[In the following essay, Woodland discusses how the literary tradition of New Orleans is changed and how New Orleans' society is portrayed in the fiction of Ellen Gilchrist, Sheila Bosworth, and Nancy Lemann.]

Experiences, reminiscences, episodes, picked up as only women know how to pick them up from other women’s lives,—or other women’s destinies, as they prefer to call them,—and told as only women know how to relate them; … that is what interests the women who sit of summer nights on balconies. For in those long-moon countries life is open and accessible, and romances seem to be furnished real and gratis, in order to save, in a languor-breeding climate, the ennui of reading and writing books.

—Grace King, Balcony Stories

Although an established literary tradition associated with a particular place, region, or city can be of enormous value to a writer, offering inspiration and teaching by example, it can also become an obstacle to success and a threat to the writer’s creativity. The danger is especially severe when the materials of the tradition gain such popular approval that publishers, critics, and other readers demand more of the same. Flannery O’Connor spoke to this difficulty when she described the predicament of the southern writer after Faulkner this way: “Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.”¹ The writer who takes New Orleans as a setting faces a similar dilemma, although we might substitute Tennessee Williams’ streetcar named Desire for the Dixie Limited as the symbolic vehicle carrying these popular expectations.

George W. Gable, in his collection of stories Old Creole Days, pioneered imaginative writing about New Orleans in English. His stories of picturesque Creoles, dark secrets, and old family feuds transformed the exotic surfaces of New Orleans life into the material of fiction. The many writers who followed him gravitated to the same thematic material and descriptive motifs; consequently, by the middle of the twentieth century, the romantic idea of Old New Orleans had ossified into predictable patterns of character, image, and plot.

Much of the writing about New Orleans since Cable falls into two traditions, one focusing on the French Quarter, the other on the Garden District. The French Quarter tradition belongs largely to outsiders, who often focus on newcomers haunted by the exoticism of the Quarter. The tradition centered on the Garden District (or, more generally, Uptown New Orleans) offers a more domestic mood, focusing on manners and mores and unfolding in private places. Grace King is one founder of this tradition: she began writing to explain the ways of New Orleans to outsiders and to defend these ways against the perceived attacks of Cable, yet her fiction reveals a cautious testing of social beliefs about the roles of women and blacks. Another is Kate Chopin, who writes critically about Creole societies as an adopted insider; Edna Pontellier in The Awakening chafes against the rigid strictures of the established society.²

The Garden District tradition has particularly influenced the view of the city held by local writers and by New Orleanians themselves. This literature both grows from and contributes to a perception of upper-class New Orleans society as different and a bit precious. This perception may derive in part, as W. Kenneth Holditch has suggested, from the fact that holding center stage in this society is the glittering artifice of a Carnival ball.³ Whatever its source, this perception results in a population thought to be set apart from the rest of the world, destined for great things—unrequited love, sexual indiscretion, alcoholism, wasted potential, suicide.

In recent years, this Uptown tradition has come under close scrutiny and revision by Ellen Gilchrist, Sheila Bosworth, and Nancy Lemann; each has written a novel depicting the conflict of a central female character with this tradition; their characters and plots, and even their narrative forms, embody the confrontation with tradition. Among the three, Gilchrist’s perspective is unique: the protagonists of her fiction inhabit the margins of this society, and their conflicts with the society take place within fairly traditional narrative forms. Both Bosworth and Lemann, by contrast, offer protagonists who have grown up within this society and whose rejection of it is thus more complex. This complexity shapes unusual narrative forms that unify the rejection of social and literary traditions.

Ellen Gilchrist’s rejection of Uptown society and its literary tradition is the simplest and, at the same time, the most complete. The New Orleans residents she includes are often marginal characters themselves; to them and to Gilchrist, the shallowness of upper-class New Orleans society is clear. Her central characters can never be accepted into Uptown society, and generally would spurn such acceptance. In her novel The Annunciation (1983), a bride new to the city drives down St. Charles Avenue with her housekeeper sitting beside her; feeling a shared alienation, they imagine themselves “new people in the old museum of New Orleans, Louisiana.”⁴ This image serves as a useful figure for all of Gilchrist’s New Orleans fiction, which places characters new to the city’s literary tradition in conflict with the symbols and tokens of the entrenched societal tradition.

