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The wealth of the world is here unworked gold in the ore. The paradise of
the South is here, deserted and half in ruins. I never beheld anything so beautiful
and so sad. —Lafcadio Hearn, Life and Letters, 1877.
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| Introduction FIRES. FLOODS. PLAGUES. TEN WARS. SIX FLAGS. But we’re still here and we still have stories to tell the world. The
French Quarter has crawled into its fourth century as the heart of a distinct
star in the homogenized red, white and blue sky. And while it may not be the oldest
neighborhood in America, it is arguably the oldest that has retained a true sense
of its history and original culture, and it is as well the oldest bohemian village. Every
year the Quarter chews up and spits out a stream of eight million tourists, real
estate investors, gutterpunks and celebrities. From the world over they funnel
through this place, a thin, swift current along the steady, perpetual fall of
the Mississippi. They leave a trace of themselves here and inevitably they add
a short story or two to the anthology of their own lives. They
come for jazz, some of the best food in the world, and 202 bars at last count.
One could go on and on expounding the Quarter’s virtues (vices?), but you’re
not holding a 384-page pamphlet from the Department of Tourism. Still, I would
dare anyone to find a neighborhood in the core of a city with more “eccentric”
characters than are to be found in every store, pub, and street corner of the
French Quarter. Anywhere. Just go shopping at our one major food store, the miniaturized
A&P of Marda Burton’s “Making Groceries,” and I promise seven
out of the ten people in line with you will be… well, let’s just say
some of their screws will be “eccentrically” loose. It
is no secret that the French Quarter has inspired many a writer. From French Romanticists
like Chateaubriand to Whitman to Faulkner to Robert Olen Butler, for almost three
hundred years authors have penned tales with ink of the blood that flows from
the heart of the Crescent City. There have been local literary journals: from
Les Cenelles in 1845, the first anthology of African-American poetry in
the United States; to the Double Dealer of the 1920s; to the New Laurel
Review currently working on its 22nd volume. But
never before has the combined merit of the Vieux Carré’s uniqueness,
and the plethora of living writers that have dwelled in it, been consolidated
into one volume. And
so here it is.
The
single criterion for stories was that they were anchored in the French Quarter
of New Orleans, Louisiana—physically, spiritually. However,
by no means are these stories wholly trapped in this 13 x 6-block rectangle. The
characters contained in these works also find themselves everywhere from Sarajevo
on the eve of the First World War to Algiers Point just across the River. Nor
need these Newest Stories be confined to modern times. They wander from the 18th
Century New World of John Verlenden’s “Lost Text: The Hotel St. Pierre”
to a rooftop view of Bourbon Street as we shoot into the third millennium of “S.I.N.ners”
by Joe Longo. It
did not matter how long a writer had spent here. What was necessary was that their
story penetrate the standard clichés that “N’awlins” evokes—Mardi
Gras, voodoo, swamp, jazz, etc. Not to say that stories could not address these
themes, but one would be hard-pressed to find voodoo captured with the cruel integrity
of Jarret Keene’s “Conjure Me.” We
asked for work from some of the preeminent authors of our time and also scored
through hundreds of unsolicited submissions from down the street to the Czech
Republic to Australia. While some material was written exclusively for the anthology,
some stories have been hitherto unpublished, others appeared in literary magazines,
and still others selected and republished from authors’ best work. They are
stories of people who visit the French Quarter, people who have a home in the
French Quarter, and those who make a home of the French Quarter. In them are all
facets of Quarter life—from the homeless to the service industry to high
society. Whether it’s flash fiction, surrealism, or satire, when it comes
down to it, these are simply great stories: exciting, beautiful, poignant, tragic
and comic. Hope,
despair, and their fellow universal themes weave around these stories’ common
thread, the French Quarter—the one thread through to the end, the others
woven around it until they are cut or knotted and the last period is placed after
the last word of a story. Turn the page and follow the thread’s flow into
the next sentence of the book. We
created some semblance of method behind the madness of organizing the stories’
order by splicing their groupings with local cocktail recipes—their ingredients
or history eerily appropriate to the stories that follow them. Give them a taste
if you haven’t already.
