Lafcadio Hearn, Chronicler of America

by Roger Pulvers

"On lifting the coffin lid a powerful and penetrating odor, strongly resembling the smell of burnt beef, yet heavier and fouler, filled the room. Laid upon the clean white lining of the coffin [the remains] resembled great shapeless lumps of half-burnt bituminous coal .… masses of crumbling human bones strung together by half-burnt sinews or glued one upon another by a hideous adhesion of half-molten flesh, boiled brains and jellied blood. The skull had burst like a shell in the fierce furnace heat; and the whole upper portion seemed as though it had been blown out by the steam from the boiling and bubbling brains.”

I have somewhat edited Lafcadio Hearn’s article, Violent Cremation, from The Cincinnati Enquirer of November 9, 1874. In fact, this long piece persists in grizzly descriptions, such as of “a roasted liver and kidneys fairly fried.” The body belonged to the victim of a murder-by-cremation, and Hearn speculates that the poor fellow may very well have been alive when flung into the furnace.

In another article, this one titled Gibbeted, from The Cincinnati Commercial of August 26, 1876, Hearn takes up the execution of James Murphy, the 19-year-old son of Irish immigrants. In what I believe to be one of Hearn’s best pieces of writing, he describes in even tones “the pyramid of agony” confronting the lad after Father Murphy (no relation), “a fat, kindly, red-cheeked Irish priest,” tried to comfort the boy on his way to the gallows.

Hearn, there to witness the events, is meticulous on the detail.

The first attempt to gibbet the boy fails. There is a “pitiful groan” from the boy beneath his black hood.
“Why, I ain’t dead. I ain’t dead!”

Father Murphy inquires: “Are you hurt, my child?”
“No, father, I’m not dead. I’m not hurt. What are they going to do with me?” The executioners then take the “ghastly mask” off the boy’s head to fasten a new noose to his neck.

“His face was livid, his limbs shook with terror, and he suddenly seized Deputy Freeman desperately by the coat, saying in a husky whisper, ‘What are you going to do with me?’ ”

“Then the little Irish priest whispered firmly in his ear, ‘Let go, my son; let go, like a man—be a man; die like a man.’ ”

Hearn goes on to depict the young man’s agonizingly slow (17-minute) death in painstaking detail.

Here is 19th-century journalism at its best—matter-of-fact, steel-eyed description. Much of the reportage that Lafcadio Hearn did in Cincinnati was perceptive and composed. It foreshadows his fastidious investigative approach to the esotericae of Meiji Japan.

Who was the journalist Lafcadio Hearn?

He was born on June 27, 1850, on Lefkada, one of the Ionian Islands that were, from 1815 until 1864, occupied by the British Imperial Army Protectorate Forces. His father, Charles Bush Hearn, was a Surgeon-Major in the British Army Medical Staff and was stationed temporarily on the island.
Hearn’s mother was Rosa Antonia Tessima Cerg Kassimatis, of Kythera. Rosa’s own mother was Maltese, a fact that gets ignored in Japan. The Japanese prefer to see Hearn as purely Greek, bizarrely implying that he somehow inherited ancient Hellenic traditions. There is also a tendency in many studies to view Hearn as fascinated by Irish culture, which he most certainly wasn’t. If he refers occasionally to Irish culture in his letters and writing, he makes many more references to a large number of other cultures. Hearn’s ability to view the cultures and subcultures of the world in such depth stems from the fact that he refused to identify with any “native” tradition.

The 19-year-old Hearn arrived in Cincinnati, Ohio, sinking easily to the very bottom of the melting pot of post-Civil War America. As a schoolboy in England, he had been a Greek-Irish misfit in his Durhamshire school, short in stature, swarthy, and sightless in one eye (probably due to a playground accident). In multiracial Cincinnati, Hearn was ambitious to find a niche for himself. He was taken in by a printer, Henry Watkin, and taught typesetting, began to write freelance articles for The Enquirer, and, in 1872, was hired as a reporter on the paper.

Due to a liaison with a woman of mixed blood—Alethea Folley, a single mother at the time—he was fired from the paper. (The owner of The Enquirer, Washington McLean, was an unreconstructed sympathizer of the Southern cause.) Although Lafcadio and Alethea had a wedding ceremony, marriage between people of mixed race was illegal in Ohio at the time. To disregard the propriety of the day in such a way was an outrageous action.

It was virtually impossible for Hearn, due to his background, to contemplate marriage to a “respectable” white woman; and, in any case, he passed most of his time with people who would now be called slumdwellers. His outlook on the misery of the blacks is often very moving. In Story of a Slave, published in The Cincinnati Commercial on April 2, 1876, Hearn tells the tragic story of Henrietta Woods, a black slave who was freed and then enslaved again by unscrupulous traders. Story of a Slave, with its documentary-style descriptions of the plight of the blacks before and after the Civil War, is, to my mind, as good as any short work of Langston Hughes or Ralph Ellison. Thanks to the fact that he was representing no country or culture himself, Hearn was able to empathize with the blacks, as he did with the Japanese from the moment he set foot on Japanese soil.

Hearn had a way of arriving in a place when it was in decline (with the exception of Japan, of course).

