Above all else, the book is saturated with the presence of the city of New Orleans, whose history and organization Reizenstein knew intimately. In the novel, New Orleans is the “palmetto boudoir” of Louisiana, a sinkhole of every delicious vice humans are heir to. Reizenstein himself celebrated the “daughters of Sodom” who populated its streets, mostly mixed-race girls in their early teens. The sweaty brothels and dance halls of the Crescent City are his favorite venue. Looming over the city is the continual threat of visitations of yellow fever, attributed by Reizenstein to the poison of a strange plant, Mantis religiosa, said to bloom at the mysterious source of the Red River in distant Texas, where Hiram, the nemesis of the South, dwells.
The South is not the only target of Reizenstein’s fury. At the start of the final book, Hiram presides at an allegorical trial of three villainous beasts, a bald eagle (representing American racism and rapacity), a Nebraska owl (the Kansas-Nebraska Act) and a pelican (the mournful bird of Louisiana). He foretells a dreadful fate for all of them, since they have managed to combine inhuman cruelty with cowardice. Reizenstein’s approach is meta-political rather than political: his condemnation of American life is so total that he prescribes no practical solution, no sop of socialism for the poor. He even eschews the usual facile anti-Jesuit polemics: he loathes individual priests for their hypocrisy, but he sees no point in denouncing whole orders when there is bigger game to hunt.
The mover of the story, Hiram, remains a puzzle throughout, since his goals are expressed in nearly incoherent ravings. Hiram is clearly the master of the situation, the puppet master over all the figures in the drama, but his purpose, his mission of bringing to birth the “black messiah,” is that of a midwife of fate. Although Hiram obscurely celebrates the glory of “Nigritia,” his main purpose is to punish whites for their historic crimes against African-Americans.
The story is moved along by agents other than Hiram, though they are less aware of their motivation and goals. The diabolical Hungarian Lajos, a gentleman criminal in league with the sadistic old Catholic preacher Dubreuil, commits most of the more heinous acts in the book. Neither Lajos nor Dubreuil appears capable of profiting from their many crimes: time and again, the profits of their escapades flow away, leaving them empty. Lajos represents an evil so radical that only a bolt sent down from heaven can eradicate him. The story also displays a dark fringe of episodes suggesting that all the protagonists have Doppelgängers pursuing alternative lines of story development, reflecting the tentative nature of visible reality, even if it simply may be a sign of the author’s shaky grasp of reality.
Lastly, Reizenstein challenges the platitudinous moralism of his freethinker colleagues by gratuitously stressing the peculiar sexuality of most of his characters. It is easy to say that the only sympathetic lovers—really the only “straight” people—in his entire story are the tender lesbians, Claudine and Orleana. They represent an alternative lesbian society flourishing in New Orleans as nowhere else in America. This particular vision of lesbian communal utopias derives from a masculine pornographic-voyeuristic tradition that ritualizes the sexuality of “others” in society, whether they are repressed monks or women ensconced in harems. When projected specifically on women, such ideal communes recur throughout the history of American popular culture, from fictionalized seraglios to the Amazon community that was home to Wonder Woman. Despite its dubious parentage and progeny, Reizenstein’s celebration of same-sex love remains a landmark in the portrayal of homosexuality in American fiction.73 Reizenstein does not hesitate to see the love of Orleana and Claudine as a revolutionary act, a gentle revolt against the domination of males over females, against the domination of property over want, against the domination of oligarchy over virtue, and even against the domination of humans over other animal species. The lesbian episode appears to have had some deep personal importance to Reizenstein, since it serves no purpose in moving the plot forward. Needless to say, Reizenstein would have had to wait a long time to find the audience for such a message.
“New Orleans and Environs,” from Norman’s New Orleans and Environs (New Orleans: B. M. Norman, 1845), 190. From the Collections of the St. Louis Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
Virtually everyone else in his book displays perverted sexuality: the effeminate cross-dressing dandy Emil, the equally effeminate architect Albert, Emil’s amoral hooker-lover Lucy, the drunken sexist “Cocker” Hahn, the murderous, sadistic priest Dubreuil, the necrophiliac rapist Lajos, the timorously incestuous repressed lesbians Frida and Jenny, and even the naive North German cook Urschl (who becomes in all likelihood the only white female in nineteenth-century American fiction to have her sexual encounter with a black male portrayed as a comic episode).
“View near the Head of the Ke-Che-Ah-Que-Ho-No,” now known as Palo Duro Canyon. This and other illustrations in a report by Randolph B. Marcy adumbrated Reizenstein’s description of the mythical Mesa in Books IV and V. From Randolph B. Marcy, with George B. McClellan, Exploration of the Red River of Louisiana in the Year 1852, with Reports on the Natural History of the Country, and Numerous Illustrations, House of Representatives, 33rd Congress, 1st session (Washington, D.C.: A. O. P. Nicholson, Public Printer, 1854), lithographic plate no. 8, by H. Lawrence of New York, from the Thomas Jefferson Library of the University of Missouri—St. Louis.
