The Fine Print; Program 06-14 Guest Dominic Smith Book The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre; The Fine Print with Rebecca Bain April 8 & 9, 2006

from national public radio this is the fine print and exploration and celebration of the written word i'm rebecca bain we do care was one of photography surrounding fathers and he's certainly one of the most famous and eighteen thirty five as legend has it he discovered by accident that the fumes from mercury would produce a brilliant image on a plate that he exposed his skull rock lobster by eighteen thirty seven he had discovered how to fix that image and he'd named his creation and dr ty this is the jumping off point for dominic smith's first novel which he is titled the mercury visions of that we did care done its premise is that de guerre is played by delusions cause by poisoning from his many years of handling mercury the nature of that year's visions and his response to the make for a truly fascinating really critics agree john dalton wrote a splendid novel you don't often see such a graceful

command of historical detail in the first book or such breaking an elegant prose dominic smith joins me this week on the fine print and we'll be discussing the mercury visions of who we dont care over the course of this next half hour he's done it i want to talk to you a lot as a matter of fact about the idea for this book the execution in this book all those sorts of things and in the book itself but i think before we talk about any of those things for listeners who aren't really certain who do we de guerre was and what his contribution society was would you give us all that crazy or silly de guerre is credited with inventing the first practical form of photography in eighteen thirty nine year photography in many ways doesn't have a single inventor and there are a variety of prosser sees that are invented all within about the same ten year period the system of photography we've inherited is actually paper based photography

based on the idea of the negative which really from that of england and henry fox talbot but before that de guerre and his big contribution was that big air tank named after him and in nineteen thirty nine when it was released it really took the world by storm and within a year it was being used on every continent was being used in different elegy studies of african slaves it was being used in europe there are hundreds of portraits studios people like samuel morse and walt whitman were riding in a rave reviews about this new art form and what's interesting about big ears that his big booming the substance that really allowed his process to become for a time the preeminent force and photography was mercury and there's this kind of legend in photography about the way he discovered that and as i researched again his life it was very hard to disentangle the legend from what might have been the reality but

essentially the legend goes that one afternoon after this is for used to being attempting to find the right kind of fixing agent for essentially photography you expose of play that has some kind of light sensitive material on an inside camera which in those days was just a black box with a hole they once it's exposed you have to fix it with some kind of agent and they'd been using various things but the image would never fix permanently so the story was that the gear head an expose played sitting in a drawer of the night and he didn't have time to finish the development process and we came back in the morning i was fully fix just from sitting in the drawer and there are a bunch of other items in the drawer one of those items was a thermometer that had a cracked they senate and so some of the mercury vapor had seeped out of a thermometer and fix display and so being you know thats the quote that fortune

favors the prepared mind selling applies to de guerre depending on how much of that story really where he began using mercury and fender i'm perfecting the process by which mercury vapor of fix the image so that was really how he kind of came into the public eye so how did you come into the high of dominic smith well i you know i think it's in photography in old his old world photography for a while but it was when i was in graduate school for writing that i took a photography class at the university of texas at austin the end you know things we looked at in that class was the kind of early pioneering efforts in photography and that did is name came up and there's a fair amount of controversy about the good one of the reasons is that he had a business partner by the name of nice afford meets and it's actually took the one furry for the world's very first photographic image of any kind know is in about eighteen twenty six and that

image was called the healy a graph and is actually owned by the harry ransom center at the university of texas early on in my research i went to look at that image and out it's quite interesting because while both to the untrained eye doesn't really look like a photograph what a bizarre and surreal about is that it's an image taken from a dormer window out in the french countryside and sinking down on a pear tree and a pigeon house in the remarkable thing about it is that because the exposure was taken for entire twelve hour day so the shuttle was open for two hours every object has two sets of shadows and so there's this kind of surreal ghostly quality to it and then you know there's this rumor that there was this very contentious relationship between apes and the gear milton lea de guerre kind of manipulated the business relationship to his aaron's in fact the elder inmates died

