CINCINNATI
"... I think there was one mistake in the story of OEdipus
and the Sphinx. It was the sweeping statement about the
Sphinx's alternative. It isn't true that she devoured every
one who couldn't answer her riddles. Everybody meets the
Sphinx in life;--so I can speak from authority. She doesn't
kill people like me,--she only bites and scratches them; and
I've got the marks of her teeth in a number of places on my
soul. She meets me every few years and asks the same tiresome
question,--and I have latterly contented myself with simply
telling her, 'I don't know.'"[8]
[8] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
In a letter to his sister, written from Kumamoto, in Japan, years later,
Hearn tells her that he found his way to the office of an old English
printer, named Watkin, some months after his arrival in Cincinnati. "I
asked him to help me. He took a fancy to me, and said, 'You do not know
anything; but I will teach you. You can sleep in my office. I cannot pay
you, because you are of no use to me, except as a companion, but I can
feed you.' He made me a paper-bed (paper-shavings from the book-trimming
department); it was nice and warm. I did errand boy in the intervals of
tidying the papers, sweeping the floor of the shop, and sharing Mr.
Watkin's frugal meals."
In Henry Watkin's Reminiscences the purport is given of the conversation
that passed between the future author of "Kokoro" and himself at his
shop in the city of Cincinnati, when Hearn first found his way there in
the year 1859.
"Well, young man, what ambition do you nourish?"
"To write, sir."
"Mercy on us. Learn something that will put bread in your mouth first,
try your hand at writing later on."
Henry Watkin was a person apparently of elastic views and varied
reading; self-educated, but shrewd and gifted with a natural knowledge
of mankind. He was nearly thirty years older than the boy he spoke to,
but he remembered the days when his ideal of life had been far other
than working a printing-press in a back street in Cincinnati. At one
time he had steeped himself in the French school of philosophy,
Fourierism and St. Simonism; then for a time followed Hegel and Kant,
regaling himself in lighter moments with Edgar Allan Poe and Hoffmann's
weird tales.
The lad who had come to solicit his aid was undersized, extremely
near-sighted--one of his eyes, in consequence of the accident that had
befallen him at Ushaw, was prominent and white--he was intensely shy,
and had a certain caution and stealthiness of movement that in itself
was apt to influence people against him. But the intellectual brow, a
something dignified and reserved in voice and manner, an intangible air
of breeding, arrested Mr. Watkin's attention. As Hearn somewhere says,
hearts are the supreme mysteries in life, people meet, touch each
other's inner being with a shock and a feeling as if they had seen a
ghost. This strange waif, who had drifted to the door of his
printing-office, touched Henry Watkin's sympathetic nature; he discerned
at once, behind the unprepossessing exterior, a specific individuality,
and conceived an immediate affection for the boy.
Many were the shifts that Lafcadio had been put to from the time he left
France until he cast anchor in the haven of Mr. Watkin's printing-shop
in a retired back street in the city of Cincinnati.
Filling up the gaps in his own recital, we can see the sequence of
events that invariably distinguished Hearn's progress through life. In
his improvident manner he had apparently squandered the money that had
been contributed by Mrs. Brenane for his journey, and thus found himself
in considerable difficulties.
Amongst the papers found after his death was a sketch, inspired, he
tells Professor Yrjo Hirn, writing from Tokyo in January, 1902, by the
names of the Scandinavian publishers, Wahlstrom and Weilstrand. It is
sufficiently reminiscent of Stevenson to make one think that the reading
of "Across the Plains," rather than the names of Scandinavian
publishers, was responsible for its inception. It relates very much the
same experiences as Stevenson's on his journey from New York to Chicago
in an American emigrant train. Absolutely destitute of money and food,
he must have presented a forlorn appearance. Moved to pity, a Norwegian
peasant girl, seated opposite him in the car, offered him a slice of
brown bread and yellow cheese. Thirty-five years later he recalled the
vision of this kind-hearted girl, no doubt endowing her memory with a
beauty and charm that never were hers--and under the title of "My First
Romance" left it for publication amongst his papers.
