What were we, my father and I, doing there? I had just finished high school. My mother had died the year before and my sister had got married. My father decided it would be good for both of us if we went abroad. He had never been abroad. But he liked to say that we were both entitled to a Wanderjahr, as he called it. He was a romantic and a lover of music. In fact, he taught piano at the music school at Nicholls State Junior College. If you want to know the truth, he was second-rate, not really first-class at playing, not really first-class at teaching, not really a scholar. He was a certain type, quite common in the South, a lover of culture, books, the lofty things in life. Music of a certain sort moved him to the point of tears. In short, he was a romantic. His great ambition for years had been to make the grand tour of Europe, to see the cathedrals, above all to go to Bayreuth. It was natural that we should visit our cousins. The Rhine, the Lorelei, the cathedral at Cologne — they were as much a part of his dream of Europe as Chartres and Mont-Saint-Michel and Florence. I think he thought of Tübingen and Heidelberg as a sort of backdrop for The Student Prince. Do you recall that being a student at Heidelberg was as much a part of the Southern tradition as reading Sir Walter Scott?
It is important to understand that in the 1930s most Americans didn’t have two thoughts about the Third Reich and Hitler. We were still in the grip of the Depression. Mussolini, in fact, was the object of more curiosity than Hitler. I remember my mother presenting a paper at her literary club entitled something like “Mussolini, the New Caesar.” Mussolini, the strong man who made Italy work. Fascism was then thought of as a bundle of sticks, fasces, stronger than one stick and not necessarily a bad thing. Hitler seemed to be a German version of the same, another strong man whom the Germans had in fact elected, a matter of some, though not much, interest.
There was certainly no reason not to go to Germany then, if one was going to Chartres and Florence.
I must tell you how I felt about my father and mother, though it does me little credit. My father was, as I say, a type familiar in the South, not successful in life but an upholder of culture, lofty ideals, and the higher things. He was a practitioner of the arts, by turns a painter and a musician. And an author: he wrote occasional articles for the New Orleans newspaper about old Creole days, perhaps a humorous anecdote about Père Antoine or a historical sketch about a romantic encounter between a plantation belle and a handsome Yankee captain. As a young man he wrote poetry and was named poet laureate of Thibodaux by the mayor’s proclamation. But he settled on music and gave piano recitals at places like Knights of Columbus halls or the Jewish Community Center. Later he became assistant professor of music at Tulane, not the university proper, but in the university college, which was a sort of night school for adults. As I’ve said, not first-rate.
We come from old Alsatian German stock who two hundred years ago were lured here by the thousands by a real-estate swindler named John Law who promised an idyllic life in a Louisiana paradise. So they landed in the swamps next to the west bank of the river, which is still known as the Côte des Allemands, the German coast, where they were engulfed by mosquitoes, malaria, yellow fever, and the French. My father’s family, the Schmidts, became Smith. My mother’s family, the Zweigs, became Labranche.
My grandfather had a hardware store in Thibodaux, but my father moved to New Orleans, where he lived in the French Quarter, wore a beret, and painted a bit, like an American on the Left Bank. He claimed to have been a confidant of Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson and Frances Parkinson Keyes.
My mother was a thin, hypertensive woman, perpetually worried by my father’s airy improvidence, by his playing at la vie de bohème—I can still see him at the piano on students’ nights-at-home, playing and singing “Che gelida manina” not quite accurately, fingernails clicking on the keys, head swaying, eyes closed at Puccini’s melting melodies. But my mother had to make ends meet and keep up with New Orleans social life. She was both pious and hostile. She had it both ways. If someone offended her, she sent them holy cards, notices of Masses for their “intentions.” What she was really saying was: Even though you’ve done this rotten thing, I’m having a Mass said for you. She had a mail-order hookup with some obscure order — I think it was the Palatine Fathers of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin — so that if, say, her own parish priest offended her by having a black altar boy, he would get a card of acknowledgment from the Palatine Fathers of Fond du Lac that thanks to the generosity of Mrs. Simon R. Smith ten Masses were going to be said for him. How to argue with that? The more somebody offended her, the more Masses he got. Once, an acquaintance of hers mortally offended her by contriving to have her daughter named queen of the Lorelei Carnival Ball — not one of the major balls, to be sure — when my sister was the obvious choice, what with my father being one of the founders of the Krewe of Lorelei. But money won out and my sister had to settle for being a maid in the court. My mother, white-lipped, blood pressure kiting over three hundred, of course said nothing. But after the ball both the queen and her mother received cards of acknowledgment from the Palatine Fathers of Fond du Lac that thanks to the generosity of Mrs. Simon R. Smith, thirty Masses were to be said for each, sixty Masses in all.
Honor thy father and mother. I didn’t exactly. I am not proud of it. It sounds as if I’m saying that my father was a phony and my mother a shrew. Well, yes. On the other hand, no. To be truthful, I didn’t exactly honor my father and mother. But no, it was sadder than that. I felt sorry for them. How many other people, I wondered, were messed up for life? Most, I later discovered. But yes, it’s true, I was an ingrate. To tell the whole truth, I was a spiteful boy. I couldn’t stand what my mother called religion. I couldn’t stand my father’s fecklessness and his everlasting talk about the loftier things in life, Truth, Beauty, Freedom, Art, the Soaring of the Spirit in the Realm of Music. Would you believe I couldn’t stand all that Catholic business, holy cards, candles, rosaries, my mother’s flying novenas and Nine First Fridays. I couldn’t stand Holy Cross High School — except for football. I played tackle and we beat Jesuit, who thought they were the hottest stuff in town. I liked to hit, as they say. And I liked the science courses — no bull, just the facts and verifiable theory, no praying for anyone’s “intentions,” no swooning over Puccini. Actually, I couldn’t stand Louisiana, and New Orleans, with its self-conscious cultivation of being the Big Easy, its unbuttoned y’all-come bonhomie, good eats and phony French laissez le bon temps rouler, let the good times roll, which masked a cold-blooded marriage of moneymaking and social climbing, rotten politics and self-indulgence. Don’t misunderstand me. If I was anti-Catholic, I was also anti-Protestant. They were, if anything, worse. Actually there was not much left of Protestantism except a dislike for Catholics and a fondness for their festival. For, though they had nothing to do with Ash Wednesday, indeed had not the faintest notion of what it was about, they took to Fat Tuesday like ducks to water, in fact took it over. Worst of all were the local village atheists, professor-philosophers, ACLU zealots, educated Episcopal-type unbelievers, media types, NBC anchormen, New York Times pundits, show-biz gurus. If one can imagine anything worse than Jerry Falwell governing the country, how about Norman Lear? Love your fellow man, the Lord said. That’s asking a lot. Frankly, I found my fellow man, with few exceptions, either victims or assholes. I did not exclude myself. The only people I got along with were bums, outcasts, pariahs, family skeletons, and the dying.