The Roving Mistress of Vibes
“The trial of the governor for racketeering, fraud, and bribery, was conducted in a New Orleans courtroom by a crowd of drawling white-haired gents,” Nancy Lemann writes in her lyrical, electrifying, and oddly moving narrative-nonfiction-cum-memoir-in-fragments, The Ritz of the Bayou: The New Orleans Adventures of a Young Novelist Covering the Trials of the Governor of Louisiana, with Digressions on Smoldering Nightclubs, Jazz-Crazed Bars, and Other Aspects of Life in the Tropic Zone (yes, that really is the whole title), about the first of several criminal trials of four-term Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards in 1985, reissued this April by Hub City Press to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of its publication. “It was there,” Lemann continues, “that I obtained some education of the world, of politics and men and morals. One deception can be traded for another, greatness and betrayal lie beside each other closely intertwined. The truth, in the end, I think, is not always to be found in a courtroom, but a great deal of human frailty is. There is a lot of human frailty floating around.”
To briefly set the facts aside: Perhaps the best way of approaching the enigmatic brilliance of Lemann’s Ritz of the Bayou, a book unlike quite any other I’ve read, is in some imitation of its prominent aspects. Here follows an overview of its construction by a technique that means to approximate Lemann’s, with further reflection in fragments.
Lemann’s Ritz of the Bayou was originally commissioned as a narrative of long-form journalistic nonfiction for Vanity Fair, where Lemann (then an up-and-coming novelist, most notably of The Lives of the Saints and Sportsman’s Paradise, and a protégé of Gordon Lish and Walker Percy) submitted her piece to the editor of the magazine as an unruly conflagration of dramatic vignettes, philosophical musings, and personal reflections. According to James Walcott, who wrote the forward to Ritz’s anniversary edition, Vanity Fair’s editor the time reportedly groaned of Lemann’s piece that “nowhere . . . did Nancy specify what the trial was about, what the actual charges were, and what the criminal penalties might be”—“the facts of the case [were] nowhere to be found.” After a few conciliatory revisions, Lemann happily abandoned her reportage altogether, receiving a kill fee; Ritz was published two years later. “For the finished book,” Walcott continues, “Nancy included all of the factual necessities lacking in her original Vanity Fair draft, but it isn’t as journalism that the book deserves better than it got and gets. . . . It reveals [her] as an unrivaled, unlicensed detective in the art of ‘reading the room,’ the roving mistress of vibes.”
Ritz largely covers the first Edwards trial in the spring of 1985, which itself toggled back and forth between the courtrooms of New Orleans and Baton Rouge, though most of the “story” is set in New Orleans. The fellow on trial, Edwin Edwards himself—a jocular, blameless Dixie Democrat of the old school, whose truest antecedent is most nearly found in the life of Huey “the Kingfish” Long (himself immortalized in Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 masterpiece, All the King’s Men, to which Lemann also pays tribute in Ritz)—was indicted on racketeering, fraud, and bribery charges for accepting kickbacks that he and his confreres received for green-lighting various hospital construction projects across Louisiana. But when the jury was deadlocked, it ended in mistrial. Indicted again, in 1986, Edwards, this time, was acquitted. (Indicted yet a third time, in 1997, he’d later spend eight years in prison.) Though Ritz covers the first two Edwards trials back-to-back, Lemann writes it in fiercely nonlinear order, a luminous slurry of lyrical fragments and set pieces that somehow, in mirroring the befuddlement of justice that took place and has always taken place, in some sense, in the state of Louisiana, is able to generate more meaning than a strict reportorial view ever could.
Mere “vibes” can say, and do so much. Lemann’s truly run the spectrum.
From acerbic, observational comedy: “One of the governor’s sons started coming to the trial as a spectator. One saw him having Cajun relations with various countrified old wrecks in the hall.”
To deadpan satire that feels ripped from the headlines: “Meanwhile the state was falling apart. The Lafayette hotel went bankrupt and the trial had to adjourn early that day so the lawyers could move out. The libraries in New Orleans, it was announced, would close, due to fiscal crisis. Gambling casinos would open instead.”
To luminous dread, aka the Sublime: “I was driving down Prytania Street in the evening while the parade was going down the Avenue. A gigantic bus was driving toward me, two stories high, all black, only with the ghostly letters of, I can guess, its destination, glowing at the top: Paradise.”
To tempestuous longing: “There is a place across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, in a small town in Louisiana, with a plain stone floor, cane chairs, white tablecloths, and heartbreakingly deferential black waiters in gold tuxedos. . . . There I may be filled with longing and unease, but among the raging, honorable oaks, on the raging lake.”
It is infinitely possible, Lemann suggests, to miss New Orleans even when you are there—especially, perhaps, when you are there. New Orleans’ very character is “longing and unease.” It falls like the rain there, and grows like the weeds.
I write this review of Ritz from Paris, a New Orleanian on a long-stay visa who has left the Deep South and may never return, the first real duration in over twelve years that I have been anywhere else but that city, a “jazz-crazed” madman’s dream at the edge of the Gulf. Already I know what Lemann means to write of your home in a place separate from it, even if, as with Lemann, that place is your home (she was born in New Orleans in 1956), for which you may long in the process of being or the process of leaving, in two ways alike.