before photography or the big airtight was announced the will and his son kind of took over the other controversy around eager de guerre and the legend is that he may have had some form of mercury poisoning when he died and eighteen fifty one as i was researching the novel i quickly realize that for my purposes that was almost impossible to verify you know in that there were a lot of great forensics being in the middle of the nineteenth century so i try to look at you know different counts and see if they could find medical records and things like that but i really had to go on kind of circumstantial evidence in early on i decided that i was writing a novel you know a piece of fiction an autobiography in that i would use to gears life as a kind of a scaffold for a fictional story that would be woven of the top what is a mercury poisoning what does is actually due to a person so mercury poisoning you're in a contemporary context we know that mostly from for a fish you know

people can get mercury poisoning of date certain kinds of fish that have ingested mercury from the water there's a huge spectrum of mercury poisoning but the context for the kind of mercury poisoning i'm interested in is really what we can know all through cut loose carol we know that the expression mad as a hatter comes from having factories in the nineteenth century in europe where giant vats of mercury were using the boiling that's a mercury where felt that was to be made into a hat will be dipped into the mercury and then flat and then you know various things removed and prepared and so people routinely working as factories here last he suffered delusions died prematurely there was very limited knowledge indict that time also relieved that the dangers all of hazardous chemicals people knew that they were not exactly good few but they don't necessarily know how to

prevent certain aspects of it and they were using any kind of protective measures so as a research record poison one of the things i found is that there's a huge spectrum between chronic mercury poisoning and acute mercury poisoning and it really depends on the nature of the exposure how frequently and how much you are exposed to and in the case of pig ear for my research ike i knew that he'd been using mercury he'd been exposed to mercury vapor is for at least a decade on a fairly regular basis the exposures were probably fairly so short injure a sham because you take an expose played into a back room and he would run it back and forth over what was called a mercury buff and that was simply heated mercury yet now you have to here to the point where it starts to become a gas and the mad is actually what fixes that big air time it seemed to me very plausible that i he would have had to

have had some level of mercury poisoning but the degree to which she had the poisoning the degree which he suffered delusions that quickly became a point of a fictional invention rather than you know whether or not i could have i could be proven from the historical record what a wonderful device for a novelist to have as a springboard and then to go from their own at this point let's tell our listeners the bones of the story if you know your novel the large revisions of the week to get you so the not only starts with the premise that you know the inventor of our one of the inventors of mom photography is suffering from mercury poisoning after about a decade of using it it picks him up really at the height and yet also the beginning of his demise in about eighteen forty six eighteen forty seven so he released the process of making thirty nine emily his name was a household name the world and he was given the legion of honor in real

life as in the novel ends receive the national pension so it's a story picks him up when he's kind of famous and he's achieved everything in his life he wants to achieve but he's his mind is addled by mercury poisoning and he would have the prologue opens with a vision or a delusion that he has that the world is going to add and once he heaved believes that the world's going to and he sets out to create what he calls a doomsday list which has a list of ten items that he has to capture before the final day kenny believes the wall and within a calendar year and so that's really that the meat off the structure of the story that these list of ten items and one of the items is a portrait of a woman and as a goal for nearly two in his youth he grew up on a state outside of

all around she was a maid who worked on the estate and she was there is a time of tremendous cut social change it up you'll win in paris in france she's maybe a cost below him he's born into a kind of courtship family his father the court for you know what remained of the aristocracy and they have this time this love that come blossoms when he's a young boy in a barely a peep this and boy and she's three years older and because of the age difference and the class difference there are all these reasons why that love could never really come to fruition end as i explored the real big air and ultimately turn to one thing came to me early on was that in his heart he was obsessed with this idea of wanting to trap a single moment in time and the real big eric was was

definitely a possessed by that notion on his the theatrical experiments he came to photography through the theater and from the time he was a scenic design apprentice he began working on pena ramos which were these unknown most you know this does that were painted and we're kind of entertainment in their own right and then he also developed the dire amr which was a huge success and second eighteen twenty isn't making thirty zero the dire and was a little bit like the imax theater of today means enormous people all over europe were lining up in pain you know in france i think it was three frank's to have to go and sit inside his darkened chamber where an image had been painted on it you know a hundred foot expanse are some kind of transparent women and that would be painted on one side for shadow and on the other side for like and then lit in various ways to repeal aspects of the image it was a kind of super reality people and critics you know there was so