After his arrival in Cincinnati the lad seems very nearly to have
touched the confines of despair; and for some months lived a life of
misery such as seems incredible for a person of intellect and refinement
in a civilised city. Sometimes when quite at the end of his tether he
had, it appears, to sleep in dry-goods boxes in grocers' sheds, even to
seek shelter in a disused boiler in a vacant "lot."
"My dear little sister," he writes years afterwards to Mrs. Atkinson,
when recounting his adventures at this period, "has been very, very
lucky, she has not seen the wolf's side of life, the ravening side, the
apish side; the ugly facets of the monkey puzzle.
"I found myself dropped into the enormous machinery of life I knew
nothing about, friends tried to get me work after I had been turned out
of my first boarding-house through inability to pay. I lost father's
photograph at that time by seizure of all my earthly possessions. I had
to sleep for nights in the street, for which the police scolded me; then
I found refuge in a mews, where some English coachmen allowed me to
sleep in a hay-loft at night, and fed me by stealth with victuals stolen
from the house."
This incident Mrs. Wetmore, in her biography of Hearn, refers to as
having taken place during his stay in London. His letter to his sister
and his use of the word "dollars" in estimating the value of the horses,
unmistakably connects the scene of it with the United States, where at
that time it was the custom to employ English stablemen.
His sketch, written years after, recalling this night in a hay-loft,
delightfully simple and suggestive, tells of the delights of his
hay-bed, the first bed of any sort for many a long month! The pleasure
of the sense of rest! whilst overhead the stars were shining in the
frosty air. Beneath, he could hear the horses stirring heavily, and he
thought of the sense of force and life that issued from them. They were
of use in the world, but of what use was he?... And the sharp shining
stars, they were suns, enormous suns, inhabited perhaps by creatures
like horses, with small things like rats and mice hiding in the hay. The
horses did not know that there were a hundred million of suns, yet they
were superior beings worth a great deal of money, much more than he was,
yet he knew that there were hundreds of millions of suns and they did
not.
"I endeavoured later," he tells Mrs. Atkinson, "to go as accountant in a
business office, but it was soon found that I was incapable of filling
the situation, defective in mathematical capacity, and even in ordinary
calculation power. I was entered into a Telegraph Office as Telegraph
Messenger Boy, but I was nineteen and the other boys were young; I
looked ridiculously out of place and was laughed at. I was touchy--went
off without asking for my wages. Enraged friends refused to do anything
further for me. Boarding-houses warned me out of doors. At last I became
a Boarding-house servant, lighted fires, shovelled coals, etc., in
exchange for food and privilege of sleeping on the floor of the
smoking-room. I worked thus for about one and a half years, finding time
to read and write stories. The stories were published in cheap Weekly
Papers, long extinct; but I was never paid for them. I tried other
occupations also--canvassing, show-card writing, etc. These brought
enough to buy smoking tobacco and second-hand clothes--nothing more."
It is typical of Hearn that, though driven to such straits, he never
applied to Mr. Cullinane, to whose charge he had been committed. We are
not surprised that the little room at the back of Mr. Watkin's shop,
with the bed of paper shavings, and Mr. Watkin's frugal meals, yes, even
sleeping in dry-goods boxes in a grocer's shed, or the shelter of a
disused boiler in a vacant "lot," was preferable to the acceptance of
money sent through the intervention of Henry Molyneux to Henry
Molyneux's brother-in-law.
In his book, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn,"[9] Dr. George Milbury Gould
alludes to this gentleman in the following terms:--
[9] Messrs. Fisher Unwin.
"There is still living, an Irishman, to whom Lafcadio was sent from
Ireland, and in whose care, at least to a limited extent, the boy was
placed. He was living in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1870."
"He was not sure," says Gould in his account of an interview with Mr.
