ANDREI CODRESCU
At the end of the nineteenth century, Lafcadio Hearn was one
of America’s best-known writers, one of a stellar company that included Mark
Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Twain, Poe, and Stevenson
have entered the established literary canon and are still read for duty and
pleasure. Lafcadio Hearn has been forgotten, with two remarkable exceptions: in
Louisiana and in Japan. Yet Hearn’s place in the canon is significant for many
reasons, not least of which is how the twentieth century came to view the
nineteenth. This view, both academic and popular, reflects the triumph of a
certain futuristic Modernism over the mysteries of religion, folklore, and what
was once called “folk wisdom.” To witness this phenomenon in time-lapse,
sped-up motion, one need only consider Lafcadio Hearn, the Greek-born,
Irish-raised, New World immigrant who metamorphosed from a celebrated
fin-de-siècle American writer into the beloved Japanese cultural icon Koizumi
Yakumo in less than a decade, in roughly the same time that Japan changed from
a millennia-old feudal society into a great industrial power.
History is a fairy tale true to its telling. Lafcadio
Hearn’s lives are a fairy tale true in various tellings, primarily his own,
then those of his correspondents, and with greater uncertainty, those of his
biographers. Hearn changed, as if magically, from one person into another, from
a Greek islander into a British student, from a penniless London street
ragamuffin into a respected American newspaper writer, from a journalist into a
novelist, and, most astonishingly, from a stateless Western man into a loyal
Japanese citizen. His sheer number of guises make him a creature of legend. Yet
this life, as recorded both by himself and by others, grows more mysterious the
more one examines it, for it is like the Japanese story of the Buddhist monk
Kwashin Koji, in “Impressions of Japan,” who owned a painting so detailed it
flowed with life. A samurai chieftain saw it and wanted to buy it, but the monk
wouldn’t sell it, so the chieftain had him followed and murdered. But when the
painting was brought to the chieftain and unrolled, there was nothing on it; it
was blank. Hearn reported this story told to him by a Japanese monk to
illustrate some aspect of the Buddhist doctrine of karma, but he might as well
have been speaking about himself as Koji: the more “literary” the renderings of
the original story, the less fresh and vivid it becomes, until it might
literally disappear, like that legendary painting.
The knowable tellings of Hearn are particular, interesting,
and specific to the literary personae of Lafcadio-Koizumi, insofar as one is
absorbed and lost in them. But this tremendously prolific producer of
literature remains, somehow, elusive. Hearn tempts, or we could say “dares,”
his critics to interpret his work and his life, but, in the end, he belongs to
the reader who best surrenders to his stories and his own life-reporting.
Lafcadio Hearn was born in 1850 not far from Ithaca, on the
island of Lefkada in Greece, from the union of Charles Bush Hearn, an Irish
surgeon in the British army, and Rosa Kassimatis, a Greek woman born on
Cythera. The island of Lefkada, said by Ovid in his “Ode to Love” to be the
place where Sappho jumped to her death in the sea because of unrequited love,
was Lafcadio’s paradise, the womb-island from which he was “expelled” when his
father returned and took mother and child to Dublin. On that dismal northern
isle, Lafcadio was expelled a second time, this time away from his mother.
While his father was abroad on yet another military assignment in the West
Indies, Rosa fled Dublin with a Greek man, back to her “island of feasting
hearts and secret joys,” leaving Lafcadio in the custody of a pious Catholic
aunt. Then a schoolyard accident in one of the British schools he resentfully
attended left him blind in one eye. His father remarried, and his aunt’s family
became bankrupt, two unrelated yet near-simultaneous disasters. A
seventeen-year-old Lafcadio wandered penniless in London among vagabonds,
thieves, and prostitutes. In the spring of 1869, a relation of his father’s,
worried about the family’s reputation, handed him a one-way boat ticket to the
United States, then overland to Cincinnati, Ohio, where another relation of the
Hearns lived.
His departure for the New World was Lafacadio Hearn’s third
exile. In Cincinnati, where he had imagined generous help, his relation handed
him a few dollars and told him to fend for himself. A twenty-year-old Lafcadio
found himself, once again, a penniless tramp. So far, with the exception of a
few school exercises and some ghoulish poetry inspired by his fear of ghosts,
Lafcadio Hearn had written nothing. In Cincinnati, he lived again in the
underworld, until a kind angel intervened: the printer Henry Watkin allowed the
young tramp to sleep on piles of old newspapers in his shop. Watkin, a utopian
anarchist, encouraged the youth to read radical and fantastic literature.
