Finally, some Intersection(ality)
On Lofcadio Hearn, a Mysterious Man of American Letters, at the Intersection, Finally, of Himself
I think Lofcadio Hearn might have been the first global citizen of the contemporary world.
Much of his biography is murky, and while the information we have on his early years is probably too heavily dependent on him, the outline is tantalizing.
Patrick Lofcadio Hearn was born in Greece in the year 1850, on the mostly historically unremarkable island of Lefkada, which is perhaps best known, apart from, today, its association with Hearn, for being a plausible candidate for the real Ithaka of Homer’s epics. You can find the island’s name in his, and his life of wandering is suggestive of Odysseus’s. His mother was Greek, from a comparatively distant and similarly unremarkable island on the other side of the Peloponnesos. His father seems to have been a bit of an English-Irish mutt military man who was assigned and reassigned to the many far-flung corners of the world as the British Empire grew, thrashed about, and policed the planet. Meanwhile, Lofcadio and his mother were sent to Ireland to hang around his father’s relatives, who didn’t much like her, and eventually she dragged her son back to Greece, where she gave birth to another boy. In relatively short order, Lofcadio’s father had the marriage annulled; his mother remarried a local senior bureaucrat type; and she acquiesced in the second husband’s demand that she renounce her two sons from the prior marriage. Something begins to sound like an echo. Lofcadio was, at a young age, a many-turned little guy.
Literary comparisons continue. Due to some Dickensian twists of fate, Lofcadio, split from his brother by parental planning and neglect, landed with a well-to-do aunt whose houses in Ireland and Wales were, at least, full of books. The young child either read or learned to read Greek, and there were enough Hellenic books on her shelves that he was able to nurture a passion for his homeland. At about eleven years old, he was sent to France for some heavy duty Catholic schooling, and then, a couple of years later, on to Durham, England, for more of the same. He thrived. Around the time he was sixteen, in a Jane Austen rotation, his aunt went bankrupt, and Hearn found himself in a garret on the seedy side of London.
For no especially good reason, after listing around London for a while, he made his way to Cincinnati at the age of nineteen.
That was when, as has famously happened so many times for so many American immigrant protagonists, things really started to change. He parlayed school age skill in composition into a job in newspapers, and the fire in his life was well lit. He started out at the Cincinnati Enquirer, which is still a going concern and which I imagine must have some quiet corner of their office nave still dedicated to him. Externally, he won the attention of readers, and internally, the carefully cultivated confidence of a young person discovering his own voice.
A few years later, by now in his early twenties, he married a Black woman, and the Enquirer fired him in connection with his violation of Ohio’s anti-miscegenation law. He later divorced this wife (his first of a bunch) but continued to bear a grudge against his old newspaper. He migrated to New Orleans to send dispatches for the Cincinnati Commercial, the Enquirer’s hometown rival, perhaps so that he might continue to thumb his nose at his previous employer.
New Orleans was like a second stage booster rocket for Hearn. He flourished as a writer covering the city’s high- and low-brow, with an avid interest in its racial diversity and varying cultural expressions, including Creole food and Voodoo, and he became temporarily famous not only as a journalist but also as a woodcut artist who captured a broad range of local faces and color. Much of what we think of New Orleans today — let’s call it the city of Anne Rice — is probably due to some combination of Hearn’s reporting and myth-making.
Suddenly enough, in his late thirties, after covering Louisiana and the Gulf Coast in unsurpassed depth, he embarked on a multi-year journey to the Caribbean, chiefly to the French-speaking part, during which time he wrote a traveler’s account of the place’s history, ethnography, and daily life.
Then, very suddenly this time, he went to Japan, and he never came back. Lofcadio seems to have found himself there. He married and had four kids. He learned Japanese, martial arts, and poetry. His day job, until his death at 54, shortly after the turn of the century, was as a teacher, often of English or English literature. But his renown grew throughout the West as a correspondent and chronicler of Japan, as a man who could translate and open up, through his writing, a country that was increasingly appealing as a subject of inquiry both because it remained almost perfectly closed to outsiders and because it was becoming obviously ascendant on both the high street and high seas.
Hearn must have been a fascinating man to know. His life certainly reads that way. And he was, perhaps liberated from the baggage of strict identity by his parents’ rather dislikable treatment of him, able to carve a path of his own, from Ancient West to Contemporary West to Midwest to Far East, on his own steam. He lived the life many high school and college students nowadays can only dream of because they have too much security and too much to lose and are probably too risk averse to try anything off-piste, anyway. He was fascinated by place, status, color, nationality, and what many today would call identity, and yet he was apparently not burdened by any of it. We can admire that much of him a lot.
For this reason, and for many others, I really wanted to like the Library of America collection of his writings, and I did, I suppose, except that I think, finally, he was probably more interesting than his work. By my rough count, more books have been written about him than he himself wrote. For a man of letters, that might be saying something.
Hearn appears to me to be one of the American authors one needs to read but doesn't love reading as they are, disproportionately, artifacts of their time. (For calibration: many will disagree with me when I say that Sinclair Lewis and John Dos Passos are probably also on my version of this list. But if they are on the fringes of that roster, Hearn is dead center.) He was chiefly a journalist, and that DNA shows up everywhere. Most of his fiction-type writing, including his novels, is comprised of romantic or impressionistic vignettes, exactly as you would imagine them given his background: scenes, riffed stories, stories within stories, sentence fragments, fragmentary dialogue, with scarcely a plot or any character boasting more than a single noticeable quality. His characters would belong in medieval morality tales.
Hearn had a particular interest in the wide spectrum of racial makeup found in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico (as well as Greater Cincinnati), and he certainly has as much to teach about that as he does about local grog manufacture, reptile populations, and somnolent weather. Hearn also took a strong interest in what you could broadly call ghost stories, which are, in some sense, legendary folk journalism. One gets the sense that Lofcadio could have been a Mark Twain if he could only have pieced the vignettes together into arresting narratives and developed characters beyond one or two dimensions.
One particular selection stands out: Un Revenant, Pere Labat. It is the best Martinique Sketch, unless you go in for pastoral travel writing, which I mostly think is quaint. The book also contains some remarkable insights about how a prior century handled plague, which has been, of course, lately upon us once again. And, for those who are seeking a modest but heart-rending fancy, there is, in these pages, a marvelous picture of what a doomed chapter of the Caribbean — especially Martinique — looked like, especially before the 1902 volcanic eruption.
There is a lot about this book that would, facially, at least, recommend itself to the current moment. We are, judging by the guttural sounds that emanate from Twitter and its cousins, a society now rather obsessed with the qualities of intersectionality that Lofcadio Hearn both personified and spent most of his elective career covering. With this in mind, I think I can say this book would be a rather good helpmate for anyone seeking frank contemporary insights on race and politics, or, perhaps with more poignancy, anyone who conceives of himself or herself as a devotee of what some academics still call Local Color. Reading this book would probably be a good litmus test as to whether one really is or whether, finally, one’s chief interest in diversity and difference is rather more or less skin deep.