Cullinane, "whether Mrs. Brenane was really Hearn's grand-aunt; the fact
is, he declared that he knew nothing, and no one knew anything true of
Hearn's life. Asked why the lad was shipped to him, he replied, 'I do
not know--I do not even know whether he was related to my
brother-in-law, Molyneux, or not.'"
From these statements Gould infers that the boy couldn't stop in any
school to which he was sent, that he was apparently an unwelcome charge
upon his father's Irish relations. Every one, indeed, who had anything
to do with him made haste to rid themselves of the obligation.
The friendship with Mr. Watkin, the old English printer, was destined to
last for the term of Hearn's life.
Many of Hearn's friends in America have insinuated that Mr. Watkin
exaggerated the strength of the tie that bound him to Lafcadio Hearn;
but Hearn's letters to his sister bear out all the statements made in
the introduction to the volume entitled "Letters from the Raven." Even
when Hearn succeeded in obtaining occupation elsewhere, he would return
to Mr. Watkin's office during leisure hours, either for a talk with his
friend, or, if Mr. Watkin was out, for a desultory reading of the books
in the "library," the appellation by which the two or three shelves
containing Mr. Watkin's heterogeneous collection was dignified. He was
of no use in Mr. Watkin's business owing to defective eyesight, but when
he returned after his day's work elsewhere, literary, political and
religious subjects were discussed and quarrelled over.
As was now and afterwards his custom with his friends, in spite of daily
intercourse, Hearn kept up a frequent correspondence with Mr. Watkin.
This correspondence has been edited and published by Mr. Milton Bronner
under the title of "Letters from the Raven." Edgar Allan Poe had died in
1849, but the influence of his weird and strange genius was still
pre-eminent in America. Early in their acquaintance Hearn established
the habit of addressing Mr. Watkin as "Old Man" or "Dad," while on the
other hand the boy, in consequence of his sallow complexion, black hair,
and admiration for Poe's works, was known as the "Raven." During the
long years of their correspondence, a drawing of a raven was generally
placed in lieu of signature when Lafcadio wrote to Mr. Watkin. Many of
these pen-and-ink sketches interspersed with other illustrations here
and there through the letters show considerable talent for drawing, of a
fantastic sort, that might have been developed, had Hearn's eyesight
permitted, and had he not nourished other ambitions.
Some of the letters are simply short statements left on the table for
Mr. Watkin's perusal when he returned home, or a few lines of nonsense
scribbled on a bit of paper and pinned on a door of the office.
Often when Hearn was offended by some observation, or a reprimand
administered by the older man, he would "run away in a huff." Mr.
Watkin, who was genuinely attached to the erratic little genius and
understood how to deal with him, would simply follow him, tell him not
to be a fool, and bring him back again.
In the fourth autobiographical fragment, found amongst Hearn's papers
after his death, is one entitled "Intuition." He there alludes to Watkin
as "the one countryman he knew in Cincinnati--a man who had preceded him
into exile by nearly forty years."
In a glass case at the entrance to a photographer's shop, Hearn had come
across the photograph of a face, the first sight of which had left him
breathless with wonder and delight.... The gaze of the large dark eyes,
the aquiline curve of the nose, the mouth firm but fine--made him think
of a falcon, in spite of the delicacy of the face.... He stood looking
at it, and the more he looked, the more the splendid wonder of it seemed
to grow like a fascination. But who was she? He dared not ask the owner
of the gallery. To his old friend Watkin, therefore, he went and at once
proposed a visit to the photographer's. The picture was as much a puzzle
to him as to Hearn.
For long years the incident of the photograph passed from Hearn's memory
until, in a Southern city hundreds of miles away, he suddenly perceived,
in a glass case in a druggist's shop, the same photograph.
"Please tell me whose face that is," he asked.
"Is it possible you do not know?" responded the druggist. "Surely you
are joking?"
Hearn answered in the negative. Then the man told him--it was that of
the great tragedienne, Rachel.
* * * * *
Cincinnati is separated from Kentucky by the Ohio. It is there but a
narrow river, and the Cincinnati folk were wont to migrate into Kentucky
when there were lectures on spiritualism, revivalist meetings, or
political haranguings going on. Hearn and his old "Dad" used often to
make the journey when the day's work was done.