Gilchrist’s position as an outside observer who sets herself and her main characters in opposition to the Uptown society is most clearly seen in “Looking over Jordan,” a story that seems based, at least loosely, on the reception of Gilchrist’s work in New Orleans. Its two central characters are Lady Margaret Sarpie, a young woman of a distinguished but declining family who has recently chastised in print Anna Hand, the author of a scandalous book ridiculing the city; and Hand herself, who decides to add a hedonistic dimension to her book tour: “The strange lassitude of New Orleans in summer, the wine at the party, the tiredness in her bones. Why not, she thought. I’ll be gone tomorrow. Get drunk, eat sugar, get laid by a native, be here.”⁵ The native in question is Lady Margaret’s brother Armand, and the three are brought together in the Sarpies’ old summer home on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. Through the interplay of the two women, Gilchrist aligns herself with Anna Hand in opposition to the community’s attachment to faded gentility and remembered glamour.

The title story of Gilchrist’s first collection, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams (1981), traces the threat an outsider poses to the remnant of this gilded age. The action unfolds at a decisive moment: change has come to the New Orleans Tennis Club. Gone are the days when “waiters had brought steaming cups of thick chicory-flavored café au lait out onto the balcony with cream and sugar in silver servers”; now the members must put up with “percolated coffee in Styrofoam cups with plastic spoons and some kind of powder instead of cream.” What’s more, in order to pay the mortgage, new members have been allowed in, new members who “didn’t belong to the Boston Club or the Southern Yacht Club or Comus or Momus or Proteus.”⁶

One of these new members has forced a descendant of the Old Guard to break a once-inviolable code of honor: “There was no denying it. There was no undoing it. At ten o’clock that morning LaGrande McGruder, whose grandfather had been president of the United States Lawn Tennis Association, had cheated a crippled girl out of a tennis match.”⁷ LaGrande’s opponent, Roxanne, is one of the nouveau members; the fact that she and her husband are Jewish makes them even less welcome. The story opens as LaGrande, remembering her Pyrrhic victory over Roxanne, throws her tennis gear into the Mississippi from the Huey P. Long Bridge, marking an ironic populist victory for the Kingfish.

In other stories, Gilchrist creates a variety of characters who, like Roxanne, live on the fringes of Uptown society. An enterprising young pusher sets up shop under an Audubon Park oak tree in “The President of the Louisiana Live Oak Society.” Nora Jane Whittington robs an Irish Channel bar to finance a trip west in “The Famous Poll at Jody’s Bar.” Crystal Weiss, in a series of stories in Victory over Japan (1984) and Drunk with Love (1986), exemplifies a different kind of marginality: her unwillingness to adopt the roles of happy socialite, devoted wife, and young mother assigned to her by Uptown society drives her into drunken isolation.

Gilchrist offers a more fully developed version of Crystal in the central character of The Annunciation. Like Crystal, Amanda McCamey Ashe is an unhappily married woman whose Mississippi Delta origins conflict with the New Orleans Jewish roots of her husband. As a young girl growing up in the Delta, Amanda was fascinated by New Orleans (an experience shared by young women in the fiction of Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Spencer). She encounters the city firsthand at age fourteen when, pregnant by her older cousin, she is sent to a New Orleans home for unwed mothers to give birth. When she moves to New Orleans years later, after her wedding, she recalls her experience as a pregnant and frightened teenager. As her marriage deteriorates, her thoughts turn increasingly to her lost daughter, whom she imagines she sees throughout the city. In fact, her daughter is herself unhappily married to a New Orleans lawyer and lives a few blocks from Amanda. Although the women do not meet as mother and daughter in the novel, events at its end suggest that a meeting may be imminent. (A later collection, Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle, includes two stories that, according to the book jacket, “provide a new ending to” The Annuciation. This additional material clarifies some ambiguities and provides a happier conclusion to the earlier book.)

