New Orleans, They Wrote : Authors from Tennessee Williiams to Anne Rice have lived here and captured the city’s licentious grace

If cities were people, New Orleans would be the earthy and lovable old uncle who shows up drunk (and with a young thing at his side) at sedate family gatherings, all the while secretly reveling in his open defiance of polite society. It has had that attitude for centuries, way before its label “The City That Care Forgot” was mongrelized into the coarser sound bite of “The Big Easy.”

Sprawled over both banks of a crescent formed by the Mississippi River Delta, New Orleans is really not North American at all. Its rhythms, smells, lusty ambience and complacency developed from a delicious mixture of French, Spanish, African, Creole and Cajun cultures spiced with the spirit of the American frontier. In its infancy, pirates, mercenaries, outcasts, drunks, religious fanatics, defrocked priests, gamblers and whores all found haven here and thrived in the warmth of its tolerance. To this day, the place reeks of hedonism, decadence and immorality--qualities long recognized as potent magnets for writers.

My interest in New Orleans began more than a decade ago, when I first visited the city while on a magazine assignment. Subsequent visits saw the hedonistic thrills of Bourbon Street grow stale--but a wisp of profound solemnity could be perceived floating above the laughter, behind the shrill jazz emerging from French Quarter dives. I had heard that no one could know the “real” New Orleans unless he or she studied the literature that spawned in the city. After many visits, I began looking for this other New Orleans, even though the place seems to resent having anyone peeking behind the carnival mask it perennially wears.

It’s morning in New Orleans. The daily invasion of tourists in the Vieux Carre (“old square”), or French Quarter, hasn’t started yet and the Dixieland jazz sidewalk bands are only unpacking their instruments. The early, late winter sun tints St. Louis Cathedral the color of bourbon and water and Andrew Jackson, astride a rearing horse in the middle of the square, seems to be saluting the daybreak. The French Quarter, the heart of the old city, is stirring from its few hours of restless slumber and the scent of cafe au lait and fried beignets, New Orleans’ famous powdered-sugar-doused doughnuts, drifts from the Cafe du Monde to mingle with the smells of the river. A clarinetist starts a mournful version of “A Closer Walk.”

The melancholic spiritual seems appropriate background music for a rummage through the dusty literary attic of the city that probably has been home to more famous writers than anywhere else in the United States, with the possible exception of Concord, Mass. But Concord is another world. Concord is frigid, North Atlantic and Protestant. New Orleans is sultry, Caribbean and Catholic.

Across Decatur Street from the Cafe du Monde stands a 19th-Century brick building with shops catering to the tourist trade at street level and offices on the top floor. The building once housed Madame Begue’s infamous and bawdy restaurant, Tujague’s, where O. Henry held court on his frequent visits to the city in the late 1800s.

O. Henry’s roguishness was tailor-made for New Orleans’ equally wicked character. Years before, he had fled the country one step ahead of the law, bolting from what he felt were the restrictive shackles of his job as a reporter for a Houston newspaper, to hide in Honduras after having defrauded a bank. Returning surreptitiously to the United States to visit his terminally ill wife, he was arrested, manacled with chains more substantial than any job and sent to serve three years in prison, where he started to write the short stories that made him incredibly famous and rich.

He was treated like royalty at Madame Begue’s, whose place was so well known for so long that Edna Ferber mentions it in her novel “Saratoga Trunk,” published half a century after O. Henry was a fixture there.

A few short blocks away, on a narrow street appropriately called Pirate’s Alley, the house where William Faulkner worked on his first novel, “Soldiers’ Pay,” is these days a homey and well-stocked bookstore named the Faulkner House. It’s a three-story, narrow building with wrought iron alcoves full of Boston ferns and other semi-tropical plants that mirror the Mediterranean colonial soul of the city.

Owners Joanne Sealy and Joe DaSalvo live above their bookstore and are well versed in New Orleans’ literary legacy. They note that Pirate’s Alley, which runs parallel to the west side of St. Louis Cathedral, was known as Orleans Alley in Faulkner’s day. “Seems like everybody who’s written a book has lived in New Orleans at one time or another,” says DaSalvo, rattling off the names of literary lions. “Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Dos Passos, Percy Walker, Anne Rice . . . . “

*

Rice, the New Orleans native and author of the extremely popular series of vampire books, until recently was so readily accessible that she was listed in the New Orleans telephone directory. Today, Rice lives in a magnificent Victorian mansion on First Street in the elegant Garden District, a short trolley ride along St. Charles Avenue and minutes away from the French Quarter.

Faulkner was 24 in 1925 when he arrived in New Orleans and met Sherwood Anderson, by then a successful novelist, who nurtured the younger writer’s talent. While living in the Pirate’s Alley building, Faulkner wrote a series of articles for the Times-Picayune known as the “New Orleans Sketches” and began “Soldiers’ Pay,” based on his experiences in the Royal Air Force.

