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Uptown, Downtown F or anyone familiar with other Bohemian scenes, one striking aspect of this one is the relative absence of rivalries, jealousies, backbiting , factions, and conspiracies. Cicero Odiorne was struck by the contrast with Paris, where, “underneath the brilliance, the spirit is that of the jungle.” Elizabeth Anderson and Lillian Marcus were social rivals and disliked each other, and Flo Field resented her business competitor Helen Pitkin Schertz, but that seems to have been about it for hard feelings. Odiorne marveled that, “with us, in New Orleans, jealousy did not exist. If anyone had a small success . . . such as a story printed . . . the rest were delighted. We probably celebrated with a dinner party . . . with vino pinto, made by our Italian neighbors.” Oliver La Farge also wrote of “delight”— “When one of us achieved anything at all, however slight, the other workers were delighted, and I think everyone took new courage”—and Basso, too, looked back fondly on an atmosphere of “mutual friendliness and good will.” Even more remarkable is that this web of friendship and respect sometimes bridged the divide between Bohemia and Society, between “uptown” and “downtown.” Consider the case of Grace King. That genteel septuagenarian was a kind of figure that Bohemians elsewhere would have mocked. But that’s not what happened in New Orleans. It may not be surprising that she and Lyle Saxon were close (Saxon had a weakness for dowagers), but she and the rumbustious Roark Bradford were also friends, and she even had a touching exchange of correspondence with Sherwood Anderson, in which the rough Midwesterner confessed that he had always hoped to merit acceptance by members of “the gentler tribe of the ink party” like her, and she wrote, in turn, “You 77 78 | The World of the Famous Creoles have a pen of iron & use it like a giant.” When the Louisiana Historical Society honored her at the Cabildo in 1923, flowers were piled up around her, the band played “Dixie,” and her friend Dorothy Dix said that she “has not only given us back our past, but has stuck a rose in its teeth, and a pomegranate bloom behind its ear!” Surely Miss King belonged among the “lady fictioneers [from] the sodden marshes of Southern Literature” whose “treacly sentimentalities” the Double Dealer editorially deplored, but when King’s Creole Families of New Orleans appeared in 1921, the Double Dealer reviewed it respectfully. And of course two young Bohemians less than half her age put her among the Famous Creoles. Creole Families of New Orleans was illustrated by Ellsworth Woodward, an establishment figure with old-fashioned artistic tastes who might also seem an unlikely member of the circle. True, one or two of his more avantgarde students at Newcomb and more adventurous art-fanciers like Hunt Henderson grumbled about his conservatism, but Woodward seems generally to have been recognized as the kindly, avuncular elder statesman that he was, and Spratling and Faulkner honored him for his contributions. Just so, Mrs. James Oscar Nixon and Helen Pitkin Schertz, two distinctly un-Bohemian clubwomen, knew and were known by the more obviously “artful and crafty” and shared their interests. And there they are in Famous Creoles. The respect and goodwill ran both ways. As we saw, moneyed and cultivated uptown people initiated and supported all of the circle’s major institutions , enjoyed associating with the artists and writers of the Arts and Crafts Club and the Double Dealer, and invited the more presentable ones to speak at the Quartier Club and Le Petit Salon. Younger and more frivolous uptowners also liked to hang out with the Quarter’s Bohemians, for other reasons. The Campaign for Preservation One of the most important of the interests shared by Society and Bohemia was the revitalization of the French Quarter. Most Famous Creoles contributed in one way or another to the nascent historic preservation movement. Grace King had been a pioneer; as early as 1884 she produced a display that celebrated the Quarter’s charm at a time when it was far from obvious to most New Orleanians. Ellsworth Woodward and architects Moise Goldstein and N. C. Curtis were early and active preservationists, and their efforts re- Uptown, Downtown | 79 ceived sympathetic newspaper coverage from, among others, Lyle Saxon and Keith Temple. Mrs. Schertz and Flo Field each claimed to have organized the Quarter’s first guide service; William Spratling served on the Vieux Carré Commission, established in 1925; and Elizebeth Werlein would eventually become the city’s...

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