The Mysteries of New Orleans (The Longfellow Series of American Languages and Literatures)
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In 1845, family responsibilities compelled Baron Alexander to remarry, and he took a Protestant spinster as a wife. This marriage would remain childless. Due to the poor air in the city, the baron’s new wife soon withdrew from Munich, settling with the younger children in a newly purchased property in Streitberg.17 This left Baron Alexander alone in the capital, where he was in the habit of changing apartments more than once every year.18
In the meantime my son Ludwig had completed the Gymnasium at Neuburg on the Danube, but owing to his inclinations and my own frequent absences from Munich, it was not held to be prudent to have him enter the University there right away. Instead he obtained a place at the Lyceum at Freising, where I placed him under the control of Freuden-sprung, the able rector of this institution. He remained there for a year, and only then did he transfer to Munich for specialized study. Since he was unsteady and variable in his character, he could never come to a decision as to what career he would chose. First he wanted to be a jurist, then a physician, then he simply wanted to train as a writer. In this manner a year passed, during which he attended the courses of the University in philosophy when I was in Munich, skipping classes when I was out of town. This was my son, who otherwise had so many abilities, who learned and grasped everything so quickly, and it caused me so much concern that I looked to the future with nothing but anxiety.19
Baron Alexander consulted various authorities to see what to do with this wayward, unsteady young man, and they recommended placing him under stricter ecclesiastical discipline. Ludwig rejected this suggestion, since it ran against his nature.
By the start of 1848, Baron Alexander had already decided Ludwig had to leave. He petitioned the king to permit Ludwig to enter the military service of the British East India Company, arguing that Ludwig was “talented but frivolous to the highest degree” and that he was in no position to control his son’s conduct; during his last absence of three months, the young Ludwig had managed to run up seven hundred guilders in debts. Since Baron Alexander could not afford to place his son under continual surveillance, his solution was that “he must go at once to a distant quarter of the world.” The strict discipline of such a post, far from any chance of family aid, would perhaps help bring him around. The king was asked to release Ludwig from his obligation of Bavarian military service and allow him to apply his student stipend to travel costs so he could go abroad.20 Just under the surface of this petition is the father’s obvious fear that his son might be retracing the downward path into insanity already taken by his institutionalized mother.
During the outbreak of revolutionary tumult that swept Germany in March 1848, which before the end of the month would precipitate the abdication of King Ludwig I, Baron Alexander was sent to the Rhenish Palatinate to report on the state of popular opinion. He soon had another unpleasant surprise: “On returning to Munich from my mission, I found my son Ludwig absent, and it was only after several days of searching in town that he was at last discovered in Brunthal, a resort for residents of Munich, where he had quartered himself together with a friend of his persuasion, a young Count Voltolini, and both of them had been living it up for weeks at my expense.”21 This passage is the only one hinting that Ludwig might have been homosexual, since the phrase seiner Überzeugung, here translated as “of his persuasion,” could be interpreted that way. The delicacy with which Baron Alexander danced around the subject was precisely the same way he had handled questions of his wife’s sexuality five years before.
What is missing from this confession of family sorrows is any indication that Ludwig von Reizenstein was involved in the political troubles in Munich of 1847–48 surrounding Lola Montez, the “favorite” of King Ludwig I.22 In later years, Ludwig von Reizenstein would claim to have been a member of the Alemannia Corps, a student fraternity that served as Lola’s personal bodyguard at the end of 1847 and in the early weeks of 1848. Led by Fritz Peissner, the corps had promoted the establishment of a secular state that would reduce the role of political Catholicism in Bavaria; several members of the corps joined Lola on the first stages of her exile from Munich. The records of the Bavarian government, however, including those dealing directly with the Alemannia Corps, never mention Ludwig von Reizenstein, nor do police records cite him as one of those expelled from the university once the fraternity had been banned.23
Whether or not Ludwig von Reizenstein had been involved in the “Lola Affair,” his father remained convinced Ludwig had no future in Bavaria. When a Herr Steinberger from Bayreuth recruited Ludwig to run his farm in America, Baron Alexander agreed to ship Ludwig there: “[Ludwig] eagerly agreed to this, since he always loved change in his life, worshiped the ideal of the free spirit, and expected to make mountains of money in the New World.” Steinberger, however, died of cholera on the passage to America. Soon Ludwig ran out of cash and had to go to work.
