NEW ORLEANS
"The infinite gulf of blue above seems a shoreless sea, whose
foam is stars, a myriad million lights are throbbing and
flickering and palpitating, a vast stillness filled with
perfume prevails over the land,--made only more impressive by
the voices of the night-birds and crickets; and all the busy
voices of business are dead. The boats are laid up, cotton
presses closed, and the city is half empty. So that the time
is really inspiring. But I must wait to record the
inspiration in some more energetic climate."
It is by Hearn's letters to Mr. Watkin that we are able to follow his
more intimate feelings and mode of life at this period of his career. He
was at first extravagantly enthusiastic about the quaint beauty and
novelty of his surroundings, the luxuriant vegetation, the warmth of the
climate, the charm of the Creole population of the older portion of the
city. The wealth of a world, unworked gold in the ore, he declared, was
to be found in this half-ruined Southern Paradise; in spite of her
pitiful decay, it still was an enchanting city. This rose-coloured view
of New Orleans was soon dissipated by pressing financial anxiety.
He had been visiting his uncle, he wrote, and was on the verge of
beggary. It was possible, however, to live on fish and vegetables for
twenty cents a day. Not long after, we find him begging his old Dad to
sell all his books, "except the French ones," and send him the proceeds,
as he was in a state of desperation with no friend to help him. The need
of money, indeed, so cramped and hindered his movements that he was
unable any longer to get material for the "copy" of his newspaper
correspondence.
Want of money seems also to have necessitated frequent change of
residence. His first card is written from 228 Baronne Street, care of
Mrs. Bustellos. In the left-hand corner is the drawing of a raven
sitting disconsolate beside a door. Shortly afterwards he describes
himself as living in an old house with dovecot-shaped windows shadowed
with creeping plants, where we have a picture of him sitting close to
the fire, smoking his pipe of "_terre Gambiese_," conjuring up fancies
of palm-trees and humming-birds, and perfume-laden winds, while a "voice
from the far tropics called to him across the darkness."
It is easy with our knowledge of Hearn to imagine how the money he
started with in his pocket from Cincinnati melted away during his
sojourn at Memphis, his journey down the Mississippi, and two or three
days spent amidst the attractions of the curio shops and restaurants of
the Crescent City. Gould mentions indignantly Hearn's "intolerable and
brutalising improvidence." Without using language quite so intemperate,
it must be acknowledged that he had a most irritating incapacity for
mastering the ignoble necessity for making expenditure tally with
revenue. The editor of the _Commercial_, being accustomed to deal with
the ordinary American journalist, to whom forty dollars was as a
fortune, did not reckon apparently with Hearn's Celtic recklessness in
the matter of ways and means.
Seven months later, he declared that he hadn't made seven cents by his
literary work in New Orleans. His books and clothes were all gone, his
shirt was sticking through the seat of his pants, and he could only
enjoy a five-cent meal once every two days. At last he hadn't even a
penny to buy stamps to mail his letters, and still the _Commercial_
hadn't sent him any supplies. Mr. Watkin's means did not admit of his
helping the woe-begone "raven." He was also prevented by business
affairs from sending a reply for some weeks.
His silence elicited another post-card, a tombstone this time,
surmounted by a crescent moon, with a dishevelled-looking raven perched
close by.
"I dream of old, ugly things," Hearn writes years later from Japan, when
referring to the possibility of his son being subjected to the poverty
and suffering he had experienced himself. "I am alone in an American
city; and I've only ten cents in my pocket--and to send off a letter
that I must send will take three cents. That leaves me seven cents for
the day's food.... The horror of being without employ in an American
city appals me--because I remember."
The _Hermes_ of AEschylus ventured the opinion, as an impartial observer
of events, that adversity was no doubt salutary for _Prometheus_. The
same might be said of most of those touched with Promethean fire. Not
only does privation and struggle keep the spark alight, but often blows
it into a flame. In spite of hunger and straitened means, Hearn was
absorbing impressions on every hand. New Orleans, in the seventies and
eighties of last century, presented conditions for the nourishing and
expanding of such a genius as his, that were most likely unattainable in
any other city in the world.
From an article written by him, entitled "The Scenes of Cable's
Romances," that appeared at this time in the _Century Magazine_, we can
conjure up this strange city rising out of the water like a dream, its
multi-coloured dilapidated Franco-Spanish houses, with their eccentric
facades and quaint shop-signs and names. We can see the Rue Royale, its
picturesqueness almost unadulterated by innovation, its gables, eaves,
dormers, projecting balconies or verandahs, overtopping or jutting out
of houses of every imaginable tint; each window adorned with sap-green
batten shutters, and balustraded with Arabesque work in wrought iron,
framing some monogram of which the meaning is forgotten. We can imagine
the little genius wandering along such a street, watching the Indians as
they passed in coloured blankets, Mexicans in leather gaiters, negresses
decked out in green and yellow bandanas, planters in white flannels,
American business men in broadcloth and straw hats--sauntering backwards
and forwards beneath the quaint arcades, balconies and coloured awnings.