Hearn’s education took a vast leap: he underwent a kind of osmosis as if he had
absorbed the spirit of nineteenth-century America from the very newspapers he
slept on. He had lived variously and wanted to let the world know how cruel and
wondrous life was. Clumsily, with Henry Watkin’s encouragement, he started to
write.
He submitted a story to the Enquirer, a failing
yellow-press daily. His story appeared in bold type on the front page. Other
stories soon followed. Young Hearn’s first writings were blood-curdling
reportage steeped in gothic horror. They scandalized the readers of the Enquirer and
lifted the newspaper from near-bankruptcy to a prosperous business. Hearn’s
ultra-realist exposés were drenched in the wounded sensibility of a writer with
a merciless eye who had Greek myths and Celtic fairy tales in his blood.
At the height of his Cincinnati success as a journalist,
gossip about his personal life undermined his standing. His stories about the
misery and magic of the city’s underworld started upsetting the upstanding
citizens, who had seen them, to a point, as mere fancies. A pur sang bohemian,
Hearn lived in a world far from his bourgeois readers. He is said to have
married a black woman and lived with her on the other side of the tracks: a
scandal in the segregated city. The Enquirer fired him.
Spurning offers from rival newspapers, Hearn abandoned
Cincinnati and departed for New Orleans. New Orleans was a city in exile from
mainstream America, and New Orleans loved Lafcadio Hearn at first reading. From
his early columns in the local newspapers to his novel Chita, his
literary persona took on mythic proportions. Hearn’s colorful newspaper essays
about local lore, his articles about high and low New Orleans life, and his
translations from the French of Gautier, Maupassant, and Loti drew many
admirers. His reputation grew. While writing for the New Orleans papers, he
attracted the attention of New York literati and was courted by major
publishers. He started writing for Harper’s Weekly and
published his first book, Chita, with Harper and Brothers. The
novella, set on Grand Isle, the favorite vacation refuge of New Orleanians
fleeing the unhealthy summer of the city, remains one of the classics of
Louisiana literature and has never gone out of print.
In his introduction to The Selected Writings of
Lafcadio Hearn, the editor Malcolm Cowley was by turns critical and
complimentary. He found Hearn’s writing for newspapers in Cincinnati and New
Orleans guilty of “a purple style.” Of Hearn’s New Orleans novels, Cowley said,
“The atmosphere is more important than the story.” In the end, Cowley thought
that Hearn found his subject in Japan, as well as his identity in Koizumi
Yakumo, the name he adopted later in life. In other words, Hearn had completed
an epic journey in search of himself, a circular odyssey in both real-time and word-time,
as adventure-filled as that of Odysseus and perhaps Homer, but which was not a
return to the island where he was born, though it had taken him from one island
to another.
Lafcadio’s Japanese life began in typically inauspicious
fashion when his few contacts promised to find him a job and didn’t. The money
vaguely promised by Harper’s Weekly for his reports from Japan
never showed up. Death and its shadows preoccupied Hearn his entire life, but
they took new meaning in Japan, where death was a starkly defined world. The
ghostly world, the activities of the dead, the influence of the dead on the
living, the complex Buddhist teachings about death, are in almost every one of
Hearn’s essays, but are most present in his rendering of Japanese fairy tales,
where he found the stories in the abstract Buddhist concepts. These stories
were the folk translations of the Buddhist monks and scholars’ explanations.
They contained the charm and thrill of a mysterious world. Otherworldly
mysteries as told by the common folk always interested Hearn and fascinated his
readers. In the rich lore of Japanese stories, many of which were told to him
by his second wife, Setsu, Hearn found the revelation that death as introduced
to Japan by Western ideas was corrupting the Buddhist teachings on death and
the afterlife.
In February 1896, Lafcadio Hearn became the Japanese citizen
Yakumo Koizumi. Adopted by his Japanese family as a condition for citizenship,
he took the family name Koizumi, meaning “little spring,” and chose for his own
name Yakumo, meaning “eight clouds,” which was the first word of the “most
ancient poem extant in the Japanese language,” as well as one of the names for
Izumo, “my beloved province, the place of the Issuing of the Clouds.”