Cincinnati had once been a thriving city, thanks to its strategic location on the north bank of the Ohio River. The location on the northern edge of the South and the southern edge of the North played well until two things changed the city’s prosperous course: the Civil War and, in a word, Chicago.

Chicago, the upstart, always saw Cincinnati as the town to beat. When the latter started up a professional baseball team, the Red Stockings, the former answered with the White Stockings. Cincinnati had been the pork-packing capital of America. Chicago took its place. The vehicle that powered Chicago’s rise to power was the railroad. Cincinnati had always been the gateway to the West, but after the Gold Rush in California, Chicago, with its rail link, stole the gate and everything that went with it.

Hearn wallowed in Cincinnati lowlife, particularly that centered around the levee. Hearn himself was feisty and passionate, and he spent many evenings with the stevedores—two-thirds of whom were black—the tramps and the roustabouts of the dockland. He immersed himself in the gritty subculture of America for the first time, writing about it in more than 300 articles. He covered the opium den, the brothel and the slaughterhouse. Again, it is his ethnographic approach to reportage that, I believe, schooled him in his later studies of Japanese folklore.
The culture of Meiji Japan was decidedly Western, but the subculture was still rooted in the mores, superstitions, rituals and folklore of the Edo Period and earlier. Without his American apprenticeship in the documenting of subculture, Hearn would have been just another Western-biased analyzer of Japanese life.

Some of his best writing on the folklore of Cincinnati’s subculture focuses on music and language. Here are portraits of blacks loving, talking, dancing, singing and “slapping juba.” (Slapping, or patting, juba was a method of creating a drum beat by using spoons, washboards, or the person’s own chest and legs. The use of drums had been banned on plantations.) Whether he is recording the romantic words of “The Wandering Steamboat Man” or the “darky malarkey” of the levee culture, Hearn is a faithful chronicler of the life of a cityscape all but invisible to the city’s well-to-do citizens.

When Hearn arrived in New Orleans in 1877, for a stay of about 11 years, he was again immediately drawn to the black culture of the city.

Some of Hearn’s journalism from his New Orleans period suffers badly from over-embellishment. When it is not embellished, he packs in a storehouse of pedantic references, as if intent on rivaling scholars in factual proliferation. These two tendencies—to over-color and over-explain—became Hearn’s bane, eventually preventing him from being an original prose writer of significance.
He probably aimed many of the local articles from this period at the booming New Orleans tourist trade, emphasizing the exotic and coloring it purple. His best work, at any point in his career, is in the dry recounting of story or event. His hand betrays his eye when he waxes lyrical on a subject.

New Orleans, even more than Cincinnati, was in the throes of decline and decay. What a delightful laboratory for the assiduous grubber in the Rue Morgue, the impassioned observer of female morphine eaters, the fossicker of any and all detail that would color his mosaic of decadent life in the post-Civil War South!

He studied the city’s six Creole dialects and their many proverbs. He even wrote a cookbook, though he apparently refused to have his name put on it for fear of being branded a cookbook author.

The articles from his New Orleans period may be steeped in exotica, but sometimes he uncovers an intriguing story, like the one from Saint Malo: A Lacustrine Village in Louisiana that appeared in Harper’s Weekly on March 31, 1883. This piece is about a settlement of Tagalas, or Philippine, fishermen. They were originally seamen who jumped their Spanish ship in Mexico, crossed over to the Gulf and came to live in Louisiana. Like much of Hearn’s writing of the period, this is a rather undistinguished travel piece; but it does apparently constitute the first recording of a Filipino community in America. Hearn’s instincts often led him to the right place. It was his unique outlook on the miseries of non-mainstream society—not his brilliant prose style—that made him a pioneering documentarist of ethnic America.

New Orleans in the 1880s had a huge transient population of sailors, migrants and opportunity seekers. This made it a city with countless hotels, eating establishments of all sorts, gambling dens and brothels. As in Cincinnati, Hearn was prolific here, writing not only his usual articles but also editorials, drama critiques and translations from French, in which he was extremely proficient. (He translated de Maupassant, Loti and Zola, among others.)
But even in his relatively early days in New Orleans, Hearn began to tire of the city. He wrote to his friend, musicologist Henry Edward Krehbiel, in February 1881:
“I am very weary of New Orleans. The first delightful impression it produced has vanished. …What remains is something horrible like the tombs here—material and moral rottenness which no pen can do justice to.”

In fact, Lafcadio Hearn felt at home nowhere. Even after more than a decade in Japan, with a high salary and a large family that relied upon him in every way, with a growing stack of books to his name and respect from the Japanese community, he wished to leave this country. Had he lived, he might have gone back to America. There was a potential job offer from Cornell University, which, in the end, did not pan out. He also toyed with the idea of moving to Manila.

Hearn, who had a Japanese wife and four children, died in Tokyo, age 54, on September 26, 1904. His father had died of malaria on his way back to Ireland from India and was buried at sea, age 48. His mother died, age 59, in the National Mental Asylum on Corfu. Lafcadio had only the faintest memories of either of them.

The fascination of this orphan of the 19th century comes from the fact that he belonged to no country and no place. It is this very rootlessness that gave him an edge, both in America and Japan. That edge remains sharp in the best of his work now, more than 100 years after his death.

FCCL NUMBER 1 SHIMBUN OCTOBER 2006

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