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.