literary-artistic group of similar souls, a clique appropriately known as the Eleven Without Women. Eventually one of the Eleven succumbed, and invited Jules to the wedding. Jules fell immediately for the bride's sister, a widow with two small daughters. She accepted his proposal. (Given Jules' record, it is to be presumed that she took what she could get.)

Jules was now married, and his relentlessly unimaginative wife did what she could to break him to middle-class harness. Jules' new brother-ln-law was doing okay in the stock market, so Jules figured he would give it a try. He extorted a big loan from his despairing father and bought a position on the Bourse. He soon earned a reputation among his fellow brokers as a cut-up and general weird duck. He didn't manage to go broke, but a daguerreotype of the period shows his mood. The extended Verne family sits stiffly before the camera. Jules is the one in the back, his face in a clown's grimace, his arm blurred as he waves wildly in a brokerage floor "buy" signal.

Denied his longed-for position in the theater, Jules groaningly decided that he might condescend to try prose. He wrote a couple of stories heavily influenced by Poe, a big period favorite of French intellectuals. There was a cheapo publisher in town who was starting a kid's pop-science magazine called "Family Museum." Jules wrote a couple of pieces for peanuts and got cover billing. The publisher decided to try him out on books. Jules was willing. He signed a contract to do two books a year, more or less forever, in exchange for a monthly sum.

Jules, who liked hobnobbing with explorers and scientists, happened to know a local deranged techie called Nadar. Nadar's real name was Felix Tournachon, but everybody called him Nadar, for he was one of those period Gallic swashbucklers who passed through life with great swirlings of scarlet and purple and the scent of attar of roses. Nadar was involved in two breaking high-tech developments of the period: photography and ballooning. (Nadar is perhaps best remembered today as the father of aerial photography.)

Nadar had Big Ideas. Jules' real forte was geography--a date-line or a geodesic sent him into raptures--but he liked Nadar's style and knew good copy when he saw it. Jules helped out behind the scenes when Nadar launched THE GIANT, the largest balloon ever seen at the time, with a gondola the size of a two-story house, lavishly supplied with champagne. Jules never rode the thing--he had a wife and kids now--but he retired into his study with the plot-line of his first book, and drove his wife to distraction. "There are manuscripts everywhere--nothing but manuscripts," she said in a fine burst of wifely confidence. "Let's hope they don't end up under the cooking pot."