"True stories are not often good art": Some comments on Strange True Stories of Louisiana

An undated photo of the Delphine Lalaurie House, on the corner of Royal and Governor Nichols streets in New Orleans. Image found here. This house is the setting for Cable's story, "The 'Haunted House' in Royal Street" (which you can read online here.

Recently, I posted some comments on literary regionalism's potential for indulging in a cultural provincialism that, as nostalgia, is basically harmless but can help feed the social anxieties of some to the point of heightening their resistance or outright hostility toward the nation's political institutions. As I noted in that post, a fair amount of Southern fiction from the Jim Crow era participated in that feeding. But a Southern writer I could/should have mentioned in that post who kind of passively-aggressively resists that impulse is George Washington Cable. Here, I'll briefly seek to make amends by saying a few words about his story collection, Strange True Stories of Louisiana.

More below the fold.

Back in December of 2008, I posted here on Cable's best-known novel, The Grandissimes; if reading that interests you, you may enjoy this post over at Domestic Issue. As you'll see in that first post, I was initially skeptical of those people who see in Cable a precursor of Faulkner, but I've since come around to their way of thinking: Both writers deeply loved their regions and its people, but that love didn't blind either to those regions' flaws--most particularly to the fact that both regions' codes (legal, social, economic . . . take your pick) were predicated upon maintaining the moral outrage of slavery and, afterward, segregation. Cable's writing leans stylistically toward a stilted sentimentality in his narratives, but I and others suspect that that is a marketing decision rather than a direction in which he was naturally inclined. It's just such a style that pervaded the local colorist writing of the time. But Cable's readers--especially his Southern ones--could tell he was no moonlight-and-magnolias apologist. Indeed, as the Castillo piece I just linked to relates, Cable, whose family was so staunchly Southern that they left New Orleans when General Benjamin Butler's Union army took control in the spring of 1862 (more about Butler's rule in New Orleans here), would fall out of favor with his fellow Southerners for his (for the time) direct criticisms of slavery and segregation.

Lots of background, I know, but it's to purpose. When I started reading "How I Got Them," Strange True Stories' lengthy introduction, in which Cable relates to his reader how these stories--diary entries, letters, rough drafts of memoirs, etc.--came to be in his possession, I confess to thinking, Sure these are actual stories. His rendering, via large gaps in the text on the page, of the original documents' missing corners and his inclusion of lithographs of actual letters and diaries only heightened my skepticism. How very proto-postmodern, I thought. His tone in "How I Got Them" kept reminding me of Hawthorne's tone in "The Custom-House," his preface to The Scarlet Letter, to the point that I felt sorry that ol' Nate hadn't thought to work up a lithograph of Hester's "A" to include. More reading, though, assures me that actual people did indeed send these to Cable or, just as he describes, he and his agent would hear of these pieces and track them down through surviving relatives of their authors.

But I'm not telling you about this book because of its stories' origins in actual events in New Orleans and southern Louisiana for the hundred or so years from its early days as a French colony to the Civil War. Rather, what is of interest is how Cable has given these stories a sense of unity that causes this collection to be more than a simple assemblage of vignettes. In fact, it reminded me a little of Faulkner's Go Down, Moses: each has stand-alone sections linked, mostly, by recurring characters (some recur in the sense that they're referred to indirectly); and the sections don't appear in chronological order. (Cable's book is more strictly chronological, but "Alix de Morainville" is the story of the titular character's past in France during the Reign of Terror, a past she alludes to in the preceding story, "The Adventures of François and Suzanne"; meanwhile, the last narrative, "War Diary of a Union Woman in the South," follows after a couple of stories set during Reconstruction.) More subtly, though, whereas with Faulkner's novel it is the House of McCaslin that is haunted by slavery's legacy, the (almost literal) and thematic center of Strange True Stories is a literal house--the one in the image at the beginning of this post--which is haunted by slavery and segregation, certainly thematically and, perhaps, literally as well (note my source for the image).

"The 'Haunted House' in Royal Street" is actually two stories. The first concerns Madame Delphine LaLaurie, quite the socialite in her day, and the city's outrage when it was revealed that her rumored brutal treatment of her slaves was indeed true; the second is about the house's second life during Reconstruction as an unsegregated school for girls that, with the change in government, is forced to send away its black students . . . if only there were a way to determine who is indeed black that isn't more than a little socially and politically awkward. By themselves, they really wouldn't amount to much. But Cable, I think it's safe to say, sees in these stories something more, as the following passage from early in the story suggests, in which Cable describes the view from the second-story belvedere over the street:

