New Orleans and its Writers: Burdens of Place

Abstract

THOMAS BONNER, JR. Xavier University of Louisiana New Orleans and Its Writers: Burdens of Place1 WHEN C.VANN WOODWARD FIRST PUBLISHED HIS ESSAY “THE SEARCH FOR a Southern Identity” in 1958 in the Virginia Quarterly Review, I had experienced by two years some of what he wrote about. Among the features that he held gave the South a unique identity was place or environment. He argued that while the South was always American, it was clearly different from the rest of the nation. He cited Thornton Wilder’s notion that “Americans can find in environment no confirmation of their identity” and that “Americans are disconnected” (29). Acknowledging, of course, that Wilder knew all along that the South was an exception, Woodward quotes Eudora Welty’s now famous observations on place to establish his focus on the particular distinction of Southern identity: “I am myself touched off by place. The place where I am and the place I know, and other places that familiarity with and love for my own make strange and lovely and enlightening to look into, are what set me to writing my stories. . . . place opens a door in the mind.” Accordingly, she remarked upon “the blessing of being located— contained” (30). Woodward legitimately characterized the South in this manner, and yet some concerns about Southern identity and indelibility expressed so well by Michael Kreyling in his study Inventing Southern Literature have merit. He argues that Woodward as an historian and the Agrarians and later Louis D. Rubin, Jr., have advanced the image of a South at the expense of omitting realities of its composition that do not fit its perceivedandsubsequentlycreated,ortouseKreyling’sword“invented” (xii), shape. The centrality of Confederate experience seems largely to be a given among those historians and literary scholars who have advanced the study of the South over the first three quarters of the twentieth century, and yet there are places in the South that do not correspond to the image 1 This was the keynote address at the 2009 Mississippi Philological Association Conference at Mississippi College, Clinton, Mississippi. Thanks to Professor James Potts, the conference director, for his cooperation in this publication. 196 Thomas Bonner, Jr. that has been projected. The most immediate example of this comes in the memoir Outside the Southern Myth by Faulkner and Welty scholar Noel Polk, whose Southern rearing in Picayune, Mississippi, does not include an antebellum and Civil War heritage. He observes: There were no Civil War battles in the area, so we had no statues of Civil War heroes adorning our courthouse square—we had no courthouse square, for that matter. We had no huge courthouse or antebellum homes sporting minié ball scars which we showed to visitors. I never to my knowledge talked to a Civil War veteran or anybody else who knew one, and I never heard tales about The War. (xi) Of course, the reason for this non-mythic experience lies in the fact that most towns in this part of Mississippi developed after the Civil War when the Northern lumber industry became interested in harvesting the pine forests so common here. We can find examples similar to Polk’s experiences, however, in areas that predated the Civil War, but felt neither the winds nor the flames of that conflict. New Orleans stands apart from the myth of the South as articulated since the death in 1889 of the Confederacy’s president Jefferson Davis. Never comfortable with being an entirely American city, clearly not pleased during the Spanish occupation, and noticeably angry with the French for ceding it to Spain initially and then selling it to the United States, New Orleans has had its own identity that resembles metaphorically its insular geography. Near the end of the Mississippi River, it developed its own way. A. J. Liebling was right in The Earl of Louisiana when he wittily remarked that the city was not the southernmost part of the United States but the northernmost border of Central America and the westernmost outpost of Bourbon Europe (87-88). So despite its essential anti-American leanings, New Orleans was comfortable with the status quo at the outset of the Civil War; it wanted no part of...