“One of the Great Literary Curiosities” of French Quarter Bohemia Turns 100

Ordinarily, that would have been the end of it. The book was a strictly amateur production, it was full of allusions that were unintelligible to anyone not in the circle, some of the sketches were decidedly clumsy, and the authors even misspelled a half-dozen of their friends’ names. But two facts turned this little jeu d’esprit into what The Booklover’s Guide to New Orleans calls “one of the great literary curiosities in the city’s history.” One of the Bills was named Faulkner. And the friend featured most prominently was the novelist Sherwood Anderson.

Let’s go back and start over.

When William Faulkner arrived in New Orleans in 1925, he moved in with William Spratling, an artist who taught at Tulane’s architecture school. When the two assembled their book, they were living in a fourth-floor garret on St. Peter Street. The year before, Miguel Covarrubias, a New York-based Mexican artist, had published The Prince of Wales and Other Famous Americans, a compilation of his caricatures of celebrities. Spratling, who admired Covarrubias, persuaded Faulkner that it might be fun to do a New Orleans version of the same thing. Soon their friend Natalie Scott (who was also their landlady) was writing breathlessly in her social column for the States newspaper that “Bill Spratling is working on a series of caricatures to be called Sherwood Anderson and Other Eminent Creoles [and] everybody is wondering who is going to be who in this new New Orleans Who’s Who.” The fact that Scott got the title almost right suggests that Spratling, who had a gift for self-promotion, wasn’t exactly keeping the project a secret.

The Pelican Bookshop on Royal Street was a favorite hangout of the French Quarter’s literary crowd, and the “Pelican Bookshop Press” seems to have been conjured into being for the sole purpose of publishing Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles: A Gallery of Contemporary New Orleans. The book was printed by the Robt. H. True Company, practically around the corner on Bienville Street, and it was for sale by December 19, when Natalie Scott wrote in her column that it was “really a delight” (without mentioning that she was in it). Bound in green boards, it opened “With Respectful Deference to Miguel Covarrubias,” followed by a dedication, “To All the Artful and Crafty Ones of the French Quarter,” and the dog Latin epigraph, “Ave et Cave / per Ars ad Artis.” A classicist friend shudders at the grammar but suspects this may be a lame attempt to say something like, “Look out—we’re using art to portray the artist.” He suggests that it might make more sense after a few drinks, which is probably how it was written.

Sherwood Anderson took pride of place in the title not only because he was far and away the most “Famous” of those included, but also because he and his wife Elizabeth were at the center of the French Quarter’s social life, their apartment on Jackson Square abuzz with the comings and goings of writers and artists, practicing and would-be. Anderson’s was the first portrait in the book, and Faulkner’s introduction is an unmistakable parody of the older man’s sometimes pompous style. (“When this young man, Spratling, came to see me, I did not remember him. Perhaps I had passed him in the street. Perhaps he had been one of the painters at whose easel I had paused to examine. Perhaps he knew me. Perhaps he had recognized me when I paused, perhaps he had been aware of the fellowship between us. . .”)

Faulkner and Spratling seem to have meant their book to be a sort of teasing tribute to Anderson, but that’s not exactly how it worked out. Spratling recalled that when he and Faulkner “proudly” gave Anderson a copy of the book the evening it came off the press, he looked it over, scowled, and said, “I don’t think it’s very funny.” Spratling joked that Anderson “was taking himself very seriously at that time” because someone had recently called him the “Dean of American Literature,” but Faulkner, a writer himself, was more sympathetic; he came to believe that he had truly hurt Anderson by making fun of his style at a time when the older man was beginning to recognize that he had passed his prime and had nothing left but style. Faulkner regretted what he called “the unhappy caricature affair” for the rest of his life—although in fact Anderson may not have been all that hurt: Some years later he asked Spratling for another copy.

Anyway, these days Famous Creoles, as I’ll call it for short, is a curiosity and a collector’s item, of interest primarily to literary scholars and bibliophiles. (The Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University judges it “the rarest book in the Faulkner canon,” and original copies sell for more than $1,000—sometimes much more.) But is it anything more than that? Spratling himself thought so: “Though certainly not literature,” he wrote in the 1960s, “it may now be considered a sort of mirror of our scene in New Orleans,” and it is that: an introduction to a bohemian crowd of artists, writers, journalists, musicians, poseurs, and hangers-on found in the French Quarter in the mid-1920s.