realistic that you know if you if the gear did la and a dire our maw of a cathedral when people walk into the dublin chamber of aging inflected they literally thought that they were inside a cathedral so the idea came to me will how would this man be in love you know because there's that you know a kind of nineteenth century a preoccupation with we're one of the big ideas of that time as perfectibility and the idea that if you continue along the lines of a certain process eventually reached the point of perfection and also this idea that you can track the moment in time economist alger for the past year an image that you've seen in the past and so early on i realized that in his delusions he would be it would kind of hold the object of his love up in a very similar way to an image that's taken up in the swiss alps you know it's kind of exist mostly in the mines i am somehow reality

never quite play is about the way he sees it but it's the drive to reach that perfect moment that really in all governments is romantic so it's about you know in many ways a simpler words about love and madness in paris and the pursuit of trying to find his last love among some forty five years later our conversation with dominic smith author of the mercury visions of the week to gear will resume after this brief time what i hope you can continue to check out the fine for it it's b or close

by what share with listeners as it comes early in the book this was very fascinating to me his listeners doomsday list of ten things i want to know mr dominic smith came up with this list and if you don't mind i'll give it very quickly first was a beautiful woman naked second the sun three the moon fourth the perfect paris boulevard five a pastoral scene six

galloping horses seven a perfect apple at a flower type to be determined nine the king of france and ten of course is a bill before dna well the list is is i think one of the elements and the role that changed about a hundred thousand but it's a kind of amalgam of things that i knew de guerre was interested in for example there were early de guerre types taken of the sun and the men from the paris observatory one of the year's big allies an unveiling his process was francois argo who was for a time the director of the paris observatory and you know as photography was developed it immediately i was seen that it had enormous scientific potential galloping horses was something that was beyond the possibilities awfully early de guerre type but indeed his retirement what's interesting is another reason that may mean speculate that he had a very warped

consciousness by that was that he began to experiment with increasingly are dangerous chemicals and processes ie use gold core it nitric acid and certain kinds of cyanide gas too tried to get movement this is really fifty years before the early experiments that led to the moving picture you know the kinds of things that people did with photography of the turn of the century that made them realize that movement can be captured in a series of frames obviously that led to you know the movie industry sometime later they're galloping horses and you know he was a guy in his later years working very diligently towards trying to capture movement and he had this idea which and almost plausible another level was kind of where he was electrifying quite woes in the cameras to try to capture movement and so's the sky he wanted to inject the play with a

new kind of dynamic element in order to kind of create a mirror image of what was before the camera so elements like that were you know kind of drawn from what i knew of the gears work in the period and then there are other things that were just you know sitting with the question of you know if you are a big air base so i knew of his real person in general what i'd invented for him as a character what are the things that somehow a quintessential you know she had to go out and captured ten images today of our age and fun and documented what would that be the end and you and it's a very personal specific question on some level but at the same time i think you all wood as an odd has tried captures things that seem t universal and so the list you know evolved over time and obviously isabella four year had to be there you know that's a really big you know but the

quest that that year was woven through the whole model before we move on from this let's bring a pigeon who he ends up with a strange quirk of fate being an even more important player in this entire book and we think she will be to begin with his pigeons while pigeon is up surely invented character and then all you know the other's no correlation to anything i found in because life that he was a character i struggle with because she is in the now all she's a prostitute and you no i struggled with that because it seemed a very kind of like a nineteenth century paris cliche have a prostitute novel but it was the more i read about that period the more i realized that that was such a intense or pod called the social order you know my my kind of theory of the reading so much history from this period french history is that there was a long

lasting damage to the compass it after so many years of blood and bloodshed and social upheaval and you know king being beheaded those is real paranoia and social disturbance and so it manifested itself in lots of interesting and bizarre ways there were you know in paris are these catacombs that had been there since the early roman days in a paris was originally a roman outpost and these catacombs of the interviews common underground quarries ever since enduring shells the tents rain there would be these strange ritualistic orgies that would take place in the catacombs and these were also the areas where and the bodies from the revolution in other militia and the revolutionary brothers were buried down there so that there are lots of these contradictions and paradox is a tent without without giving away too much of the plot it turns out that pigeon

