Spectator's Journal/We Never Called It "The Big Easy"
Gold, Victor
SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL WE NEVER CALLED IT "THE BIG EASY" There is a New Orleans accent... associated with downtown New Orleans; particularly with the German and Irish Third Ward, that is hard to...
...The tourist A. J. Liebling, quoted by John Kennedy Toole in A Confederacy of Dunces o you're visiting New Orleans for the first time...
...This means leaving the beaten tourist path to take in one of the city's out-of-the-way neighborhood restaurants, where the natives eat not pompano en papillote but red or pinto beans-andrice, and fried oyster poorboys...
...3. The quaint carriage ride around the Quarters is fine, but the only true transportation in New Orleans, for cultural research, is via taxicab...
...There is always either an election or post-election vote fraud investigation going on in Louisiana...
...Will you shut up, Jones...
...Elia Kazan's Panic in the Streets, a cinema verite film of 1950, covered the darker side of the Crescent City's waterfront...
...4. Either before or during your visit, acquire and delve into the following reference books to put you into the spirit of things: Confederacy and The Earl, of course...
...I'll get to you next...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1990 35...
...Once published, A Confederacy of Dunces won a Pulitzer Prize andbecame one of the best-selling novels of the 1980s...
...Okay," Jones answered...
...This excludes, the discerning traveler will note, visiting the city during Mardi Gras season, the worst of all possible times to enjoy New Orleans-as-New Orleans and not as a mecca for indiscriminate tourists...
...The name of the city is New Or-tuns or Or-lyuns, never New Or-leens (except when Louis Armstrong sings it...
...Nobody knew the town better than Toole, who died by his own hand in 1969, at age thirty-two...
...But to find the city beyond the stereotype, think of it as a blue-collar rather than a ruffled-shirt town...
...Where that started, I'll never know...
...The reason, as you might expect, is that the same stocks that brought the accent to Manhattan imposed it on New Orleans...
...5. Finally, make a special effort to ingratiate yourself with the locals by learning the native patois...
...which is to say that all the blackened redfish craze has done, in addition to ruining a lot of 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1990 good seafood, is replace one myth with another...
...Oo-wee," the Negro said across the room...
...the sergeant called out...
...Odds are your driver willbe one of the Assessor's relatives...
...and Mary Lou Widmer's New Orleans in the Thirties (Pelican, 1989), a period book that evokes a sense of the city as a community, not a tourist trap...
...Say, I didn call nobody no cawmniss," Jones said .. . [from A Confederacy of Dunces (1980)] Surely this wasn't Creole New Orleans, the Land of Dreams perceived by Manhattan publishers...
...For that matter, write off December through March—the chill, dank, drizzly months when, if your object is to get away for the winter, your money will spend better in Florida...
...But don't call it, for God or John Kennedy Toole's sake, The Big Easy...
...but in all my years in the city, I never heard it uttered by a New Orleanian...
...It has its Robichauxs, Heberts, and Prudhommes, descended from the early French Acadian migrants to south Louisiana, but they are stirred in with the Mancusos, Reillys, Kolbs, Joneses, and Levys, all ingredients in the ethnic jambalaya that makes the town unique...
...J. Liebling alone fairly reflected Toole's, which is to say the real, New Orleans, in The Earl of Louisiana (1961...
...Harnett Kane's Louisiana Hayride (Morrow/Pelican), in particular Chapter XVIII, "Campaign a la Mardi Gras...
...the sergeant asked the old man...
...I didn't mean it," the little man said sadly, noticing how fiercely the sergeant was handling the little cards...
...Not that there haven't been a few films over the years that showed glimpses of the real New Orleans...
...Fellas wit' him at Hot Springs tell me he's champin' at da bit to go...
...Excess, yes, corruption, certainly, .1— r but they still haven't got it right...
...Too late to write a book about it...
...Go, live it up, but above all, look and listen...
...The rejection slips piled up and Toole died convinced he was a failure...
...He's like a hoss dat woik is what he needs . . . a stoiling campaigner . . ." In the meanwhile, as the Assessor would say, Hollywood's portrayal of the city was largely confined to epics like The Buccaneer, a tinseled history of the legendary Jean Lafitte, with by Victor Gold Fredric March, of all unlikely swashbucklers, starring in the 1938 version, and Yul Brynner, of all unlikely bayou-dwellers, in the 1958 remake...
...a little of Marseilles or Paris-on-the-Mississippi, but more like a Baltimore-with-style...
...Significantly, neither of these films was touted by its studio as a "New Orleans" picture, because they didn't fit into the Hollywood perception of what a "New Orleans" picture should be...
...A decade later, nudged by the author's persistent mother, no less a sponsor than Walker Percy re-submitted Confederacy, calling it "a great rumbling farce of Falstaffian dimensions...
