Читать книгу Concerning Lafcadio Hearn; With a Bibliography by Laura Stedman - George M. Gould - Страница 6

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WHEN Hearn arrived in Cincinnati, in 1871 or 1872, he was twenty-one or twenty-two years of age. All other methods of making a livelihood except that by his pen had failed, or were soon to fail, and it is not long before the literary way is exclusively and permanently adopted. There was a brief first time of service with Robert Clarke and Company as proof-reader. The exact uses of punctuation, the clearness which the proper marks give to writing, soon earned for him the sobriquet "Old Semicolon" among his fellow reporters. All his life Hearn clung meticulously to his theories concerning the necessity and precise rules of punctuation. Some of his later quarrels with periodical editors and proof-readers arose from differences of opinion in these things. There was a short engagement of Hearn by the librarian, Mr. Thomas Vickers, as private secretary or helper. Among his early friends was a printer, Mr. Henry Watkin, now residing at 1312 McMillan Street, who was kind to him, and who taught him to set type.

"In 1874," Mr. O. P. Caylor[3] writes, "Col. Cockerill of the World was managing editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer. A few weeks previous to the 'Tan-Yard Murder' Mr. Hearn came to the Enquirer office to sell a manuscript. Upstairs he ventured, but there his courage failed him. It was not enough to induce him to brave the awful editorial presence. So he paced up and down the hall with his velvet restless tread until the awful door opened and the terrible giant came forth. Hearn would, no doubt, have run away had he not been at the rear of the hall when Mr. Cockerill came out into the other end, and the stairway was between.

[3] A quotation in the Author, January 15, 1890, from an article by Mr. Caylor in the Philadelphia North American.

"Thus it occurred that the author of 'Chita' submitted his first manuscript. He came with others later, but never could he persuade himself to knock at that editorial door for admission. Up and down, up and down the hall he would pace or glide until Colonel Cockerill came forth, whether the time consumed in waiting was ten minutes or two hours."

In Current Literature, June, 1896, Colonel John A. Cockerill, writing of Hearn, tells the story thus:

"Some twenty years ago I was the editor in charge of a daily newspaper in a Western city. One day there came to my office a quaint, dark-skinned little fellow, strangely diffident, wearing glasses of great magnifying power and bearing with him evidence that Fortune and he were scarce on nodding terms.

"In a soft, shrinking voice he asked if I ever paid for outside contributions. I informed him that I was somewhat restricted in the matter of expenditure, but that I would give consideration to what he had to offer. He drew from under his coat a manuscript, and tremblingly laid it upon my table. Then he stole away like a distorted brownie, leaving behind him an impression that was uncanny and indescribable.

"Later in the day I looked over the contribution which he had left. I was astonished to find it charmingly written. …

"He sat in the corner of my room and wrote special articles for the Sunday edition as thoroughly excellent as anything that appeared in the magazines of those days. I have known him to have twelve and fifteen columns of this matter in a single issue of the paper. He was delighted to work, and I was pleased to have him work, for his style was beautiful and the tone he imparted to the newspaper was considerable. Hour after hour he would sit at his table, his great bulbous eyes resting as close to the paper as his nose would permit, scratching away with beaver-like diligence and giving me no more annoyance than a bronze ornament.

"His eyes troubled him greatly in those days. He was as sensitive as a flower. An unkind word from anybody was as serious to him as a cut from a whiplash, but I do not believe he was in any sense resentful. … He was poetic, and his whole nature seemed attuned to the beautiful, and he wrote beautifully of things which were neither wholesome nor inspiring. He came to be in time a member of the city staff at a fair compensation, and it was then that his descriptive powers developed. He loved to write of things in humble life. He prowled about the dark corners of the city, and from gruesome places he dug out charming idyllic stories. The negro stevedores on the steamboat-landings fascinated him. He wrote of their songs, their imitations, their uncouth ways, and he found picturesqueness in their rags, poetry in their juba dances."

In January or February, 1874, there was a horrible murder, "the famous Tan-Yard case," in Cincinnati, and Hearn's account of it in the Enquirer, from the newspaper and reportorial standpoint was so graphic and so far beyond the power of all rivals that he was henceforth assured of employment and of a measure and kind of respect. His friend, Mr. Edward Henderson, formerly city editor of the Commercial, now City Clerk in Cincinnati, says that because of his startling report of this murder "his city editors kept him at the most arduous work of a daily morning paper—the night-stations, for in that field mostly developed the sensational events that were worthy of his pen. In these days his powers would be held in reserve to write up what others should discover. … His repertory was strongest in the unusual and the startling. He was never known to shirk hardship or danger in filling an assignment or following up his self-obtained pointer."