In a letter dated “22 Jan 1925,” he wrote to his mother: “This place is filled with beggars, people following the races, you know. All kinds of stories. One lad about 15 beat his way down here from St. Louis, got into jail immediately. He asked me for a nickel, and I took him to a restaurant and bought him a real meal . . . .”

In March, the future Nobel Laureate described the house on then-Orleans Alley: “ . . . [it] faces the garden behind St. Louis Cathedral. The Catholics, you know, have a Mass each hour . . . Across the garden is the house where the priests live . . . The nuns live in a wing of the same house--a convent. Between Masses the little choir boys in their purple robes and white surplices play leapfrog in the garden, yelling and cursing each other, then go back inside and sing like angels.”

Faulkner left New Orleans for Europe in July, 1925. Although none of his possessions remain behind, his stay is commemorated by a plaque on the wall of the winsome building at 624 Pirate’s Alley.

There is no such plaque at 722 Toulouse St., the building a few short blocks away where Tennessee Williams lived in 1938 while learning to write the incisive dramas that fathomed the frustrations of Southern society.

Williams wrote “A Streetcar Named Desire” in Chapala, Mexico, nine years later, but the play about illusion, repressed passion and cruelty remains a shining example of how good writers are able to capture the flavor of a city from a considerable geographic distance--the technique known as “transposing oneself.” Incidentally, a streetcar from the Desire Line, which once ran down Bourbon to Canal Street, is permanently displayed in a wing of the renovated French Market, a Decatur Street landmark that reopened earlier this year.

A native of Mississippi, Williams arrived in the city after his graduation from the University of Iowa and after having bummed his way through the Western states. In the Vieux Carre, the budding playwright worked as a waiter in a restaurant, now defunct. Unlike most writers, Williams was perfectly satisfied with the meager pay his writing at times brought him in those early days. “My salaries have ranged from $50 a month to $250 a week,” he told the St. Louis Star-Times in 1944. “But I preferred the $50 job because it enabled me to live in New Orleans.”

In 1957, by then a hugely successful playwright, Williams waxed nostalgic about the city. In an interview with the Tennessean Magazine he was quoted as saying: “My happiest years were there. I was desperately poor . . . hocked everything but my typewriter to get by, and that was when you could get a good room for $5 a week. New Orleans is my favorite city of America . . . of all the world, actually.”

Today, as then, the three-story building on Toulouse Street has apartments on the top floor. Ferns and plants deck the wrought iron alcoves that face the street; the inevitable tourist shops are at street level. From across the street, the skylight mentioned in Williams’ play, “Vieux Carre,” is clearly discernible. The residence today remains a private apartment. As in most of the homes where writers lived, tenants come and go, often unaware of who preceded them.

At 811 Royal St., a short distance away, a run-down building once housed a young writer named Truman Capote who arrived in New Orleans in 1945 aboard a Greyhound bus, determined to master the craft of writing. Capote, who was born in the city but later moved away, found the place “noisy as a steel mill. Streetcars clattered and tourists chattered outside during the day; at night soldiers and sailors turned the street into a raucous party. So I took to working all night and sleeping all day.”

He wrote many short stories and part of the novel, “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” while living there. Capote returned to New Orleans later to write what came to be considered the first “impressionistic” travel article for Harper’s Bazaar.

Six blocks away, in the northeast of the Quarter at 715 Governor Nicholls, is the Sherwood Anderson home. Anderson bought the house in 1922 and there wrote the novel “Many Marriages” and a collection of short stories, “Horses and Men.” Faulkner, Lillian Hellman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Spratling, Gertrude Stein and John Dos Passos all visited at one time or another to drink and trade stories.

In 1924, while writing “Manhattan Transfer,” Dos Passos lived at the northeast end of the French Quarter, at 510 Esplanade Ave. near the old U.S. Mint at 1300 Decatur St. (Today the mint is a museum housing an extensive collection on New Orleans jazz and Mardi Gras.) The letters the globe-trotting author wrote from there exude praise for the charms of New Orleans, a city that remained one of his favorites.

Although most writers have lived and worked in the French Quarter, uptown New Orleans has attracted its share of famous literati.

The elegant Garden District, lying roughly between Canal Street and Tulane University, is where most Anglo-Saxons built their homes when they flocked to the city following the Louisiana Purchase. They were shunned by the French, Spanish and Creole residents of the Vieux Carre, a place the new settlers found foreign and claustrophobic anyway, with its narrow streets and Mediterranean flavor.

*

The houses in the Garden District are more typical of New England than of New Orleans and it is there, on Prytania Avenue, that Lillian Hellman spent her formative years and early adulthood in a boarding house, an exquisite four-plex shaded by a live oak, owned by her aunt. Hellman, who was born in New Orleans, is known for her plays “Toys in the Attic,” “Watch on the Rhine” and “The Little Foxes.” But she first attained fame in 1934 with “The Children’s Hour,” her drama about the devastating effects of a child’s charge of lesbianism against two of her teachers. Hellman wrote it while living at 1718 Prytania Ave.

