RUTHFULLY YOURS

Long before globalisation became a word in common use and “world literature” was established as a field of academic study, Hearn was a genuine writer-without-borders, making him a singular figure from the past who is our contemporary, or perhaps the future. He ranged widely, and wherever he went in the world he transformed it into text. A true literary adventurer, Lafcadio Hearn lived, and travelled, by the word. It seems he could have lived anywhere and written about anything.

Born in 1850 in the Ionian Islands to a Greek mother and Irish father, Hearn grew up mostly in Ireland, France and England and lived his adult life in parts of the world which were much more remote from one other in physical terms and in shared understanding than is the case today. Among Anglophone writers, Hearn was even more widely travelled than the likes of Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson and, for that matter, Mark Twain, who met Hearn in New Orleans in 1882 and with whom he toured.

In the English-speaking world, Hearn today perhaps is best known as a member of the generation of writers—another was George Washington Cable—that put New Orleans on the literary map. Hearn lived in the city for a decade before settling in Japan, where he was to spend the rest of his life, becoming a citizen and taking a Japanese name in 1895. Today, Yakumo Koizumi, as Hearn became known, is regarded as the nearest thing to a major Japanese writer that a non-native could have become.

Before his arrival in New Orleans in 1877 Hearn wrote extensively about places as various as Martinique, China and the United States. While working as a journalist in Cincinnati in the early 1870s, Hearn married a former slave, Aletha Foley, in defiance of the law at that time in Ohio forbidding so-called miscegenation, and lived illegally with her and her child from a previous relationship. The union, the revelation of which resulted in Hearn being fired from his job at the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer on the grounds of “deplorable moral habits”, ended in separation after three years.

Many years later, in 1891, while living in Japan, Hearn married a much younger woman, the daughter of a samurai family in Matsue. The couple had a son and a daughter. Hearn died in Tokyo in 1904 at the age of fifty-four.

There are permanent memorials to Hearn in four countries: Greece, Ireland, Japan and the United States. A museum at his birthplace in Lefkada opened in 2014, the same year that the Lafcadio Hearn Gardens opened in County Waterford. In Japan, a Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum maintained in his former residence in Kumamoto attracts around 150,000 visitors a year, according to the museum website.

There is also a house in New Orleans in Cleveland Avenue not far from the St Louis Cemetery, a nineteenth-century townhouse in a now isolated spot in what I was told by locals, when I expressed a wish to visit it, is a tricky part of town on the fringe of the CBD. The Lafcadio Hearn House, in which Hearn took a room (though it is not known for sure which he occupied), was added to the US National Register of Historic Places in 2006 after recognition of its significance by the City Council of New Orleans in 2004. (The Cleveland Avenue house was saved from destruction and restored by Pat Swilling, a property developer and former linebacker for the New Orleans Saints NFL team who became a Louisiana state legislator after retiring from professional football. Only in New Orleans.)

The sheer range in terms of genre as well as location in Hearn’s work is impressive: journalism, fiction, travel, folklore and ghost stories, poetry. Hearn translated Maupassant, Flaubert and Gautier as well as being a major interpreter for Western readers of traditional Asian poetry, folk tales and ghost stories, which he himself also originated.

In addition to journalism, while in New Orleans Hearn published a recipe book titled La Cuisine Créole as well as a collection of Creole proverbs and Chita: A Memory of Last Island, a novella set during the Louisiana hurricane catastrophe of 1856 known as the Great Storm. Chita recreates the disaster which befell an entire resort island that was destroyed in the hurricane. Not only were the grand hotel and other buildings on the island destroyed, but the land mass known as Last Island was completely submerged. Just over half of the 400 inhabitants, many of whom were members of the aristocratic Louisiana plantation-owning elite, perished in the hurricane or afterwards from injuries. In Chita, Hearn combines real people and events with fiction, including the main character, a young Creole girl who survives the storm but is separated from her family and taken in by a fisherman and his wife.

Apart from anything else, the book is an impressive demonstration of Hearn’s descriptive powers—he did not witness the hurricane, which happened two decades before he arrived in Louisiana. Before widespread use of photography and modern communications and media, writers evoking distant places and people their readers would never have seen for themselves had to make the most of the words at their disposal. Though short, Chita is remarkably detailed and vividly realised. Here is a sample:

On the Gulf side of these islands you may observe that the trees—when there are any trees—all bend away from the sea; and, even on bright, hot days when the wind sleeps, there is something grotesquely pathetic in their look of agonized terror. A group of oaks at Grande Isle I remember as especially suggestive: five stopping silhouettes in line against the horizon, like fleeing women with streaming garments and wind-blown hair,—bowing grievously and thrusting out arms desperately northward as if to save themselves from falling. And they are being pursued indeed;—for the sea is devouring the land.