I was much above any neighboring roof. Far to the south and south-west the newer New Orleans spread away over the flat land. North-eastward, but near at hand, were the masts of ships and steamers, with glimpses here and there of the water, and farther away the open breadth of the great yellow river sweeping around Slaughterhouse Point under an air heavy with the falling black smoke and white steam of hurrying tugs. Closer by, there was a strange confusion of roofs, trees, walls, vines, tiled roofs, brown and pink, and stuccoed walls, pink, white, yellow, red, and every sort of gray. The old convent of the Ursulines stood in the midst, and against it the old chapel of St. Mary with a great sycamore on one side and a willow on the other. Almost under me I noticed some of the semicircular arches of rotten red brick that were once a part of the Spanish barracks. In the north the "Old Third" (third city district) lay, as though I looked down upon it from a cliff--a tempestuous gray sea of slate roofs dotted with tossing green tree-tops. Beyond it, not far away, the deep green, ragged line of cypress swamp half encircled it and gleamed weirdly under a sky packed with dark clouds that flashed and growled and boomed and growled again. You could see rain falling from one cloud over Lake Pontchartrain; the strong gale brought the sweet smell of it. Westward, yonder, you may still descry the old calaboose just peeping over the tops of some lofty trees; and that bunch a little at the left is Congo Square; but the old, old calaboose--the one to which this house was once strangely related--is hiding behind the cathedral here on the south. The street that crosses Royal here and makes the corner on which the house stands is Hospital street; and yonder, westward, where it bends a little to the right and runs away so bright, clean, and empty between two long lines of groves and flower gardens, it is the old Bayou Road to the lake. It was down that road that the mistress of this house fled in her carriage from its door with the howling mob at her heels. Before you descend from the belvedere turn and note how the roof drops away in eight different slopes; and think--from whichever one of these slopes it was--of the little fluttering, befrocked lump of terrified childhood that leaped from there and fell clean to the paved yard below.

As you can see, Cable isn't engaged here in straight objective description as he provides some foreshadowing of events in the first act of the story. But I'd also argue that there's something even more literary at work here. The house is at once a vantage point from which to survey the "strange confusion" of New Orleans and, as we'll see via the two acts, something like the apotheosis (or perhaps a vortex?) of that confusion. But this house, as a space whose stories seem to be about more than the particulars of the physical space within which those stories occur, also appears to be not just the center for Strange True Stories but also a gathering of images and narratives for Cable as a writer. I don't yet know enough to say more, but I do know that Cable borrows the name Delphine for a character in his story collection, Old Creole Days, and another story in that same collection appears to be an expansion on an incident briefly alluded to in "Haunted-House"'s second act.

The other stories in Strange True Stories vary in their quality; with one exception, I won't be writing about them for the book project. As glimpses into the lives of women (the central characters in all these stories are women) of the better-off classes, though, they make for engaging reading; and "War Diary of a Union Woman in the South," disappoints because I wish it were longer: it begins with the woman and her husband feeling compelled to leave New Orleans and ending up in a place where they thought they would be safe from the war: Vicksburg; her descriptions of life in that city during Grant's siege are gripping. But they don't become that something more that lets them signify something larger and more complex. "Haunted-House," though, becomes more than a true story, to the point that it just may haunt you, too.

Read More...

Summary only...

The dark side of literary regionalism

David Edwin Bernard, Threshing Run # 7 (1984). Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas. Image found here. About a hundred years after the rise of regionalist literature, but it captures well regionalism's usually-rural setting and life therein, and the implicit tension between the old ways and the new.

I've just finished reading around in Brazil Imagined: 1500 to the Present by Darlene J. Sadlier, billed by its publisher (Univ. of Texas Press) as "the first comprehensive cultural history of Brazil to be written in English." It does indeed seem to be comprehensive (but then again, I don't know a heck of a lot about Brazil relative to the little I know about the rest of Spanish-speaking America, so, "grain of salt" and all that), and it's written in a very approachable manner. At the very least, it's an excellent place to start for those interested in learning a little more about how others have imagined and depicted Brazil and--the reason I'm posting this today--how Brazilians have imagined themselves to themselves.

Though politically Brazil's history in the 19th century does not parallel ours, I was intrigued to learn from Sadlier's chapter on the emergence of Brazilian literature that its literary history does. In both countries in the second half of that century, as cultural and economic power shifted to the cities, the regions of the interior became the subject of writers intent on exploring their topography and cultural and linguistic mores: the essence of literary regionalism (itself an offshoot of literary realism). In the U.S., among the more prominent regionalists and the places they wrote about are Sarah Orne Jewett (Maine), Kate Chopin (New Orleans, and Cajun and Creole country), Joel Chandler Harris (Georgia), Bret Harte (the West), and, later, Willa Cather (the Plains and New Mexico) and Charles W. Chesnutt (North Carolina; intriguingly, Chesnutt was an African-American writer whose first-person narrators often "passed" to their readership as white by not explicitly revealing their race). In the case of Brazilian literature, Sadlier notes the influence of Portuguese writers becoming more interested in the lives of people living in rural Portugal (of course, they would have been reading other European writers doing the same sort of thing, as were the U.S. writers I named above).