We picture the savannahs and half-submerged cypress-groves on the river
bank, the green and crimson sunsets, the star-lit dusks, the sound of
the mighty current of the Mississippi as it slipped by under the shadow
of willow-planted jungle and rustling orange-groves towards Barataria
and the Gulf.
He describes a planter's house, an "antique vision," relic of the feudal
splendours of the great cotton and sugar country, endeavouring to hide
its ruin amidst overgrown gardens and neglected groves, oak-groves left
untouched only because their French Creole owners, though ruined,
refused to allow Yankee interlopers to cart them to the sawmill, or to
allow them to be sent away to the cities up North.
We follow him as, in his near-sighted, observant way he wandered through
the city, listening to the medley of strange tongues peculiar to the
great southern port; observing the Chinese in the fruit-market, yellow
as bananas, the quadroons with skins like dead gold, swarthy sailors
from the Mediterranean coasts and the Levant--from Sicily and Cyprus,
Corsica and Malta, the Ionian Archipelago, and a hundred cities fringing
the coasts of southern Europe, wanderers who have wandered all over the
face of the earth, sailors who have sailed all seas, sunned themselves
at a hundred tropical ports, casting anchor at last by the levee of New
Orleans, under a sky as divinely blue, in a climate as sunny and warm as
their own beloved sea. Amongst them all he was able, he imagined, to
distinguish some on whose faces lay a shadow of the beauty of the
antique world--one, in particular, from Zante, first a sailor, then a
vendor; some day, perhaps, a merchant. Hearn immediately purchased some
of his oranges, a dozen at six cents.
From the market he made his way to the Spanish cathedral, founded by the
representation of His Most Catholic Majesty, Don Andre Alminaster, where
plebeian feet were blotting out the escutcheons of the knights of the
ancient regime, and the knees of worshippers obliterating their memory
from the carven stone.
Side by side with him you find your way to the cotton landing of the
levee, thence watch the cotton presses with monstrous heads of living
iron and brass, fifty feet high from their junction with the ground,
with their mouths five feet wide, opening six feet from the mastodon
teeth in the lower jaw. "The more I looked at the thing," he says, "the
more I felt as though its prodigious anatomy had been studied after the
anatomy of some extinct animal,--the way those jaws worked, the manner
in which those muscles moved. Men rolled a cotton bale to the mouth of
the monster. The jaws opened with a loud roar, and so remained. The
lower jaw had descended to the level with the platform on which the bale
was lying. It was an immense plantation bale. Two black men rolled it
into the yawning mouth. The Titan muscles contracted, and the jaws
closed silently, steadily, swiftly. The bale flattened, flattened,
flattened down to sixteen inches, twelve inches, eight inches, five
inches,--positively less than five inches! I thought it was going to
disappear altogether. But after crushing it beyond five inches the jaw
remained stationary and the monster growled like rumbling thunder. I
thought the machine began to look as hideous as one of those horrible
yawning heads which formed the gates of the Teocallis at Palenque,
through whose awful jaws the sacrificed victims passed."
The romance that hung over the French colony of New Orleans appealed to
Hearn's love of the picturesque. The small minority, obliged to submit
to the rules and laws of the United States, but animated by a feeling of
futile rebellion against their rulers, still remaining devoted to their
country that had sold them for expediency.
With the sympathy of his Celtic nature he entered into the misery of
those who had once been opulent--the princely misery that never doffed
its smiling mask, though living in secret from week to week on bread and
orange-leaf tea, the misery that affected condescension in accepting an
invitation to dine, staring at the face of a watch (refused by the _mont
de piete_) with eyes half-blinded by starvation; the pretty misery,
young, brave, sweet, asking for "a treat" of cakes too jocosely to have
its asking answered, laughing and coquetting with its well-fed wooers,
and crying for hunger after they were gone.
Here for the first time since the France of his youthful days, Hearn
mixed with Latins, seldom hearing the English tongue.
During this time, while he was loafing and dreaming, he at various
intervals contributed letters to the _Commercial_. Now that his genius
has become acknowledged, these "Ozias Midwinter" letters, written in the
autumn and winter of 1877 and 1878, are appreciated at their just value;
but it would be absurd to say that from the accepted signification of
the word they come under the head of satisfactory newspaper reporting.
