http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/hearn/Benfey_interview_on_Hearn.pdf
In his New Yorker review of Jonathan Cott’s 1990 biography of Lafcadio
Hearn, Brad Leithauser wrote “The canon of nineteenth-century American literature contains a number of outsize oddballs (Poe, Dickinson, and
Whitman foremost among them), but even in such singular company
Hearn often succeeds in looking sharply eccentric. In his fifty-four years, this British-Irish-Greek-American-Japanese essayist, fiction writer, folk-
lorist, and translator clashed with our country’s miscegenation laws (in
1874, with a black clergyman presiding, he married Mattie Foley, an eighteen-year-old mulatto who was born a slave); denounced Christianity and pursued Buddhism; composed journalism of such raw gusto that even in our unbuttoned age it can still jangle the nerves; . . . talked to ghosts in mediums’ dens; and became, possibly, a bigamist (his marriage, in 1891, to a Japanese woman was evidently not preceded by a divorce from
Mattie). Given a life so contrarily colorful and so charged with explosive social issues, it is surprising that Hearn has not found his way onto more
English-department syllabuses.” Does this sound accurate? Will Lafcadio
Hearn: American Writings remedy this oversight?
I’m completely convinced that Hearn’s time has come. He famously wrote that he worshiped “the Odd, the Queer, the Strange, the Exotic, the Monstrous.”
Such pronouncements have made it easy to dismiss him as some oddball com-
bination of Poe and Gauguin, living in an escapist world of dreams. But what
Hearn was really interested in was the astonishing variety of human life. That’s what comes across strongly in his American Writings, in which his omnivorous curiosity is everywhere on show. Despite his traumatic early years, when he was abandoned by his relatives and just about everyone he trusted, he retained an incredible zest and openness for new experiences and places. When he finds himself in a new locale—an African-American dive in segregated Cincinnati, a voodoo ceremony in New Orleans, an uncharted Filipino fishing village in the
Gulf of Mexico—he wants to devour everything in it. He simply goes further afield than any of his contemporaries—try to imagine Henry James or Edith
Wharton in these places! It’s true that Hearn’s tastes run toward the decadent and the evanescent. “The Last of the Voudoos” is the title of his vivid article on the legendary voodoo wizard Jean Montanet, and we’ve also included his charming portrait of “The Last of the New Orleans Fencing-Masters.”
(...) One of our best current travel writers, Pico Iyer, uses the phrase “global soul” for people who have adapted themselves to our new world of mass migra-
tion and globalization. Hearn, it seems to me, was an early version of a global soul...
