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”

Fragment from Martinique

I love when he reaffirms my faith in his being one of the best American writers:

"How gray seem the words of poets in the presence of this Nature! . . . The enormous silent poem of color and light--(you who know only the North do not know color, do not know light!)--of sea and sky, of the woods and the peaks, so far surpasses imagination as to paralyze it--mocking the language of admiration, defying all power of expression. That is before you which never can be painted or chanted, because there is no cunning of art or speech able to reflect it. Nature realizes your most hopeless ideals of beauty, even as one gives toys to a child. And the sight of this supreme terrestrial expression of creative magic numbs thought. In the great centres of civilization we admire and study only the results of mind,--the products of human endeavor: here one views only the work of Nature,--but Nature in all her primeval power, as in the legendary frostless morning of creation. Man here seems to bear scarcely more relation to the green life about him than the insect; and the results of human effort seem impotent by comparison with the operation of those vast blind forces which clothe the peaks and crown the dead craters with impenetrable forest. The air itself seems inimical to thought,--soporific, and yet pregnant with activities of dissolution so powerful that the mightiest tree begins to melt like wax from the moment it has ceased to live. For man merely to exist is an effort; and doubtless in the perpetual struggle of the blood to preserve itself from fermentation, there is such an expenditure of vital energy as leaves little surplus for mental exertion.
    . . . Scarcely less than poet or philosopher, the artist, I fancy, would feel his helplessness. In the city he may find wonderful picturesqueness to invite his pencil, but when he stands face to face alone with Nature he will discover that he has no colors! The luminosities of tropic foliage could only be imitated in fire."

The excerpt is from A Midsummer Trip to the Tropics Ch. XIX., Two Years in the French West Indies. We can also become just as awed at "Nature" reminding us of our petty mortal pursuits. Hearn did not let such realizations deter him; they only further inspired him to create something beautiful in hopes that his writings would someday be worthy of his fellow man.

Some Translation

Here are some basic translations from Japanese; although, we can argue these days that the internet makes such instruction pointless, everything being only a click away [I reserve the right to be bitter about my expertise]:

Lafcadio Hearn –　[Ra-fu-kaa-di-o Haa-n or ラフカーディオ・ハーン in Katakana]

Koizumi Yakumo –　小泉・八雲 Koizumi [ko-i-zu-mi, or こいずみ in Hiragana] is the family name of his adoptive Japanese family. “Ko” uses the character 小, which means small. “izumi” uses the character 泉, which means “spring of water”. Thus we have the surname “Little Spring”.

Hearn chose the first name “Yakumo” [or やくも in Hiragana] in deference to the gods whose shrines are found near Matsue: a place he wrote of in The Chief City of the Province of the Gods in his Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan vol. 1. The “ya” is a prefix meaning “eight”; the “kumo” means cloud. And so we have “Eight Cloud”; “Little Spring Eight Cloud” in western order.

Kwaidan – 談 The second character, “dan”, was easy to find. It combines “to say”, “fire”, and “fire”, to form “talk”; but this character is frequently used at the end of a word to mean “story” or “tale”. Bless my Kodansha dictionary for then pointing out to me that the first character,怪“kwai”, is actually modernized as “kai”, or in English, “mysterious”. Thus we have literally “mysterious stories”; comprehended by the Japanese as “ghost stories” in the term “kaidan”怪談 . [ka-i-da-n かいだん　in Hiragana.]

Kokoro –　心　This is a simple one-character word meaning “of the heart”, “heart”, “spirit of the heart” … ect. [ko-ko-ro or こころ in Hiragana,　心 in Kanji.]

