by Tom Piazza
In writing my novel City of Refuge, which followed characters through the events of Katrina, this became partly a technical problem of composition. The book demanded to be written in a couple of different styles; a single, consistent style would telegraph a continuity to the events, and there was no continuity. And certainly a fine mandarin literary style would run counter to the reality in the book—the variety of the characters, and the disjunctive, harsh, chaotic nature of their experience. There are times when good taste is in bad taste. And I felt that readers shouldn’t come out of a book about such a disaster feeling as if they had just spent a day at a spa having their assumptions manicured and their complacencies flattered.
In the aftermath, a small handful of readers expressed discomfort, even embarrassment, that the book contained no evil characters. An evil character, in life as in fiction, can act as a grounding wire to discharge the currents of guilt, anxiety, and shame evoked by individual or collective failure. In Katrina, the facts pointed toward a collective failure of government and, by extension, of the society represented by that government. Against that collective failure, and in light of the collective responsibility for it, hundreds of thousands of individual characters struggled to rebuild broken lives. With Katrina, the finger pointed unavoidably at the witness—each citizen, each viewer, each reader—rather than at an Other who could embody the guilt and carry it away.
“Though I have never suffered, thank God, at the hands of man . . . still I detest my fellow-beings and do not feel that I am their fellow at all.” That’s Flaubert, in a letter to Victor Hugo composed at the time of Madame Bovary’s writing. Also to Hugo, around the same time, he wrote, “What is best in art will always elude mediocre natures, that is to say, seven eighths of the human race. So why denature truth for the benefit of the vulgar?”
It may be one of the underrecognized tragedies of literary history that the intelligence and talent that resulted in all of Flaubert’s exquisite observation and fine prose was coupled in him with an inability to experience a degree of humility in the face of the kinds of sacrifices and strengths that those mediocre natures exhibit in caring for their families, in making it through the day. It is the great weakness of Flaubert’s otherwise sublime art, and of his legacy to literature—the message that the truth about humans is one-sidedly ugly, and that the writer (and the adequate reader) stands outside and above, redeemed only by style.
After the conversation with my friend who hates “Cathedral,” I found myself wondering what the psychic benefit might be in telling yourself that, while you want to hear good things, you instead make the brave choice to face the bad. Fiction writers pride themselves on getting underneath characters’ ostensible motives and finding the true motive structure underneath. If we can do this with characters, the author ought to be eligible for the same questioning.
The flip side of brutality and evil is, dependably, sentimentality. The hit man kissing the picture of his sainted mother before he exterminates a mark, the mawkish evocations of home and youth in Nazi propaganda, the image of the pristine Southern belle under siege that propelled so many lynchings, the need for cleansing, cleansing . . . Sentimentality is the perfume that disguises, and even justifies, this lust for brutal cleansing and killing.
But the inverse is also true: that an attitude, or a pose, of cool and bracing willingness to face evil and brutality, and to dismiss its opposite as wish fulfillment, might function as a seawall against a tide of shame and grief so heavy that it can’t be faced directly. The stink of mistakes made, or possibilities lost, can make an image of the good intolerable. If it is too expensive to look at what might have been and realize that one may just not have been good enough, it can be a comfort to think that it was never possible in the first place. This evasion is possible on a societal level, as well as in the private hearts of individuals. The novel is still the best tool we have for understanding the one level in terms of the other.
An insistence that seven eighths of the human race is basically dispensable, and that we inhabit a doomed, shrinking island of the elite, is the quintessence of the sentimental. Flaubert, the begetter of our sharpest tools and our most brilliant mistakes, paid dearly, for his cynicism, and for the right to express it. He realized it in prose that changed the way people wrote and perceived. He was a titan. But that is never the end of discussion. Flaubert’s weaknesses as a writer were weaknesses of character. It takes nothing away from his literary genius to say that his human weakness left a wound in the writing. Maybe it left a wound in all of us who followed him. It hardened our hearts and, in the process, broke them. But maybe we don’t need to sit up with that ghost anymore.