...In the 1960s, when A Confederacy of Dunces was making the publishing rounds, they thought of New Orleans in terms of Creole cuisine, Mardi Gras, Dixieland jazz, and Blanche DuBois...
...I said gently that I had come to talk politics, and asked him what he had heard about Governor Long's condition . . . "I hear he's on da steady improve all da time," the Assessor said...
...New York editors (along with Hollywood filmmakers) have always held a skewed vision of Toole's (and my) hometown...
...Ask, then listen...
...The outside world's misperception of his hometown persists, albeit in a different package...
...Incredibly, not even the endorsement of one of the great Southern writers of our time could get Toole's manuscript published...
...At the time of his death he was an unpublished author, a frustrated genius endowed with perfect pitch for the sound and sight of a culture foreign to New York editors...
...2. By all means, take in Bourbon Street and at least one of the city's haute cuisine restaurants (some but not all of which are in the French Quarter...
...You ast me, it was probly some communiss thought it up...
...Toole's New Orleans cut across that stereotype...
...The sergeant looked over the cards and said, "Patrolman Mancuso here says you Victor Gold is national correspondent for The American Spectator and frequently—in April May, October, or November—returns to his hometown for an oyster poorboy and bottle of Dixie...
...f all the foreign writers who've...
...Odds are you'll run into any number of Toole's characters...
...Panic in the Streets, after all, was about a pneumonic plague scare, not a Mardi Gras orgy...
...What's your name...
...A brief travel advisory is in order, and what better place to begin than the legend of John Kennedy Toole...
...New Orleans may not be a Creole city of antebellum charm, but neither is it a village of two-stepping Cajuns just in from the Andouille Festival at Evangeline Oak...
...Here then, for the first-time visitor, are a few travel tips on how to make the most out of your stay in John Kennedy Toole's hometown: 1. Unless you've already been suckered into a super-saver bargain basement air excursion, don't plan your trip for the months of June, July, August, or September...
...Besides, the books have already been written, and the "particularities" of America's Most Interesting City (in this case a Chamber of Commerce come-on that happens to be accurate) are there for any tourist who, like Liebling, cares to look beyond the myth...
...Call it Or-tuns, call it Or-lyuns, call it, if you're carried away by Chamber of Commerce slogans, America's Most Interesting City, or The City That Care Forgot...
...It wasn't so much that Toole was a misunderstood writer, only that he chose to write about a misunderstood subject...
...Claude Robichaux," he answered and put his little cards on the desk before the sergeant...
...covered the city in the past eighty years—roughly speaking, since the great Irish and European migration of the early 1900s—A...
...Mancuso says you say all policemen are communiss...
...Sadly, the advent of franchise barbarism has depleted the number of these homegrown eateries in recent years (a Jackin-the-Box has replaced the venerable Beacon in my old neighborhood), but the native culture survives in places like Jaeger's, at the corner of Elysian Fields and Galvez...
...The truth of the matter is that there are only four months of the year when a tourist can take in the city at its best—April, May, October, and November...
...Tennessee Williams they bought, but who were these characters and where did they come from...
...while Hard Times was about a bareknuckle fighter down on his luck, not General Beauregard losing the plantation...
...Back came the movie-makers, this time to discard the old Creole scenario and show the city as a Cajun kingdom, a hotbed of sybaritic excess and bastard-French corruption: The Big Easy...
...while Walter Hill's 1975 mini-classic Hard Times, with Charles Bronson and James Coburn, captured the oystershell texture of the town (including its varied speech patterns) in the Depression thirties...
...What Percy calls "the particularities of New Orleans" are as little known to outsiders today as they were when Confederacy was making the New York publishing rounds...
...John Chase's Frenchmen, Desire Good Children (and Other Streets of New Orleans), a lively 1960 history of the city, published by Robert L. Crager & Co...
...Yet Toole, despite belated recognition of his comic genius, remains a failure in one regard...
...Then, in the early 1980s, came the ubiquitous Chef Paul Prudhomme with his blackened redfish and super-hype of bayou culture, Faster than you could say, Laissez le bon temps router, New Orleans was transmogrified...
...When the book finally found a home, it was at Louisiana State University Press, where Percy's praise of Toole's "rendering of the particularities of New Orleans, its out-of-the-way neighborhoods, its odd speech" was duly appreciated...
...Engage your driver in conversation about either the Saints or the latest election/vote fraud investigation going on in Louisiana...
...particularly with the German and Irish Third Ward, that is hard to distinguish from the accent of Hoboken, Jersey City, and Astoria, Long Island where the-Al Smith inflection, extinct in Manhattan, has taken refuge...
...resisted arrest and called him a communiss...
...What the Chamber won't tell you is that New Orleans is also America's Most Miserable Mid-Summer Vacation City...
Vol. 23 • February 1990 • No. 2
