The New Criterion

Lafcadio Hearn, whose American writings are the subject of a new Library of America volume, is joining some rarified company. His closest neighbor in the collection will be Nathaniel Hawthorne, while nearby is Henry James—with fifteen tomes to his name—a contemporary whose refined sensibilities displeased Hearn. Looming from the end of the shelf is Walt Whitman, of whom Hearn once remarked, “I have not the patience for him.” The Library of America may be a compendium of our greatest writers, but isn’t clear that Hearn would have wanted a seat at this table.

Only a few scholars have written on Hearn—they would fit comfortably into a Toyota Corolla—and opinion is divided about his place in the American canon. Christopher Benfey of Mount Holyoke, who edited the Library of America volume, calls Hearn a progenitor of the Southern Gothic tradition that eventually gave rise to William Faulkner. Still, he is rarely mentioned alongside the giants of Southern literature, and his fame is derived primarily from his rhapsodic reveries about imperial Japan, none of which are present here. Perhaps David Barber of The Atlantic—who has written on Hearn’s sojourn in the Far East—is not far off the mark when he calls Hearn a “minor writer’s minor writer.”

Part of the problem may be that Hearn was an inveterate vagabond who courted an aura of mystery that has made it difficult to classify him. His name alone, Patrick Lafcadio Tessima Carlos Hearn, reflects a muddled heritage: His father, an Irishman, met his mother, a native of the Greek isles, when he was stationed there with the British Army. Shortly after the family moved to Dublin, the marriage was annulled; Patrick was raised at first in Ireland, then France, then England, where he received a blow from a schoolmate that permanently deformed his left eye. Eventually, he ended up in a relative’s home in Cincinnati: “I was dropped moneyless on the pavement of an American city to begin life,” he wrote, ditching Patrick for Lafcadio (the name is derived from Lefkada, the island where he was born), in what was the first of many attempts to jettison his Anglo-Saxon heritage.

It was in Cincinnati that Hearn became a writer. An eternal outcast who was described by a biographer as “the stub end of a candle being snuffed out by a pie plate,” Hearn had a natural capacity to relate with, and depict, society’s lowest depths. Cincinnati was a shipping boomtown rivaling Chicago, and Hearn prowled stockyards and factory districts for sensational stories that he published in the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, perfecting what Frederick Starr of Johns Hopkins, who has written extensively on Hearn, calls “shocking Romanticism.”

“He traversed the same territory as Dostoyevsky,” Starr explains. Dostoyevsky communed with serfs; Hearn gravitated to settlements of recently emancipated blacks, who had traveled to Ohio in search of jobs. In one article, he recounts a visit to a notorious part of town known as Sausage Row:

A number of the colored river men are adroit thieves; these will work two or three months and then “lay off” until all their money has found its way to whisky-shops and brothels. … A levee hand with extinct cigar will, for example, walk into a shoe shop with a “Say, bohss, giv a fellah a light.” While the “bohss” is giving a light to the visitor, who always takes care to stand between the proprietor and the doorway, a confederate sneaks off with a pair of shoes.

Hearn’s fledgling career suffered a setback in 1874 when he decided to marry Althea Foley, a former slave. The marriage was another attempt to challenge the strictures of proper society, but it succeed somewhat too thoroughly: the Daily Enquirer fired him for “deplorable moral habits.”

Nor did the marriage last. They separated in 1877, with Hearn on his way to New Orleans, where he sought to rejuvenate his career with sensational dispatches for the Cincinnati Commercial, written under the pseudonym Ozias Midwinter. The move proved auspicious: “Hearn is there at the invention of New Orleans as literary property,” says Benfey, who is hoping that the ample selection of New Orleans journalism will cast a brighter spotlight on Hearn’s achievement. More than a decade after the end of the Civil War, New Orleans was a thriving port city, an amalgam of cultures—white and black, American and European, plebian and aristocratic—that enthralled Hearn with the promise of fertile, undiscovered terrain.

Although Hearn quickly fell in love with the dilapidated mansions and overgrown graveyards of New Orleans, success did not come easily. In one of several letters to his Cincinnati friend Henry Edward Krehbiel, Hearn complains in his typically exaggerated style: “I do not wonder the South has produced nothing of literary art. Its beautiful realities fill the imagination to repletion.”

His fortune began to change when he befriended George Washington Cable, a writer whose story “Jean-ah Poquelin” Hearn had read and admired. A native of New Orleans, Cable shared Hearn’s progressive political outlook. They eagerly explored the city that had risen from the ashes of the antebellum South, leaving the haute society in which Cable was raised. As Starr has written in a study of Hearn’s New Orleans period, “He caroused with an Irish gangster, hung around the levee with black stevedores, and patronized prostitutes of every color,” publishing his fantastical accounts of New Orleans in local publications (Daily City Item and the Times-Democrat, where he became a literary editor in 1881) and national ones (Harper’s Weekly, Century Magazine).