Reizenstein certainly had major flaws as a writer. His book, like most subscription publications, is too long, although it is strikingly short on the irrelevant storytelling found in abundance in such other writers as Emil Klauprecht. Just as critics of a few years ago would have been shocked at Reizenstein’s sensuality, decadence, and openness to alternative sexuality, readers today will be bothered by a whiff of anti-Semitism in his portrayal of Gabor. The same present-day readers will tend to overlook the quite pornographic anticlericalism; this is a sign of our own hypocrisy, not his. Still, bigotry of all varieties issues from the mouths of his villains and fools, which are many. In this he was recording the world around him to condemn it, certainly not to endorse it. He also has a superfluity of characters, some created only in order to be snuffed out in particularly colorful and ghastly ways. Even when boiled down to the minimum needed to carry the story, there are still too many characters to keep straight or to effectively move the story forward.
After all of this, Reizenstein’s peculiar vision of New Orleans is worth resurrecting precisely because it crossed the boundaries of acceptable taste in nineteenth-century German America and squatted firmly on the other side. By writing a dark comedy about the dreadful fate of America, he cut through confused sentimentality to reveal the roots of a clear and present danger. By challenging the platitudes under which freethinkers sought to give lip-service to Christian values while challenging clerical authority, Reizenstein reveals the hypocrisy of a lukewarm semihumanism. By neglecting to reward the virtue of individuals in order to lambaste the criminality of an entire social order, Reizenstein highlights the shallow compromises made in the other exemplars of the urban mysteries genre. By articulating his dreadful fantasy of a coming cataclysm, Reizenstein documents beyond a shadow of a doubt the historical existence of a very real southern nightmare. Above all else, this work makes us realize how limited our notions were of what could be conceived by a fertile American imagination in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Perhaps the best thing to come from this resurrection of The Mysteries of New Orleans is Baron Ludwig himself, a wanderer between the worlds with more than a superficial resemblance to his fellow European-American lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov. He could also be seen as a bizarre Teutonic avatar of Tennessee Williams. Like his heroine Orleana, the baron in the end had become the arch-representative of a whole new ethnic category, the German Creole. It is high time he came home to us and told his tale. This time, we just might listen.
Memoranda
for the SYMPATHETIC READER
Ever since Eugène Sue’s delicate Fleur-de-Marie resisted the enti
cement of the “wedding night” with a prince, preferring to end her young life in a cloister, Fleurs-de-Marie have lost their charm, and since they are what blooms in the garden of mysteries, mysteries have ceased to be fashionable.1 It is a decade too late to sow Fleurs-de-Marie, all the more so because, as every lover of flowers knows, they can only produce seeds for two years.
All of the subsequent mysteries were thus more or less like one of the Gerolsteins,2 even if the former lacked princes, Viscounts Remy, or Marquises D’Harville.
The disreputable novelist Ned Buntline launched the literature of mysteries on American soil and thereby utterly killed all their enchantment as well as any interest in them.3
The “Mysteries of St. Louis” flowed from a German-American pen and is of importance only insofar as its appearance coincided with the struggle of Germans at that time against the attacks of Jesuitism.4 H. Hassaureck’s “Mysteries of Cincinnati”5 are a pale reflection of the Mysteries of Berlin or New York, and they unfortunately contain too much that is familiar for a well-read man.
Despite all this, the author has given his work the title of Mysteries because it is based on a true event that would be hard for anyone in this generation of our city to be aware of unless he happened by accident to obtain a transcription of Lakanal’s “Narrative of an Ursuline Novice in New Orleans.”6 In the days when Baron de Carondelet was still governor of the province and the areas around Canal and Esplanade Streets consisted of plantations,7 an ominous person lived on the plantation where Talbot’s slave depot is now located. This person was summoned before the Inquisition of Louisiana, and then suddenly vanished before the eyes of everyone, leaving dreadful traces behind in the city.
Although common sense rebels against all that is fabulous and mysterious, extraordinary events often give us the key to the unbelievable, and what is most improbable becomes true.
Thus in the following work.
New Orleans, 25 December 1853
THE AUTHOR
Prologue
NO CITY of the old or new continents, save perhaps for San Francisco and Calcutta, displays a greater panorama of peoples than New Orleans, the Queen of the South, ruler of the majestic Gulf of Mexico. Louisiana’s most radiant city already had a stable, highly defined character when still under Spanish jurisdiction, and it retained that character under French rule beneath the scepter of Napoleon Bonaparte. The Castilian idiom, with its deep earnestness and quiet craving for pleasure, was never really more than a monochrome painting in contrast to the noisy disorder and flippant nonchalance of the French. Only after the Americans had solidly set foot here, after 1804, followed by more energetic trade and manufacture, did the character of our city melt into a desolate chaos of morals, languages, and customs. It became a true world city, taking on a thoroughly cosmopolitan appearance.
