MEMPHIS
"So I wait for the poet's Pentecost--the inspiration of
Nature--the descent of the Tongues of Fire. And I think they
will come when the wild skies brighten, and the sun of the
Mexican Gulf reappears for his worshippers--with hymns of
wind and sea, and the prayers of birds. When one becomes
bathed in this azure and gold air--saturated with the perfume
of the sea, he can't help writing something. And he cannot
help feeling a new sense of being. The Soul of the Sea
mingles with his own, is breathed into him: the Spirit that
moveth over the deep is the Creator indeed--vivifying,
illuminating, strengthening. I really feel his Religion--the
sense of awe that comes to one in some great silent temple.
You would feel it too under this eternal vault of blue, when
the weird old Sea is touching the keys of his mighty organ
..."[12]
[12] Letter to Dr. Matas in Dr. Gould's book, "Concerning Lafcadio
Hearn," Messrs. Fisher Unwin.
It was in the autumn of 1877 that Lafcadio Hearn, with forty dollars in
his pocket and a head full of dreams, started for Memphis on his way to
New Orleans. Mr. Halstead and Mr. Edward Henderson, editors of the
_Commercial_, and his old friend, Mr. Watkin, were at the little Miami
depot to bid him God speed.
Memphis is situated at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio
rivers. Hearn had to await the steamboat there on its return journey
from New Orleans. In those days punctuality was not rigidly enforced,
and very often the arrival of the steamer necessitated a wait of several
days at Memphis. The only person with whom Hearn kept up communication
in the northern city he had left was Henry Watkin. Hieroglyphs of
ravens, tombstones, and crescent moons illustrate the text. It is in
moments of loneliness and depression, such as these days at Memphis,
that the real Hearn shows himself. He becomes now and then almost
defiantly frank in his self-revelations and confessions.
On October 28 he dispatched a card bearing two drawings of a raven; "In
a dilemma at Memphis" was the inscription under a raven scratching its
head with a claw. The other is merely labelled "Remorseful." His
finances had, apparently, run out, and in spite of paying two dollars a
day for his accommodations, he, according to his own account, had to
lodge in a tumble-down, dirty, poverty-stricken hotel.
I have already referred to Hearn's choice of the name of "Ozias
Midwinter," as signature to his series of letters contributed at this
time to the _Commercial_. These letters, his first professional work,
except "The Tan-yard Murder" and "The Ascent of the Spire of St.
Peters," rescued from destruction, show how long hours of unflagging
industry spent on achieving a finished style were at last to bear fruit,
giving them that extraordinary variety, ease, and picturesqueness which,
combined with originality of thought and keenness of judgment, placed
him ultimately in the forefront of the writers of the day.
A postcard, written to Mr. Watkin on November 15, 1877, enabled the
identification in the files of the _Commercial_ of these "Midwinter"
letters.
He approached the Memphis of the Mississippi, he said, dreaming of the
Memphis of the Nile, and found but tenantless warehouses with shattered
windows, poverty-stricken hotels vainly striving to keep up
appearances.... The city's life, he said, seemed to have contracted
about its heart, leaving the greater portion of its body paralysed. It
gave him the impression of a place that had been stricken by some great
misfortune beyond the hope of recovery. When rain and white fogs came,
the melancholy of Memphis became absolutely Stygian; all things wooden
uttered strange groans and crackling sounds; all things of stone or of
stucco sweated as if in the agony of dissolution, and beyond the cloudy
brow of the bluffs the Mississippi flowed a Styx flood, with pale mists
lingering like shades upon its banks.
"Elagabalus, wishing to obtain some idea of the vastness of Imperial
Rome, ordered all the cobwebs in the city to be collected together and
heaped before him. Estimated by such a method, the size of Memphis would
appear vast enough to astonish even Elagabalus."
