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.