Hearn was ever fascinated by strange and unorthodox methods of thought.
We can imagine him poring over Fourier's "Harmonie Universelle" as well
as the strange theories set forth in esoteric Buddhism with its astral
visions and silent voices, even accepting the materialisation of
tea-cups and portraits and the transportation of material objects
through space.
These were not the only expeditions they made together. When, later,
Hearn was on the staff of the _Enquirer_ as night reporter, his "Dad"
often accompanied him on his night prowls along the "levee," as the
water edge is called on the river towns of the Mississippi valley.
At the time of Hearn's death in 1904 a member of the _Enquirer_ staff
visited Mr. Henry Watkin, who was then living in the "Old Men's Home"
(he died a few months ago), a well-known institution in Cincinnati where
business people of small means spend their declining years. An account
of this visit was printed in the newspaper on October 2nd. The writer
described the old bureau in Watkin's room with its many pigeon-holes,
holding gems more dear to the old man than all "the jewels of Tual"--the
letters of Lafcadio Hearn. To it the old gentleman tottered when the
reporter asked for a glimpse of the precious writings, and as he
balanced two packages, yellow with age, in his hand, he told, in a voice
heavy with emotion, how he first met Hearn accidentally, and how their
friendship ripened day after day and grew into full fruition with the
years.
"I always called him 'The Raven,'" said Watkin, "because his gloomy
views, his morbid thoughts and his love for the weird and uncanny
reminded me of Poe at his best--or worst, as you might call it; only, in
my opinion, Hearn's was the greater mind. Sometimes he came to my place
when I was out and then he left a card with the picture of a raven
varied according to his whim, and I could tell from it the humour he was
in when he sketched it."
Mr. Watkin was then eighty-six years of age, and dependence can hardly
be placed on his memories of nearly fifty years before. One of his
statements, that Hearn had come, in company with a Mr. McDermott, to see
him twenty-four hours after he had been in Cincinnati, cannot be quite
accurate, because of Hearn's own account to his sister of having spent
nights in the streets of Cincinnati, of his various adventures after his
arrival, of his having worked as type-setter and proof-reader for the
Robert Clarke Co., before seeking employment at Mr. Watkin's office.
It was while he was sleeping on the bed of paper shavings behind Mr.
Watkin's shop that he acted as private secretary to Thomas Vickers,
librarian in the public library at Cincinnati. He mentions Thomas
Vickers at various times in his letters to Krehbiel, and refers to rare
books on music and copies of classical works to be found at the library.
During all this period, wandering from place to place, endeavouring to
find employment of any kind, the boy's underlying ambition was to obtain
a position on the staff of one of the large daily newspapers, and thus
work his way to a competency that would enable him to devote himself to
literary work of his own.
"I believe he would have signed his soul away to the devil," one of his
colleagues says, "to get on terms of recognition with either Colonel
John Cockerill, then managing editor of the _Cincinnati Enquirer_, or
Mr. Henderson, the city editor of the _Commercial_." Though Hearn may
not have signed his soul to the devil, he certainly sold his genius to
ignoble uses when he wrote his well-known description of the tan-yard
murder. His ambition however was gratified. A reporter who could thus
cater to the public greed for horrors was an asset to the Cincinnati
press.
We have an account, given by John Cockerill, twenty years later, of
Hearn's first visit to the _Enquirer_:--
"One day there came to the office a quaint, dark-skinned little fellow,
strangely diffident, wearing glasses of great magnifying power and
bearing with him evidence that Fortune and he were scarce on nodding
terms.
"When admitted, in a soft, shrinking voice he asked if I ever paid for
outside contributions. I informed him that I was somewhat restricted in
the matter of expenditures, but that I would give consideration to what
he had to offer. He drew from under his coat a manuscript, and
tremblingly laid it upon my table. Then he stole away like a distorted
brownie, leaving behind him an impression that was uncanny and
indescribable.