Amanda rejects New Orleans upper-class society as she gradually awakens to the shallowness of those around her. Gilchrist gives us the substance of Amanda’s critique through a flurry of cocktail party chatter that reveals a startling variety of oppressive attitudes, ranging from racism (“She told her brother she was pregnant and he said, good, he’d go on safari and bring her back a little Negro”) to the use of children as status symbols (“Did she get into Sacred Heart? Oh, that’s a shame”); the chatter, reported with an accurate ear for distinctive New Orleans syntax and intonation, builds to a climax that displays the inevitable results of such oppressions:

“Shot himself in front of his girlfriend’s house while the party was going on. Oh, yes, barely sixteen. They don’t know where he got the gun.”

“Hung himself in the closet at Covington.”

“Jumped off a bridge. Just like his daddy before him.”

“Oh, he’s disappeared into the Quarter. Won’t even take calls. Of course, everyone’s known for years. I heard it was a high school boy, an Italian.”

(68–69)

Moving through this world of shallow chatter and deep wounds, Amanda grows ever more conscious that she does not belong in this world of tea parties and suicidal youth. She finds a friend and ally in her housekeeper, Lavertis; their shared alienation from the community contributes to their common sense that they are “new people in the old museum of New Orleans.”

These experiences contribute to Amanda’s disaffection with her husband and her eventual flight to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where she translates French poetry and takes a young lover. Although Amanda never returns to New Orleans in the course of the novel, she cannot escape the “cargo” of her unknown daughter. Here Gilchrist adopts a motif common in New Orleans fiction. The lost child, the heritage hidden behind locked gates within mysterious courtyards, the dark family secret: these reappear continually in New Orleans writing—in the stories of George W. Cable and Grace King, in Absalom, Absalom!, even in Anne Rice’s vampire chronicles. The heritage that Amanda passes unwittingly to her daughter is the oppression of Uptown society, an oppression that Amanda overcomes only through understanding herself and taking responsibility for her life; only by leaving New Orleans entirely can she hope to escape the city’s snare.

In the novels of Sheila Bosworth and Nancy Lemann, freedom is not so easily won. Although they perceive, with Gilchrist, fatal flaws in the ways Uptown society constitutes itself, each is too deeply rooted in that society to reject it without a struggle. Bosworth’s protagonist must reexamine painful childhood memories, and Lemann’s protagonist seems so entrenched that she may never escape. To these authors, the structures and manners of New Orleans society are not merely museum exhibits to be examined, analyzed, perhaps laughed at, but active forces that threaten their protagonists, who are both members of the society and observers of it. Their characters are latter-day Quentin Compsons, wanting to be free of the ruins of the old order yet knowing that it is only from those ruins that their freedom can come.

Clay-Lee Calvert, the protagonist of Bosworth’s Almost Innocent (1984) is, in many ways, a figure familiar to readers of southern literature. Her search is to understand the past (grounded for her in New Orleans) in order to understand herself. In the narrative of Clay-Lee’s search, Bosworth conducts her own analytical search, using the literary material of the grand New Orleans novel to subvert the genre itself. Her subversion takes several forms; the details of plot and character that we have come to expect of New Orleans novels are here in abundance, yet Bosworth sets them in a context that questions both their source and their effect. We see these motifs through the central consciousness of Clay-Lee, and through her we understand their impact. The book’s narrative circles through recollections and flashbacks, telling the story of Clay-Lee’s past as she herself comes to understand it. We learn the story of Clay-Lee’s parents and her early life as Clay-Lee herself hears it from her mother’s cousin Felicity Léger de la Corde, then Clay-Lee’s own memories move the story toward the present.

This nostalgic tone is set in the novel’s opening scene. As Clay-Lee and her father have dinner at Galatoire’s, Clay-Lee sees their waiter as a link with the past: “Vallon is old now, almost eighty. He used to give my father’s father red beans and rice in one of the upstairs rooms, generations ago.”⁸ Looking at her aging father’s youthful smile, Clay-Lee begins examining her past, trying to understand the forces that led to the death of her mother, Constance, and the continuing impact of those forces on her own life.

