Читать книгу Concerning Lafcadio Hearn; With a Bibliography by Laura Stedman - George M. Gould - Страница 4

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Hearn at about the Age of Eight.

From a Photograph.

To face page 1.

MANY conflicting accounts have been given concerning Hearn's parents and childhood. From his own statements made in 1889, the notes of which, taken down at the moment, are before me, he was born on June 27, 1850, at Leucadia, in Santa Maura, one of the Ionian Islands. His father, he said, was an Irishman, Charles Bush Hearn, Surgeon-Major in the 76th English Infantry Regiment, which had been stationed at Madras, Calcutta. The regiment was later merged into the 22nd West Riding Battalion. His mother was a Greek from Cerigo, another of the Ionian Isles; her name he had forgotten. He spoke of his father and mother as having been married, and of a subsequent divorce, about 1857 or 1858. Allusion was made to a younger brother, named Daniel, who was brought up by an artist, a painter, Richard Hearn, a brother of Charles Bush Hearn, who lived in Paris. [1] Hearn thought this brother was educated as a civil engineer. After the divorce his mother remarried, her second husband being a lawyer, a Greek, name unknown, and living at Smyrna, Asia Minor. Lafcadio's father also remarried, taking his wife to India. Three daughters were said to have been born there. Lafcadio was put under the care of his aunt, Mrs. Sarah Brenane, of Dublin, No. 73 Upper Leeson Street. She was a widow without children. In a letter to me, written prior to 1889, Hearn says: "As for me, I have a good deal in me not to thank my ancestors for; and it is a pleasure that I cannot, even if I would, trace myself two generations back, not even one generation on my mother's side. Half these Greeks are mixed with Turks and Arabs—don't know how much of an Oriental mixture I have, or may have." And again, "I do not know anything about my mother, whether alive or dead. My father died on his return from India. There was a queer romance in the history of my mother's marriage." He told me later that this romance was said to have been that Surgeon-Major Hearn was once set upon by the brothers of the young Greek woman to whom he was paying attention, and that he was left supposedly dead, with about a score of dagger-made wounds in his body.

[1] In The Bookbuyer, May, 1896, Hearn's friend, Mr. J. S. Tunison, speaks of the existence of a brother, "a busy farmer in Northwestern Ohio."

In the Dayton, Ohio, Journal, of December 25, 1906, Mr. Tunison speaks authoritatively of the discrepant accounts given by many writers, and by Hearn himself, concerning his parents, birth and early years. "Hearn himself had misgivings, and sometimes associated his baptismal name with the not uncommon Spanish name, Leocadie." The boy, of course, could only repeat what he had been told by his relatives or friends. Physiognomy can help little perhaps, but here its testimony is assuredly not confirmatory of the more common story. Any attempt to secure definite information in Ireland would scarcely be successful. One possibility remained: There is still living an Irish gentleman to whom Lafcadio was sent from Ireland, and in whose care, at least to a limited extent, the boy was placed. I have not the right to mention his name. He was living in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1870, and through his brother-in-law in Ireland, Lafcadio was, as it were, consigned to my informant. The subject is an unpleasant one to him, and he answered my questions with reluctance. He did not like the boy and did not feel that he had any obligation toward him; in fact, he did not feel that he was in any way responsible for his care. Besides, he had heavy duties toward his own children that absorbed all his energies. "I never had a letter from him. He came to the house three times. Mrs. Brenane sent me money, which I gave to him to pay his bills with. When he got work, he never came near me again." He was not sure that Mrs. Brenane was, in truth, Hearn's aunt, and upon being pressed, answered repeatedly, "I know nothing, nobody knows anything true of Hearn's life. He may have been related to my wife's family, but I never knew." Asked why the lad was "shipped" to him, he replied, "I do not know." Inquiries concerning the boy's schooling brought no more than, "I only know that he could never stay long in one school." "His father was Irish, was he not?" "Yes." "And his mother was Greek?" "O yes, I suppose so," but with an indefinite inflection.

The mystery, therefore, of Hearn's parentage and boyhood years is probably not to be cleared up. He was, perhaps, a "bad boy," and expelled from several schools; his lifelong hatred and fear of Catholics and Jesuits doubtless dates from these youthful and irrational experiences; but it is useless to inquire whether or not they were in any sense justifiable. A little reflected light is thrown upon this period by an apocryphal anecdote in a letter to me, written while Hearn was at my house, and which Miss Bisland in her "Life and Letters" kindly failed to put in its proper place,[2] as well as omitted to say whence she obtained it:

[2] Vol. I, pp. 459–460, just prior to the last paragraph.

This again reminds me of something. When I was a boy, I had to go to confession, and my confessions were honest ones. One day I told the ghostly father that I had been guilty of desiring that the devil would come to me in the shape of the beautiful woman in which he came to the Anchorites in the desert, and that I thought that I would yield to such temptations. He was a grim man who rarely showed emotion, my confessor, but on that occasion he actually rose to his feet in anger.

"Let me warn you!" he cried, "let me warn you! Of all things never wish that! You might be more sorry for it than you can possibly believe!"

His earnestness filled me with fearful joy;—for I thought the temptation might actually be realized—so serious he looked … but the pretty succubi all continued to remain in hell.

The necessary inference, therefore, is that the lad was an unwelcome charge upon those Irish relations or friends of his father, in whose care he was placed. It is said that he always spoke with bitterness of his father, and with love of his mother. Beyond a certain amount of money allotted (by his father?) for his support, neither parent was evidently concerned about his upbringing and welfare, and all who should have been interested in those things made haste to rid themselves of the obligations. If the stories of his boyish "badness" were true, the lad could not be blamed for putting into practice his inherited instincts, so that the pathos of his early misfortunes only increase our sympathy for the youth and his tragedies. (I reproduce a photograph of Lafcadio and his aunt, Mrs. Justin, or Sarah, Brenane. The lad must have been at the time about eight years of age.) The "consignment" of the nineteen-year old youth to the distant relative of the family, who was then living in Cincinnati, explains the reason why, landing in New York, he finally went to Cincinnati. How long he lived in New York City and any details of his life there before he went West, may be held as beyond investigation. Mr. Tunison incidentally speaks of him during this time as "sleeping in dry-goods boxes on the street, etc.," and I have heard that he acted as a restaurant waiter. There have been published stories of a period of want and suffering endured in London before the emigration to New York City. Others concerning great scholarship and the intimate knowledge of several languages, especially French, are surely not true. Even in 1889, after the New Orleans and Martinique periods, Hearn could not speak French with ease or correctness. In Cincinnati he secured the help of a French scholar in translating Gautier's "Émaux et Camées." His want of knowledge of the Latin language is deplored in his letters and, to the last, after a dozen or more years in Japan, his inability to read a Japanese newspaper or speak the language was a source of regret to himself, of errors too numerous to mention, and of grievous limitations in his work as an interpreter. In the one field of which his taste, aptitude and function dictated a wide and stimulating acquaintance, folk-lore, he was lamentably wanting. It might seem unfitting to allude to this were it not well to be discriminating in all cases, and had not Hearn sought to reach authoritativeness in a department wherein he had not gathered the fundamental data.