At the outset he split oysters on the shore, watched cows for a farmer, then he also edited a newspaper for a time, an undertaking which he soon gave up, since he lacked capital… then he traveled through most of the American states selling birdcages, coming finally to St. Louis, Missouri, where he met a relative, a Baron Eglofstein, who ran a surveying office. He finally felt more suited to this occupation than to any of the others he had yet tried, and he soon learned it and established himself in New Orleans as a civil engineer and architect, a business that brought him sufficient income to raise him to the level where he could obtain a house and garden in his last place of residence.
If I had not left him on his own, had I supported him occasionally as he desired, he would never have achieved autonomy or grasped the necessity for a man to lift himself by his own efforts. He also found a wife to support him on the course he had chosen, a women he said was the daughter of a Colonel Schroder, who appears to have brought with her a considerable dowry of understanding and strength of character. These were qualities that gave needed support and persistence to our ever-trembling reed. In the first years he gave me considerable news of his efforts, but later he no longer concerned himself with his relatives living in another part of the world. He did not care whether his father, mother or siblings still lived, and he only gave any sign of life when I demanded a statement on a matter of business.24
Although the father seems to display a grudging pride at his son’s eventual self-mastery, Ludwig’s obvious disinterest in the fate of his relatives in Germany provoked Baron Alexander’s scorn. It was the second son, Ernst, who carried on the traditions of the Reitzenstein-Hartungs line, even though Ernst’s military career had been blighted by dubious loyalties in the revolutionary year of 1848.25 Ernst went on to marry a factory owner’s daughter and fulfill, on a modest scale, the expectations his father had harbored for his older brother. In his will, published after his death in 1890, Alexander von Reitzenstein felt bound to grant only a minimal portion of the estate to the family of his eldest son, since Ludwig had pursued democratic political imperatives, even marrying in America without his father’s permission.26
Ludwig von Reizenstein’s ambivalence about his family and social rank is indicated by the evolution of his own name in the course of his life in New Orleans. In the 1850s, soon after the heyday of the democratic forty-eighter immigration, he was simply Ludwig Reizenstein, then by the late 1860s he had become Ludwig von Reizenstein, and by the end of his life he was known as “Baron von Reizenstein.”27
On 12 May 1851 Ludwig von Reizenstein entered the public record in America by launching a weekly German newspaper, Alligator, published by a group of reptilian “saurians” in New Orleans and its suburb of Lafayette. By the next year he was living in Pekin, Illinois, near Peoria, and on 23 March 1852 he circulated the prospectus for a paper called Der Pekin Demokrat, in which he promised he would soon publish a novel entitled Die Geheimnisse von New Orleans.28 He is mentioned serving as secretary for an assembly hastily called in Pekin in late April 1852 to hear an address by the German revolutionaries Amand Goegg and Ernst Violand.29 He must have left Pekin with
in months, since he first appeared in a New Orleans city directory for 1853, published in late 1852, and would continue to be listed as a New Orleans resident until his death.30 Following his failed efforts to launch his own journal, Ludwig von Reizenstein wrote first for the Louisiana Staats-Zeitung (1850–66), the more radical of the two major German dailies. Its rival, the Deutsche Zeitung (1848–1915), was also anticlerical and Unionist but tended to defend the status quo (specifically the institution of slavery) in New Orleans and Louisiana.31
Despite his episodic involvement with journalism, Reizenstein usually stated his profession as draftsman, architect, engineer, surveyor, or civil engineer,32 although much of his income appears to have come from surveying or preparing illustrations of property posted at auctions (an occupation for marginal artists, which he describes in detail in Book II of The Mysteries). The Notarial Archive of Orleans Parish preserves a large number of Reizenstein paintings, most of which display only perfunctory skill. He changed residences with a nervous frequency exceeded only by his father in Munich, moving from the uptown area to the French Quarter and back, sometimes relocating only a few doors away from one year to the next.33
Reizenstein’s obsession with the insects and plants of Louisiana was already blooming in the pages of The Mysteries and would bring him a quiet sort of local scientific renown, but old associates also recalled with dismay his vain efforts to find a mathematical formula for winning the lotteries in Havana and Louisiana.34 As will be seen, his quick, broad intelligence never allowed him any rest.