The beginning of Hearn's literary career was his report of the Tan-Yard Murder case. It was published in the Cincinnati Enquirer, November, 1874. I shall quote some parts of it in a footnote to illustrate his innate and studied ability to outfit with words and expressions of the most startling and realistic picturing quality, the most horrible and loathsome facts. Keeping in mind the comparison with the illustrations from his later work in which he was equally capable of painting noble and beautiful things (all except those of a spiritual or religious nature), one is filled with admiration of a faculty so rare and perfect. Those who are sensitive should not read the excerpts which I append, and which are given in obedience to a sense of duty.[4]

[4] "An Enquirer reporter visited the establishment some hours later, accompanied by Dr. Maley, and examined all so far discovered of Herman Schilling's charred corpse. The hideous mass of reeking cinders, despite all the efforts of the brutal murderers to hide their ghastly crime, remain sufficiently intact to bear frightful evidence against them.

"On lifting the coffin-lid, a powerful and penetrating odour, strongly resembling the smell of burnt beef, yet heavier and fouler, filled the room and almost sickened the spectators. But the sight of the black remains was far more sickening. Laid upon the clean white lining of the coffin, they rather resembled great shapeless lumps of half-burnt bituminous coal than aught else at the first hurried glance; and only a closer investigation could enable a strong-stomached observer to detect their ghastly character—masses of crumbling human bones, strung together by half-burnt sinews, or glued one upon another by a hideous adhesion of half-molten flesh, boiled brains and jellied blood, mingled with coal.

"The skull had burst like a shell in the fierce furnace heat, and the whole upper portion seemed as though it had been blown out by the steam from the boiling and bubbling brains. Only the posterior portion of the occipital and parietal bones, and the inferior and superior maxillary, and some of the face bones remained—the upper portion of the skull bones being jagged, burnt brown in some spots, and in others charred to black ashes. The brain had all boiled away, save a small waste lump at the base of the skull about the size of a lemon. It was crisped and still warm to the touch. On pushing the finger through the crisp, the interior felt about the consistency of banana fruit, and the yellow fibre seemed to writhe like worms in the Coroner's hands. The eyes were cooked to bubbled crisps in the blackened sockets, and the bones of the nose were gone, leaving a hideous hole.

"So covered were the jaws and the lower facial bones with coal, crusted blood and gummy flesh, that the Coroner at first supposed that the lower maxillary had been burned away. On tearing away the frightful skull-mask of mingled flesh and coal and charred gristle, however, the grinning teeth shone ghastly white, and the jaws were found intact. They were set together so firmly that it was found impossible to separate them, without reducing the whole mass to ashes. So great had been the heat that the Coroner was able to crumble one of the upper teeth in his fingers.

"Besides the fragments of the skull, have been found six ribs of the right side and four of the left; the middle portion of the spinal-column; the liver, spleen, and kidneys; the pelvic bones, the right and left humerus, the femoral bone and the tibia and fibula of both legs. The body had burnt open at the chest, and the heart and lungs had been entirely consumed. The liver had been simply roasted and the kidneys fairly fried. There is a horrible probability that the wretched victim was forced into the furnace alive, and suffered all the agonies of the bitterest death man can die, while wedged in the flaming flue. The teeth were so terribly clinched that more than one spectator of the hideous skull declared that only the most frightful agony could have set those jaws together. Perhaps, stunned and disabled by the murderous blows of his assailants, the unconscious body of the poor German was forced into the furnace. Perhaps the thrusts of the assassin's pitchfork, wedging him still further into the fiery hell, or perhaps the first agony of burning when his bloody garments took fire, revived him to meet the death of flames. Fancy the shrieks for mercy, the mad expostulation, the frightful fight for life, the superhuman struggle for existence—a century of agony crowded into a moment—the shrieks growing feebler—the desperate struggle dying into feeble writhings. And through it all, the grim murderers, demoniacally pitiless, devilishly desperate, gasping with their exertions to destroy a poor human life, looking on in silent triumph, peering into the furnace until the skull exploded, and the steaming body burst, and the fiery flue hissed like a hundred snakes! It may not be true—we hope for humanity's sake it cannot be true; but the rightful secrets of that fearful night are known only to the criminals and their God. They may be brought to acknowledge much; but surely never so much as we have dared to hint at."

"When his city editor, in compliance with the urgency of a steeple-climber, consented to send a reporter to take observations of the city from the top of the cross surmounting the spire of St. Peter's Cathedral in Cincinnati, Hearn was the man selected. In mentioning the assignment to him, the city editor handed him a valuable field-glass, with the suggestion that he might find it useful. On taking his departure with the climbers, Hearn quietly handed back the glasses with the remark in undertone, 'Perhaps I'd better not take these; something might happen.' He made the trip to the top of the spire, though the men found it necessary to haul him part of the way in mid-air and to bodily place and hold him on top of the cross. And he produced an account of that thrilling experience that went the round of the newspaper world."[5]