Budayeen Nights: Stories

Introduction to The City on the Sand

In some ways, this is the ultimate tale of Budayeen Nights.

In every other tale of the Budayeen, while the action is going on, the presence of Emst Weinraub is more or less implied, sitting at his cafe table, watching what goes on without the faintest idea of what’s actually going on. You can almost see him out of the comer of your eye.

This is another one printed here from George’s file copy, not the version actually published in F&SF — and this story was later expanded upon to make up George’s novel Relatives. It was the first appearance of the Budayeen, and one of the few works in which it, and the nameless City, are described: the Chinese quarter; the canal with its restaurants, bars, casinos (i.e. Canal Street in New Orleans, which was named after a canal that was never dug); the marketplace and miniature golf facilities; and the bizarre replica of Singapore built by a crazed millionaire. (On St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans stands a 1960s copy of the mansion “Tarn” from the film Gone with the Wind.)

“The city was the final hope of those who truly needed to hide.”

As was — and is — New Orleans.

The hiding place to which George fled from the noise and stress of New York in the early seventies; the place where he returned after the final disaster of his last marriage in Los Angeles.

We see a day in the life of the Budayeen, through the eyes of lost, shabby, and hopeless expatriate Ernst Weinraub (or Weintraub). We meet, for the first time, Monsieur Gargotier, proprietor of the Fee Blanche; see Sandor Courane in one of his few nonfatal roles; hear tell of Marîd’s favorite hangouts, the Solace and Chiriga’s. We see the ubiquitous Arab boy, here called Kebap (“Roast Beef), though he has other names in other tales, coming and going like a troublesome little ghost.

Weinraub himself like Sandor Courane, was one of George’s generic recurring heroes, appearing in a number of early stories before he was supplanted by Courane. In most of them, Ernst is the ultimate square-jawed hero, but without Courane’s doomed and hapless charm; maybe that was Ernst’s point. In this tale he has been sawed and filed down to being a legend in his own mind: aloof in his self-conscious dreams, mocked at by the street folk, losing himself deeper and deeper into his alcoholic fantasies. He wants to be a writer and wants desperately to be noticed, but he only pretends to write — a fate that befalls and befell many writers who get seduced by the “New Orleans lifestyle.”

I suspect George had met a number of Ernsts in New Orleans — I know he was friends with Tennessee Williams’s houseboy, to whom he lived next door for many years. (I still have the smudged and blotted napkins bearing the outlines of trilogies never written, in George’s spiky block-print hand, including the outline of the fourth Budayeen novel, Word of Night.)

Weinraub has tried — as George tried for so many years — “to write…short, terse essays about the city…” But “he couldn’t seem to capture the true emotions he experienced…the pervasive sense of isolation, of eternal uncleanness, of a soul-deep loss of personality….”

But where poor Ernst failed, George succeeded dazzlingly. This is very much a Budayeen night: a night on which nothing in particular takes place. The nameless city simply winds its accustomed way through another turning of the sterile Earth. Everyone in it goes about their own obscure business like the characters in the Dylan song “Mr. Tambourine Man,” observed by a failed poet who has nowhere left to go.

— Barbara Hambly