Many of the traditions Clay-Lee encounters during this self-examination are those of a Catholic upbringing: Lenten regulations, parochial school, catechism, and fasting before First Communion. The memories of these rituals are shaded by a mature understanding of the oppressions of childhood, as when Clay-Lee recalls, with wry humor, the inadvertent breaking of her First Communion fast: “It was the day I made my First Communion, and it was the day I consigned my immortal soul to hell” (92). For the young girl, the damnation of her soul is less important than the embarrassment of not going through a ceremony so meaningful to her mother. Clay-Lee inherits this fixation on the past from Constance, lost in the sorrows of her own childhood. When Clay-Lee’s great-uncle (called “Uncle Baby Brother” by all) agrees to pay her tuition to Sacred Heart Academy, the exclusive girls’ school that Constance attended, her mother urges upon Clay-Lee the importance of this event: “‘Just think,’ Constance was telling me, ‘Saint Madeleine Sophie Barat founded the Society of the Sacred Heart in France, in 1800, and here you are, almost two hundred years later, way over in Louisiana, about to share in all its history and tradition’” (163).

The rebellious young Clay-Lee fights against the strictures of this history and tradition. When her aunt urges her to read Lives of the Saints for Little People, she turns instead to Louisiana Hayride, a history of Huey Long’s tumultuous career; when her aunt warns her to pray to “the saints instead of making fun of them,” she retorts, “Maybe I’ll pray to Huey Long instead” (195). We chuckle at this youthful rebellion, but underlying Bosworth’s humor is a serious point: the mature Clay-Lee must realize how these traditions imposed themselves on her developing sense of self.

And yet the novel’s grounding in New Orleans does not derive solely from its repetition of the old chestnuts of the New Orleans literary tradition; Bosworth balances the sentimental perspective of the past with the more realistic appraisal of the present. Bosworth’s clearest use of this dual perspective comes through her use of Mardi Gras, always a prominent motif of the grand New Orleans novel. As the central event of New Orleans social life, Carnival often becomes, as here, a prime setting for serendipitous meetings.

The dramatic manner in which Clay-Lee describes her parents’ first meeting suggests how completely her mother’s identity was bound to the grand artificiality of New Orleans high society: “She was Constance Blaise Alexander, Queen of Comus, the most magnificent of the Carnival balls, on the night they fell in love” (17). Their masked meeting recalls those that begin George W. Cable’s Grandissimes and Frances Parkinson Keyes’s Crescent Carnival and is marked by the equally venerable literary tradition of flaunting custom: “As Constance leaned forward to greet her consort, Rand Calvert, far below, defied tradition by throwing aside his mask to see her face more clearly” (17). The special connection of this family with Mardi Gras goes back even to Constance’s birth on Twelfth Night, the traditional beginning of the Carnival season. With the obstetrician still in his satin ball costume, Constance’s mother vows to “dress her daughter in only blue or white till she was five years old, as a sign of thanksgiving to the Mother of God for the child’s existence” (27).

Yet this romantic view of Carnival is sharply undercut when Constance learns, after her father’s sudden death, that he lost most of his money gambling and died penniless because he “borrowed against everything he still owned for the pleasure of seeing you, Mrs. Calvert, as the beautiful debutante and Carnival Queen that you were” (66). We are to see, with Clay-Lee, the absurdity of this gesture, yet Clay-Lee also responds to its grandeur.

As the narrative moves into Clay-Lee’s own memories, she recalls a Carnival season that serves as a crucial turning point for the plot. Her recollections of Felicity and her husband Airey’s annual Mardi Gras open house are cast as a romantic childhood idyll, yet it sets into motion events that will haunt Clay-Lee well into her adult life. In describing the party, Bosworth captures a certain self-consciously gracious New Orleans social style: “Felicity had not forgotten the light eaters and pregnant ladies, either (and it seemed to me then there were always dozens of the latter, in this city of Catholic wealth and dynasty): waiters circulated with trays of watercress or Virginia ham finger sandwiches, offered iced tea to the mothers-to-be, and poured champagne for their husbands” (125). This fragility cannot prevail against the passage of time: “I don’t like the parades any more,” recalls Constance; “I used to like them when I lived in the Garden District” (123). Despite the care with which plans have been laid, the party turns out disastrously when Clay-Lee’s great-uncle shows up unexpectedly with a surprise guest: “Uncle Baby had brought an octoroon to the de la Cordes’ Open House” (131). Damaging as this scene is to the delicate sensibilities of the guests, Uncle Baby Brother’s appearance forebodes more lasting damage: his infatuation with Constance will lead to the breakup of the Calverts’ marriage and to Constance’s death.

