Concerning Lafcadio Hearn; With a Bibliography by Laura Stedman. George M. Gould
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of the fated Giglampz was a four-column retelling of "the weird story of Loki's evil children from the strange folk-lore of Ancient Scandinavia."
It was thus blood, sensualism and fiendishness that still aroused Hearn's interest when not only not compelled to the choice, but when they were contraindicated and wholly illogical. But it was all a little less revolting, less real, more artistic, than the tan-yard reporting, and it was drawn from more remote sources. Mr. Henderson suggests the same when he writes:
"But it was not in this slavery for a living even to crush out of him the determination to advance and excel. In the small hours of morning, into broad daylight, after the rough work of the police rounds and the writing of perhaps columns, in his inimitable style, he could be seen, under merely a poor jet of gas, with his one useful eye close to book and manuscript, translating 'One of Cleopatra's Nights.' …
"An Oriental warmth and glow pervaded him. While his lines were hard ones in the grime and soot and trying weather of Cincinnati, from which his frail body shrank continually, his trend of thought was largely tropical. Perhaps he saw beyond the dusky faces, rolling eyes and broad noses of the people of the Cincinnati levee, the mixed people of the West Indies and the beautiful little ones of Japan, with whom he was destined to live before long. However that may be, his greatest pleasure, after a translation from Gautier or an original tragedy where he could in his masterful way use his vocabulary of the gruesome, was to study and absorb the indolent, sensuous life of the negro race, as he found it in Cincinnati and New Orleans, and to steep them in a sense of romance that he alone could extract from the study. Things that were common to these people in their everyday life, his vivid imagination transformed into a subtle melody of romance. The distant booming upon the midnight air of a river steamer's whistle was for him the roustabout's call to his waiting mistress at the landing, and his fruitful pen drew the picture of their watching and coming and meeting."
The words indolent and sensuous life are also significant. The tropics, their fatalism and the kind of life there lived were drawing him with secret but irresistible force. Now begins to mix with and mollify the gruesome a softer element, also Oriental, or what is much the same thing, tropical—sympathy with and study of the simple and unlettered, those who are the improvident slaves of fate, thoughtless impulse or heedless desire. To them, as we shall see, Hearn's mind turned more and more. His was essentially an Oriental mind and heart, an exotic weed (and weeds may become the loveliest of flowers) dropped by some migrating bird upon the strange crabbed soil of the crudest of Occidentalism. Never did Hearn stop yearning for the warmth, the fatalism and the laziness of tropic semi-barbarism. The gruesome was not being killed, but was being modified and tamed by civilization.
Hearn had been discharged from the Commercial, where his salary was $25 a week, "on an ethical point of policy which need not be discussed here. The Commercial took him on at $22." Judge M. F. Wilson, of Cincinnati, tells me that his discharge was caused by his seeking a licence for and an open marriage with a coloured woman. The licence was refused, because illegal at that time. The law was repealed a little later. The marriage did not take place.[9]
[9] Mr. George Mortimer Roe, at that time a friend of Hearn, now living at Long Beach, California, writes me: "Hearn was quite persistent in his efforts to persuade me to assist him in getting the licence, but I told him I could not aid him in his ambition to be guilty of miscegenation. For many years we had been the best of friends, but from that time on he always avoided me, scarcely speaking to me if by accident we did meet."
Mr. Henderson continues thus:
"As Hearn advanced in his power to write, the sense of the discomforts of his situation in Cincinnati grew upon him. His body and mind longed for the congeniality of southern air and scenes. One morning, after the usual hard work of an unusually nasty winter night in Cincinnati, in a leisure hour of conversation, he heard an associate on the paper describe a scene in a Gulf State. It was something about a grand old mansion of an antebellum cotton prince, with its great white columns, its beautiful private drive down to the public road, whitewashed negro-quarters stretching away in the background, in the distance some cypress and live-oaks and Spanish moss, and close by a grove of magnolias with their delightful odours and the melody of mocking-birds in the early sunlight. Hearn took in every word of this, though he had little to say at the time, with great keenness of interest, as shown by the dilation of his nostrils. It was as though he could see and hear and smell the delights of the scene. Not long after this, on leaving Cincinnati for New Orleans, he remarked: 'I have lost my loyalty to this paper, and change was inevitable. Perhaps it isn't so much the lack of opportunity here or a lack of appreciation of associations as this beastly climate. I seem to shrivel up in this alternation of dampness, heat and cold. I had to go sooner or later, but it was your description of the sunlight and melodies and fragrance and all the delights with which the South appeals to the senses that determined me. I shall feel better in the South and I believe I shall do better.'"
Some of his Cincinnati acquaintances speak of his obsequious, even fawning, manner ("timid and feline of approach," says Henderson), of his "washing his hands with invisible water"—characteristics not dictated by the parentage ascribed to him, not consonant with his photographs, and not wholly with his gruesome traits. He wore heavy myopic spectacles at this time, not to see (because they were wholly discarded later), but probably in order not to be seen—i.e. to hide the double deformity of his eyes. One must remember that with or without spectacles the world a foot or two away was much of a mystery to Hearn, and that one fears a surely existent and near-by mystery. One approaches it or comes within its power with doubt, dislike and caution. The play of facial expression was not to be seen by Hearn. All Uriah Heeps may not be myopic, but all highly myopic persons will have slow, stealthy, careful, even catlike attitudes and manners; every step they take must be done with hesitation, bowed head and great care, in order not to fall or stumble against something. The wholly blind walk with more decision and quickness. Of course this slow, soft carefulness of manner, "the velvet feline step," was Hearn's all his life. It followed inexorably that, though possessed of a healthy and athletic body, there was possible for him no athletics which required accuracy of sight or sequent precision and celerity of movement. That with good eyes he would have been an utterly different man in character and in literature, is as certain as that he would have had a very different manner, movement and style of physical existence. With good eyes he would have been strong, athletic, bold, as is admirably illustrated by the fact that in the single sport in which little vision was required—swimming—he was most expert, and that he enjoyed this exercise to the fullest degree.
To scale a steeple in order to describe the city from that unusual point of view was a task worthy of yellow journalism which cared little for accuracy but much for "scare" headlines. Hearn saw little or nothing of the city, of course.
The only letters written during the Cincinnati period, known to exist, are those of 1876, called, "Letters to a Lady," published in the volume, Letters from the Raven, Milton Bronner, editor.[10] One other work, the origins of which date from this period, is "One of Cleopatra's Nights," and with this is demonstrated the beginning of the influence of the modern French school of story-writers. Hearn was tiring of the worst brutality and coarseness of Occidentalism, and seeking a way to the true home of his mind. The ghastly must become the ghostly. The Frenchman's art was to become his half-way house.
[10] Brentano's, 1907.
CHAPTER IV.—THE NEW ORLEANS TIME
I HAVE somewhere read of a nomad child of the desert, born and rocked upon a camel, who was ever thereafter incapable of resting more than a day in one place. Whether or not the wandering father gave the homeless son his illogical spirit of unrest, matters less than that Hearn had it to a morbid degree.