{"id":677,"date":"2012-04-05T14:12:52","date_gmt":"2012-04-05T14:12:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/?p=677"},"modified":"2012-04-05T14:12:52","modified_gmt":"2012-04-05T14:12:52","slug":"just-acquired-lafcadio-hearn-iana","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/2012\/04\/05\/just-acquired-lafcadio-hearn-iana\/","title":{"rendered":"Just acquired, Lafcadio Hearn-iana"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We’ve just acquired a group of books by and about Lafcadio Hearn, which will join an already impressive collection both in the Watkinson and the main library stacks.<\/p>\n

Lafcadio Hearn was a mongrel child of the world,\u2014a global villager,\u2014a man unattached to country, kin, or creed.\u00a0 He was a sensitive underdog marginalized for his proclivities from beginning to end.\u00a0 Born Patrick Lafcadio Hearn on June 27, 1850, on the Ionian island of Leucadia just north of Ithaca (of Homeric fame), Lafcadio\u2019s own odyssey would bring him to far shores and settings, both exotic and mundane.<\/p>\n

In 2009 the Library of America published a selection of Hearn\u2019s works, edited by Christopher Benfey, entitled Lafcadio Hearn: American Writings<\/em>.\u00a0 In an interview Benfey stated, \u201cI\u2019m completely convinced that Hearn\u2019s time has come.\u00a0 He famously wrote that he worshiped \u2018the Odd, the Queer, the Strange, the Exotic, the Monstrous.\u2019\u00a0 Such pronouncements have made it easy to dismiss him as some oddball combination of Poe and Gauguin, living in an escapist world of dreams.\u00a0 But what Hearn was really interested in was the astonishing variety of human life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hearn\u2019s mother, Rosa Antonia Cassimati, was from Cerigo (known to the Greeks as Cythera); his father, Charles Bush Hearn, was an Irish surgeon and officer in the British Army.\u00a0 Their romance was not favored by either of their families.\u00a0 After Charles was re-assigned to the West Indies, he managed to send Rosa and young Patrick to Dublin, where his relations greeted these \u201cgypsy\u201d additions to their household with predictable warmth.\u00a0 An estranged aunt who doted on Patrick took them in, but after Charles finally returned to Ireland and established a little household in 1853 it became clear he had lost interest in Rosa.\u00a0 He took a new military assignment in the West Indies, and by the time he returned in 1856, Rosa had gone back to Greece and left five-year-old Patrick alone with his great-aunt.\u00a0 Charles Hearn annulled their marriage, and the Hearn family hid the boy from his mother when she returned to Ireland to see him.<\/p>\n

At age nine or ten young Patrick discovered the library in his great-aunt\u2019s house, and found several books of art containing images from Greek mythology.\u00a0 \u201cHow my heart leaped and fluttered on that happy day!\u201d he would later write.\u00a0 \u201cBreathless I gazed; and the longer that I gazed the more unspeakably lovely those faces and forms appeared.\u00a0 Figure after figure dazzled, astounded, bewitched me.\u201d\u00a0 This fascination with the elder gods did not sit well with his aunt, a devout Catholic, who sent him to a boarding school\u2014three quarters monastery and one quarter military academy\u2014run by \u201ca hateful venomous-hearted old maid.\u201d\u00a0 Guy de Maupassant, who attended the school months after Lafcadio left, wrote \u201cI can never think of the place even now without a shudder.\u00a0 It smelled of prayers the way a fish market smells of fish . . . We lived there in a narrow, contemplative, unnatural piety\u2014and also in a truly meritorious state of filth . . . As for baths, they were as unknown as the name of Victor Hugo.\u00a0 Our masters apparently held them in the greatest contempt.\u201d<\/p>\n

When he was sixteen Hearn suffered an accident which blinded his left eye, and from then on he would instinctively cover it with his left hand in conversation, or look down or to the left when photographed.\u00a0 Financial troubles forced him to seek schooling in London while living with a dock worker and his wife (distant relatives)\u2014and there he made his first forays into the underside of urban existence, fascinated and repelled by \u201cthe wolf\u2019s side of life, the ravening side, the apish side; the ugly facets of the monkey puzzle.\u201d\u00a0 Fed up with his dilatory and dreamy ways, his family gave him a one-way ticket to New York City and told him to make his way to Cincinnati, to another set of relatives who didn\u2019t want the strange young man.\u00a0 Penniless and homeless, he wandered the streets of the river town until he found work doing odd jobs at one of the local newspapers.\u00a0 In October of 1872 he submitted a review of Tennyson\u2019s Idylls of the King<\/em> to the editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer<\/em>, which became his first signed publication.\u00a0 Thus was born a literary journalist\u2014an intelligent, provocative observer with a ripe facility for language and a penchant for exposing the horror and the humor of everyday urban life.<\/p>\n

Christopher Benfey notes, \u201cOne of our best current travel writers, Pico Iyer, uses the phrase \u2018global soul\u2019 for people who have adapted themselves to our new world of mass migration and globalization.\u00a0 Hearn, it seems ot me, was an early version of a global soul.\u00a0 Born into the British Empire, he experienced firsthand the bitter divisions of the American Gilded Age, and lived to witness the rise of a new power in Asia: Imperial Japan.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLate in his life,\u201d Benfy continues, \u201cHearn became the Brothers Grimm for Japan, assembling the bare bones of some Japanese ghost stories and transmuting them\u2014with a whiff of Poe and M\u00e9rim\u00e9e\u2014into literary masterpieces.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’ve just acquired a group of books by and about Lafcadio Hearn, which will join an already impressive collection both in the Watkinson and the main library stacks. Lafcadio Hearn was a mongrel child of the world,\u2014a global villager,\u2014a man unattached to country, kin, or creed.\u00a0 He was a sensitive underdog marginalized for his proclivities […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":122,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/122"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=677"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":681,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677\/revisions\/681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}