What emerges from Lemann’s confluence of “vibes” is far less a personally inflected portrait of a high-profile criminal trial—such as Hunter S. Thompson or Joan Didion might’ve written—than a series of nesting-doll characterizations of the city of New Orleans, in the state of Louisiana, in the realms of the unreal American South. A city is on profile here, yet also a region and whole way of life, of which Governor Edwards, the figure on trial, isn’t so much a symbol as he is a symptom.
This profile has some common features—
Lawyers, from both sides of the courtroom, glad-handing, canoodling, raging in bars: “There was a bar in the Quarter where every Thursday a celebrity of the trial would be the bartender. The Governor went at least once, and made an unsavory toast to the Prosecutor. The Governor’s brother went and wore a paper bag over his head (to kid the Prosecutor, who represented him as the ‘bagman’ for the Governor) and handed out fake money.”
Reporters, not excluding Lemann, succumbing to the fumes of existential inertia: “All the out-of-towners were falling apart. Once they got to New Orleans, they fell to pieces. They ate oysters at Felix’s in the Quarter, and danced at the F&M piano bar at four in the morning. The girl reporter from Shreveport sat at the bar of the F&M Patio wearing a black lace dress, blowing cigarette smoke up to the ceiling, with a dazed expression.”
Jurors stumbling about in miasmic confusion with little recourse to the judge or the lawyers.
The politicians (see: Edwards and all his cronies) playing foul and uncouth with the faith of their voters, the reach of their office, the health of their state.
All this disorder finds its outlet in an indirect portrait of Lemann herself, who begins to endure a sort of breakdown as Edwards’s “ceaseless trials” drag on. “I too was cracking up,” she writes. Lemann loses whole weeks in the bars of New Orleans sitting alongside her fellow reporters; she goes on a side quest to Alexandria, Louisiana, to visit the famed deliquescent hotel from which the book derives its title, even making a stop to interview Alexandria’s mayor, a raving, conspiracy-hounded philosopher king who “stocked the city swimming pool with catfish” and made Edwin Edwards seem “incredibly normal.” Lemann has the mayor on record: “‘I admit I need a haircut,’ he said (apropos of nothing, after a long silence). ‘I’m going to get one later.’” After returning to New Orleans, Lemann, while “[gazing] up . . . moon-eyed” at Edwards’s chief counsel for the defense, the unlicensed prodigy Camille Gravel, “[crashed] into a planter made of concrete outside the courthouse.”
“I wish I could return to what I was before,” Lemann writes wistfully as the trial winds down, “[girl] reporter trying to learn the ropes, minding her own business, tending her own garden, expecting nothing. But I had my own such trials, and my own such sorrows, and only when I had my own such sorrows, could I understand these fellows at all.”
In self-exile among the French, I somewhat know what Lemann means, although Paris, of course, is a jaw-dropping city. My red beans and rice has become cassoulet. The morning commute to my kids’ charter schools in New Orleans, over potholes, past sinkholes, through endless construction, and skirting death along the 10, is now a sensible, quiet, forty-minute Métro ride among sensible, quiet French commuters. The view from my room of my Hollygrove street (what Lil’ Wayne calls “the holy Mecca”), the place I have lived for thirteen years with its Section 8 Housing and raggedy light poles, is now a restored medieval windmill. A few weeks after my family and I first arrived here in February, come the morning of Mardi Gras back in New Orleans, my older son witnessed a curious woman as our train sped away from Châtelet station, bedazzled in sparkles from cap to house slippers, cutting it up on the Métro platform. We rejoiced at this French woman feeling Fat Tuesday. Yet several days later, we saw her again, still cutting it up in the same sparkly suit.
As it turned out, the woman was mentally ill. But my kids and I saw what we wanted to see.
I am lucky to be here, but still I have sorrows. When Lemann wrote in 1985 that “[Louisiana] was falling apart,” I’ll tell you that not a lot has changed. Nor does very much promise to change in the future. We won’t return to New Orleans. As visitors, maybe, but not as we were, New Orleanians, maskers in that grand charade which is more real, somehow, than life anywhere else. Perhaps difficult to empathize with someone away from America now—but I don’t mean I’ll miss the country. And I don’t mean I’ll miss the South.
“I was standing outside of the tourist-filled grotto on Bourbon Street,” Lemann writes in a passage from Ritz that made me weep, “yet on some corner in the rain, with the old jazz across the street, contemplating my memories. It is the drama of the tropics, and of your native place, what belongs to you and you to it. A flawed thing may be more full of life than a perfect thing. You can only state the condition of the thing you love, despite its flaws. You may be filled with longing and unease, but one thing you know—when you are there, your ticker’s back in business.”
Ritz of the Bayou is something like this: a masterpiece that boasts its flaws and the warm “human frailty” that flows from its pages, an imperfect thing that is “more full of life.”
New Orleans is something like that, too.
“Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?” Louis Armstrong once asked.
Nancy Lemann has answered. Whether here, among the windmills and the boulevards and the statues. Or there, among the oak trees and the madmen and the rain.
Adrian Van Young is the author of three books of fiction: the story collection The Man Who Noticed Everything (Black Lawrence Press), the novel Shadows in Summerland (Open Road Media), and the collection Midnight Self (Black Lawrence Press). His fiction, nonfiction, and criticism have been published or are forthcoming in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Black Warrior Review, Conjunctions, Guernica, Slate, BOMB, Granta, McSweeney’s, and The New Yorker online, among others.
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