New Orleans is the spring from which so many thousands have drawn their wealth, but it is also a bitter cup of suffering, misery, and despair. New Orleans is now the prima donna of the South, the whore insatiable in her embraces, letting go of her victims only after the last drop of blood has been drained and their innermost marrow of life sucked dry. New Orleans is the great gambling den at whose roulette and faro wheels excited players consort day and night with the goddess of luck, from whom they receive in the end only a stab in the back. It is a vast grave for poor immigrants and the homeless, who can never extract themselves in time from the arms of this prostitute. Here the chains of a maligned race rattle day and night with no advocate for their human rights; they can expect such only from the North. Only rarely is there heard in this southern clime a weak echo of the shouts of revenge in the grove of Abington. No angels have yet appeared to our Negritians to announce the birth of a Toussaint L’Ouverture!
Poisonous mists arise from the palmetto swamps, and from the mighty live oaks ominous “Spanish moss” hangs like the hair of an old man, blowing in the wind. Up to Natchez and as far west as the source of the Red River, this marks the region of yellow fever.
How many hearts have beat their last here? How many tears have been poured out here? How many have looked about hopeless and despairing, feeling themselves alone and abandoned amid the chaotic hustle and bustle? New Orleans is the tree with the forbidden fruit; here the old snake extends its three-forked tongue as far as the Gulf shore and licks its frothy waves. Here life and death dance continuously with each another, each sinking into the other’s arms. Whoever has not yet seen sin, come hither!
• • •
Horrid foolishness! I dreamed
I was Messiah,
And that I bore the great cross
With patience and fidelity.
Impoverished beauty is sore pressed,
But I shall make her free
From blame and sin, from torment and
want,
From the filthiness of the world.
[Romanzero]
New Orleans had not seen so magnificent a night in ages. The sickle of the waning moon seemed to float blissfully in the midst of the immeasurable sea of stars, and it held the entire city as if embraced in a golden frame. Happy was he who could lean over the veranda of his house on this enchanting night and look down on his garden to breathe in the scents of magnolia blossoms, kissed by the moon, or who could stand at the stern of his boat, spying through a sextant the light of his life in the midst of the forest of masts—they are to be envied tonight; they are the fortunate ones who are privileged to carry the starry train of the Queen of the South and view her face in its full glory. He is a nasty usurer with his feelings indeed who demands more of his life than to be truly happy for one night. For the one will be carried to the grave before his magnolias wither; and the other will soon float in rings around his wayward boat, a ghost, and he will be the herald of his own death on seeing his own flag flying at half-staff. What does it matter? They were happy once.
This evening is the first gift of a miserly divinity in several months; stars are being embroidered on a dark blue baldachin to shine on graves and paint the emptied streets with pale figures.
It was the 27th of April, 18—.
A tired pony trotted down Magazine Street bearing a figure on a loose saddle whose long legs almost scraped the ground, in complete contrast with its short upper body.
Despite the southern climate, the figure wore the head covering of a farmer from northern Missouri, a stiffened fur cap with hanging earflaps, a buffalo-hide vest covered by a wool blanket, high sportsmen’s boots reaching to his thighs, and a red wool shirt whose open collar was marked at the corners with the crude insignia of a sailor’s jacket.
He negligently let the reins lie loose on the neck and shaggy mane of the horse, which seemed to know the way precisely.
At this moment he turned at the next row of houses, suddenly revealing his face, illuminated by the moonlight. Just as suddenly, he shrouded his face in the darkness of the blanket, as if he feared to show himself, and he drew his fur cap down over his eyebrows. Then he lowered his head, pressing a kiss on two rosy lips and murmuring: “Diana Robert will already be in bed—we are there, my child—I cannot see any lights at the windows, we should go back and pass the night in the open.”
“Oh, let’s ride through the passageway and knock on the window, Hiram,” a sweet voice responded. “I haven’t slept for three nights—and I am deathly tired,” it added with a sigh.
“Be still, my child,” the cadaverous figure responded, “don’t be upset with my excessive caution—consider that I am all too well known in this city—six years ago we only escaped from our enemies with great difficulty.
“Now, to be sure, it seems we have been forgotten, for once again, sin has spread its luxuriant tent, and many a beautiful young life will be sacrificed on the scaffold of its passions.
“Have patience, my child, you will be given back to the world, and—”
A soft arm wrapped around his neck suppressed his words. The rider now came to a complete stop.
He found himself be
fore an old building with cracked columns and capitals eaten away by storm and weather. The windows were broken and weathered, and the interior rooms, where gold had once been counted, weighed, and discounted, were abandoned and desolate.
It was the Atchafalaya Bank,1 two doors down from the Canal Bank,2 but at the time these lines were written it was already gone. Two stately four-story brick buildings have replaced it, and in their interior the goods of the wealthy Mr. James are stored. Nemesis itself ruled over New Orleans only a few months ago, where merchandise now is being stored and bartered. Why was the building of the Atchafalaya Bank torn down? Was it speculation or—a whim? Neither of the two.
The building had to vanish, along with the lodgers who had lived in its rear room. On tearing it down, a worker discovered under the rubble a three-foot-high cross of iron, engraved with the insignia and symbols of the Freemasons. This cross now decorates the grave of a great tolerator, a noble philanthropist much mourned by his brothers in the Order, who has only lain in consecrated soil for a few months.
The Mysteries of New Orleans (The Longfellow Series of American Languages and Literatures) Page 4