The novel’s critical view of New Orleans traditions is manifested most clearly in Felicity’s narration of the early portion of Constance’s story to Clay-Lee. Bosworth draws a sharp contrast between the dying woman and the legendary exploits of her youth: “Tales of her bewitching magnetism, her pitiless heart, ran rife among a certain segment of New Orleans’ population. Felicity Léger had trifled with the affections of a brilliant Jewish medical student, wrecked his studies, and robbed him of his future; she had worn underpants fashioned from a Rebel flag to a childhood friend’s coming-out party, lifted her skirt, and shown them to the orchestra leader, whose band then burst into the most rousing rendition of ‘I Wish I Was in Dixie’ ever heard at the Southern Yacht Club” (23). By now Felicity has become the picturesque aging relative, recounting the family history to the adoring Clay-Lee. Bosworth refuses, however, to let Felicity slip fully into a nostalgic haze; into a sensuous account of childhood memories she interjects a jarring reminder of Felicity’s present decay:

All through the rooms were the blending, alternating aromas of sachet-scented bed linens, hand-embroidered by French nuns at a convent in Vermilion Parish; of magnolias and camellias, floating in silver bowls in every room, each spring and summer; of pine logs burning in the wide fireplaces in winter; of freshly baked biscuits and of French-drip coffee in the mornings, gumbos and baked hams and honey-basted plantains at dinnertime. …

Felicity paused for a minute, to swallow what looked like a Percodan, then went on.

(33–34)

A gashed arm provides the immediate occasion for the Percodan, yet her action suggests that the past itself is a dangerous narcotic, its soothing forces offering both solace and addiction. In her perseverance and her love for Clay-Lee, Felicity recalls other stoic New Orleans ladies, particularly Binx Bolling’s aunt, Emily Cutrer, in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. Her desire to pass on something of value to future generations is especially clear in her bequest to Clay-Lee of a collection of books, one a leather-bound edition of Ovid with a letter in it: “‘Dear Clay-Lee,’ the letter read, ‘go on without me, from where we stopped our last Friday night together. If you start at the place where you recall things firsthand—that would be your first years at the house on Camp Street—you will look well and fairly at what you know of your mother’s life and your own, and eventually you will see cause and effect. Felicity.’” (73). Added to this was a quote from Ovid: “Parsque meminisse doloris, she had written; it is part of grief to remember” (73). Like Binx, Clay-Lee must decide how to interpret these hints from the past and how to integrate them with the knowledge she has gained on her own. Only then can she understand who is responsible for the events of her childhood.

The question of responsibility is posed most clearly by the figure of Rand, Clay-Lee’s father, the carefree artist and defier of tradition who, in the opening scene that introduces the book’s flashbacks, stumbles drunkenly through dinner at Galatoire’s. Rand is the central exhibit before whom Clay-Lee stands, aware that she must understand its meaning for her life before she can move on.

A Times-Picayune writer has called Rand “an uptown New Orleans archetype,” and reported Bosworth’s experience with Rand’s avatars: “‘I know so many men like that. … In fact, three different men have said to me, “Oh, I’m Rand Calvert.” And I say “Oh well, yes.” … I wonder if any other city has them. … I’m talking about bright, sophisticated, charming men who have that fatal lethargy. You have a feeling they wouldn’t be as charming if they had that drive, that Toledo, Ohio, drive. The charm comes at a price.’”⁹

How to interpret the life of Rand Calvert is a critical question for Bosworth and for her protagonist, just as how to interpret the glamorous fates of men like Rand is a central dilemma in understanding New Orleans and its fiction. To see their doom as a noble expression of the human condition is to risk both sentimentality and the perpetuation of a dangerous myth. To deny any mythic quality is to accept the hard truth of a pathetic and wasted life.

The interpretation of Clay-Lee’s story poses another problem, especially for a study of Bosworth in the context of Louisiana women writers, and this problem becomes even more thorny with Lemann’s Lives of the Saints. Although Bosworth and Lemann trace a woman’s search for the meaningful pattern of her life, their protagonists do not, in the end, come to the self-reliant rejection of masculine definitions that Gilchrist’s Amanda achieves, and that a feminist viewpoint might lead us to expect and desire. Clay-Lee and, to an even greater extent, Lemann’s Louise are obsessed with the doom that defines the lives of the men they love.