"Later in the day I looked over the contribution which he had left. I
was astonished to find it charmingly written....
"From that time forward he sat in the corner of my room and wrote
special articles for the Sunday Edition as thoroughly excellent as
anything that appeared in the magazines of those days. I have known him
to have twelve and fifteen columns of this matter in a single issue of
the paper. He was delighted to work, and I was pleased to have his work,
for his style was beautiful and the tone he imparted to the newspaper
was considerable. Hour after hour he would sit at his table, his
prominent eyes resting as close to the paper as his nose would permit,
scratching away with beaver-like diligence and giving me no more
annoyance than a bronze ornament. His eyes troubled him greatly in those
days, one was bulbous, and protruded farther than the other. He was as
sensitive as a flower. An unkind word from anybody was as serious to him
as a cut from a whiplash, but I do not believe he was in any sense
resentful.... He was poetic, and his whole nature seemed attuned to the
beautiful, and he wrote beautifully of things which were neither
wholesome nor inspiring. He came to be in time a member of the city
staff at a fair compensation, and it was then that his descriptive
powers developed. He loved to write of things in humble life. He prowled
about the dark corners of the city, and from gruesome places he dug out
charming idyllic stories. The negro stevedores on the steamboat-landings
fascinated him. He wrote of their songs, their imitations, their uncouth
ways, and he found picturesqueness in their rags, poetry in their juba
dances."
A journalistic feat still remembered in Cincinnati for its daring was
Hearn's ascent of the spire of the cathedral on the back of a famous
steeplejack, for the purpose of writing an account of the view of the
city from that exalted position.
Mr. Edmund Henderson gives an account of the accomplishment of the
performance. Hearn was told of the peril of the thing but he would not
listen. Despite his physique he was as courageous as a lion, and there
was no assignment of peril that he would not bid for avidly. "Before the
climb began the editor handed him a field glass with the suggestion that
he might find it useful. Hearn, however, quietly handed it back with the
remark 'perhaps I had better not take it; something might happen.'
Amidst the cheers of the crowd beneath the foolhardy pair accomplished
their climb. Hearn came back to the office and wrote two columns
describing his sensations, and the wonders of the view he had obtained
from the steeple top, though he was so near-sighted he could not have
seen five feet beyond the tip of his nose."
Henceforth Hearn accepted the "night stations" on the staff of the
paper. Amongst the policemen of Cincinnati, who accompanied him in his
wanderings, he was a prime favourite, known as "O'Hearn" both to them
and to his fellow-reporters.
After hours of exposure, weary and hungry, he might be seen sitting in
the deserted newspaper office until the small hours of the morning,
under a miserable gas-jet burning like a "mere tooth of flame in its
wire muzzle," his nose close to paper and book, working at translations
from Theophile Gautier, Gustave Flaubert, and Baudelaire.
Being a meridional, he said, he felt rather with the Latin race than the
Anglo-Saxon, and he hoped with time and study to be able to create
something different from the stone-grey and somewhat chilly style of the
latter-day English and American romance. Although later he modified
considerably his opinion with regard to the moral tendency of their art,
he ever retained the same admiration for the artistic completeness and
finish of the French Impressionist School; their instinct for the right
phrase, their deftness in setting it precisely in the right position,
the strength that came from reserve, and the ease due to
vividly-realised themes and objects, all these elements combined
conferred a particular charm on their method of expression to a stylist
of Hearn's quality.
Not being able to find a publisher for Gautier's "Avatar," his first
translation from the French, he subjected it "to the holy purification
of fire." He next attempted a portion of some of Gautier's tales,
included under the title of "One of Cleopatra's Nights"; then he
undertook the arduous task of translating Flaubert's "La Tentation de
Saint Antoine." "It is astonishing what system will accomplish. If a man
cannot spare an hour a day he can certainly spare a half-hour. I
translated "La Tentation" by this method, never allowing a day to pass
without translating a page or two. The work is audacious in parts; but I
think nothing ought to be suppressed."