stands that you know that the name pigeon is not her real birthday i was it was common in certain social circles to have been invented persona and if you were a prostitute or a consulate in a little class system based on that you haven't invented name it she is a character kind of stands between the way that she functions malicious kind of bridging you know the board he corrupts become morally broken down social order in paris at the time and yet she's also affected into this highly idealistic new era romanticism that exists at the time which and to gear you know has really kind of standing on one end of that when you have characters like bolivia who is again you know content create the gears and ended their character bowler in the novel is based pretty heavily on what i can ascertain about him as a person or a lot of his poetry and his criticism from the time and he

also is you know he's doing some very interesting kinds of social rebellion he actually is one that he identify himself as a dandy which is interesting because we mostly think of that as being a nineteen twenties nothing but actually it began during this period and in paris i was really about resisting the social order for style so you know you would wear in his case black which is a very odd thing to do to wear all but in huge shave your head you know and some we will set see signs of that that amuse me knowing and deliberately that not all everything old is new and how funny dominic while riding why is this new career he'd chosen to and i think that's a good question probably one that every writer's for so when they're out there on their first book stiff but it you know for me i've written from an early

age and you know growing up when i was nine and ten i was writing these very strange kind of serial comic novels yeah i'm i think my first one was called operation vladivostok and i mean that was kind of it asa on how about nine or ten and we were talking about you know novels that are about twenty five pages long but with lots of pitches but you know is clearly interested in writing from an early age in and telling stories and there are lots of plagiarize storylines from james bond and other young men and later a kind of mad max movies and things like that but later in college you know i came i grew up in a strain i came to the us when i was nineteen and that i was a big turning point for me i like it was the first time in astray had been setting up protection when i came to the us it was the first time really be involved in a liberal arts education

and that really opened up my horizons as far as what i thought was possible in it it occurred to me at some point that you could become are either and i was actually a pretty revolutionary thing to me and so i ended up transferring to the university of iowa as an undergraduate and it has a very strong writing program and i was involved there as an undergrad are in them in the underground or writers workshop and then really that the kind of commitment in the seriousness for the art form they air it was a really awe inspiring time i mean you know i got to interact with people who would come into seminars and talks and reading you know richard ford and marilynne robinson and people like that and so it was really inspiring timon and i think the seed was lay bare that this was something that you could do the odds were very much in your favor but you could do it and then i you know one often ended a whole lot of other things but i was always

writing ended there came a point where i realized that most of what you need in the early stages of your writing career is just hot you need to somehow steel time to be authorized and it's something that you it's very difficult to do when you're riding on the weekends and at night you need a concentration of top sights on applying to graduate schools and in two thousand i was admitted to be a michener center for writers in texas and this is a program that was really set up by an endowment from james michener at the university of texas austin so i study their own fiction and screenwriting but you know i think center the question really have front on it's the single most satisfying thing for me i mean it's very it's difficult and demanding in its certainly there are lots of long lonely hours involved but leila create something from scratch the onus create something new is a huge

thrill and i think deeply satisfying so nothing else has ever really cunning gauged me as a person so much as writing so you know i feel very having warts alongside lots of writers who are at the state and you know the early stages of the kurds it's it's a tough to tougher racket as they say you know it's hard to break into and on some level you just have to focus on the process and they all that other stuff you don't really control the only thing in control is your approach to the work in and trying to scan to new to enjoy it because otherwise it's just kind of a long lonely road of it's going to go i can say is i'm delighted that you decided to take that long lonely road and i look forward to now because certainly the mercury visions of lead and here is a wonderful think it's so much better shape and dominic smith arthur of the

mercury visions of july we did hear and that does conclude our program for this week i hope you enjoyed it and i hope you will join me next week as well when together we'll check out the fine print for national public radio i'm rebecca they are fb