"Nightmare-Touch" (2010) Review

For the longest time, I had passed over purchasing this book online for several reasons. First, its simple cover that I am now fond of struck me as rather print-on-demandish in outward appearance; second, the title, "Nightmare-Touch", is simply the title of a Hearn essay found in "Shadowings". My logic told me that the volume was either print on demand or a simple reprinting of one essay. Finally, and upon closer inspection, I realized that this book has a substantial selection of Hearn's writings with an introduction from Hearn biographer Paul Murray.

Initially I was disappointed with the selections as they were purported to contain Hearn's best horror writing. Yours truly was thinking of undergoing a similar project a couple of years ago rendering myself knowledgeable of such selections. After reading the introduction, and despite Murray's mentioning such pieces, many of the titles that one would think should be included in a collection of Hearn's horror writing have been omitted: My Guardian Angel, the tanyard murder, Haceldama, Skulls and Skeletons, Golgotha, Vespertina Cognito, and Gautier's Clarimonde just to name a few. Murray's reasons for doing so apparently center around the idea that Hearn, as a writer, was not yet fully matured during his Cincinnati period which would account for a number of the aforementioned titles missing. The translations are, well, translations; and "Nightmare-Touch" already contains a strong selection of works from Hearn's Japanese period, although, Vespertina Cognito is perhaps his most chilling tale.

As for the book itself, it was published by Tartarus Press in a limited edition of 300 copies in 2010. The book comes with a white dust jacket and its hardback underneath is made of green material. It is a fine book in an age when publishing is on the wane. Contents are as follows:

Introduction by Paul A. Murray

Nightmare-Touch (Shadowings)

Fantastics (Fantastics and Other Fancies)
The Fountain of Gold
The Ghostly Kiss
The Vision of the Dead Creole
The Name on the Stone
Aphrodite and [the] King's Prisoner
A Dead Love
At the Cemetery

Stray Leaves from Strange Literature
The Fountain Maiden
The Magical Words
The Bird Wife
The Legend of the Monster Misfortune

Some Chinese Ghosts
The Legend of Tchi-Niu
The Story of Ming-Y
The Return of Yen-Tchin-King
The Tradition of the Tea-Plant

Two Years in the French West Indies
La Guiablesse
Ye

Japanese Ghosts
Of Ghosts and Goblins (Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, v2)
Fragment (In Ghostly Japan)
A Passional Karma (In Ghostly Japan)
Ingwa-banashi (In Ghostly Japan)
The Reconciliation (Shadowings)
The Corpse-Rider (Shadowings)
Of a Promise Broken (Japanese Miscellany)
The Story of Umetsu Chubei (Japanese Miscellany)
The Legend of Yurei-Daki (Kotto)
In a Cup of Tea (Kotto)
The Story of Chugoro (Kotto)
Ikiryo (Kotto)
The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hoichi (Kwaidan)
Rokuro-Kubi (Kwaidan)
Yuki-Onna (Kwaidan)
The Dream of Akinosuke (Kwaidan)
Jikininki (Kwaidan)
Mujina (Kwaidan)
The Story of Ito Norisuke (Romance of the Milky Way)

Important Connections

Here is an entry that shows how Hearn, sometimes over the course of many years, never forgot his inspirational origins. First, for those who follow Hearn’s Cincinnati career, we undoubtedly remember his posthumous satirical obituary for his short-lived paper Ye Giglampz titled simply: Giglampz. This article appeared on October 4^th, 1874, in the Cincinnati Enquirer; and as other Hearnologists have pointed out, there is a short quotation from this article that self-describes the young ambitious journalist in satirical detail stating: 

“Now, in those days there was a young man connected with the Daily Enquirer whose tastes were whimsically grotesque and arabesque. He was by nature a fervent admirer of extremes. He believed only in the Revoltingly Horrible or the Excruciatingly Beautiful. He worshiped the French School of sensation, and reveled in thrusting a reeking mixture of bones, blood and hair under people’s noses at breakfast time. To produce qualms in  the stomachs of other people affords him especial delight. To borrow the picturesque phraseology of Jean Paul Richter, his life-path was ever running down into vaults and out over graves. He was only known to fame by the name of “The Ghoul.”

In the first sentence, we have the descriptors “grotesque and arabesque.” And, as you might likely already know, Hearn was a great admirer, in his youth, of Edgar Allan Poe. Could it be any wonder then that we find Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque to be the title of a two-volume collection, published in 1840, of Poe’s works which included stories like The Fall of the House of Usher, MS. Found in a Bottle, and Ligeia? No. The connection is so vivid, giving us even the very title of the volumes the young Hearn adored so.