An obvious, and relatively benign, cultural function of regionalist writing is that at its best, its depiction of a distinctive place unfamiliar to many readers reveals the people of that place in its distinctiveness and, at the same time, to be in its essence as much a part of the wider nation as any other part. For a relatively new nation seeking to gain a sense of national identity, regionalism thus also performs important political work. Clearly some of this is at work in U.S. regionalist writing, coming as it does in the wake of the Civil War and the beginnings of the settlement of the West along with the rise of urbanization and immigration from both Europe and Asia. But in this writing there's some nostalgia-feeding as well: much regionalist writing appeared in magazines, whose readership was urban and, more often than not, had moved away from the very places that served as settings for the regionalists--and, as well, the stories themselves often recall "the way things used to be" in those now much-changed places (as just one example, Harris's Uncle Remus tales have their origins in antebellum times--though, as near as I can tell, Uncle Remus himself isn't nostalgic about slavery itself). So, then: two levels of nostalgia--the audience's for a place; that place's people for an earlier, now-lost time--are often at work in U.S. regional writing.

These aren't necessarily bad things in and of themselves. But, as per the title of this post, an endnote in Sadlier's book reminded me that they can be, and that led me to wonder a bit about our own contemporary moment.

As I mentioned earlier, though Brazilian and U.S. regionalist literature appeared at about the same time in the 19th century, our corresponding respective political and cultural moments were quite different. Though Brazil won its independence from Portugal in 1820, it was ruled by a monarchy until the 1890s; moreover, Brazil did not abolish slavery until 1888. For another, Brazil's landmass is the size of all of Europe's, the result being that, whereas certain regions of the U.S. (with, probably, the exception of Creole society) never appeared exotic but, rather, quaint, for Brazilians enormous expanses of their nation seemed like other nations entirely to the Europeanized coastal areas. The people of these regions--the sertanejos (the Brazilian equivalent of the gauchos) of Brazil's semi-arid deep-northeastern interior, and the by-then-all-but-extinct Indians of the coastal regions--were the romanticized heroes of these narratives, but they were also types that the vast majority of Brazilians reading these narratives would have had no direct experience with . . . and yet, their writers were establishing these types as archetypal Brazilians, as embodiments of the nation's emerging national consciousness.

It's within this context that Sadlier paraphrases literary historian José Maurício Gomes de Almeida's discussion of regionalism (which doesn't differ in its essentials from mine above) and then goes on to speculate:

It is interesting to consider late-nineteenth-century Brazilian regionalism in light of Benedict Anderson's discussions of the nation as an imagined community. Perhaps the concept of a regional literature, which focuses on a specific area and communtiy, was a way for writers to circumvent the vastness and variety that made knowing or representing Brazil as a whole implausible. (315, n. 39)

This is an intriguing idea. I'll just say that I don't know if this is right, but it's certainly not incongruous with anything about regionalism that I've said above. All of us know the risks inherent in insisting on a single place--or, for that matter, some experience in that single place--as being a synecdoche of even that place, let alone an entire nation. Still, perhaps, also at work in the audience for those magazine stories about Home was the comfort that, as confused, confusing and alienating as life in the city could be, there was always a place where life made sense. (Just to be clear: I'm speaking here of U.S. regionalism. My sense of Brazilian regionalist fiction's audience, as I mentioned before, was that they had little if any direct knowledge of the sertão (the "backlands" of the northeast) and the jungle; to them, these places might as well have been entirely different countries.)

The "dark side" reading of this idea, though, is that regionalism can become a means of insisting on a place's distinctiveness, its misunderstood-ness, even its superiority, relative to (and, thus, to the exclusion of) the rest of the nation. In other words, regionalism becomes provincialism. Just off the top of my head, when thinking about this idea as regards U.S. regionalism I think one could make the case that this happened with the "moonlight and magnolias" turn that novels set in the South took after the end of Reconstruction and into the 20th century, culminating in the Southern Agrarian movement as articulated in the essay collection I'll Take My Stand and, much more disturbingly, in the novels of Thomas J. Dixon (whose most famous novel, The Clansman, was made into the film Birth of a Nation). I think we also can hear echoes of provincialism in the recent politics of some via the "real America" trope that seems implicitly to exclude large urban, more cosmopolitan places in favor of an older, more culturally-homogeneous America. That trope, I hasten to add, is not explicitly a racist or a xenophobic one, but it seems inherently suspicious of the Other--it is a trope as old as America itself. It is resistant to difference to the point of being unwilling even to consider that acknowledgement and acceptance of difference under the umbrella of a set of ideas to which we collectively subscribe might also be American.

You might have suspicioned that I don't think that trope is a good thing. To our credit, our literature largely has avoided being too provincial. That which strays too far that way tends not to survive. Sarah Orne Jewett's most famous story, "A White Heron," has survived--and flourished--not because it is about Maine but because it is about a little girl learning the cost of what it means to become a person separate and distinct from other people, something not only Mainers have experiences with. As goes our literature, so goes our nation. We are at our best when we are not insisting on authenticity or reveling in nostalgia. We'll never find the truly authentic; the nostalgic is always prettier than it really was.

Read More...

Summary only...