Although we may question, and even condemn, the protagonists’ concern with taking care of helpless men, the two women make little progress, if any, in escaping this “codependency” in either novel. The narratives of both books circle back again and again to the cultural expectations that circumscribe the lives of the glamorous, doomed men the women love. Clay-Lee and Louise understand the artificiality of this cultural construct, but they are all but powerless to change it. Their only resource is narrative itself; by pushing the tale to its limits, they can demonstrate its essential fictionality. We as readers must wrestle with the same question: are the glittering young men who populate fictional Uptown society pale southern imitations of Jay Gatsby, or are they, as Nancy Lemann’s narrator might put it, The Real Thing?

This question lies at the heart of Lemann’s Lives of the Saints (1985), a book characterized by manic irony from the title onward. Lemann’s rejection of the Uptown tradition is more radical than that of either Gilchrist or Bosworth. Although Lemann’s narrator, Louise, like Clay-Lee, is a product of New Orleans society, she is unable to reach the freedom from the past that Clay-Lee finally attains. Louise is driven both to “record the passing parade,” as she says, and to turn a withering stare on the pretensions of these Doomed Young Men, thereby freeing them (not the least of her ironic strategies is the capitalization of clichéd concepts that have taken on a life and power of their own). The edges of Louise’s picture are beginning to fray, the calm hush of Clay-Lee’s reverence replaced by disorder and the refusal to consider such accommodation.

The “saints” of her title are the Collier brothers, Saint Claude Collier (called “Claude”) and his younger brother Saint Louis Collier (called “Saint”). Their father, Saint Louis Collier, a former judge and present eccentric, embodies in his dress the fading of a glamorous past: he “always wore seersucker suits that he had had for about fifty years and which were always wrinkled and faded to a kind of yellow color.”¹⁰ In describing a summer evening in the Quarter, Lemann makes explicit the connection between fashion and nostalgia: “It was Latin American Night in the Quarter, in Jackson Square, starting at eight o’clock. The time is gone when we were ‘the gateway to the Americas’ and ships left our harbor daily for Havana with all the men wearing white suits. But all the men still wear white suits in New Orleans, on certain summer days” (56). Even the men’s white suits here offer a glimpse of nostalgia, recalling as they do days before air conditioning, when crisp white suits bespoke a certain elegance.

Lemann’s lack of sympathy for society’s pretensions is seen most clearly in her brief portrait of Judge Collier’s wife, who—like Joseph Frowenfeld in Cable’s Grandissimes or Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire—has had to become acclimated to the city and adapt her exterior view of New Orleans to an understanding of what life there is really like: “She was a Yankee girl Mr. Collier had brought down from Harvard many years ago, and she never got over the shock of New Orleans. As a newlywed, she wanted to wear baggy shirts and work with the professors in her department at Tulane, but somehow this was too unlike her generation, and also, there were always garden parties and witty intrigues and carnival balls. Mrs. Collier had to learn to cope with silver, with crystal, with entertaining, and with other things previously foreign to her” (34). She has made the adjustments that Amanda, in The Annunciation, refuses to make, and as a result has become a bitter, pessimistic woman, unable to intervene in her family’s inevitable slide toward doom.

Her husband, the Judge, has made his own adjustments. His three passions—gardening, grand opera, and ancient Greek poetry—mark his detachment from the crazed world around him. Although this response is a version of Felicity’s admirable stoic detachment, its effects on his sons, who have inherited his sense of doom, are severe. Despite Claude’s early promise, he has taken to “hanging around with wino lunatics and racetrack habitués and other weird types of wrecks” (23). His much younger brother, Saint, addicted to Cokes and fatally accident prone, falls to his death from a balcony, a tragedy that leads to his father’s nervous breakdown and Claude’s further decline.

The classic motifs of New Orleans writing all appear in the novel, but unlike the details in Bosworth’s novel, they remain isolated and do not contribute directly to a larger narrative structure. Lemann manifests a curious disinterest in plot; again and again the focus of the narrative shifts from the story to the milieu. One of the narrator’s recurring concerns is the weather: “It was a night in the spring, though in New Orleans you can hardly tell the season as it’s so often hot. A sweltering night in October can be just the same as a sweltering night in April, for in New Orleans the seasons have only subtle differences, unlike in the North. It was balmy old New Orleans weather in the tropic spring, and everything was green and overgrown” (5).