At the risk of making this entry too long, I will provide one more fascinating connection in Hearn’s life.

So far in my eyes the most mesmeric translation done by Hearn was his version of Theophile Gautier’s Clarimonde, a short story included in Hearn’s collection of Gautier titled One of Cleopatra’s Nights and Other Fantastic Romances. Although not published until 1882—Hearn then living in New Orleans—we can know, from the descriptions by his Cincinnati friends, that he labored tirelessly at translating Gautier while working at the Cincinnati Enquirer. This means his translations of Gautier were started before 1875 when Hearn was unjustly fired from the newspaper. In fact, from his letters out of New Orleans, we know that Hearn was merely trying to finish his translation of the last story in that collection of Gautier he had been working on (King Candaules). This might mean that Clarimonde was finished before even 1875. Why does this matter? Time elapse!

In the year 1894, Hearn’s most famous book from Japan was published, titled Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan. To this day, it is perhaps his most well-known work. Yet, in the text of his later-lamented translations of Gautier, in the tale Clarimonde, a sentence catches our eyes: 

“And gazing I felt opening  within me gates that had until then remained closed; vents long obstructed became all clear, permitting glimpses of unfamiliar perspectives within; life suddenly made itself visible to me under a totally novel aspect.”

In the study of Hearn, this is most utterly striking. Not only did Hearn take the same words, “glimpses of unfamiliar” from his previous work of twenty years ago, but also he shows us, with this sentence, how life had changed for him upon his coming to Japan. It seems like a fantastic and youthful daydream realized only later during his life in the far east.

Hokuseido Books

One cannot study Hearn without coming across the occasionally rare book by the Hokuseido Press. A publisher out of Tokyo, this book producer gives Hearnology some of the best resources available to study from, however, most of their books are not scanned via Google Books... ect. Perhaps it has to do with copyrights or an amount of international respect for property? Anyway, here is a list of the Hearn-related books I could find by this publisher which didn't bat an eyelash in regard to the coming and going of WW2:

A History of English Literature – edited by Ryuji Tanabe, Teisaburo Ochiai, and Ichiro Nishizaki. 2 volumes in 1927.

On Art, Literature, and Philosophy – edited by Ryuji Tanabe, Teisaburo Ochiai, and Ichiro Nishizaki. 1932.

On Poetry – edited by Ryuji Tanabe, Teisaburo Ochiai, and Ichiro Nishizaki. 1934.

Letters from Basil Hall Chamberlain to Lafcadio Hearn – edited by Kazuo Koizumi. 1936.

More Letters from Basil Hall Chamberlain to Lafcadio Hearn – edited by Kazuo Koizumi. 19??.

Barbarous Barbers – edited by Ichiro Nishizaki. 1939.

Buying Christmas Toys and Other Essays – edited by Ichiro Nishizaki. 1939.

Literary Essays – edited by Ichiro Nishizaki. 1939.

Oriental Articles – edited by Ichiro Nishizaki. 1939.

The New Radiance and Other Scientific Sketches – edited by Ichiro Nishizaki. 1939.

On Poets – edited by Ryuji Tanabe, Teisaburo Ochiai, and Ichiro Nishizaki. (there is a 1941 edition)

The Idyl – by Leona Queyrouze Barel. 250 copies. 19??.

Essays on American Literature – edited by Albert Mordell. 19??.

Lafcadio Hearn: a Bibliography of His Writings –by P. D. and Ione Perkins. 200 copies. 19??.

Stories from Pierre Loti – by Pierre Loti, trans. by Lafcadio Hearn, edited by Albert Mordell. 19??.

The Adventures of Walter Schnaffs and Other Stories – by Guy de Maupassant, trans. by Lafcadio Hearn, edited by Albert  Mordell.

Lectures on Shakespeare

Lectures on Prosody

Some Strange English Literary Figures of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 

New Orleans Sketches – edited by Ichiro Nishizaki and William Faulkner. 1955.

Young Hearn – by O. W. Frost. 1958.

Erskine's Books

The beloved Columbia University Professor of English, John Erskine, edited and published many volumes of Lafcadio Hearn's lectures for Tokyo Imperial University. These lectures were primarily about English Literature and were taken down somehow by hand by his dedicated students. Although English literature was not something Hearn considered himself an expert in, Erskine's volumes prove the writer to be a master of criticism. It is easy, however, for us-so many years later-to get confused about the contents of Erskine's books... So allow me to make sense of it.