It was John Biguenet, one of New Orleans’s most distinguished literary figures and himself an accomplished author in two languages (English and French), who introduced me to Hearn. Perhaps John sensed that an Irish-educated Australian visiting New Orleans for the first time would find in Hearn something of a kindred spirit. John, who is wise as well as thoughtful and kind, was right about that.

I believe Hearn was not only astute in his observation of New Orleans but also modern to the point of prophetic. For me in my own engagement with the city, which has resulted in several visits flowing into half a dozen or so newspaper articles, Hearn remains the writer who sums up New Orleans with the greatest clarity and succinctness, even though he lived there more than a century ago. In so many ways, but especially cultural and environmental, New Orleans represents the future of us all, just as it did in Hearn’s time.

The best place to start with Hearn’s writings on New Orleans is the appropriately titled essay “At the Gates of the Tropics”. “It is not an easy thing to describe one’s first impression of New Orleans,” concedes Hearn, “for while it actually resembles no other city upon the face of the earth, yet it recalls vague memories of a hundred cities.”

In addition to encountering the exotic, Hearn understood that travellers to new places tend to find what they know. It is familiarity rather than the “tropical beauty of the city itself”, Hearn argues, that makes New Orleans attractive to visitors: “New Orleans is especially a city of verandas, piazzas, porches and balconies, and the stranger is liable to be impressed with this fact immediately upon leaving the levee.”

(In my experience, the sense of familiarity may be delayed—it was only after arriving back in Melbourne after my first visit to New Orleans that I saw the similarities between the porches and balconies, and the use of wrought iron, of the old buildings in both places. The Lafcadio Hearn House itself could fit in quite easily among the Victorian terraces in inner Melbourne or Sydney.)

The ability to grasp at once the unique and universal aspects of New Orleans is what makes Hearn’s impressions of the city so valuable and persuasive. So much of what he describes, including the fecund atmosphere and apocalyptic weather, the battered grandeur of the older districts, and the ever-present danger of street violence in certain sections of New Orleans, hasn’t really changed at all. Equally enduring is the constant arrival of new visitors, though nowadays these are more likely to be tourists than sailors or fortune seekers. Hearn lived in New Orleans before the invention of jazz, with all that the music embodies and brought with it, but otherwise captures the spirit of the city.

Mardi Gras, that most distinctive of New Orleans festivals, is described by Hearn, but he saw the world-famous carnival as obscuring “the romantic charm of the old city”. Indeed, the essay “New Orleans in Carnival Garb” is most vivid in describing New Orleans at other, quieter times of the year:

To see the Queen of the South in her most natural and pleasing mood one should visit her during the dreamy season called St Martin’s summer, when the orange blossoms exhale their fragrance, and the winds are still lukewarm, and the autumn glow bronzes those faint tints which the old-fashioned edifices wear. Then the curious confusion of gables and balconies gracefully jutting against the blue above, the Doresque oddity of the shadows wrought below, give the more antiquated streets a peculiarly impressive aspect—a foreign look not of this hemisphere or even of this century.

Elsewhere, Hearn’s invocation of the “Southern moon” is timeless—it is one of the images most vivid in my memory—while in other respects he describes a Louisiana that has vanished yet through which as an outsider he was able freely to move. Hearn was the first journalist to visit the Filipino settlement at Saint Malo, a small village in St Bernhard Parish that disappeared completely after its destruction during the 1915 hurricane but which was the first community of Asian origin in North America.

He also wrote an obituary for Jean Montenat, reputedly the last supreme exponent of voodoo, who left Africa and found fame and fortune in New Orleans. For all that Hearn disdained what in the occult he saw as “humbug”, he was inclined to see in Montenat an extraordinary individual “in point of natural intelligence”.

Hearn also celebrated the life of an equally legendary character who thrived in a different part of New Orleanian society, the Spanish fencing master known as Pepe Llulla. Duelling was very popular among the high society in Creole New Orleans, and Hearn illustrates the point that the city was Spanish before it was even French, much less American as was the case after 1815. Duelling remained popular in New Orleans long after it had ceased to matter in Europe as a serious means of resolving disputes.

When in 2012 Lafcadio Hearn’s great-grandson Bon Koizumi and his wife Shoko came from Japan to visit the newly restored house in which his famous ancestor had lived in New Orleans more than a century before, he was quoted in the Times-Picayune as saying that “New Orleans is one of my favorite cities in the world. The Creole culture makes people open-minded. So this is the reason I love this city.” That same open-mindedness, he said, was a defining characteristic of his great-grandfather.

As indeed it is. If you are inclined to believe, as Les Murray for one has mooted in relation to Australia, that the future of culture and language is creole, then Lafcadio Hearn, all of whose works are available in the public domain, provides a literary model of curiosity and inclusiveness as well as being a fine, original writer.