Of Forrest, the great Confederate leader, whose funeral took place at
Memphis while Hearn was there, he gives a vivid description. "Rough,
rugged, desperate, uncultured. His character fitted him rather for the
life of the border and the planter. He was by nature a typical
pioneer--one of those fierce and terrible men who form in themselves a
kind of protecting fringe to the borders of white civilisation."
Then comes a typical paragraph: "The night they buried him, there came a
storm.... From the same room whence I had watched the funeral, I saw the
Northern mists crossing the Mississippi into Arkansas like an invading
army; then came grey rain, and at last a fierce wind, making wild
charges through it all. Somehow or other the queer fancy came to me that
the dead Confederate cavalrymen, rejoined by their desperate leader,
were fighting ghostly battles with the men who died for the Union."
To Mr. Watkin he wrote describing his big, dreary hotel room overlooking
the Mississippi whence he could hear the panting and puffing of the
cotton boats and the deep calls of the river traffic, but of the
_Thompson Dean_ there was not a sign to be seen or heard. In every
corner between the banisters of the old stairway spiders were busy
spinning their dusty tapestries, and when he walked over the floors at
night they creaked and groaned as if something or somebody was following
him in the dark.
It was, he declared, a lonely sensation, that of finding yourself alone
in a strange city. He felt inclined to cry during the solitary hours of
the night, as he used to do when a college boy returned from
vacation.... "I suppose," he adds, "you are beginning to think I am
writing quite often. I suppose I am, and you know the reason why; and
perhaps you are thinking to yourself, 'He feels lonely, and is
accordingly affectionate, but by and by he will forget.' Well, I suppose
you are right." By and by, when he was less lonely, he said, he would
write perhaps only by weeks, or perhaps by months, or perhaps, again,
only by years--until the times and places of old friendships were
forgotten and old faces had become dim as dreams.
At last the New Orleans steamer, the _Thompson Dean_, arrived, and Hearn
floated off on board into the current of the mighty river, and also,
inspired by the enchantment of his surroundings, into the flood-tide of
his genius. A letter contributed to the _Commercial_, describing the
"Fair Paradise of the South," the great sugar country, in which he now
found himself, shows how he was gaining in the manipulation of his
material, also gaining in the power of appreciating the splendour of the
vision, the inmost ultimate secret Nature ever reveals to those who can
comprehend and decipher it.
As the little half-blind genius sat on the cotton bales on the deck of
the _Thompson Dean_ those autumn days, peering forth one moment, the
next with nose close to the paper, his pen scratching rapidly,
describing the marvellous pictures, setting down the impressions that
slipped by on either hand, all the joy of an imprisoned tumultuous soul
set free, mentally and morally free, must have come to him. It breathes
in every line, in every paragraph of his work. And not only was this
passionate joy his, but also the exhilarating assurance of knowing that
by self-denial, industry and the determination to succeed he had
achieved and perfected the power to describe and expound the marvellous
pageant to others. From the horizon widening in front of him, through
the "Great South Gate," from "The Gulf" and the Tropics, from Martinique
and Florida came the health-giving breeze, carrying on its wings
courage, regeneration, and the promise of future recognition and fame.
Many were his backslidings, even to the extent of meditating suicide
during the first years of his sojourn in New Orleans, but never did he
fall so morally low as at Cincinnati. That life of sordidness and
ignominy was left behind, the unclean spirit exorcised and cast forth!
He had made his body a house of shame, but that very shame had set
throbbing subtle, infinite vibrations, a spiritual resonance and
response to higher endeavour and hope. He knew himself to be a man
again, sane, clear-brained, his deep appreciation of beauty able to rise
on the heights of the music of utterance as he poured forth the delight
of his soul.
Surely some light from the Louisiana sun must have flashed from the page
athwart the gloom of the dusty office of the _Commercial_; some magic,
bewitching the senses of the practical, hard-headed editor, inducing him
to offer the piece of poetic prose contributed by his "Ozias Midwinter"
correspondent, describing a Louisiana sunrise, to the ordinary reading
public of a Cincinnati daily newspaper.