Essays. Catscan Columns

_Five Weeks In A Balloon_ was Jules' first hit. The thing was a smash for his publisher, who sold it all over the world in lavish foreign editions for which Jules received pittances. But Jules wasn't complaining--probably because he wasn't paying attention.

With a firm toehold in the public eye, Jules soon hit his stride as a popular author. He a

Jules Verne had invented hard science fiction. He originated the hard SF metier of off-the-rack plots and characters, combined with vast expository lumps of pop science. His i

Verne's dialogue, considered quite snappy for the period, was derived from the stage. His characters constantly strike dramatic poses: Ned Land with harpoon upraised, Phileas Fogg reappearing stage-right in his London club at the last possible tick of the clock. The minor characters--comic Scots, Russians, Jews--are all stage dialect and glued-on beards, instantly recognizable to period readers, yet fresh because of cross-genre effects. They brought a proto- cinematic flash to readers used to the gluey, soulful character studies of, say, Stendhal.

The books we remember, the books determined people still occasionally read, are products of Verne in his thirties and forties. (His first novel was written at thirty-five.) In these early books, flashes of young Jules' student radicalism periodically surface for air, much like the Nautilus. The character of Captain Nemo, for instance, is often linked to novelistic conventions of the Byronic hero. Nemo is, in fact, a democratic terrorist of the period of '48, the year when the working-class flung up Paris barricades, and, during a few weeks of brief civil war, managed to kill off more French army officers than were lost in the entire Napoleonic campaigns. The uprising was squelched, but Jules' generation of Paris '48, like that of May '68, never truly forgot.

Jules did okay by his "new form of the novel." He eventually became quite wealthy, though not through publishing, but the theater. (Nowadays it would be movie rights, but the principle still stands.) Jules, incidently, did not write the stage versions of his own books; they were done by professional theater hacks. Jules knew the plays stank, and that they travestied his books, but they made him a fortune. The theatrical version of his mainstream smash, _Michael Strogoff_, included such lavish special effects as a live elephant on stage. It was so successful that the term "Strogoff" became contemporary Paris slang for anything wildly bravissimo.

Fortified with fame and money, Jules lunged against the traces. He travelled to America and Scandinavia, faithfully toting his notebooks. He bought three increasingly lavish yachts, and took to sea for days at a time, where he would lie on his stomach scribbling _Twenty Thousand Leagues_ against the deck.

During the height of his popularity, he collected his family and sailed his yacht to North Africa, where he had a grand time and a thrilling brush with guntoting Libyans. On the way back, he toured Italy, where the populace turned out to greet him with fireworks and speeches. In Rome, the Pope received him and praised his books because they weren't smutty. His wife, who was terrified of drowning, refused to get on the boat again, and eventually Verne sold it.

At his wife's insistence, Jules moved to the provincial town of Amiens, where she had relatives. Downstairs, Mme. Verne courted local society in drawing rooms crammed with Second Empire bric-a-brac, while Jules isolated himself upstairs in a spartan study worthy of Nemo, its wall lined with wooden cubbyholes full of carefully labeled index-cards. They slept in separate bedrooms, and rumor says Jules had a mistress in Paris, where he often vanished for weeks.

Jules' son Michel grew up to be a holy terror, visiting upon Jules all the accumulated karma of his own lack of filial piety. The teenage Michel was in trouble with cops, was confined in an asylum, was even banished onto a naval voyage. Michel ended up producing silent films, not very successfully. Jules' stepdaughters made middle-class marriages and vanished into straitlaced Catholic domesticity, where they cooked up family feuds against their scapegrace half- brother.

Verne's work is marked by an obsession with desert islands. Mysterious Isles, secret hollow volcanoes in the mid-Atlantic, vast ice-floes that crack off and head for the North Pole. Verne never really made it into the bosom of society. He did his best, and played the part whenever onstage, but one senses that he knew somehow that he was Not Like The Others and might be torn to pieces if his facade cracked. One notes his longing for the freedom of empty seas and skies, for a submarine full of books that can sink below storm level into eternal calm, for the hollow shell fired into the pristine unpeopled emptiness of circumlunar space.

From within his index-card lighthouse, the isolation began to tell on the aging Jules. He had now streamlined the production of novels to industrial assembly-work, so much so that lying gossip claimed he used a troop of ghostwriters. He could field-strip a Verne book blindfolded, with a greased slot for every part--the daffy scientist, the comic muscleman or acrobat, the ordinary Joe who asks all the wide-eyed questions, the woman who scarcely exists and is rescued from suttee or sharks or red Indians. Sometimes the machine is the hero--the steam-driven elephant, the flying war-machine, the gigantic raft-- sometimes the geography: caverns, coal-mines, ice- floes, darkest Africa.

Bored, Jules entered politics, and joined the Amiens City Council, where he was quickly shuffled onto the cultural committee. It was a natural sinecure and he did a fair job, getting electric lights installed, widening a few streets, building a municipal theater that everyone admired and no one attended. His book sales slumped steadily. The woods were full of guys writing scientific romances by now-- people who actually knew how to write novels, like Herbert Wells. The folk-myth quotes Verne on Wells' _First Men In The Moon_: "Where is this gravity- repelling metal? Let him show it to me." If not the earliest, it is certainly the most famous exemplar of the hard-SF writer's eternal plaint against the fantasist.

The last years were painful. A deranged nephew shot Verne in the foot, crippling him; it was at this time that he wrote one of his rare late poems, the "So

Jules Verne never knew he was "inventing science fiction," in the felicitous phrase of Peter Costello's insightful 1978 biography. He knew he was on to something hot, but he stepped onto a commercial treadmill that he didn't understand, and the money and the fame got to him. The early artistic failures, the romantic rejections, had softened him up, and when the public finally Recognized His Genius he was grateful, and fell into line with their wishes.