Koizumi Setsuko –　小泉・節子　Much more difficult to find due to Japanese homonyms—and as Setsuko is often spelled in Hiragana—the characters tried to eluded me. 節 setsu, meaning “season”or “knuckle/joint”, ko, meaning “child.” I, however, assume the meaning to be one of lesser use; and one that is in relation to samurai ethic. That is, “loyalty/allegiance/fidelity/integrity/honor/chastity”…ect. As for the “ko”, Hearn himself states clearly that “ko” is used as a suffix for women’s names in his Japanese Female Names from his section of Japanese Studies in Shadowings. Also in this essay, “setsu”, is listed as meaning “(‘True,’—tender and true)”.

Travel Essays

Lafcadio always wrote about his initial journeys to different regions. This tradition of his spans three of his greatest migrations: New Orleans, the French West Indies, and Japan. Hearn even finds time to relate an experience, in his autobiographical fragment My First Romance, from his trip to Cincinnati by train in 1869. Here is just a short list off the top of my head of his traveling accounts:

My First Romance - Published posthumously in the opening biographical portion of Elizabeth Bisland’s Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn [vol. 1]. This fragment was written  as a retrospective while in Japan.

Memphis to New Orleans - Submitted to and published by the Cincinnati Commercial in 1877, this article was one of those written under the pen name Ozias Midwinter from New Orleans.

A Midsummer Trip to the Tropics - This story was originally published in three parts for Harper’s under the title A Midsummer Trip to the West Indies [July-August-September 1888]. It was also made to serve as the opening portion to his book Two Years in the French West Indies.

A Winter Journey to Japan - Written for Harper’s, and appears in the November issue of 1890. It is also reprinted in Albert Mordell”s American Miscellany [vol. 2].

A Hearnologist's Gem

I have in my possession a somewhat rare copy of O. W. Frost’s Young Hearn which was published in 1958 by The Hokuseido Press in Tokyo. It is strange how what one perceives as a literary treasure could be so easily acquired on Amazon.com. For it seems like the copy which I came into possession of was maybe Albert Mordell’s, or Ichiro Nishizaki’s, copy signed by Frost to the apparent Hearn scholar:

“April 15, 1959

For Albert Mordell who should have written this book

O. W. Frost”

The chances are good that it is a copy owned by one of these two Hearn scholars,  however, there are extensive notes throughout the index of Mordell and Nishizaki whom Mordell compiled works for in Japan. I hope to someday identify exactly who owned this book. Other interesting facts about Young Hearn for those who cannot get their hands on it: the books focusses extensively on Hearn’s family origins and various factoids about his early years, there is in the opening pages a foldout family tree, and a number of quality pictures and scans of articles.

note: Frost’s version of the Hearn family tree does not connect Lafcadio to the gypsy Sir Hugh de Heron as others—Hearn himself—have purported. Here is an online version of a Hearn family tree: http://www5.ocn.ne.jp/~kilib/hearn/study_material/english/family-tree.html

Letters to a Pagan Dilemma

The topic of Letters to a Pagan’s validity is particularly troubling for any biographer of Hearn. The book containing the letters, supposedly from Hearn to Countess Annetta Halliday Antona, was published in 1933 by Robert Bruna Powers. Perhaps the best authority on Lafcadio Hearn, the late Albert Mordell, wrote a disturbing essay on the falsity of Letters to a Pagan and its numerously odd examples of plagiaristic time flux. Hearn, having died in 1904, surely couldn’t have plagiarized lines from Mordell’s introduction to a collection of his own writings published in 1924! [An American Miscellany vol. 1] Not only do these letters demean Hearn’s personage by suggesting his interest in an underage girl, but they also force history to make a decision on the matter. Will the letters be accepted; will they be refused as forgeries; or will they forever exist as a grey cloud floating amongst the correspondences of one of the greatest letter writers of nineteenth century America?

Fortunately for us, Mordell tackles the subject vividly in his essay “Letters to a Pagan” not by Hearn in his 1964 book Discoveries: Essays on Lafcadio Hearn. The primary evidence cited by Mordell are frequent—indeed, almost verbatim—duplications of lines from previously established Hearn letters then appearing rewritten in Letters to a Pagan. Often times these rehashed topics are strangely found in letters or other writings by Hearn from years in the past, future, or even posthumously. It seems supremely unusual that Hearn would mention to the young countess thoughts he published many years later.