Anyway, for me, for the length of the story “Cathedral,” Raymond Carver was a greater writer than Flaubert, because he was able to get past that tired old jive.
Note in a Bottle
[The pattern] imposed by a circular image of this kind compensates the disorder and confusion of the psychic state—namely, through the construction of a central point to which everything is related, or by a concentric arrangement of the disordered multiplicity and of contradictory and irreconcilable elements. This is evidently an attempt at self-healing on the part of Nature, which does not spring from conscious reflection but from an instinctive impulse.
—C. G. Jung, Mandala Symbolism
Sunday afternoon along the river road heading west from New Orleans; low clouds over the levee. I was in the passenger seat, for once, as we passed under the giant, rickety Huey P. Long Bridge and out through Harahan, where the housing subdivisions creep outward, like a fungus, from Metairie. I always expect to see a billboard reading, TIRED OF SURPRISES? LIVE HERE. A wasteland of time and space spreading out in all directions.
That day I had been feeling edgy for no reason I could name, and I was no fun to be around. I remembered the feeling all too well from when I was a kid, returning home from church on a grey afternoon, watching the leaves tossing fitfully along the curbs, the feeling of being in exile, somehow, from someplace I had never seen, and which would have been a lot better than where I was.
So we decided to take a ride, a time-honored way to put the blues off for a few hours. We had made it out into Kenner, passing modest brick houses built on cement slabs with lawns that were turning brown, dogs in groups of two and three, when the car slowed sharply and pulled to the shoulder.
“What happened?” I said, jolted out of wherever I was in my head.
“You want me to prove I love you?” she said. It wasn’t an entirely rhetorical question, but she was smiling mischievously, looking into the side view, waiting for the car behind us to pass. Then she made a U-turn and started back toward where we’d come from, slowed immediately, and I saw the sign, tiny, stuck into somebody’s lawn: FLEA MARKET, with an arrow pointing down the side street, away from the levee. Usually I am the one who notices these signs. I must, I thought, be slipping. She pulled into the street, and we made our way along, guided by more tiny signs that took us over the railroad tracks and along behind some giant Quonset huts.
Eventually we found it, a permanent building the size of an airplane hangar. It would have been hard to imagine a more out-of-the-way location. We parked and strolled in together through an open garage door beneath the dim fluorescent lights high up under the corrugated metal roof, through the aisles and alleys of forgotten junk.
You train yourself not to get optimistic in these circumstances. Flea markets often mean factory-second clothes, cheap, shrink-wrapped tools. But this place had a promising mix of older furniture, display cases with military medals and advertising pens, stacks of sheet music along with hideous ashtrays and baby strollers, computer equipment from the late 1980s, ancient boom boxes.
And then I saw the 78s and felt the immediate surge in my pulse that they always elicit. There were several stacks of the shellac discs in bins, next to some LPs and eight-track tapes. I squeezed Mary’s hand and walked over to the bins. The old 78s have fascinated me for as long as I can
remember. Each one is a little world of its own, a ten-inch-wide mandala in which the grooves spiral gradually inward to the central point, which is the ending, a disappearing center consisting of the hole through which the turntable spindle fits.
The 78s contain about three minutes of recorded sound on each side, three minutes in which every detail counts, as in good fiction. For the three minutes between the recording’s beginning and its ending, the blues singers and jazz bands and old-time string bands cast their thoughts, their whole style of approaching reality, out into the world without being able to know exactly where it would all land. Such wit, such intensity, such heartbreak, such style, such care with the expressive detail. Each record is like a note in a bottle. They made the records, and the records landed in places no one could predict, and they added oxygen to the world. Finding a good one is like experiencing grace itself descending upon you. Time itself is redeemed, to live again and again, expanding infinitely.
