Big Easy reading: A 300-year-old city in books

LITERARY HISTORY

Big Easy reading

A 300-year-old city in books

2057 words

NEW ORLEANS

DRUNK, dishevelled and remorseful, Stanley Kowalski throws back his head and howls at his wife: "Stellahhhhh!" Every March contestants gather in Jackson Square, New Orleans, to recreate this scene from "A Streetcar Named Desire"—ripping their T-shirts, pouring the contents of hip-flasks over themselves and dropping to their knees. The competition is the finale of a festival that honours the play's author, Tennessee Williams, who called the city his spiritual home.

Ten minutes' walk away, on Canal Street, is a bronze statue of an overweight man in a deerstalker hat. It is a likeness of Ignatius J. Reilly, the misanthropic hero of "A Confederacy of Dunces"; for Ignatius, New Orleans is an abode of "jades, litterbugs and lesbians", but the world outside it is a "wasteland". People come to the statue to pay tribute to this incorrigible voice of the Big Easy, and to his creator, John Kennedy Toole, who committed suicide before his book was published.

New Orleans is 300 years old this year. It has been celebrating its literary history for 100 of them—cultural tours were offered as early as the 1920s—but especially since the 1990s, when the Ignatius statue was erected and the shouting competition was inaugurated. Locals dress up as their favourite fictional characters during Mardi Gras and attend vampire balls that nod to Anne Rice's novels at Halloween. Some of the hotels are literary attractions in their own right. The Monteleone has featured in scores of stories; its Carousel Bar was a favourite haunt of Truman Capote and Eudora Welty. So are some of the bookshops, such as Faulkner House Books in Pirate's Alley, named after William Faulkner, a former resident. New Orleans helped to transform him from an obscure poet into a Nobel laureate, just as it turned plain-old Thomas Williams into Tennessee.

If transformation is one of the themes that pervades the city's literature, another is diversity. Like many ports, New Orleans has always been a melting pot: Frenchmen, Spaniards, Creoles, African slaves, Native Americans, free people of colour and waves of immigrants commingled, on the streets and on the page. "Les Cenelles", the first anthology of poetry by Americans of colour, was published there in 1845. As literature migrated from French to English in the aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase, novelists used the community's nuances to explore racial inequalities in the South, in books such as George Washington Cable's "The Grandissimes", published in 1880. Kate Chopin explored the limits of female roles and desires in 19th-century Creole society in "The Awakening" (1899).

In the 1920s the Double Dealer, a literary magazine, was launched in New Orleans as a voice for modernist literature, and to show that the South was not a cultural backwater. It included African-American and women's writing and early work by Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Against a soundtrack of the jazz age, authors took up residence in the romantic decay of the French Quarter; the writer Sherwood Anderson hosted Parisian-style salons for the likes of Carl Sandburg and Gertrude Stein. In his introduction to "New Orleans: The First 300 Years", Lawrence Powell describes how this "Dixie Bohemia" inaugurated "a tradition of literary slumming that has scarcely abated".

Lost in the flood

In the post-war decades the Beat generation passed through: Jack Kerouac immortalised his stay with William Burroughs and their visit to the French Quarter in "On the Road" (1957). The city "at the washed-out bottom of America", Kerouac wrote, was "burned in our brains" before his party got there. In "The Moviegoer", Walker Percy's existential novel of 1961, the war-veteran narrator, Binx Bolling, perambulates around New Orleans and its cinemas in a quest for meaning.

The bygone days of piracy, plantationsand the old red-light district inspired historical fantasia; the grandiose cemeteries and practitioners of voodoo nurtured tales of the supernatural, witches and vampires. Meanwhile the latter-day mean streets cultivated characters such as Dave Robicheaux, the hardboiled protagonist of James Lee Burke's mysteries. Later arrivals showed up in fiction, too. In 1993 Robert Olen Butler won a Pulitzer for "A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain", a collection of stories about Vietnamese immigrants in Louisiana.

In 2005 Hurricane Katrina hit, the levees broke and most of New Orleans was flooded. People lost everything. But, as Susan Larson, author of "The Booklover's Guide to New Orleans", recounts, in time "fresh literary energy emerged from the fact that every New Orleanian had a story". Writing was a form of civic therapy. Dave Robicheaux returned to battle post-Katrina crime. New characters are changed irrevocably by the storm, such as T.C. in Margaret Wilkerson Sexton's "A Kind of Freedom". Katrina became a prism through which to ponder the issues that have always concerned the city's chroniclers: race, history, madness, identity, survival and death.

Today, as in the past, writers are drawn to the freedom, exuberance and tolerance of eccentricity. New Orleans embraces them while they are alive and reveres them when they are gone; writers, in turn, have helped to sear its legend into the imaginations of America and the world. But if the material is as rich as ever, the challenge to portray it freshly is steep. It is hard to better Alice Dunbar-Nelson's view of carnival from 1895: "A madding dream of colour and melody and fantasy gone wild in an effervescent bubble of beauty that shifts and changes and passes kaleidoscope-like before the bewildered eye."

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