These dispatches—crowned with flowery titles like “The City of Dreams,” “Ruffians-Vendetta Grammar,” and “The Curious Nomenclature of New Orleans Streets”—are perhaps the best case for a collection of Hearn’s American writings, since they were at least partly responsible for engendering the romantic, slightly dangerous, view of New Orleans that persists to this day, with their accounts of voodoo queens, Mardi Gras festivities, and haunted byways.

Among these, his studies of Creole culture stand out as gems of what Starr calls “passionate sociology.” Traversing the Creole quarters with Cable, who knew them well already, Hearn collected Creole songs, published a book of Creole recipes (La Cuisine Créole), and studied with particular interest the Creole language (Gombo Zhèbes: A Little Dictionary of Creole Proverbs), extolling it much as an English romantic might have praised Gaelic or Scottish dialects: “There is no provincial dialect of the mother country wealthier in romantic tradition and ballad legends than this almost unwritten tongue of Louisiana.” If the Library of America accomplishes nothing else, it will at least restore Hearn as an early—if not entirely academic—archivist of an American subculture that has all but disappeared from our national legacy.

He also wrote one of the first novels about New Orleans. Published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1889, Chita: Memory of Last Island is set on the Isle Derniere, a popular resort for Southern aristocrats until a hurricane wreaked havoc on it in 1856. The story itself—about a child, Conchita, who survives the storm—is not remarkable, but in depicting the storm Hearn achieves something like the Biblical lyricism that Melville perfected with Moby-Dick:

Then the fear of the Abyss, the vast and voiceless Nightmare of the Sea, will come upon you; the silent panic of all those opaline millions that flee glimmering by will enter into you also.

To point out the similarities to Katrina is needless, but they will inform any reading of this little novel, which Benfey passionately defends as a “lost masterpiece.” Any reader today will be haunted by images that seem to have been ripped right from the tragedy of Lower Ninth Ward, as when Hearn writes, “the tide was heavy with human dead—passing out, processionally, to the great open.”

New Orleans also provided a point of departure for Hearn, and in the late 1880’s he traveled throughout the Caribbean, which led to Two Years in the French West Indies and another novel, Youma: The Story of a West-Indian Slave, both of which Benfey includes in their entirety, with original engravings. The illustrations are superfluous, given Hearn’s vivid language: a Fauvist palate emerges, a painter’s concern with light and color that found its true home in the Caribbean, particularly in Martinique. The inescapable comparison to Gauguin is especially apt, since both men sought so desperately an escape into a world more lush and primitive than theirs. A typical description of his stay in the West Indies explicitly celebrates all that is contrary to the supposedly frigid culture of his father:

It seems to you that you could never weary of watching this picturesque life,—of studying the costumes, brilliant with butterfly colors,—and the statuesque semi-nudity of laboring hundreds,—and the untaught grace of attitudes,—and the simplicity of manners. Each day brings some new pleasure of surprise;—even from the window of your lodging you are ever noting something novel, something to delight the sense of oddity or beauty.

But such excitable writing becomes tiresome after several hundred pages, especially since Hearn’s strength is in description, not analysis.

The Library of America volume, however, may be most interesting in what it excludes. Not a single word is to be found of Hearn’s extensive writings about Japan—this is “American Writings,” after all. The only sign of his long-lasting fascination with the Orient is “Some Chinese Ghosts,” a pedestrian collection of Chinese folk tales that Hearn published in 1887, several years before he left North America for good.

Hearn moved to Japan in 1890, after a decade that thoroughly exhausted his fascination with New Orleans. There he finally found the ancient culture that he had sought ever since he snooped around Cincinnati as a young journalist. Having escaped the West in full, he now opposed with predictable furor the effort to modernize Japanese had begun with Commodore Perry in 1854. Traditionalists saw a Western champion of their threatened values, and Hearn—who eventually took a Japanese wife, Japanese citizenship, and the name Koizumi Yakumo—achieved a popularity that he enjoys there to this day, with most school children familiar with his works and the city of Matsue, where he lived and taught, honoring him like a native son.

“He gave the Japanese words to describe their waning traditional culture,” Starr explains, even as that culture, with the forward-looking Meiji Restoration, was on a collision course with modernity. Westerners also found his stories of the distant land compelling, and a New York Times reviewer wrote in 1900, “Should Japan care at all to be understood by Western barbarians, she must feel that she owes a large debt of gratitude to Mr. Lafcadio Hearn.” But the aggressive, militarized Japan that burst into the modern world was nothing like the one that Hearn had described so lovingly, and eventually his version of history simply became obsolete.

Benfey has good reasons for bypassing Japan. Through Hearn’s journalism, fiction, and correspondence, he outlines the “American apprenticeship” that ought to establish Hearn as a serious contemporary of his much better-known peers. Given the outsized reputations of James and Whitman, thrusting Hearn into their midst is a bold—and surprisingly successful—attempt at what Benfey calls an “initial attempt to see this strange writer whole.”