Lafcadio Hearn

THE biographers of the self-styled “civilized nomad” have been a motley crew, ranging from slightly hysterical women to a slanderous male oculist. Mrs. Vera McWilliams is the first to bring to her subject long training as a professional writer, adequate scholarship, and fifteen years of devoted research. The result is a sane and readable account of the life of the one-eyed, beak-nosed genius known to the Japanese as “Many Clouds” and to his godparents as Patricio Lafcadio Tessima Carlos Hearn.

Lafcadio Hearn was born in 1850 of Irish and Maltese stock on the Ionian island where Sappho died. He was educated in England, Ireland, and France; his religious training was Protestant, Catholic, and Buddhist; his citizenship was first British, then Japanese; his first marriage was to an American Negress, his second to the daughter of a Japanese samurai; and he began his career as an Irish remittance man in Cincinnati at the age of nineteen. That a man with this background should at first impress his Japanese wife as a lunatic is hardly surprising.

Hearn’s work as a reporter in Cincinnati in the seventies and in New Orleans in the eighties provides excellent material for the biographer. For Hearn was what is known in the trade today us a PM reporter. He dedicated himself to “the Old, the Queer, the Strange, the Exotic, the Monstrous,” and these early accounts are of prostitutes, murders, ghosts, and the taste of blood (Hearn found the “crimson cream” delicious).

In 1890 he turned to the Orient for new material. Backed with promises from Harper’a Magazine and cash donated by a Canadian Pacific Railways mogul (for publicity), he set out for Japan. There he was to remain until his death fourteen years later.

Hearn embodied the type of the American artist of the later nineteenth century, an artist in restless flight from the machines and the concrete of New York and in search of a stable artistic society, whether in the South Seas, the Middle Ages, or Japan. The tragedy of Hearn’s life is that even as he discovered his ideal society in Meiji Japan, it vanished before his eyes under the pressures of militarism and industrialization.

Here Mrs. McWilliams’s biography has confined itself too narrowly to the intimate details of Hearn’s life at the expense of what he said. But her life of Hearn as a whole will probably be the definitive treatment until Hearn’s last period can be more thoroughly examined in connection with his thought.

JOHN ASHMEAD, JR.