The title of Famous Creoles is, of course, part of the joke. Of the 43 Famous Creoles (as I’ll call them for short), only pianist Genevieve Pitot and artist Caroline Durieux were actually Creoles, as Creoles understand that word. Sherwood Anderson certainly wasn’t. Not only that, but many weren’t famous either, by any standard, and such fame as others had was fleeting, or the kind that one of them, Meigs Frost, had in mind when he wryly remarked that “so many of us here are internationally famous locally.”

To be sure, a handful have received a great deal of attention. Faulkner scholarship now provides employment for hundreds around the world, and there’s a respectable, if much smaller, body of work on Sherwood Anderson. Famous Creoles Grace King, Hamilton Basso, and Lyle Saxon have at least had their biographers, and Ellsworth Woodward gets some respect as a painter from students of Southern art. A surprising amount has been written about Spratling, although this owes less to what he was doing in the 1920s than to his later fame as a jewelry designer. (Neither of the major museums of Southern art holds any of his work, and he is not, to my knowledge, mentioned in any survey.) But most of the Famous Creoles appear only in supporting roles, if at all, in the stories of these few.

In a few cases this neglect is completely undeserved. Durieux, Pitot, journalist Frederick Oechsner, and writer Roark Bradford are largely forgotten, although they have at least acquired entries in Wikipedia. The obscurity in which others languish is fitting, if we are to judge by literary or artistic achievement alone, but even these least Famous can be interesting in their own ways, often in their own right (like, say, Marian Draper, former Ziegfield Follies dancer turned Tulane cheerleader and architecture student), but especially when viewed collectively.

The Famous Creoles were not a tightly knit group. In fact, they weren’t a group at all, in the sociological sense. They were divided by generation—in 1926 the oldest was 76, the youngest 20—and by social class. Some had been born to wealth or social distinction; others had worked their way up, to varying degrees, from humble origins. Some were Yankees, some Southerners, and among the Southerners the native New Orleanians held themselves somewhat apart. A few were establishment figures, a few a bit raffish. Not all were friends, or even acquaintances. It seems unlikely that Marian Draper and Grace King ever met, or that photographer Cicero Odiorne and President Dinwiddie of Tulane were ever in the same room. But if the Famous Creoles weren’t a group, they did make up a social circle, a loose network of relationships linked by friends in common (if nothing else, they all knew Bill Spratling), by association with the same institutions, and by common interests.

By their nature social circles have no formal leaders, but they may have their notables, and this one had Sherwood Anderson, “our Royal Personage,” according to Hamilton Basso—“the Grand Old Man of the literati in New Orleans at the time,” in Spratling’s judgment. But Anderson was more than an honored elder. A social circle usually has a core, and the core of this one comprised those who were regularly part of the Quarter’s busy social life, a nucleus that would certainly have included Anderson and his wife, as well as Lyle Saxon and Spratling himself. If some Famous Creoles were at the core, it follows that others were peripheral, and some were so much so that it may be a puzzle why they were included at all.

A social circle almost always exists in symbiosis with one or more institutions, and this one was no exception. Institutions bring people with common interests together in the first place, and the circle they form may create other institutions, which then operate to keep the circle going. The Newcomb College Art School, Tulane University, and the daily newspapers (especially the Times-Picayune) brought the Famous Creoles’ circle into being. Its members and future members then created the Double Dealer magazine, the Arts and Crafts Club, Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carré, and other, less important institutions.

Nearly all of the Famous Creoles were associated with more than one of these enterprises, and the criss-crossing patterns of interaction—in effect, overlapping circles within the larger circle—held the larger circle together. The interests that created these institutions also tied the circle together and provided topics for conversation (other than the gossip about individuals that seems always to have been a feature of New Orleans life). Those interests included art, literature, drama, and historic preservation. I don’t believe that any one member of the circle was seriously interested in all of these areas, but, with the possible exception of President Dinwiddie, each was deeply engaged with at least one and almost always more than one.

Many of the Famous Creoles had firsthand experience with the bohemian scenes of New York and Paris, and much of this activity was a conscious attempt to create what local boy Hamilton Basso called “a sort of Creole version of the Left Bank.” It was surprisingly successful.