The
French Quarter is an American anomaly that has perhaps never truly pledged allegiance
to any of the flags flown over Jackson Square. Trapped between Acadia and the
Deep South, its heritage is Caribbean, African, French, Spanish, Irish, Italian
and many other ingredients in the bowl of Gumbo that is its city. Unlike
the melting pot of other American cities, social and cultural identities have
remained distinct in New Orleans, and for the most part still work in harmony
with one another. And it is in the French Quarter that these groups collide. Only
here could the native college kid of John Biguenet's “Gregory’s Fate”
use The Times-Picayune stock exchange reports to shield himself from a
right-wing Nicaraguan arms smuggler’s daughter who had just finished shopping
at the city’s most expensive boutiques (in a café modeled after one
operated by an East Asian family). Add
to this mix the tourists from across the globe, and it can make for one hell of
an interesting talk around the bar. At one time I forced myself to carry a small
notebook whenever I went out in order to write snapshots of the people I encountered.
Within a week—somewhere between a man who was the fifth child of his family,
born at 5:55 AM on 5/5/55 with five sons from five wives living in apartment #5;
and a blind Mongolian whose lifelong ambition was to shoot heroin in William Burroughs’
old house across the River—the pages were filled, and it was all too strange
for fiction. The
short story, more so than the novel, replicates how we depict our lives, both
to others and ourselves. No person can be encapsulated within the narrow confines
of even an epic novel. Our lives are anthologies of experiences, a repertoire
of stories—the same ones we spout off around a café table or belly
up to a bar. Since
this neighborhood has the highest density of bars and cafés in the world
there’s likely more stories being told here at any given time than anywhere
on Earth. And just as we fill it with our own stories, so it too has its stories,
and these are 37 of its best, the ones we dare unmask because we can call them
fiction.
“The
past keeps rising up here,” Tom Piazza writes, “the water table is too
high.” Characters now gone from our mortal world make their way around this
neighborhood and across these pages. John Biguenet said it all when he once told
me, “Ghostbuster-ing would not occur to a New Orleanian.” Tennessee
Williams believed it was some boy’s lost spirirt that rang the wind-chimes
in his second room, and for this it was the favorite of all his possessions. It
is the past, and occasionally the present, that concern this neighborhood, this
city, as opposed to the future—“restoration rather than reinvention,”
as James Nolan has stated, “rather than the ongoing American frontier of
endless self-invention.” This is taken to a mania by Andrei Codrescu’s
antagonist from his upcoming novel Fleeing the Restoration, indicative
of a paradoxical element here that is concerned with endless restoration. Restoration
of the soul also transpires. Renewed identities are realized through discovering
those you had buried or forgotten, latent. Lee Grue’s “Pretty Birdie
and the Toy Pomeranian” exposes the inherent possibility of recognizing,
as well as accepting, one’s true identity in this place. In
“The New Orleans of Possibilities” the Quarter surfaces buried truths
to the point where a character is unable to recall his own self. I remember sweating
buckets in William Faulkner’s backyard during a reception while David Madden
told me he had written this story, in which something happens that has never happened
before—“Ever,” he said, leaning back, his forehead glinting in
Mississippi’s July sun, his index finger piercing the deep blue sky overhead.
I wouldn’t let him finish. I purchased his book at a used book store upon
my return to New Orleans and read the story while sitting on the levee. I realized
he had not let me down as I finally raised my stare back to the River. Old
Muddy himself is, of course, a theme of our stories, a theme as inevitable as
its twisted current shaping the crescent arc of this neighborhood’s belly.
Its opaque surface hides a world below, a world that some vanish into and perhaps
other appear from. Flat and deceptively composed in appearance, it is a colossal
metaphor for the great story which intimates the hidden weight below its manifest
surface. And
just as we feel the heft of hidden worlds, we are able to actually glimpse the
characters herein behind the barriers—wooden shutters, stone walls, cast-iron
fences—that shield them from the traveling masses (and each other) and peer
into their courtyards, living rooms, bedrooms. No walking tours, nor photography
books, nor history books of this neighborhood could hope to lift the veils of
privacy so utterly. None has ever given us such an unabashed, intimate view into
the mindset of Tennessee Williams in his later years as “The Night Was Full
of Hours,” and perhaps none of his other works have either. This
project was originally intended as a celebration of the living writers whom the
Quarter has influenced. But, in keeping with theme of the Quarter’s past
inexorably rising into the present, two irresistible exceptions reared their heads.
