An Irishman in Japan
Francis King
A FANTASTIC JOURNEY: THE LIFE AND LITERATURE OF LAFCADIO HEARN by Paul Murray Japan Library, f19.99, pp. 398 Little read now in the West except by Japanophiles, Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) is still so well regarded in Japan that three years ago the centenary not of his birth and not of his death but merely of his arrival in that country was widely celebrated. At an international conference in Matsue, the beautiful and then remote town in which Hearn settled in his first academic post and in which he met his docile, protective, hard-working Japanese wife, a statue was unveiled to him in the main square. Since Hearn, the son of an Irish father and a Greek mother, was born on the Ionian island of Levkas (Cephallonia), this statue had been sculpted by a Greek, who, piquantly, had made the diminutive, boss- eyed and far from handsome writer look like some hero from the Iliad. Significantly, the statue was unveiled not by one dignitary but two: the Greek and Irish ambassadors to Japan, each tugging on a cord. This tugging provided an entertaining metaphor for the tug-of-war between the two mini-powers to claim Hearn for their own.
Because Paul Murray, the author of the latest of a surprisingly large number of biographies, is Irish and because he served in the Irish embassy in Tokyo, it is under- standable that he should repeatedly take pains to stress the essential Irishness of Hearn. In his foreword, Roy Foster, Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford, does likewise. Hearn's cast of mind, Forster tells us, can be seen as stemming from the tradition of Irish- Victorian gothic, his obsession with the occult was part of the Irish literary renaissance of the day, and a further Irish element is his 'governing preoccupation with religion as an essential part of socio- logical formation'.
There is certainly something in all this. But at least as important, probably even more so, were two other influences: that of the black folklore and music which Hearn discovered with so much rapture in New Orleans and subsequently in the French West Indies, where he lived for two years; and that of 19th-century French literature, from which, at one period of his life, he was constantly translating. Whether, as he himself claimed, he actually spent some years at school in France is still not certain, but his desire, before his arrival in Japan, to be assimilated into French and Creole culture is beyond dispute.
Murray is at his best when writing of the 14 Japanese years, during which Hearn immersed himself more and more in a wholly alien tradition and eventually became one of its two or three greatest Western interpreters. Before going out to a job in Kyoto in the early Sixties, I set about reading innumerable books on Japan. Of the abiding essentials, as distinct from the transient superficialities, I learned more
from Hearn's last book, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, than from anything else.
But ironically, at the time that he was writ- ing this definitive study, Hearn's one desire, as Murray cogently demonstrates, was to get, not even closer to Japan, but away from it altogether.
By then he had lost his university post as the result, he convinced himself in his growing paranoia, of intrigues by his English colleagues, although in fact it was the Japanese Education Department which decided that an employee so demanding and querulous should not be retained. He had also lost many of his former friends, either through quarrels or through his own indifference and neglect.
Murray is no less good, in his final chapter, on the events which followed Hearn's death. As always in the case of someone who passed years in obscurity before achieving fame, a lot of creative recollection of the dead man took place, some of it far from flattering. Much of the criticism centred on Hearn's passion in his American years not merely for negro folk- lore and music but for negresses.
Before the Matsue union, Hearn had been briefly married to an illiterate black woman, first encountered when she was working as a domestic in a Cincinatti boarding-house in which he was staying. At that period such miscegenation could only arouse disapproval and, in some cases, even horror among Hearn's white col- leagues and friends. After Hearn's death, this first wife, Mattie Foley, having con- vinced herself, erroneously, that he had left a vast fortune, claimed that she had never been divorced from him and therefore was entitled to a major share of his estate.
Despite the hitherto unpublished sources on which Murray has drawn and despite a number of striking insights, it is likely that this biography, so far from superseding Elizabeth Stevenson's excellent one of 1961, will merely come to be regarded as a useful complement to it. Its first defect is the wilful eccentricity of its chronology, with the reader being initially provided with a résumé of the whole life, then being taken through the turbulent years in Amer- ica and the West Indies, then being given the first half of the Japanese period, then being jerked back to antecedents and child- hood, and then finally being returned to Japan, the last illness and the death. The second defect is far more crucial. Every first-rate biographer must possess at least something of the narrative gift and psycho- logical acumen of a novelist. These attributes Murray shows only intermittent- ly. In consequence the many dramas of Hearn's life — his childhood desertion by his beloved Greek mother, his teenage rejection by the wealthy great-aunt who had, in effect, adopted him, his failed first marriage, his quarrels with so many former friends — become disconcert- ingly undramatic in Murray's narration of them.
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