The Life and Selected Letters of Lyle Saxon.
By Chance Harvey. Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican Publishing Company, 2003. 336 pages. $24.95.

In the fall of 1999, when Chance Harvey was teaching in the University of Mississippi’s English Department, she gave a dynamic lecture on “Lyle Saxon and the Southern Renascence” at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. Her insights into the man of many masks, along with her photographic slides of this generous friend of Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson, were a tantalizing preview of The Life and Selected Letters of Lyle Saxon.

Fortunately, Harvey began her research in the late 1970s, when several of Saxon’s associates and relatives were alive and glad to talk about the author known as “Mr. Louisiana” and “Mr. New Orleans.” Harvey’s hundreds of endnotes document the interviews, as well as her frequent citations from Saxon’s diaries, his journalistic columns, his published and unpublished manuscripts, and a great variety of other resources. Several notes include fascinating sidelights, such as Harvey’s comment that photography intrigued the boy Lyle, who published three pictures in St. Nicholas magazine in 1908: “One was awarded a gold badge; the other a cash prize” (282, n. 3). A note identifying Saxon’s friend Caroline Dormon explains that “Dormon is recognized as the first female forester in the U.S. for her work with the Louisiana Department of Conservation” (293, n. 121). Harvey even lists two of Dormon’s books about Louisiana flora, adding details on a recent reprint edition by a Baton Rouge publisher.

Further enhancing the biography are several illustrations of Saxon and his circle--including Lyle’s sweet baby picture from July 1892 and a startling view of the writer as a burly werewolf at Mardi Gras 1941--from the New Orleans Public Library, the Cammie G. Henry Research Center at Louisiana’s Northwestern State University, and other collections. An especially fruitful repository of photographic images, letters, and additional material was Tulane University’s Special Collections in the Howard-Tilton Library. There, Harvey came across the unusual Lyle Saxon-Rachel Field correspondence and decided to write her doctoral dissertation about the historian who helped to launch the restoration of the French Quarter in the early 1920s and whose house at 536 Royal Street “was known as the place to meet” (10). The dissertation was the basis for Chance Harvey’s book, which she prefaces with an amusing account of her own visit to 536 Royal in April 2002. Carriageway Gallery had set up an art print business with bright pegboards and little Christmas lights, and Harvey looked in vain for traces of the former resident: “They tore the vine down. Saxon’s palm tree died one winter in a hard freeze” (11).

Several letters by Saxon, dated 1917 to 1946 and found in libraries from North Carolina and Virginia to New Orleans, complement Harvey’s biographical text in many ways and form a separate section of the volume (219-70). The Life and Selected Letters of Lyle Saxon is an outstanding addition to Pelican Publishing Company’s catalog. Over the past several years, Pelican has reprinted many of Lyle Saxon’s books, from the 1927 Father Mississippi to The Friends of Joe Gilmore, published in 1948, soon after his death. The press exaggerates, however, in claiming on the dust cover that Saxon's “life story” is told “for the first time” in this book. As Harvey makes clear, James W. Thomas’s Lyle Saxon: A Critical Biography appeared over a decade ago (Birmingham: Summa, 1991). So many myths and mysteries surround Lyle Saxon, however, that Thomas did not even begin to exhaust the rich subject; and Harvey surpasses the earlier biographer in her indefatigable search for elusive facts. For example, Harvey traveled to the Washington State Archives in Bellingham to solve “the mystery of his birthplace” (24). Because Saxon called himself a native Louisianian, and because of his maternal family's long associations with Baton Rouge, most scholars had assumed he was born in that city. Harvey’s meticulous assembling of “bits and pieces of information” (24)--interviews, Saxon’s mother’s notebook, a California physician’s business card, and a 1938 letter in the Tulane archives--hints at the prodigious labor that went into the writing of this volume. The result of Harvey’s quest appears on the seventh line of a page she reproduces from the 1891 register of births in Whatcom County, Washington: a September 4 entry for Lyle Saxon (25).

Apparently, Hugh Saxon remained on the West Coast when Kittie Chambers Saxon returned to her Baton Rouge home with their baby. A correspondent and then city editor for the Los Angeles Herald, the elder Saxon abandoned his young family, later remarried, and, between 1919 and 1934, “played bit parts in twenty-four movies, including the Charlie Chaplin classic The Circus (1928)” (27). Harvey’s note on Hugh Saxon’s film career leads the reader to the Internet Movie Database; but this entertaining citation is preceded by a note on Lyle Saxon’s cousin, Muriel Saxon Lambert, who told the biographer that Saxon never spoke about his father and refused to see him on Hugh Saxon’s visits to New Orleans. In fact, Harvey suggests that Lyle Saxon’s deep sense of rejection was an early source of the loneliness that forms a major theme of The Life and Selected Letters of Lyle Saxon.