Now, standing on the cement floor under the high, dim lights, I looked through maybe a hundred records in various small stacks squirreled away under tables and on shelves. While they were from the period that I favored—the late 1920s and early 1930s—most of the records offered more or less inconsequential dance or pop music of the time, by performers like Jesse Crawford, Seger Ellis, Art Gillham, Nat Shilkret—the now-forgotten artists who were the Bee Gees and Ricky Martins of their period. I found one or two things that were marginally interesting, but the search was basically a washout. As a formality, I asked the proprietress if she had any more 78s lying around anywhere.
She gave a short, almost derisive laugh. “Sure,” she said. “Come on over here.” I frowned and followed her around a corner, and stacked up against a wall were at least thirty boxes big enough to hold fifty records each.
“Holy smokes,” I said.
“Yeah, well, when you get finished smoking there’s just as many boxes up front.”
Mary was standing nearby when this exchange took place. I looked at her, and she said, “I’ll be outside. Don’t worry. I have the paper. Have fun.” She gave me a reassuring smile and headed out. I sat on a stool and started looking.
Quantity, in Engels’s famous remark, changes quality. But not to a shellac collector. Each new record you pull from the stack is a potential New Beginning, as fresh as the pull of the lever on a slot machine to a confirmed gambler. The records were grouped together in the boxes roughly by label—Victor, Brunswick, Columbia, OKeh. Again most were from that late ’20s to early ’30s period. There were multiple copies of certain titles, which suggested, along with the extraordinary quantity, that they came from a store stock. But store stock tends to be found in new or nearly new condition. Many of these had clearly been played repeatedly. A puzzle.
It took about forty-five minutes to go through every box. The proprietress loaned me a red marker so that I could check off the boxes I’d looked through. I turned up nothing. Some of the records were tantalizingly close—duds by pop singers who occasionally recorded with jazz accompaniments, items by well-known personalities like Maurice Chevalier or Fanny Brice, which might have interested another collector but not me. Still, the time frame was right. I could almost smell the scent of what I was looking for. But the fact that there was almost nothing was discouraging; it suggested that someone else had gone through the boxes already and beaten me to the good stuff.
When I was finished in back I stood up and made my way around front (“You didn’t find anything?” the lady asked as she pointed me in a new direction), where I was now confronted by a small mountain, an Aztec pyramid, of similar boxes, at least forty of them. The prospect of looking through all of them and again turning up nothing was momentarily demoralizing. Yet there was always the possibility. The possibility. Guiltily, I peeked out the door toward the car, where Mary was engrossed in the newspaper. I sat down on a stool with the marker and opened the first box.
It wasn’t long before I pulled up a record that sent a jolt through me—“The Only Girl I Ever Loved” by Charlie Poole with the North Carolina Ramblers—Columbia 15711-D, from 1930, one of his last records, one side of which is not even available on CD. This one was in almost new condition. I fought the impulse to yell out. It’s like catching a good trout. You don’t want to spook the whole river. You unhook the fish, place it in your pack, and keep fishing. I quietly set the disc to one side and kept looking. Before long I pulled the next good one: a fine copy of “Nehi Mamma Blues” by the Memphis blues singer Frank Stokes, a very rare record. Breathing deeply through my nose I set it on top of the Poole record. A few records later I turned up a copy of “Got the Jake Leg Too” by the Ray Brothers, a Mississippi string band, a rare Victor 23500 series from the bottom of the Depression, also in fine condition.
Now I was getting excited; this had the markings of a major haul. I went out to tell Mary that I might be a while. She had moved the car into the shade of a tree and was reading the paper with the door open. She nodded indulgently. I told her, sotto voce, that I’d found a copy of “Got the Jake Leg Too.” “That’s good, honey,” she said, reading.
