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Long out of print, Herbert Asbury's The French Quarter will be reissued by Thunder's Mouth Press in April 2003.
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When Herbert Asbury arrived in New Orleans in
the winter of 1935, he was already a hero to the local press. That's because Asbury
had managed to pull off what most journalists only dream of: going to court to
fight for his rights as a reporter under the First Amendment -- in Asbury's case
to affirm the right to chronicle the adventures of a home-town prostitute.
It was actually Asbury's good friend and publisher, the legendary
H. L. Mencken, who was facing jail time. But that fact didn't seem to bother
Asbury much at all. The notoriety of the case was such a thing of joy, a strange
battle between the press and the pious, that The New York Times noted
many years later that it made Asbury "a celebrity overnight."
The story that got Asbury and Mencken in trouble was called
"Hat Rack," and it was the tale of a thin young prostitute in a small, straight-laced
town drawn straight out of Sinclair Lewis' provincial mid-America. Mindful of
her customers' religious beliefs, Asbury's prostitute did business with her
Catholic customers only in Protestant cemeteries. Protestants in need of her
talents visited her only in the final resting spots of Catholics.
"Hat Rack" appeared in the April 1926 issue
of Mencken's American Mercury, a small literary journal with a cultural
influence vastly out of proportion to its actual circulation. Upon reading Asbury's
story, the Rev. J. Franklin Chase, secretary of the Boston-based Watch and Ward
Society, declared it "unfit to be read." Chase also deemed Asbury's work as
smut and a violation of Massachusetts law.
Fully appreciating the public relations potential,
Mencken and Asbury hopped a train for Boston. There, Mencken attempted to sell
a copy of the American Mercury himself and was immediately arrested.
Front-page news across the nation -- which was even more good news for the then-struggling
writer -- Mencken's trial became a reporter's circus. "I intend to have my conduct
governed by the properly constituted courts of my country and not by professional
reformers," declared Mencken, who loathed all reformers. A group of Harvard
students sitting in the packed courtroom cheered.
For Asbury, the hearing was in many ways the
apogee of a spiritual journey. Raised by a devout Methodist family in Missouri,
he had graduated from a Baptist seminary and into his early 20s thought himself
religious enough. Two things intruded upon and ultimately destroyed his faith
in organized religion: the first was service in World War I, and the second
was his decision to become a professional journalist. By l926, under the space
allotted for religion in Asbury's Who's Who listing, he wrote "Infidel."
On the stand, Asbury spared the jury the tales
of his spiritual miasma, but he insisted that "Hat Rack" was the story of a
real person. The judge took an evening to read the story for himself before
rendering a decision. "I find no offense has been committed," he said, dismissing
the complaint.
Mencken was now free to sell his American
Mercury, with its industrial green-colored covers, in Boston forever. The
press immediately hailed the judge's decision as a legal triumph of the first
order for Mencken. But for Asbury, the Boston victory meant money in the bank.
"Asbury's reputation was made," Newsweek
later noted, adding that the magazine Redbook now "gladly paid him $700
for two short stories which it had previously rejected."
Suddenly, Asbury was America's premier chronicler
of crime and sin. He published The Gangs of New York -- the Martin Scorsese-directed
film version opened at local theaters this week (see review this issue). He
followed with his equally tawdry -- or so many critics insisted -- Barbary Coast
in 1928.
Next to New York and San Francisco, Asbury
said, there was only one other city in America worth writing about: New Orleans.
In early l935, Herbert Asbury descended upon
the city. Upon his arrival, he was described in an admiring Times-Picayune
profile as a "stocky man with a shock of gray hair and disbelieving blue eyes."
"There should certainly be more color and
greater variety in criminal history here than in most places," Asbury optimistically
mused as he set to work. Over the next four months, he dug through court records
at the recently opened courthouse at Tulane Avenue and Broad Street, and examined
page after dusty page of old newspapers in big bound volumes at the library
of the Times-Picayune's old offices off Lafayette Square. When he wasn't
reading, he was asking questions, digging for anything and everything about
New Orleans, and forming lasting relationships with New Orleans writer Lyle
Saxon and reporters Meigs Frost and John McClure, among others.
