Coleman in New York, whereby Coleman would publish the curious Gombo Zhebes if Hearn would throw in the manuscript for a sure seller - a collection of Creole recipes, the plan being that Expo crowds would snatch up knowledgeable, authentic publications on New Orleans culture.
Though the books were published too late in to make a profit from the Exposition, the cookbook sold well anyway, and was re-published in New Orleans the same year by F.
Though Hearn saw little money from his cookbook, and did not want to be known as the author of a cookbook hence the anonymous authorship , his scheme resulted in the first compilation of Creole recipes ever to appear in print.
Many credit him with defining Creole cooking as a heritage worth preserving, and credit his book, along with the Times-Picayune's Creole Cookbook of which it inspired as still among the best sources of true Creole recipes.
That same year he published a collection of legends, Some Chinese Ghosts, and placed his first novel, Chita, with Harper's Monthly. He returned to New York City and Philadelphia two years later. He also received a commission from Harper's to travel to and write a book about Japan.
He left in March of , never to return. His articles on Japan were widely syndicated. In he wed Setusko Koizumi, and they eventually had four children. In he published his first of twelve books on Japanese culture, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, and in he became a Japanese citizen, legally changing his name to Koizumi Yakumo.
His wife, married to a British subject, would have lost her Japanese citizenry otherwise. Though he wrote to friends in America that he wished to return someday, family concerns, financial restrictions, and cancellation of his planned lecture series at Cornell University due to a typhoid outbreak in Ithaca all prevented him from coming.
He published his final book, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, in He died of heart disease on the island of Honshu, in September , at the age of Hearn was a prolific writer, and the publications mentioned above cover less than half of his original published works, many of which were published posthumously. By the end of his life, he had become the leading Western authority on Japan and Japanese culture. A literary artist, he translated and elaborated on traditional legends and stories, and created original stories of haunting power.
Considered the forerunner of multi-cultural studies, Hearn spent his life seeking to understand and express the language, stories, and cultures that were foreign to or neglected by late nineteenth century European and American modernity. In a letter dated November , addressed to his friend Elizabeth Bisland for whom his affection is quite tender he writes:.
Other stories soon followed. They scandalized the readers of the Enquirer and lifted the newspaper from near-bankruptcy to a prosperous business. At the height of his Cincinnati success as a journalist, gossip about his personal life undermined his standing.
A pur sang bohemian, Hearn lived in a world far from his bourgeois readers. He is said to have married a black woman and lived with her on the other side of the tracks: a scandal in the segregated city.
The Enquirer fired him. Spurning offers from rival newspapers, Hearn abandoned Cincinnati and departed for New Orleans. From his early columns in the local newspapers to his novel Chita , his literary persona took on mythic proportions. His reputation grew. While writing for the New Orleans papers, he attracted the attention of New York literati and was courted by major publishers.
The novella, set on Grand Isle, the favorite vacation refuge of New Orleanians fleeing the unhealthy summer of the city, remains one of the classics of Louisiana literature and has never gone out of print.
In other words, Hearn had completed an epic journey in search of himself, a circular odyssey in both real-time and word-time, as adventure-filled as that of Odysseus and perhaps Homer, but which was not a return to the island where he was born, though it had taken him from one island to another. Death and its shadows preoccupied Hearn his entire life, but they took new meaning in Japan, where death was a starkly defined world.
They contained the charm and thrill of a mysterious world. He inserts himself into them in the most casually disruptive ways: offering interpretations or digressive asides about the person who first told him the tale in question, or saying that there is more to the story but he has forgotten it. He interrupts one tale to complain, Charles Kinbote-like, about the ubiquitous sight of telegraph poles in the hotel where he was staying when he first heard the story he is relating.
As so often with Hearn, there are two ways to feel about this. Unquestionably, it makes for a more interesting and sophisticated reading experience, and yet these authorial intrusions in ancient narratives represent a kind of claim to them, a display of control.
And here we touch on the interesting question of how he was exposed to many of these ghost stories in the first place. Listening to her, he became so childishly terrified that his reaction sometimes scared Setsu, who would worry that she had gone too far.
Then he would take notes. What drew Hearn so powerfully to these stories about the return of the departed? But a more personal explanation suggests itself as one notices the shared premise of tale after tale: nearly every one of them is about a young woman who disappears. Sometimes she is wronged and stranded in the invisible world; sometimes she performs miracles in order to be reunited with a loved one she left behind.
The possibility that the dead, whose absences are so painful and hard to understand, are still among us, and may still want something from us: this is the seat of horror, but also of fantasy. Perhaps—for it happens to some of us—you may have seen this haunter, in dreams of the night, even during childhood. Then, of course, you could not know the beautiful shape bending above your rest: possibly you thought her to be an angel. Once that you have seen her she will never cease to visit you.
And this haunting,—ineffably sweet, inexplicably sad,—may fill you with rash desire to wander over the world in search of somebody like her. But however long and far you wander, never will you find that somebody. Who can blame him? He waited all his life, if only in dreams, for the return of the one who abandoned him, who existed on the other side of some uncanny perceptual curtain. I also thought of its inevitable failures.
As a wife, I knew that it was false that Hearn alone devised this language. Setsu and Hearn would have created it together. The biographers who credited Hearn alone for the language had dismissed Setsu and her intellect and, most importantly, her will to survive. I did not. I agree with these Japanese scholars that Hearn was an excellent listener. He knew what to listen for. He knew not to dismiss the stories of women, children, and the common man. He listened to Setsu as she told and retold him these stories in their language, until he finally heard within these stories the reasons for their persistence and longevity.
Then he wrote his version of them. That patience paid off, as these narratives were documented in written form, not left behind or forgotten as Meiji Japan turned toward the West with breakneck speed.
How much information was out there about her life? MT: Alethea Foley—a young biracial woman, who was formerly enslaved in Kentucky—met Hearn in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she was working as a cook in the boarding house where he roomed. It has been white men who get to publish, who can claim the status of author and expert, and make their living from writing books.
The first document is a feature that Hearn wrote for the Cincinnati Commercial , after he and Alethea had already married.
He places quotation marks around most of the article, signaling that it is she who is speaking and not the reporter. What follows is a jumble of eerie, atmospheric stories. In short, he did not reduce her to a racialized caricature. Given the ghostly subject matter of her stories and her storytelling gifts, it was clear to me why Hearn was attracted to Alethea. It took more time to imagine why she would be attracted to him. The second of the scrimmed documents is an interview that Alethea gave to the Cincinnati Enquirer in The resolve, the will, and the inner strength that Alethea must have possessed in order to say to herself and to the court that she would fight for what was rightfully hers in a court of law.
That plus giving the interview, where she was clearly taking her claim into the court of public opinion? I was beyond impressed. I wanted to spend time with this Alethea.
I wanted to imagine what and who in her life had shaped her. Still, they are formidable despite not having the skills that most of us today would take for granted. MT: I write my novels in the first-person voice because it requires that I enter fully into the language of my narrators. It requires me to let go of my own vocabulary, syntax, and relationship to language, written and otherwise.
0コメント