#andrei codrescu

My good friend, James Nolan, died last week. Jimmy was a true New Orleans aristocrat, who could trace his Creole Catholic family from its origins to its multi-leveled tomb in St. Louis 3 Cemetery. He was a superb story-teller whose books are alive with the events of his adventurous life. While still an adolescent, he frequented one of the only integrated places in the American South, the French Quarter bars where Blacks, bohemians and gay sailors mixed and drank. Still in his youth, he also lived in the redwood forest in Sonoma County, in one of the first settlements in the age of Communes. He was part of San Francisco's radical street theater of the Angels of Light. He taught English in China during Mao's Cultural revolution, lived in Spain during the Franco regime, and was back in San Francisco in time for a literary renaissance.

Each of these places found themselves in his fiction and essays. Threaded through them was always a civilised, erudite and welcoming New Orleans accent. Like the multi-cultural city he returned to after his travels, his prose emanated the ineffable quality of the city, like the sweet olive that blooms unexpectedly behind the St. Louis Cathedral. Jimmy translated Pablo Neruda into English, and wrote highly regarded essays in Spain's best literary journals and newspapers. In San Francisco he had an apartment under a freeway that was the only place in that city that resembled a New Orleans house, with a courtyard and a balcony.

Each of his adventures found another life in the stories he told his friends. We spent many magical hours in the French Quarter, at Molly's on the Market, regaling each other, or anyone who would listen, with our stories. We once discussed all the places we lived in, and decided that ours was the best of them. We wrote a song, titled "There is no Molly's in Tibet," an anthem meaning that even the most exotic locations in the world could not compare with our hangout in New Orleans.

Jimmy was also a superb cook. He lived in an early 19th century house where one could easily imagine John James Audobon and Lafcadio Hearn talking late into the quiet night. An evening meal of shrimp etoufeé and fine wine on a breezy Fall evening on the balcony of Jimmy's French Quarter apartment was a memorable event.

When the mayor ordered the evacuation of the city during Hurricane Katrina, Jimmy was one of the last to leave. Bored National Guard soldiers from five states often gathered under his balcony to drink and holler all night in the empty city. Jimmy retaliated by playing Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row" at high volume. The soldiers moved. When electricity was cut, Jimmy lived a time with candle light, which perfectly suited the house and his own taste. It was only when the city shut off water that he left, in the unique style of a true native of the city. Gathered in the lobby of the Monteleone Hotel, where Tennessee Williams often stayed, was a group of tourists waiting patiently for a bus that the Monteleone manager promised would take them to safety. During the longer and longer wait, a yellow school bus requisitioned by a concerned citizen stopped in front of the hotel. "Ten bucks will get you to Baton Rouge!" announced the driver. Jimmy and some locals, including a famous musician, boarded instantly. They were taken out of the city to the safe dry Baton Rouge airport. The hotel bus never came.

Our friendship included mutual admiration for each other's writing. Jimmy's last book was "Between Dying and Not Dying, I Chose the Guitar: the Pandemic Years In New Orleans” (University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press). He had the good fortune of seeing it in print just before he died. On the back cover, I wrote: "This journal of the plague years beginning in 2020 declares itself crisply on the side of poetry. Even as James Nolan documents, with the flair of the great storyteller he is, the details of his life in a city where life-loving citizens have been sentenced to solitary confinement, he finds the courage and humor to survive. The mix of prescience, sobri­ety, satire, and curiosity that are the trademarks of his writing shine here. I have no doubt that Between Dying and Not Dying, I Chose the Guitar will take its place alongside Pepys, Defoe, and Camus among the great plague chronicles.” All true, yet every blurb is an obituary. His body didn't have a choice, but his guitar will play a long time for us.

Andrei Codrescu

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