James Nolan’s latest work, “Between Dying and Not Dying, I Chose the Guitar,” is much more than a memoir. We all remember the frustration of social distancing, empty grocery shelves, the masks fogging our glasses. But in addition to being author Nolan’s personal story of the coronavirus years of 2020-2023, this is a chronicle of how society has dealt with plagues throughout history.
Although Nolan is a well-known novelist, short story writer, essayist, teacher and translator, he is at heart a poet. Like his first memoir, 2017’s “Flight Risk Memoirs of a New Orleans Bad Boy,” the new book captures the essence of the subject in rhythmic, and despite the serious subject, often witty prose.
But the author, a self-described “septuagenarian flower child,” has done his homework. He gives us numbers. Woven among recollections of his childhood in New Orleans with his Creole grandparents and conversations with family and friends during the COVID pandemic are statistics.
The reader will discover that during the late 1800s, 15% of the population of New Orleans succumbed to yellow fever. During the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-1919, 3,362 citizens of New Orleans died of the disease, while approximately 50 million died worldwide.
Nolan goes on to document the impact of other epidemics including Hansen’s disease, polio and AIDS. As a child of the polio era, he was terrified of being placed in an iron lung, and as a bisexual man living in San Francisco in the 1980s, he lost many friends to AIDS.
He also discusses herd immunity, and the “long history of how human displacement from one herd to another has inevitably ended in epidemic disease and massive mortalities.”
Nolan shares his “plague reading list,” beginning with Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” which he reads from a 1903 volume once owned by his grandfather. He adds Daniel Defoe’s “A Journal of the Plague Years,” a portrait of the 1665 bubonic plague in London; Boccaccio’s 14th-century epic “The Decameron,” about the 1348 plague of the Black Death that killed 100,000 people in Florence; Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice” and of course, Camus’ classic, “The Plague.”
Less well-known is “Toucoutou,” a 1928 novel by Edward Larocque Tinker, set in the French Quarter, which explores the “fear, confusion and superstition surrounding yellow fever.”
Peppered with quotes
In fact, “Between Dying and Not Dying, I Chose the Guitar” is peppered with quotes from fiction writers and poets, including the title, from “Autumn Testament” by Pablo Neruda, a poet whose work Nolan has translated and published.
But the book is sparked by Nolan’s own pandemic experience.
“On Monday March 16, 2020, in this Chinese New Year of the Metal Rat, my life was canceled in one fell swoop,” Nolan writes.
He rides on a bus line called “Walmart to Cemeteries” to his gym, only to learn the gym is closed. Then, after finding the shelves in his neighborhood grocery nearly bare, he arrives home to his apartment in the Luling Mansion near Bayou St. John, where he discovers the movie crew that was preparing to film a vampire movie in the house has decamped on orders of the city health department.
Nolan’s wry sense of humor comes through in his description of the set designers having painted the downstairs apartments purple and scarlet, colors that show up throughout the book.
He writes, “I breathed an enormous sigh of relief. I wouldn’t be living on the set of a vampire movie during what I was soon to find out was a global plague, one that had just started to kill people in New Orleans.”
Then, as he stares out his window in the direction of St. Louis Cemetery No. 3, “In the moonlight, faint white glimmers of the above ground tombs were visible through a tangle of branches. Although I couldn’t spot it through the grove of live oaks, my own tomb was in that cemetery….
“That was day one of the plague in New Orleans.”
Isolation, confrontation
Nolan takes us along as he ventures into the world after two months of isolation. And the world isn’t pretty. This includes politics, from the unmasked then-president taking an unproven anti-malarial drug to ward off coronavirus, to the pandemic causing irritation in the author.
Nolan admits losing it at his neighborhood grocery store when the security guard insists he use the hand sanitizer provided at the door.
“(T)he pandemic was bringing out the worst in me, and I was getting a glimpse of the snarling imp of the perverse buried deep inside. After all, the guard was doing her underpaid job, dealing with this Rumpelstiltskin tantrum of an older man in the only way she knew how, as if he were her unruly grandbaby.”
Later, “wearing my new face mask, we now nod at each other in complicit exasperation, rolling our eyes as if to ask each other when will this bullshit be over?”
Parallels in politics
On Jan. 6, 2021, the author watched the attempted takeover of the U.S. Capitol on television. In New Orleans, of course, Twelfth Night is usually reserved for parties and king cake — but this time, national events cast a pall over the day.
The horrible spectacle on TV takes Nolan back to 1981, when he was teaching in Barcelona, Spain. His account of living there during an attempted coup d’etat is riveting. Throughout his career, he has taught in universities across the globe, and several positions have been in countries under threat of civil unrest or in states of siege. As he observes the political shenanigans taking place in our own country. the reader will detect disturbing parallels.
Among his anecdotes of the pandemic years in New Orleans, Nolan recounts the heart-wrenching deaths of several friends and recalls others who lost their businesses due to the shutdown. He remembers the friends who rallied to assist him when he was suddenly evicted from the Luling Mansion.
There is much compassion here: for students who are frightened about resuming classes after the lockdown is lifted, for vaccine refusers (even though he is clearly not one), for his beloved New Orleans, and of course for those who died and their families.
A big takeaway from the book is the realization that social distancing and isolation can take a toll on mental health, especially that of young people. Nolan praises the public health community for finally acknowledging this fact.
In his forward to the book, Andre Codrescu says, “The mix of prescience, sobriety, satire, and curiosity that are the trademarks of James Nolan’s writing shine here.”
And in the acknowledgments at the end of the book, Nolan writes, “Nobody survives times like these on their own. We did it together.”
A resident of New Orleans for four decades, Celeste Berteau now resides in the high desert of New Mexico where she writes and rambles.
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BOOK LAUNCH
WHEN: 6 p.m. Thursday (June 6)
WHERE: Octavia Books
513 Octavia St., New Orleans