Hearn set himself to the task of studying and translating
haiku and tanka, forms of Japanese poetry that made brevity their virtue.
Poetry for every occasion, composed spontaneously, solemn or raucous, was part
of Japanese life, and a delight for all ages. Folk poetry, the recitation of
epics, provided the threads that Hearn seized on when he wrote Kwaidan,
his first truly Japanese book written in his best English. It was published in
1904, the year of his death.
Everything that might delight a reader in search of Japanese
legends, rituals, and beliefs, whether of Shintō or Buddhist origin—the
enchantment of the Japanese imaginary, wisdom about nature (which revolves most
often around the cherry tree, Japan’s true axis mundi), the feminine forces
that rule the universe (certainly Hearn’s magical world), and the many shapes
of death and afterlife through animals and spirits—can be found in Kwaidan.
Distilled here are Hearn’s efforts to find the forms best suited to his
multifaceted personalities: his own masks are to be found here, discarded,
haunting, or preserved. Kwaidan achieved what Hearn intended
to find in Japanese culture: a flowing mix of folktales, personal observations,
and a marvelous series of essays on insects—it is the work of Hearn-Koizumi, a
writer with a double vision, an English-language writer deeply intimate with
Japan, or a Japanese storyteller consciously writing in English.
Many of Hearn’s “Japanese” tales were said to be literary
transcriptions of Setsu’s storytelling, but they show also the influence of
Greek myths and that of Hans Christian Andersen. Some of the tales came from
friends and acquaintances. His friends added their own stories to Hearn’s. The
differing styles and subjects reflect the times when they were published, and
the tastes of their editors, including Hearn himself.
Hearn, even at his most negligent, was consistent in his
transcription; his Japanese tales are stark and do not resemble the fairy tales
produced by nineteenth-century writers in Europe. Occasionally, for lack of a
transition and for touching a chord in his American readers, he invented
elements that were closer to the smoky djinnis of the Thousand and One Nights,
or the monsters of Greek myths, but he rarely employed the repetitions familiar
to European readers; instead, he translated brief jingles or occasional poems
that were traditional in Japanese stories.
A cursory reading of Japanese fairy tales, scattered
throughout Hearn’s books, would tempt one to call them “ghost stories.” Indeed,
many collections do just that, and qualify them with an adjective, such
as strange. They are indeed that, but the attention that the
Japanese paid to the afterlife was detailed and absorbing. The afterlife was as
populous and eventful as life, but its observation from this shore made it
eerie, like the negative of an old film that was forbidden to view. This made
it fascinating, of course, but it was of particular interest to Hearn because
he had been tossed like a coin from one reality to another, and he made the
ghost-world one of his lives. If an afterlife followed him, indeed he would
have been hard put to recognize the difference. In dreams, which had always
been of particular interest to him, the transition was flawless. Hearn’s
recollections of his dreams, and his interpretations of them, make him a
protosurrealist. It is odd that he was left out of the surrealist canon by
André Breton, who included Hearn’s close kin, Lewis Carroll and Rimbaud. The
surrealists did not, most likely, read his work, because it was popular.
Obscurity shadows literature, a protective shield that Hearn, who was actually
read in his own time, did not possess. Yet, he was obscure in the most
fantastic and ghostly way. Like the famous vanishing details of the stolen
painting, Hearn was absorbed by the ghost-world and put to work as its
mouthpiece.
Andrei Codrescu is a poet, novelist, essayist, and NPR
commentator. His many books include Whatever Gets You through the
Night, The Postmodern Dada Guide, and The Poetry Lesson.
Excerpted from Japanese
Tales of Lafcadio Hearn, edited and introduced by Andrei Codrescu. With
a foreword by Jack Zipes. Copyright © 2019 by Princeton University Press.
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De THE PARIS REVIEW/2019
Imagen: LAFCADIO HEARN. PHOTO COURTESY OF THE MIRIAM AND IRA
D. WALLACH DIVISION OF ART, PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS: PRINT COLLECTION, THE NEW
YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY. ACCESSED VIA NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY DIGITAL COLLECTIONS.
