Passionate Pilgrim

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF LAFCADIO HEARN (566 pp.) -- Edifed by Henry Goodman, introduction by Malcolm Covv/ey--Citadel ($4).

"Unless somebody does or says something horribly mean to me," wrote Lafcadio Hearn to a friend, "I can't do certain kinds of work--the tiresome kinds, that compel a great deal of thinking."

During his 54 years of life, Author Hearn seldom lacked inspiration of one sort or another: he managed to quarrel with just about everybody he met, for long periods slept with a loaded pistol under his pillow. Born in the Ionian Islands in 1850 of mixed Anglo-Irish and Maltese stock, he emigrated to the U.S. at 19, slept in Manhattan doorways and vacant lots, finally went West to Cincinnati in 1871 and got a job on the Enquirer. Color-conscious Cincinnati readers liked his lush accounts of the seamier side of Queen City life, but were rocked to the heels when word got around that Reporter

Hearn had married a Negro woman. In 1877 he pulled up stakes, deserted his wife and headed for New Orleans, where he went to work for the Item, later for the Times-Democrat.

"He became a sort of provincial Remy de Gourmont," says Critic Malcolm Cowley in his introduction to Selected Writings. "As a newspaperman he could publish translations from Gautier and Loti that were daring for the time, besides original sketches that the magazines would have rejected as being godless or indecent (or simply overwritten)."

Quivering Nostrils. Lafcadio Hearn was a sight to see, and he knew it. One eye was blind and covered with a milky film; the other was "myopic and protruding, so that it looked like the single eye of an octopus." A short (5 ft. 3), slight man with a scraggly mustache, he made some people think of "a distorted brownie." The nostrils of his long aquiline nose quivered constantly, picking up odors that most people could not smell at all. Odors were his great passion. During his New Orleans period, he translated every article he could find in French periodicals on odors, wrote innumerable essays of his own. In one of them he claimed he could distinguish between octoroons, quadroons and pure-blooded Africans by his sense of smell.

Before long he was smelling trouble in New Orleans: his Cincinnati notoriety had dogged his heels southward. "I am pretty much in the position," he wrote, "of a bookkeeper known to have once embezzled, or of a man who has been in prison, or of a prostitute who has been on the street." In turn he tried Martinique, Philadelphia and New York, soon tired of all. Looking for something different, he signed with a publisher to go to Japan and send back some sketches.

An Entire Family. Peripatetic Hearn was completely bowled over by Yokohama --"A world where everything is upon a smaller and daintier scale . . . where all movement is slow and soft, and voices are hushed." His shortness no longer embarrassed him: Japan was a "realization . . . of the old [folklore] dream of a World of Elves." He loved Japanese ideographs, Japanese "delicacy," the "atmospheric limpidity" of the Japanese climate.

The irascible bohemian lost no time in arguing with his publisher (over money) and severing connections. He supported himself by teaching English in provincial schools (and later by lecturing on English literature at the Imperial University in Tokyo), married a Japanese girl and became a citizen. Besides his wife and their four children, he supported his wife's entire family, found himself so busy he had little time to complain about life anymore. He taught all day, wrote most of the night. His subject for his last 14 years: Japan.

With his wife's help (he never mastered Japanese), Hearn translated dozens of legends and poems, composed scores of essays and sketches on Japanese life. In the essays prepared for the eyes of Western readers, he remained his adopted country's devoted partisan to the end. Loyally, he painted his adopted country as a peace-loving land menaced by the West. Wrote Hearn: "An evil dream comes oftentimes to those who love Japan: the fear that all her efforts are being directed, with desperate heroism, only to prepare the land for the sojourn of peoples older by centuries in commercial experience . . . that her admirable army and her heroic navy may be doomed to make their last sacrifices in hopeless contest against some combination of greedy states . . ."

A River-Bed. Unofficially, in his letters, Lafcadio Hearn told a different story. "It seems as if everything had suddenly become clear to me, and utterly void of emotional interest," he wrote a few years after his arrival. "There are no depths to stir, no race-profundities to explore: all is like a Japanese riverbed . . . never filled but in times of cataclysm and destruction." The Japanese government added to his disillusionment by easing him out of his university job. In the last years of his life he often longed to escape both family and country. He never did. A heart attack killed him on Sept. 26, 1904.

The Selected Writings will "give readers a chance to assess Critic Cowley's statement that Hearn's "folk tales are the most valuable part of [his work] ... He is the writer in our language who can best be compared with Hans Christian Andersen and the brothers Grimm." Many readers will cast their votes in favor of the blunt, naturalistic American Sketches, where Author Hearn's florid prose frames some breathtaking sights in19th Century Cincinnati's Sausage Row and the New Orleans voodoo belt.

Through a shrewd winnowing of repetitious and overwritten pieces, Editor Goodman manages to show Hearn at his best, but still does not succeed in lifting him into the first rank of19th Century U.S. writers. Lafcadio Hearn's brightest virtues were the human compassion that sweetened all of his work, and his ability to spin out atmosphere like yard after yard of fine Japanese silk.

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