Mirrors of Chartres Street:
William Faulkner’s New Orleans Sketches
Originally Published on About.com’s Classic Literature Page
In the 1920s,
when so many of the most exciting new American writers had expatriated to Paris
to make their names, New Orleans was often known as the “poor man’s Paris,” because
the easily affordable Louisiana city offered writers and artists many of the
French mecca’s cultural advantages while allowing them to keep their feet
safely grounded on American soil, where home was often just a quick trainride
away. As anyone who’s had the pleasure of living in Paris knows, there’s no
substitute for the City of Lights, but even though New Orleans has nothing on
the scale of the Louvre or Notre Dame or Saint Chapelle, or any of the amazing
crush of the Île-de-France’s artistic
and historical landmarks, it has a profoundly rich and deep-rooted cultural
heritage that’s almost as Francophone as it is diversely American. And while
France had the Russian Stravinsky in residence in the 1920s, along with so many
other foreign pilgrims and exiles, New Orleans was the home of Louis Armstrong,
Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, and Kid Ory, who at the time were virtually
inventing America’s national music.
In January of 1925, William
Faulkner, a twenty-seven-year-old writer from Oxford, Mississippi who was to so mold many of his country’s motley varieties of civilization into a mythic
literary universe, arrived in New Orleans, ostensibly to book passage and leave
for England right away. In the six months that he ended up staying in the
city before embarking for Europe—Italy at first, and then Paris—he began
writing the stories that lay the foundation for the vast body of work that
would eventually garner him the Nobel Prize for literature.
Faulkner had been a poet in
Mississippi, and as he was planning his exodus he deliberately made the
decision to begin writing fiction, and when he arrived in New Orleans he found
a thriving literary community that boasted a handful of leading publications
for new writers, particularly The Double Dealer, which had published a poem
of Faulkner’s in 1922 and which regularly featured the work of such American literary
pioneers as Hart Crane, Djuna Barnes, Robert Penn Warren, Ezra Pound, Malcolm
Cowley, Thornton Wilder, Allen Tate, and Edmund Wilson. Presiding over the New
Orleans literary scene was ex-Ohioan Sherwood Anderson, author of the wonderful
and enormously influential story-cycle Winesburg, Ohio, and Anderson and
his wife were extremely hospitable to the young Faulkner, who they allowed to
stay at their house for a while in January of 1925 and who they often took out
for walks and boatrides when Anderson wasn’t off on his frequent lecture tours.
After what was supposed to be a last
visit home to Mississippi in February of 1925, Faulkner returned to New Orleans
once again to embark for Europe, but rather than leaving immediately he took
rooms at 624 Orleans Alley (now called Pirates Alley), near the rear of St.
Louis Cathedral. His apartment is now a bookstore called Faulkner House Books, which
is where a friend recently bought me a copy of New Orleans Sketches, the
collection of Faulkner’s first published prose works, which he largely wrote in
the five months that he lived at this prime French Quarter location.
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| Chartres Street, New Orleans, c. 1906 |
In January and February of that year
he wrote a series of very short sketches entitled “New Orleans,” which he sold
to The Double Dealer for a small fee. These sketches comprise eleven
reflections on the city, written in the voices of a variety of the denizens
that Faulkner observed in his nightly perambulations (and
imaginings/intuitions). The most affecting of these are the last three—“The
Artist,” “Magdalen,” and “The Tourist”—which delve not just into what Faulkner
saw on the street, but what he saw inside the mirrors of his own growing
creativity, and as the months passed he expanded upon several of these
sketches’ themes and scenarios to create the rest of the pieces now collected
in New Orleans Sketches. As the collection’s editor, Carvel Collins,
points out with great acuity in his exceptionally useful and well-researched introduction,
Faulkner would later expand even further upon many of these sketches’ themes
and concerns in several of his greatest novels.
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| Interior shot of New Orleans’ St. Louis Cathedral |
Perhaps the most illuminating of
these sketches is “Sunset,” a story about an inland black man who arrives in
New Orleans trying to book passage to Africa in order to find a real home. The
man is wholly confused about the nature of the world, and his series of mishaps
ends in deep tragedy, illustrating the vast divide between both black and white
and reality and dream. Even more, though, “Sunset” is a warped reflection of Faulkner’s
own yearnings, colored in the darkest of hues.
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| Giotto’s Ecstasy of Saint Francis, 1300 |
One of the other most affecting
stories is “The Kid Learns,” which concerns an up-and-coming pimp who decides
to muscle in on a much more powerful and experienced man’s territory, knowing
that he’s still years away from being able to pull off such a coup. The story seems
at first to be just a hardboiled sketch of lowlife machinations, but it’s not
just the kid who learns in “The Kid Learns.” It’s also Faulkner who learns, his
imagination taking the story into the beyond as the kid meets “Little sister
Death” at the tale’s end—a reference to Saint Francis of Assisi’s deathbed
addition to his “Canticle of the Sun” that shows Faulkner expanding his
creative palette to include the penetrations of mystery into his character’s
lives and deaths. Cormac McCarthy was to learn a lot from this transcendent approach.
By the time Faulkner wrote “Yo Ho
and Two Bottles of Rum,” the last story that the Times-Picayune was to
publish, he was already in Europe, and his boat trip seems to have influenced
his wide-ranging observations and given his scope a touch of the Melville and
Conrad that he was already surely familiar with but that until then was beyond
his personal experience. The anti-colonial sentiments of “Heart of Darkness”
also seem to echo through this profound tale of the Chinese crewmembers’
collective reaction to the senseless murder of a cargo ship’s messboy by a
belligerent English officer. Even beyond this broadened horizon is Faulkner’s
broadened narrative and imaginative power, which by this point was becoming piercingly
acute.
Not every piece in New Orleans
Sketches is entirely successful, however—many are little more than
character studies or explorations of particular situations, and sometimes they
can be superficial or hackneyed and can often have facile endings tying their
meandering episodes together—but as the work of an apprentice story writer,
this collection is as fascinating in itself as it is auspicious. The greatest
fascination, of course, is that these intriguing pieces sketch out a blueprint
for one of the most fertile American literary careers of the twentieth century.
Faulkner wrote all these sketches in 1925 while also working on his first
novel, Soldiers’ Pay, and by the end of the decade he would publish two
of the greatest works of American—and world—literature: The Sound and the
Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930). He would be back in
Mississippi by this time, unearthing in his works the native genius of the
American south, but as with so many other great writers, his exodus was a necessary
step in his true reflections of home. In a very short time Faulkner would
develop a voice as singular and as American as that of New Orleans’ musical
patron saint, Louis Armstrong, and his time teaching himself how to write in
“poor man’s Paris” was surely one of the seminal experiences that afforded his
work such extraordinarily deep and resonant reflectiveness.
—David Wiley
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