Beginning with chapter 1, “The Solitary Spirit and the Comic Mask,” Harvey emphasizes the “thread of intense despair, the leitmotif of his diaries and letters” (56), countering the much more typical image of Lyle Saxon as bon vivant and mentor to a generation of artists and authors. Harvey does not underestimate Saxon’s impact on the literary world in New Orleans and, during the later 1920s, in Greenwich Village. Commenting on his support for William Faulkner, both in Louisiana and New York, Harvey suggests that Children of Strangers, Saxon’s only novel, might have influenced the plot and characterization of The Sound and the Fury. Less famous authors also benefitted from Saxon’s generosity. As state director of the Louisiana Writers’ Project from 1935 to 1942, he provided employment for many Depression-era contributors to the New Orleans City Guide and Louisiana: A Guide to the State. After the state writers’ projects ended, the Louisiana Library Commission asked him to supervise the collection of folklore for Gumbo Ya-Ya. His coeditor, Robert Tallant, wrote to their mutual friend Cammie Garrett Henry: “As a writer, I owe him everything” (217).

Owner of the restored Melrose Plantation, south of Natchitoches, Louisiana, Cammie Henry often welcomed Saxon to Yucca House cabin, where he could escape the steady social and professional demands of life in New Orleans. Harvey underscores the stressfulness of journalistic and historical writing for an aesthetically sensitive man who believed fiction was a superior genre. “In his repeated statements in his letters about the writer’s art,” says Harvey, “Saxon reveals the kind of ‘anguish and travail’ that Faulkner would later note” (14). The biographer also describes the ongoing financial difficulties that distracted Saxon from writing fiction, and she states that “a failed romantic relationship” in 1928 disturbed him so seriously that “his creative ambition” was ruined (47). Arts patron Muriel Moore, photographer Doris Ulmann, and author Rachel Field are possible identifications of “the mystery lady” (148), and Harvey carefully documents the relationships each woman had with Saxon.

Another likely influence on Saxon’s recurring depression and lifelong sense of loneliness is the complex sexuality that Harvey hints at rather obliquely. Saxon never married and never lived with a woman, but he did live with his childhood and college friend George Favrot, who fought in World War I and whom Saxon had planned to join in Europe in the 1920s. Favrot died in 1925; and in 1946, shortly before his own death, Saxon told his journalist friend François Mignon: “Baton Rouge always depresses me, and I think continually of George Favrot” (269). Saxon also developed a close relationship with the music critic Noel Straus, with whom he lived in Chicago, New Orleans, and New York. And Harvey’s scrupulous avoidance of a pronoun suggests that the visitor who sometimes spent “drunken nights” with Saxon for “purely monetary” reasons--despite Saxon’s sense of “self-abasement” and his fears of a painful recurrence of syphilis--was probably a male (170). Saxon’s library, she says, contains many studies of “social and sexual aberration” (53).

Future biographers of Lyle Saxon will probably place greater emphasis on such mysteries than Harvey does. Equally complicated and deserving of further discussion are Saxon’s attitudes on race. Langston Hughes asked him to support the Scottsboro Nine in 1933, citing “the great sympathy which you have shown for the Negro peoples and the beauty you have given them in your writing” (34). And Saxon was an early promoter of folk artist Clementine Hunter, whose Cane River scenes he collected and compared to the “primitive paintings” of Europe in the Middle Ages (107). He called his valet, Joe Gilmore, “Black Saxon’ and titled his own literary reminiscences The Friends of Joe Gilmore. (Gilmore is pictured “mixing an absinthe frappé” on page 186.) Yet, Saxon’s letters and diaries are surprising for the number of patronizing and disrespectful references to African Americans.

The Life and Selected Letters of Lyle Saxon is not the last word on the author. For those who cannot make the pilgrimage to 536 Royal Street, however, the book is without parallel as an introduction to “Mr. New Orleans,” who, ironically, claimed to hate crowded parties, his Louisiana history books, and even Mardi Gras. Surely not Mardi Gras. Chance Harvey quotes from Saxon’s enthusiastic description of his all-day, all-night party for the 1940 festivities (198). Even better, she includes a photo of a six-foot, two-inch rabbit: Lyle Saxon in yet another mask.

Joan Wylie Hall