I felt like Walter Huston in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, setting up his scaffolding and sluice gates, concentrating feverishly, separating the gold from the bulk of the rock and clay. I went through every single disc, and before I was finished I’d also found a beautiful 1932 blues record on Columbia by Lonnie Johnson under the pseudonym Jimmy Jordan, a Depression-era Carter Family on Victor (“The Dying Soldier”), something by the old-time guitarist Henry Whitter on the Broadway label, entitled “There Was an Old Tramp,” which turned out not even to be listed in any of my discographies, and several records by Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers, Riley Puckett, Kelly Harrell, and Fiddlin’ John Carson.
By the time I finished, I had looked through at least three thousand discs and had whittled down my stack to thirty-five. I paid two dollars apiece for them (“They always find some good ones,” the proprietress said as she counted out my change from a wad of bills she kept in the pocket of her housedress), and I walked out slightly overstimulated, a little toasted around the edges, but with a sense of satisfaction and even of gratitude for being able to retrieve these records from the mountain of chaos where they had languished. That my own emotional cloud cover seemed to have evaporated was not lost on me, either.
Mary had been reduced to reading the automotive supplement of the Times-Picayune and I felt a little sheepish. She looked tired, and I didn’t blame her. She had, after all, been sitting there for almost two hours. Between the lines, her smile said, “Love costs.” I didn’t go into much detail about my finds. She understands and she doesn’t understand. The important thing is that where understanding leaves off, she has the faith to hang with me anyway. Grace, I thought as we drove off, is not something anyone has a right to expect in this life. But when you find it, you can at least say thank you. Which I did.
From the Oxford American, January/February 2001
Acknowledgments
My gratitude to the editors who helped to refine and shape many of these pieces, especially Eric Banks at Bookforum, Marc Smirnoff at the Oxford American, Fletcher Roberts and Peter Keepnews at the New York Times, and James Marcus at the Columbia Journalism Review.
For encouragement, friendship, and various forms of aid during the composition of these pieces, thanks to Jeff Rosen, David Gates, Elvis Costello, Eric Overmyer, Benjamin Hedin, Jeffrey Gaskill, Peter Guralnick, Mary Gaitskill, Terri Troncali, Wyatt Mason, Harry Shearer, Roy Sekoff, J. Michael Lennon, Phillip Sipiora, Ed Newman, Robert Birnbaum, Jeff Martin, Bob Dylan, Sven Birkerts, Lillian Piazza, and the late and badly missed Jean Howell. Thanks to Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts for time and space.
And special thanks to my colleagues and friends in the writers’ room of HBO’s Treme: David Simon, Eric Overmyer, Lolis Eric Elie, George Pelecanos, the late David Mills, Mari Kornhauser, James Yoshimura, and Anthony Bourdain.
For my longtime editor and friend Cal Morgan, no praise or thanks will suffice. Much gratitude to Carrie Kania at Harper Perennial for her meaningful and gracious support, and to my patient and loyal agent and friend, Amy Williams. Thanks, too, to Brittany Hamblin of HarperCollins for a hundred favors, large and small.
This book is in memory of Mike Seeger, David Mills, Barry Hannah, Clara Park, Michael P. Smith, and Herman Leonard.
And as always, my biggest thanks to my only one and only, Mary Howell.
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TOM PIAZZA is the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, including the Willie Morris Award–winning novel City of Refuge and the post-Katrina classic Why New Orleans Matters. His other books include the novel My Cold War, which won the Faulkner Society Award for the Novel, and the short story collection Blues And Trouble, which won the James Michener Award for Fiction. He currently writes for the HBO drama series Treme, created by David Simon and set in post-Katrina New Orleans.
No less a literary critic than Bob Dylan has said, “Tom Piazza’s writing pulsates with nervous electrical tension—reveals the emotions that we can’t define.” Piazza’s work has been praised by writers as different as Norman Mailer, Mary Gaitskill, Richard Ford, Monica Ali, Barry Hannah, Ann Beattie, Richard Russo, Douglas Brinkley, James Alan McPherson, and Elvis Costello. Piazza is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