In the summer of 1935, Asbury carted his New
Orleans materials to his home in the Adirondack Mountains. There, he set to
work on The French Quarter, a Knopf Publications book whose advertisement
promised to reveal the secrets of the "Wickedest City in the World." An excerpt
of that book also appeared in Mencken's American Mercury, under the entirely
unsubtle title "Loose Ladies of New Orleans."
Asbury's New Orleans was a world populated
with rogues and psychopaths. He told the tale of Kate Townsend, once a "handsome
girl with a fine figure," who in middle age was "grossly corpulent." Townsend
operated what Asbury described as "probably the most luxurious brothel that
ever opened its doors in the United States," a palace of marble and brownstone
on Basin Street, where customers were expected to purchase a $15 bottle of wine
for the assembled company.
"If his credentials were in order, he was
escorted into the drawing room and formally presented to the ladies by his full
name and style," Asbury said of the lucky client. "If one of the girls struck
his fancy, he communicated his desires to the madam, who conferred with the
lucky strumpet." Townsend herself, wrote Asbury, "was occasionally available
for the entertainment of a particularly distinguished client -- at a price which
is said to have been $50 an hour."
Asbury also documented Townsend's brutal end.
Guests reportedly visited the Basin Street home armed with pistols, knives and,
in one odd case, a sling shot. One day Townsend herself was assaulted, her murder
providing the Times-Picayune with the kind of headlines they don't write
anymore:
CARVED TO DEATH!
TERRIBLE FATE OF KATE TOWNSEND AT THE HANDS
OF TREVILLE SYKES WITH THE INSTRUMENTALITY OF A BOWIE KNIFE
HER BREASTS AND SHOULDERS LITERALLY COVERED
WITH STABS
Other The French Quarter characters
included Bill Smedley, a down-river flatboat man who once swept into the city
drunk on rye and kept nearly two dozen policemen at bay as he freed a pack of
circus animals. Smedley, Asbury said, was at last forced to flee New Orleans
after killing two Mexicans in the downtown Sure Enuf Hotel. Accusing Smedley
of cheating at cards, the men locked him up in a room and went to work on him
with knives. Passers-by heard an awful ruckus inside. Then silence. Finally,
the front doors of the Sure Enuf swung open to reveal Smedley announcing "Gentlemen!
It's free drinks today!" Those entering carefully walked over the two lifeless
bodies.
Adopting a light vein unthinkable in contemporary
journalism, Asbury also recalled Bras Coupe, a runaway slave in the l830s who
"fled into the swamps and organized a gang of escaped blacks and a few renegade
white men, whom he led on frequent robbing and murdering forays on the outskirts
of the city, with an occasional venture into the thickly settled residential
districts." With a bounty on his head of more than $2,000, it was inevitable
that Bras Coupe would eventually run into serious trouble. In the summer of
l837, he was clubbed to death by a fisherman in the then-remote Bayou St. John.
"The body of the outlaw," Asbury said of Bras Coupe, "was exposed in Place d'Armes
for two days, and several thousand slaves were compelled to march past and look
at it, as a warning."
When The French Quarter was released
in the fall of 1936, it was well-received and an instant popular hit. Newsweek
called the book a "lively and colorful chronicle of bullies, bawds, and brawls."
Louisiana writer Thad St. Martin, in the Saturday Review, lauded Asbury
for a thorough job "airing New Orleans' dirty linen -- and New Orleans has a
full line."
Yet the wild New Orleans documented in Asbury's
The French Quarter had become a hazy memory even as the writer was doing
his leg work in the city in l935. Wondering what the city must have been like
the century before, Asbury mourned the closing of Storyville, the city's sanctioned
red-light district, declaring that something once original and unpretentious
had been destroyed forever. "It can never get back the way it was," Asbury remarked,
"in spite of any attempts at revival."
The French Quarter was the last time
Asbury wrote about New Orleans. Upon his death in February 1963, the Times-Picayune
mourned his passing, recalling the many friends he had made in the Crescent
City. The New York Times was somewhat more cynical: "He thought gang
fights and rum-running and murders and prostitutes were a gaudy show," the paper
said in its official obituary of Asbury. "With one of the fastest typewriters
in the United States, he made the most of it."
