Mirrors of Chartres Street (1954)

Summary

Carvel Collins. “As Faulkner Saw New Orleans.” New York Times Book Review, February 7, 1954, p. 4.

In 1925 the Sunday Magazine section of The New Orleans Times-Picayune printed a series of sketches by William Faulkner. This was his first extended prose publication, his earlier published work having been chiefly poetry. The staff of the journal of Faulkner Studies, after searching through the Picayune files and finding eleven sketches, has reprinted them here in a limited edition.

At the end of 1924, when he was 27, Faulkner went to live in New Orleans and stayed there until he sailed for Europe the next June. These months were important in his development. For the first time he was in association with writers and artists and their shop talk; partly under their influence he put poetry somewhat to the side and began to concentrate on fiction. Among his associates in New Orleans were Sherwood Anderson, Roark Bradford, and the artist William Spratling, with whom Faulkner prepared a picture book about these men and others of their group.

Faulkner wrote the pot-boiling sketches for The Picayune under the general heading “Mirrors of Chartres Street.” A famous book of that time was Begbie's Mirrors of Downing Street, with its accounts of such personages as Lloyd George, Winston Churchill and Lord Kitchener. Faulkner's series set out to describe vagabonds, aspiring hoodlums, racing touts and workmen whom he saw in New Orleans' French Quarter, of which Chartres Street is a major thoroughfare.

William Van O'Connor points out in his helpful introduction that at the back of Faulkner's observation of this hard-pressed street life was “a desire to see the world as high romance.”