As well attempt, however, to gain a hearing for a free-thinking speech
at Exeter Hall as to obtain readers for Gautier's or Flaubert's
productions amidst a society nourished on Emerson, Longfellow, and
Thoreau! Unorthodox in religious opinion some of the American prophets
and poets might be, but rigid and narrow as a company of Puritans in the
matter of social morality.
When we know that about this time Bret Harte's "Luck of Roaring Camp"
was refused admittance to the pages of a San Francisco magazine as
likely to shock the sentiments of its readers and injure the circulation
of the periodical in consequence of the morals of the mother of the
_Luck_, we are not surprised that Hearn's attempt to introduce the
American public to the masterpieces of the French Impressionist School
was foredoomed to failure. There is a certain naive, determined defiance
of convention in his insistence on gaining admiration both from his
friends and the public for productions that were really quite unsuited
to general circulation at that time in America. We find him, for
instance, recommending the perusal of "Mdlle. de Maupin" to a clergyman
of the Established Church and sending a copy of Gautier's poems to Miss
Bisland in New Orleans.
"I shall stick," he says, "to my pedestal of faith in literary
possibilities like an Egyptian Colossus with a broken nose, seated
solemnly in the gloom of my own originality, seeking no reward save the
satisfaction of creating something beautiful; but this is worth working
for."
It is a noteworthy fact and one that may be mentioned here that, in
spite of his extraordinary mastery of the subtleties of the French
language, he always spoke French with an atrociously bad accent. "He had
a very bad ear," his friend, Henry Krehbiel, tells us in his article on
"Hearn and Folk Music," "organically incapable of humming the simplest
tune; he could not even sing the scale, a thing that most people do
naturally."
From these Cincinnati days dates Hearn's hatred of the drudgery of
journalism, "a really nefarious trade," he declared later; "it dwarfs,
stifles and emasculates thought and style.... The journalist of to-day
is obliged to hold himself in readiness to serve any cause.... If he can
enrich himself quickly and acquire comparative independence, then,
indeed, he is able to utter his heart's sentiments and indulge his
tastes...."
Amongst his colleagues on the staff of the _Enquirer_ Hearn was not
popular. He was looked upon as what Eton boys call a "sap"; his
fussiness about punctuation and style, soon earned for him the sobriquet
of "Old Semi-Colon." This meticulous precision on the subject of
punctuation and the value of words remained a passion with him all his
life. He used to declare he felt about it as a painter would feel about
the painting of his picture. He told his friend, Tunison, that the word
"gray" if spelt "grey" gave him quite a different colour sensation.
We remember his delightful outburst in a letter to Chamberlain, that has
been so often quoted. "For me words have colour, form, character: they
have faces, ports, manners, gesticulations;--they have moods, humours,
eccentricities:--they have tints, tones, personalities," etc., etc.
Though Hearn did not get on with others of the newspaper staff, he
formed ties of intimacy with several choice spirits then moving in the
best literary circles of Cincinnati and now well known in the literary
life of the United States.
Henry Krehbiel, recognised in England and America as an eminent music
lecturer and critic, was one of his most intimate friends. Joseph
Tunison was another; he afterwards became editor of the _Dayton
Journal_, and, as well as Krehbiel, wrote sympathetically of the little
Irishman after his death, expressing indignation at the scurrilous
attacks made upon his reputation by several papers in the United States.
"He was a wonderfully attractive personality, full of quaint learning,
and a certain unworldly wisdom. He had a fashion of dropping his friends
one by one; or of letting them drop him, which comes to the same thing;
whether indifference or suspicion was at the bottom of this habit it
would be hard to say. But he never spoke ill of them afterwards. It was
not his way to tell much about himself; and what he did say was let out
as if by accident in the course of conversation on other topics.... It
was impossible to be long in his company without learning that his early
years had been years of bitterness. His reminiscences of childhood
included not only his dark-haired, dark-eyed mother, but also a
beautiful blonde lady, who had somehow turned his happiness to misery."