Twelve blocks west, also on Prytania, there is an old cemetery with its graves and crypts built above ground, as is the custom in Louisiana, where the water table is just beneath the surface. Across the street, on the corner at 2900, an impeccable small white house overlooks the graveyard, which fascinated a love-struck 24-year-old who in 1920 rented an apartment there while revising the galleys of his first novel, “This Side of Paradise.”

This was a heady time for F. Scott Fitzgerald, who came to New Orleans for two reasons. First, he was an inveterate hypochondriac who worried that he would die of tuberculosis in the harsh winter of his native Minneapolis. Second, New Orleans offered a convenient proximity to Montgomery, Ala., where a beautiful young flapper named Zelda Sayre lived. She had told him that she would never marry him unless he were both famous and rich. Fitzgerald was convinced his immeasurable talent would bring him both attention and wealth.

While working on the novel’s galleys in the house on Prytania, he wrote a handful of short stories and began a novel titled “Dear Heart,” which unfortunately has been lost. He made two trips to Montgomery, bringing Zelda bottled Sazerac cocktails, her first orchids and a $600 platinum and diamond wristwatch he bought with his earnings from “Head and Shoulders,” a short story sold to Hollywood for $2,500, a fortune at the time.

In New Orleans, Fitzgerald became confident he could really write and could do so any time and anywhere. “Started story [‘The Camel’s Back’] at 8 a.m.,” he wrote a friend, “and finished it at 7 p.m., then recopied the manuscript by 4:30 a.m. and mailed it a half-hour later.”

Zelda married him six days after “This Side of Paradise” was published, when the book was on its way to becoming the classic it remains today.

If any author reflects the schizoid nature of New Orleans he is George Washington Cable, a native of the city who was regarded in his lifetime as maybe the best short story writer in the world, although very few people are familiar with his name today. Cable wrote about the “Negro experience” with such a keen eye that many who read him today think of him as black, despite the fact that he was descended from German stock and his parents were from Indiana. His story “Sieur George” has been favorably compared with the best of Joseph Conrad’s. Cable was considered “the twin genius of Mark Twain,” who made lengthy visits to New Orleans as Cable’s guest.

The house Cable lived in stands among lush greenery at 1313 8th St. It is still a private home that reflects style, wealth and the unparalleled elegance of days gone by.

The antithesis to that luxury is about one mile away, at 309 Audubon St., where a run-down, desolate house was the home of John Kennedy Toole, the slighted genius who wrote “A Confederacy of Dunces” in the early ‘60s.

This roaringly funny, and yet incredibly melancholic book stands head and shoulders above most of the literature about New Orleans. In my opinion, the only other works that come close to challenging its stature as the definite story about the city are Walker Percy’s “The Moviegoer” and Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

Percy, who also lived briefly in New Orleans before moving to a more

tranquil setting on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain, wrote the foreword to “Confederacy” and was instrumental in its publication. Toole wrote it at that bleak house that somehow manages to reflect the tragedy that was his life. “A Confederacy of Dunces” was rejected by countless agents and publishers, which likely contributed to the 32-year-old author’s suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in 1969. Toole got his revenge when the book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1980, the year it was published posthumously.

Perhaps no other city can boast of having had such a diverse group of geniuses in its midst, and yet prefers to hide behind the veneer of the ultimate party town that razzes the world while it dances at the Mardi Gras.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

GUIDEBOOK

City of Stories

Getting there: Delta and United fly nonstop from LAX to New Orleans; connecting service on Northwest, American, Continental, Southwest and America West; restricted fares start at about $380 round trip.

Where to stay: Fairmont Hotel, University Place, 123 Baronne St.; telephone (800) 527-4727. More than 100 years old; marble floors and an overwhelming lobby reflect its Victorian glamour. Double occupancy, from $220 per night.

Le Pavillon Hotel, 833 Poydras St.; tel. (800) 535-9095. Listed in the National Register of Historic Places; don’t miss the free peanut butter sandwiches and hot cocoa at midnight in the lobby. Double occupancy, from $135 per night.

Le Richelieu in the French Quarter, 1234 Chartres St.; tel. (800) 535-9653. Near French Market; double occupancy, from $95.

Bookstores: Faulkner House Books, 624 Pirate’s Alley; tel. (504) 524-2940. Classy, quaint bookstore in house where William Faulkner wrote his first novel; full of out-of-print books by Southern authors.

Libraire Book Shop, 823 Chartres St., tel. (504) 525-4837. Books on local lore, old postcards and posters.

For more information: Louisiana Office of Tourism, Attn: Inquiry Department, P.O. Box 94291, LOT, Baton Rouge 70804-9291; tel. (800) 334-8626 or (504) 342-8119.