There are a core of FOUR books Erskine had published that provide almost the entire contents of Hearn's Tokyo Imperial University lectures:

1) Interpretations of Literature Vol. 1 - 1915
2) Interpretations of Literature Vol. 2 - 1915
3) Appreciations of Poetry - 1916
4) Life and Literature - 1917

I made the mistake, earlier in my Hearn studies, of mistaking Life and Literature for Bisland's oft-cited Life and Letters. Also adding to the confusion of Erskine's books is the fact that the original volumes were created primarily for libraries thus resulting in bulky and expensive copies. Subsequently, in the 1920s, Erskine-due to a purported demand for access to Hearn's lectures-put out THREE additional books which are merely selections from the previous FOUR with ONE exception: Books and Habits [which contains three previously unpublished lectures]. The THREE books from the 20s are:

1) Talks to Writers - 1920
2) Books and Habits - 1921
3) Pre-Raphaelite and Other Poets - 1923

Newspapers & Periodicals

Over the course of his career, Mr. Hearn wrote for many newspapers and magazines. Here is a short list off the top of my head (later to be edited... now edited and thus no longer "off the top of my head") of these papers, journals, and magazines:

Boston Investigator (1869?)

Cincinnati Trade List - Proofreader (187?)

Cincinnati Inquirer - Journalist (1872)

Cincinnati Commercial - Journalist (1875)

New Orleans Daily City Item - Assistant Editor (1878)

New Orleans Times-Democrat - Literature and Translation (1881)

San Francisco Argonaut - Contributor (1882)

Century Magazine - Contributor (1883)

Harper's Weekly - Contributor (1883)

Harper's Bazaar - Contributor (1885)

New York Tribune - Contributor (1886)

Southern Bivouac - Contributor (1886)

Atlantic Monthly - Contributor (????)

Cosmopolitan - Contributor (1890)

Harper's Magazine - Contributor (1890)

Kobe Chronicle - Journalist (1895)

McClure Syndicate - Contributor (1895)

more to come...

Morbid Amours

Lately I have been noticing a career-long trend of Hearn's where in he romanticizes the love between the dead and the living. In some cases morbid, in others merely reminiscently lovelorn, these stories appear to interest him as early as his first published work translating Theophile Gautier in One of Cleopatra's Nights and Other Fantastic Romances. Even earlier hints to his passion can be found concretely in his Enquirer article Valentine Vagaries (Feb. 14th, 1875 - American Miscellany vol. I, 48-50).  This fascination of Hearn's is evident in his eager translations from "the Cleopatra" with such stories as Clarimonde, Arria Marcella, Omphale: a Rococo Story, and The Mummy's Foot. Each of the previous romances featured a hapless youth encountering a beauty long dead and their peculiar loves across the seas of time. I could argue that it was Hearn himself who was the first of these young men to be seduced, as evinced in Valentine Vagaries, by the Greek goddess of love Aphrodite.

It was none other than a similar such story which attracted Elizabeth Bisland to Hearn's place of work, then in New Orleans, by way of her admiration for his fantastic: A Dead Love (a story collected in Fantastics and Other Fancies; "It was to my juvenile admiration for this particular bit of work that I owed the privilege of meeting Lafcadio Hearn, in the winter of 1882...")

Doubtless there are many more of these morbid infatuations for me to find in his New Orleans writings, however, here are some from his works from Japan:

A Passional Karma from In Ghostly Japan, 1899.
The Reconciliation from Shadowings, 1900.

Memory thus failing me, I will add to this list whenever I rediscover more of these stories.

Signed Copies

Over that last few years I have collected a nice assortment of signed books on Lafcadio Hearn by various Hearnologists. I have previously mentioned at least one of these, and will write a short list of some of these fascinating finds:

Young Hearn
by O. W. Frost, 1958. “April 15, 1959 - For Albert Mordell who should have written this book - O. W. Frost”

The Buddhist Writings of Lafcadio Hearn
by Kenneth Rexroth, 1977. “For Betsy (??? Kluney) with all good wishes - Kenneth Rexroth 1977”
This is a real find for me. Rexroth was famous in San Francisco, having areas named after him. And he is also known as the Father of the Beat Movement. He was a character in Kerouac’s Darma Bums which, by way of its name, demonstrates the beatnik’s flirtations with Buddhism.

The Grass Lark: a Study of Lafcadio Hearn
by Elizabeth Stevenson, 1999 edition (1961 original date.) “For Joan Stevenson Wring from Elizabeth Stevenson with love – sister to sister Betty to Joan”