Publishing The Mysteries of New Orleans
The novel that Reizenstein completed in December 1853, Die Geheimnisse von New Orleans, had clearly been on his mind since early 1852, when he announced it in his prospectus for Der Pekin Demokrat, but later commentators argued that he had been moved to publish it by the horrors of the yellow fever epidemic during the summer of 1853 or by his disgust at the reception that the social world of New Orleans accorded Duke Paul of Württemberg in the autumn of that year.35
In 1852 a French-language novel entitled Les mystères de la Nouvelle-Orléans began publication in La Semaine littéraire, an occasional supplement to La Semaine. The author of this novel-in-progress was the French-born radical Charles Testut (ca. 1819–92). There is no obvious link between that novel and Reizenstein’s effort, other than title, location, and a similar fascination with occultism and decadence. After the publication of the first two “volumes” (actually fascicles of about a hundred pages each), the French novel misplaced its narrative threads so that volumes 3 and 4 became exclusively concerned with Testut’s current hobbyhorses of spiritualism and religious sectarianism, especially Mormonism.36
Publication of The Mysteries of New Orleans began on 1 January 1854, headed by a “Note to the Reader” dated December 1853. It began running in tandem with a novel by Alexandre Dumas. In a note dated 12 January 1854, the editors announced that Ludwig Reizenstein had taken over editorship of the literary section of the paper due to the great response the newspaper had received from the new novel. They promised not only that the novel would be continued, since interest was likely to rise as the novel unfolded, but also that “additional sketches with a political, religious and artistic content” would be added.37 After this point, Dumas was relegated to the back pages and The Mysteries occupied the right two columns of the first page, sometimes with a few verses to fill out the space. At the end of the first month of publication, Reizenstein published a mocking “Monthly Report of the Literary Editor,” thanking his women readers for their support and taking account of criticisms of the novel voiced by writers of the competing Deutsche Zeitung:
For several weeks the seven-star-constellation of the Deutsche Zeitung has swung through all the bars and coffeehouses of New Orleans, spreading Stardust and accusing the Louisiana Staats-Zeitung of being a “courtesans’ paper.” If these gentlemen possessed any intellectual or literary education they would see that this comment is more a compliment than an insult to the companions they so hate. Lais, Aspasia, and Nanon de l’Enclos [sic] were all courtesans, and they were the very focus of the artistic and intellectual efforts of their day. Since the existence of a “courtesan’s paper” assumes a readership of courtesans, we can indeed be very proud of our paper. If the Deutsche Zeitung really insists so much about “decency,” “good morals,” and its “moral, country-oriented” nature, then it will only be read by shy, superannuated virgins unwilling to look any man in the eye. In that case, we leave our colleagues to take over the eunuch’s office for these odalisques, and we shall not enter any chamber where someone else’s slippers are already on the threshold.38
The Deutsche Zeitung, meanwhile, reprinted this “monthly report” together with the protest of a contributor against the corruption of young women by such publications. Even if such a literature might have a right to exist, the contributor argued, it still was highly improper to market it in a newspaper that entered private homes at the cost of pennies:
Ne Omnibus Omnia [Not All Things to Everyone]
Mr. Reizenstein will not hold us to be a Jesuit on account of this motto, but he will have to admit this principle on esthetic grounds. His response to supposed attacks by another newspaper on his serial has flowed from such an unesthetic pen that we must recall Mr. Reizenstein’s conscience earnestly once more with this phrase. Alongside his lack of esthetic feeling, Mr. Reizenstein violates a veritable host of journalistic duties with his serial.