Again and again Louise tries to define what is distinctive about New Orleans, never finding an answer that satisfies her. Each motif is linked to another in a book-length chain of free association that fails to reveal any larger pattern. The author leads us to the question of what might define New Orleans, yet never settles on an answer that satisfies her. At times an overly close attachment to the past seems to explain the distinctive texture of life in New Orleans: “We got to a bar along the Mississippi coast in one of the small towns. It was a country bar, right on the Gulf, and the entire clientele looked like it had just stepped out of law school, with horn-rimmed glasses predominant. The band was playing old songs from the 1960s era in which New Orleans and environs remain, even though it is twenty years later. They’re just always playing old songs where I live” (137).

New Orleans’ obsession with the past has been noted ever since the first nineteenth-century travel writers visited the city, but in this novel the usual explanations for such a sense of the past (the city’s European heritage or its military defeat) are absent, and the focus instead is on the recent past. For Lemann’s characters, living in the past seems largely a means of avoiding the present, ultimately an unsatisfactory means.

Lemann is concerned as well with the potent cultural images of New Orleans—the book at times seems more concerned with these images than with the city itself, becoming a catalog of literary New Orleans. Beth Cooley effectively summarizes the literary landscape of the novel this way: “There is a strange blend of romantic recklessness reminiscent of Mitchell’s antebellum Georgia and an almost predetermined destruction reminiscent of Faulkner’s antebellum Mississippi. Add to this the nightmarish but voluptuous quality of A Streetcar Named Desire and then color it with the ironic humor of Eudora Welty or Walker Percy and you begin to describe the mood of Lemann’s New Orleans.”¹¹ Lemann acknowledges the power of these images even as she attempts to rob them of their efficacy. Her detailed descriptions offer images that are sensuous and seemingly full of meaning, yet rather than linking these images to create a larger thematic pattern, she abruptly shifts our attention to another scene, only to return, a few pages later, to the original image from another perspective. The resulting multifaceted picture speaks to the fragmentation of Louise’s own consciousness, and her deeply divided response to the city.

Lemann’s fragmentary treatment of Mardi Gras effectively points to differences between Bosworth’s approach and hers. In a mood that recalls Faulkner’s Pylon, New Orleans during the Carnival season becomes a wasteland:

The ticket takers were lying around on the stairs looking out at the street with the sallow faces of saints, black men wearing gold theater uniforms, sprawled on the stairs looking out to Canal Street as though it were some slow jazz party.

Carnival, in fact, was pending.

(103)

The objective, slightly ominous tone of “pending,” more suggestive of a legal judgment than a festival, is a far cry from the vibrancy of earlier literary descriptions of Carnival.

The fragile manners of Felicity’s open house in Bosworth’s Almost Innocent have shattered into the jagged fragments of obsolete fantasies. Consider Louise’s artist friend Henry: “In his rooms, Henry hung ominous paintings of Mardi Gras balls, where the queens and debutantes had insanely wide smiles and skeletal frames, holding their scepters rigid in the air. Bland men in tuxedos stood grouped around them, smiling weakly. This was Henry’s plea for satire” (65–66). Yet after Lemann holds the old sham-fantasy up to ridicule, she reclaims it in a striking, unexpected image:

The weather had turned fine. Dark fell. I looked into the glittering night. Suddenly, a parade came out of nowhere and passed through the unsuspecting street, heralded by African drumbeats in the distance vaguely, then the approach of jazz, the smell of sweet olive, ambrosia, the sense of impending spectacle. Then it passed in its fleeting beauty, this glittering dirge, and, as suddenly as it came, I was left, rather stunned, in its wake.

It is this passing parade which I chronicle.

(96)

Only by shattering the old narratives can she regain the experience from the “fragments … shored against [her] ruin,” in T. S. Eliot’s words. And yet, to follow Eliot further, Louise has these experiences of beauty but misses their meaning; she is unable to find the perspective that will make the images cohere.