Unfortunately for us, I have noticed at least one instance in which Hearn used his innate ability to recall, [or is it that he kept and referred to all of his own work?] years later and practically verbatim, small details about a particular set of observations:

“I must tell you about a Chinese restaurant which I used to patronize. No one in the American part of the city—or at least very few—know of its existence. The owner will not advertise, will not hang out a sign, and seems to try to keep his business a secret. The restaurant is situated in the rear part of an old Creole house on Dumaine Street,—about the middle of the French Quarter; and one must pass through a dark alley to get in. I had heard so much of the filthiness of the Chinese, that I would have been afraid to enter it, but for the strong recommendations of a Spanish friend of mine” … “But about the restaurant. I was surprised to find bills printed half in Spanish and half in English; and the room nearly full of Spaniards. It turned out that my Chinaman was a Manilan,—handsome, swarthy, with a great shock of black hair, wavy as that of a Malabaress. His movements were supple, noiseless, leopardine; and the Mongolian blood was scarcely visible. But his wife was positively attractive,—hair like his own, a splendid figure, sharp, strongly marked features, and eyes whose very obliqueness only rendered the face piquant,—as in those agreeable yet half-sinister faces painted on Japanese lacquerware.” ~ letter to friend H. E. Krehbiel, 1879. [Bisland, Elizabeth. Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn vol. 1]

“There is still in the oldest portion of the oldest quarter of New Orleans a certain Manila restaurant hidden away in a court, and supported almost wholly by the patronage of Spanish West Indian sailors. Few people belonging to the business circles of New Orleans know of its existence. The menu is printed in Spanish and English; the fare is cheap and good. Now it is kept by Chinese, for the Manila man and his oblique eyed wife, comely as any figure upon a Japanese vase, have gone away. Doubtless his ears, like sea-shells, were haunted by the moaning of the sea, and the Gulf winds called to him by night, so that he could not remain.” - Saint Malo: a Lacustrine Village in Louisiana, Mar. 31^st, 1883. [Harper’s Weekly]

While my realization of this striking similitude—between a personal letter and a magazine article four years later—could hint at a trend of Hearn’s to rehash his own words in surprising detail over a stretch of years, it could also simply be a coincidence and serve as evidence of the writer’s power of recollection. In the end I feel that I must side with Mordell’s superior research on the controversy given the evidence he thus provided to the invalidity of Letters to a Pagan.

note: Though being expensive and hard to acquire, Letters to a Pagan has been scanned and made electronically available and www.hathitrust.org free of expense.

Bisland's Fragments

Among some of Elizabeth Bisland's more interesting findings in her Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn were his autobiographical fragments of which there were seven thus collected posthumously. These fragments are lesser-known writings by Hearn, save to his biographers, and are titled as follows:

1) My Guardian Angel
2) Idolatry
3) Stars
4) Intuition
5) My First Romance
6) In Vanished Light
7) Elusion

note: Bisland, perhaps, mistakingly places Stars as being about time spent in New York City when in fact it is more likely to have been a reminiscence of Cincinnati days. Also, My Guardian Angel is among Hearn's most chilling pieces.

Launch

Behold!, a lowly beginning blog dedicated to the writings of and about Lafcadio Hearn. The title of the blog, Lafcadio Hearn: a Giglamped Ghoul, might sound unjustly harsh; however, it is merely a reference to his article for the Cincinnati Enquirer titled Giglampz. Hearn refers to himself as "the Ghoul", the editor and writer for the bohemian journal Kladderadatsch [later titled Ye Giglampz]. "Giglampz", or giglamps, being old slang for eyeglasses; "Ghoul" being a reference to his own "whimsically grotesque" tastes.