Lafcadio Hearn. Photo courtesy of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. Accessed via New York Public Library Digital Collections.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Lafcadio Hearn was one of America’s best-known writers, one of a stellar company that included Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Twain, Poe, and Stevenson have entered the established literary canon and are still read for duty and pleasure. Lafcadio Hearn has been forgotten, with two remarkable exceptions: in Louisiana and in Japan. Yet Hearn’s place in the canon is significant for many reasons, not least of which is how the twentieth century came to view the nineteenth. This view, both academic and popular, reflects the triumph of a certain futuristic Modernism over the mysteries of religion, folklore, and what was once called “folk wisdom.” To witness this phenomenon in time-lapse, sped-up motion, one need only consider Lafcadio Hearn, the Greek-born, Irish-raised, New World immigrant who metamorphosed from a celebrated fin-de-siècle American writer into the beloved Japanese cultural icon Koizumi Yakumo in less than a decade, in roughly the same time that Japan changed from a millennia-old feudal society into a great industrial power.

History is a fairy tale true to its telling. Lafcadio Hearn’s lives are a fairy tale true in various tellings, primarily his own, then those of his correspondents, and with greater uncertainty, those of his biographers. Hearn changed, as if magically, from one person into another, from a Greek islander into a British student, from a penniless London street ragamuffin into a respected American newspaper writer, from a journalist into a novelist, and, most astonishingly, from a stateless Western man into a loyal Japanese citizen. His sheer number of guises make him a creature of legend. Yet this life, as recorded both by himself and by others, grows more mysterious the more one examines it, for it is like the Japanese story of the Buddhist monk Kwashin Koji, in “Impressions of Japan,” who owned a painting so detailed it flowed with life. A samurai chieftain saw it and wanted to buy it, but the monk wouldn’t sell it, so the chieftain had him followed and murdered. But when the painting was brought to the chieftain and unrolled, there was nothing on it; it was blank. Hearn reported this story told to him by a Japanese monk to illustrate some aspect of the Buddhist doctrine of karma, but he might as well have been speaking about himself as Koji: the more “literary” the renderings of the original story, the less fresh and vivid it becomes, until it might literally disappear, like that legendary painting.

The knowable tellings of Hearn are particular, interesting, and specific to the literary personae of Lafcadio-Koizumi, insofar as one is absorbed and lost in them. But this tremendously prolific producer of literature remains, somehow, elusive. Hearn tempts, or we could say “dares,” his critics to interpret his work and his life, but, in the end, he belongs to the reader who best surrenders to his stories and his own life-reporting. Read More

I first “met” James Alan McPherson in the College of the Holy Cross bookstore in Worcester, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1969. I had come to find something to read beyond the nineteenth-century British novels of the course I was taking. Beyond Dickens. Beyond the Brontës. Beyond Thackeray. It was not that I had not been pleasantly, wonderfully nourished by such authors, but I had spent my teenage years in Washington, D.C., primarily devouring American writers, black and white. The literary world beyond America was still a generally new one to me, still a feast of rich, though unfamiliar food, as it were. And because Dinand Library at the Cross was still several months away from being a place that I, a black sophomore at a predominantly white school, could comfortably go and know that I could find something familiar, I went once more to the bookstore.

Familiar, then, was what I began to feel when I came upon the paperback Hue and Cry on the store’s shelf. Black cover, orange lettering. And on the back, a black-and-white stamp-size photograph of Jim, as I would come to know him, as a graduate student more than ten years later at the University of Virginia. Standing in the bookstore aisle, I had a growing feeling that I knew that man in the photograph in a way that I had not felt years earlier seeing pictures of James Baldwin or Ralph Ellison on the backs of their books. Perhaps it was because their photos were those of seasoned, established, older writers. Jim, obviously a long way from being even thirty years old, stood almost shyly in a peacoat, looking as if having his picture taken would never be one of the things he would get used to doing. I felt I knew this man because he looked like me. Read More