It must ever be the mission of anyone involved in entertainment journalism not to be used as a cover for immoral reading … We would recall Mr. Reizenstein that there are other aspects to life than the wanton wiles of a lusty Negro courtesan, and whoever announces how a man quivers in response to such charms is betraying a lack of propriety that borders on moral decadence. We are not miserable rigorists, for we do recognize that once in a while in some bar a coarse comment can and may be made, but whoever makes wit of such things before unprepared ears and allows his muse to bathe in the vicious waters of Venus vulgivaga is immoral. Perhaps all things are pure to the pure, Mr. Reizenstein, and we would not wish to suspect his morals on account of his immoral pen, but we only remark that even the purest gets dirty in mud.
It is a sad sign of the times that a trained pen exercises itself in portrayals that have their charm only in sensation, using locales only to excuse their esthetic worthlessness. There can be no distinction in being the writer of things that young girls devour all too gladly with glowing cheeks, burning with the desire to discover what is kept quiet, which their innocent souls did not yet know. There can be no distinction in creating a bordello literature with such books, introducing lustful premature development to female youth, which besides poisoning the soul will lead them never to find satisfaction in married life with one man (Mr. Reizenstein should know this himself). If such a literature must exist, then let it be sold in the form of books, since a writer does have to live, but it should not be brought into the family for a few cents, entering a reading world that hitherto had kept far from such things. Most of all, the editors are to be chided for promoting such things simply because they hope they will “draw.” In sending Mr. Reizenstein these words, we assure him that there are hundreds of Germans in New Orleans who look upon his entire serial with disgust and reject it. Sapienti sat [Enough to the wise].
S. H. Lützen39
Reizenstein responded that the opposition was not so upset by the text as it was by the intent of the stories, which was to assault hypocrisy. In a world where dreams of cotton, molasses, and codfish filled the souls of youth, sensuality and spirit were needed correctives. Soon a stage version of The Mysteries of New Orleans was announced at the American Theater, starring noted local thespian Don Arias. By the middle of February, Reizenstein was fielding guesses from correspondents about the true identity of some of his characters. Was Count Emil the young Count Seckendorf, then working as a plantation overseer in Texas? Was Orleana actually a daughter of Madame Pontalba? He tease
d his readers by telling his correspondent, “We could not find a place for your other comments about The Mysteries of New Orleans because they penetrate too deeply into the affairs of well-known families, and we do not feel entitled to violate our discretion in this direction.”40
As a sop to those who felt that the novel was too steamy for family circles, Reizenstein began publishing an alternative offering alongside it, so those offended by The Mysteries still had some poetry to read. Repeatedly throughout the publication of the novel, Reizenstein described his readership as being almost exclusively female, leading him in one of his “Monthly Reports” to celebrate the creation of a true “gynaeceum” of energetic, spirited women, reaching in spirit from the courtesan Aspasia to far Lesbos.41
The first three books of The Mysteries were completed in continuous daily installments, but at the end of Book III, Reizenstein announced that there would be a delay of a week, for reasons he claimed were already known to German readers, particularly the ladies. He promised that Books IV and V would confound those who saw the novel as nothing more than a theater of libidinous extremes and warned that the devotees of morality would lose their sleeping caps and be put to flight. In the meantime, the space previously occupied by The Mysteries was taken by a new tale by Alexandre Dumas and an exposé of Russian foreign policy in the Crimean War. The following week did not see a return of the serial, however; instead, a new serial novel replaced the Dumas story, which had run its course. It was not until 20 July 1854, after an interval of almost three months, that Book IV began. Even then, the excerpts were shorter than before, and the book was not completed until the end of September. After another interval of more than two months, a notice appeared in mid-December, in time for readers to renew their subscriptions, declaring that the fifth book of The Mysteries of New Orleans would begin the next day and appear serially without a break until finished. The preface to Book V, which speaks of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854, was clearly added to the text after the novel’s putative date of completion in December 1853, so at least some changes were made to the text after publication commenced. The book finally concluded on 4 March 1855.42