---As
Walker Percy, another former New Orleans resident, once
said, “There it is, a proper enough American city,
and yet the tourist is apt to see more nuns and naked
women than he ever saw before.” In New York, when
I see the endless parade of young mothers and nannies
pushing baby carriages down my tree-lined block, I think,
How pleasant. When I see the alarming number of couples
doing the same thing in New Orleans – usually, while
chugging daiquiris or hurricanes – I want to call
the police. This is not a neighborhood for babies.
---Tennessee Williams, who
lived around the corner, on Dumaine Street, and who apparently
was paying closer attention to things than Anderson, once
told and interviewer, “In New Orleans I found the
kind of freedom I’d always needed. And the shock
of it against the Puritanism of my nature has given me
a subject, a theme, which I’ve probably never ceased
exploiting.” The house I live in, like Williams’s
puritanical nature (who knew?), stands in direct contrast
to the activity outside the green painted gate. It was
built in 1810 as a kitchen and living quarter for the
slaves and, later, the paid servants of the family living
in the Creole cottage up front. (A Creole cottage, consisting
of four square rooms with no halls and a rear gallery,
is a relative of the French provincial half timber house,
and would’ve been the home of a middle-class merchant,
as opposed to the more formal town houses, which were
the city residences of River Road planters.) These days,
the cottage is occupied by three mostly absentee renters,
including the great Texas playwright and actor Jaston
Williams.
---In 1963, both structures
were renovated by my landlady Betty’s later |
|
husband, the architect Jack DeCell, a man of unerring
taste and restraint. Rather than chopping up the space
and Sheetrocking everything to death (the fate, alas,
of so many Quarter houses), he preserved the buildings’
integrity by dividing my loftlike second floor into “rooms”
with freestanding closets, and adding an unobtrusive iron
spiral staircase, outside). The roofs are among a handful
in the Quarter that still |
|
---It
is impossible to talk about interiors – your own,
I mean – without sounding pretentious. I believe
that the best houses, the ones you want to stay in,
find you, and then, if you’re lucky you fill them
up with stuff that makes you happy. I filled up my New
Orleans house with things that mirror its immediate
surroundings. A family of cardinals lives in the courtyard;
John Alexander’s Lamar Cardinal hangs upstairs.
A family of fish lives in the brick pond; my friend
the artist Bill Dunlap sent me the beautiful Trout Rouge
oil on paper that graces my office wall. On my secretary
sit the discarded nests from the mockingbirds that move
into my clematis vine each year; on my walls are prints
of insects and butterflies, maps of the Mississippi,
postcards of Audubons I can’t afford, a drawing
of Edwin Edwards facing the cameras after he’d
been acquitted in his second trial for corruption.
---What I did not have
when I moved in was furniture and necessities, things
like plates and silverware – a situation that was
too easily remedied. Living here is almost as bad as
living around the corner from a crack dealer if you’re
an addict. The house seems to demand things I’d
never thought about before, and all of it’s within
walking distance: nineteenth century market baskets
that now hold my laundry and magazines, old terra-cotta
pots, faience pots, handblown Louis Philippe champagne
flutes, Old Paris porcelain, damask napkins as big as
tablecloths. I made my own plywood desk with materials
from HomeDepot. (I saw one in The World of Interiors,
in a designer’s very chic eighteenth-century apartment
in Milan, so I figured I could do it, too.) |