The manic irony that characterizes Louise’s narrative voice is the instrument by which Lemann maintains a distance from the actions she describes. Her aim is to capture the texture of New Orleans life rather than to develop a traditional plot. The novel is divided not into chapters, but into 201 scenes, which range in length from a few lines to a few pages. This formlessness signals a refusal to map out a plot, and hence a doom, for her characters. Given the narrative forms available, Claude’s only choices are suicide or alcoholism. Rather than make this choice, Lemann stops the novel. At its end Claude, apparently implicated in a racing scandal, simply leaves: “He stood in his dark suit, blameless. Then he turned down Bourbon directly into that gaudy crowd of humanity, his polite, unobtrusive figure casting among it something of dignity. With his hands in his pockets and his collar turned up against the rain, my beloved Claude receded—and disappeared for years.” (144). Lemann leaves us, and Louise, to wrestle with the implications of this mysterious departure.

The hagiography in which the narrator’s affections for Claude are masked is heavily ironic; Lemann’s is not an orthodox religious imagination. The novel’s title is, of course, a pun, a play on traditional religious sensibility. Although its male members are named after saints, the Collier family practices no apparent religion. (Or perhaps they were named after streets—they may as well have been.) When Judge Collier, after Saint’s death, begins reading the Lives of the Saints, Louise takes it as further evidence of his impending breakdown. Lemann refuses to let her Lives become such a martyrology, seemingly the only narrative pattern available. By tracing the surfaces of her characters’ lives, rather than describing their ultimate shape, Louise occupies a netherland between the doomed narrative of Clay-Lee Calvert and the flippant irony of Anna Hand; her fragmented narrative signifies a refusal to accept either alternative, as well as a refusal to reject either completely. Her mixture of affection and hate for the city with disgust and love for its inhabitants leads to her narrative of fragmentation and disillusion.

The accumulated tradition of New Orleans literature weighs heavily in the fiction of Gilchrist, Bosworth, and Lemann. Like the humidity of an August afternoon in the French Quarter, remembered people, places, and actions encourage a lassitude and timidity of thought. Why imagine new stories, why invent new destinies, when the old ones are so full of life? Grace King’s observation in the passage serving as an epigraph to this essay underlines the point: “Romances seem to be furnished real and gratis, in order to save, in a languor-breeding climate, the ennui of reading and writing books.”¹² These furnished romances are not easily ignored.

Gilchrist, Bosworth, and Lemann, each in her own way, have recognized the fatal lethargy of such a course, have understood that the old stories maintain their vitality only by ensnaring new victims and perpetuating their curse. Each writer pits her protagonist against this life-destroying fiction: Amanda and Clay-Lee force the narratives of their lives into new channels; Louise, unable to conceive such a way out, removes herself from the narrative’s inexorable move toward doom. For her, the streetcar still rattles through the city streets, giving form to her nightmarish visions. All three authors transform the accumulated popular vision of New Orleans into narrative forms that offer new perspectives on the city’s social and literary traditions.

Notes

1. Flannery O’Connor, “The Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” in Mystery and Manners, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York, 1961), 41.

2. J. Randal Woodland, “‘In that city foreign and paradoxical’: The Idea of New Orleans in the Southern Literary Imagination” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1987), 134–36.

3. Conversation with W. Kenneth Holditch, August, 1986.

4. Ellen Gilchrist, The Annunciation (Boston, 1983), 81, hereinafter cited parenthetically by page number in the text.

5. Ellen Gilchrist, Victory over Japan (Boston, 1984), 83.

6. Ellen Gilchrist, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams (Fayetteville, 1981), 65, 62.

7. Ibid., 60–61.

8. Sheila Bosworth, Almost Innocent (New York, 1984), 13, hereinafter cited parenthetically by page number in the text.

9. New Orleans Times-Picayune, January 20, 1985, “Dixie” section, 4.

10. Nancy Lemann, Lives of the Saints (New York, 1985), 15, hereinafter cited parenthetically by page number in the text.

11. Beth Cooley, “White Summer Suits,” Spectator (Raleigh, N.C.), September 26, 1985, p. 24.

12. Grace King, Balcony Stories (1893; rpr. Ridgewood, N.J., 1968), 3.