The American public wanted a clear and dispassionate view of political
affairs in the state of Louisiana, and how they were likely to affect
trade in the state of Ohio.
We can imagine an honest Cincinnati citizen puzzling over the following,
and wondering what in all creation the "Louisianny" correspondent meant
by giving him such rubbish to digest with his morning's breakfast:--
"I think there is some true poetry in these allusions to the snake. Is
not the serpent a symbol of grace? Is not the so-called 'line of beauty'
serpentine? And is there not something of the serpent in the beauty of
all graceful women? something of undulating shapeliness, something of
silent fascination? something of Lilith and Lamia?"
In April, 1878, apparently in response to a demand for news more suited
to the exigencies of a daily northern newspaper, came two letters on
political questions, written in so biassed and half-hearted a fashion
that it was not surprising to see the next letter from New Orleans
signed by another name. So the little man lost his opportunity, an
opportunity such as is given to few journalists, situated as he was, of
earning a competency and achieving a literary position. He himself
acknowledged that his own incompatibility of temper and will were to be
credited with most of the adverse circumstances which beset him so
frequently during the course of his life. A little yielding on his part
was all that was necessary at this time to enable him to keep his head
above water until regular work came his way.
Not long after this catastrophe Hearn attained his twenty-eighth
birthday. Alluding to this fact, he says that, looking back to the file
of his twenty-eight years, he realised an alarming similarity of misery
in each of them, ill-success in every aim, an inability to make headway
by individual force against unforeseen and unexpected disappointments.
Indeed, sometimes, when success seemed certain, it was upset by some
unanticipated obstacle, generally proceeding from his own waywardness
and unpractical nature. Some loss of temper, and impatience, which,
instead of being restrained and concealed, was shown with stupid
frankness, might be credited with a large majority of failures. All this
he confessed in one of his characteristic letters addressed to Mr.
Watkin about this time. He then recounts the sufferings he had been
through, how he found it impossible to make ten dollars a month when
twenty was a necessity for comfortable living. He had been cheated, he
said, and swindled considerably, and had cheated and swindled others in
retaliation. Then he damns New Orleans and its inhabitants, as later he
damned Japan and the Japanese. But the real fact was that, with that
gipsy-like nature of his, he loved wandering and change of scene; he
disliked the monotony of staying beyond a certain time in the same
place. "My heart always feels like a bird, fluttering impatiently for
the migrating season. I think I could be quite happy if I were a swallow
and could have a summer nest in the ear of an Egyptian Colossus, or a
broken capital of the Parthenon."
About this time an epidemic of yellow fever swept over the city,
desolating the population. Hearn did not fall a victim, but underwent a
severe attack of "dengue" fever.
"I got hideously sick, and then well again," he writes to Mrs. Atkinson.
It killed nearly seven thousand people. He describes the pest-stricken
city, with its heat motionless and ponderous. The steel-blue of the sky
bleached from the furnace circle of the horizon; the slow-running river,
its current yellow as a flood of fluid wax, the air suffocating with
vapour; and the luminous city filled with a faint, sickly odour--a stale
smell as of dead leaves suddenly disinterred from wet mould, and each
day the terror-stricken population offering its sacrifice to Death, the
faces of the dead yellow as flame! On door-posts, telegraph-poles,
pillars of verandahs, lamps over government letter-boxes, glimmered the
white enunciations of death. All the city was spotted with them. And
lime was poured into the gutters, and huge purifying fires kindled after
sunset.
After his attack of fever, unable to regain his strength owing to
insufficient food and the unhealthiness of the part of the city where he
had elected to live, Hearn's eyesight became affected.
"I went stone blind, had to be helped to a doctor's office--no money, no
friends. My best friend was a revolver kept to use in case the doctor
failed," he tells his sister.
In "Chita," which, as we have said, is only a bundle of reminiscences,
he refers to the suicide of a Spaniard, Ramirez. From his tomb a
sinister voice seemed to say, "Go thou and do likewise!"... Then began
within that man the ghostly struggle between courage and despair,
between darkness and light, which all sensitive natures must wage in
their own souls at least once in their lives. The suicide is not a
coward, he is an egotist; as he struggled with his own worst self
something of the deeper and nobler comprehension of human weakness and
human suffering was revealed to him. He flung the lattice shutters apart
and looked out. How sweet the morning, how well life seemed worth
living, as the sunlight fell through the frost haze outside, lighting up
the quaint and chequered street and fading away through faint bluish
tints into transparent purples. Verily it is the sun that gladdeneth the
infinite world.