Labeled
“the greatest photographic son of the South,”1
Clarence John Laughlin spent most of his life in New Orleans, and was a central
artisitic figure in the Quarter. Those who made the trek up to his fourth story
residence in America’s oldest apartment buildings, the Pontalbas stretching
along Jackson Square, found over 20,000 books; 15,000 magazines; and 10,000 photographs—between
which he had manged to squeeze a cot for his bed. They were greeted with hour-long
lectures in preparation for viewing a print (it was said that an original Laughlin
had a button imprint on it since he would clutch it to his chest during this time),
hot tea from the faucet, and maybe part of a leftover sandwich. “The
Land of the Poppies,” unearthed by his agent Nancy Moss, is the only work
of his short fiction ever to be published; this from a world renowned photographer
who considered himself a writer first and foremost, then a book collector, and
thirdly a photographer. And
while his story, inspired by Omar Khayyam’s epic 12th Century poem The
Rubaiyat, is the only piece that does not occupy the same physical space as
the French Quarter, one could certainly make the case that the mystical world
Laughlin depicts is in significant aspects similar to the Vieux Carré. The
Quarter and its people seem to defy time altogether—lost somewhere between
the lack of seasonal change and the 24-hour bars—as Laughlin states of his
land, “Time has no triumph here…. The swift birds of the hours fly lightly
by.” And it seems our neighborhood imitates his land’s natural restoration:
“For as fast as the poppies whither, new ones, exactly like the dead in every
particular, spring up in their stead.” He
continues, “And the sum of all their song is to make merry while we may,
before age destroys Life’s sweetness; to seek, above all, forgetfulness of
the dark curse laid upon the race of men.” Comparison to Bruce Henricksen’s
“The Last Bijou” is irresistible: “Life’s sweetness”
is embodied in the peach Andre holds as he marvels at a smear of bubble gum on
the Riverwalk, and later that “dark curse” of mortality is defied as
he offers to push that peach through the I.V. bag for his dying mother. Andre
lives without concern for change, wholly in the present. Again,
Laughlin: Laughlin
touches a similar sentiment familiar to anyone who has spent time in the Quarter,
a more colloquial sense of intoxication—“Ah wine! Would Life be possible
without it? Would Life be endurable? Does it not alone redeem us from Time and
make us akin to the flowers?”—a sentiment celebrated in Ellen Gilchrist’s
“Sunday” and the recipe of a Ramos Gin Fizz. And
when he speaks of “the priceless gift of Joy and Death made into one,”
a better description of jazz funerals may never have been written. But
Laughlin’s eden must come to an end though forces of nature that the Quarter
itself has faced many a time, yet thus far defied. And his characters rest eternally—“this
the method by which death comes, softly and by stealth, in this slumberous land….
to slip easily and without any previous knowledge thereof, just as you would fall
asleep, into the deep dark grave.” He ends, “Subsequent to this a joyful
death among the races of men has not been known . ..” “I
hope to die in my sleep, when the time comes,” said Tenessee Williams, “and
I hope it will be in the beautiful big brass bed in my New Orleans apartment.”3
Unfortunately, death did not find him in restful unconsciousness, nor did his
soul at times. Like much of his writing in Memoirs, “The Night
Was Full of Hours” was likely composed in the graying, sleepless void of
pre-dawn. Concerned
with a plane of reality far closer to the pitted streets of the French Quarter,
Tennessee Williams grants us this last piece of the anthology, a prose poem that
like Laughlin’s is previously unpublished. Williams
once listed his favorite things as (1) New Orleans, (2) the human animal, (3)
New Orleans, (4) Ernest Hemingway, (5) New Orleans.4 He
often described it as his favorite city, the Quarter being “his spiritual
home”5 where he had done much of his best writing.
Upon exposure to uptown society, that world past the business district, Williams
reflected, “I love to visit the other side now and then, but on my social
passport Bohemia is indelibly stamped, without regret on my part.”6 As
W. Kenneth Holditch points out in The Last Frontier of Bohemia, it was the Quarter
that turned him from a “proper young man in a neat conservative suit, polished
shoes, dress shirt, and tie, into a Bohemian, wearing a sport shirt and sandals
on his way to California with a clarinet player in a decrepit Chevy.”7
And it was here that Thomas Lanier Williams found independence, here that he took
his new name. He
called this a place where poets “huddle together for some dim, communal comfort—I
have been a part of their groups because of the desperate necessity for the companionship
of one’s own kind.”8 This is the flesh and blood
over the bones of affordable living that is Bohemia, and these are stories from
our country’s oldest. Enjoy. —Joshua Clark
Back to French Quarter Fiction
Copyright©2003 by Joshua Clark All rights reserved. | ||||
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