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are merely selections from the previous FOUR with ONE exception: Books and Habits [which contains three previously unpublished lectures].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].