Authors: Thomas Mallon
Still, she’s in no greater difficulty than her neighbors in this
can-do, cooperative culture she’s joined. A reader learns how, in order to save a hired man from gangrene, her neighbor Mrs. O’Shaughnessy tricked him into putting “his finger on the chopping-block and before he could bat his eye she had chopped off the black, swollen finger.” Journeying toward a gathering of friends, Mr. and Mrs. Stewart and their companions reach a rock wall with the black-lettered legend:
DICK FELL OFF THIS HERE CLIFT AND DIED
. A snowslide then imperils the party, after they’ve gone twenty-five miles; they’ll be guided to safety by a bugler, a Mexican man who along with his wife offers them food and shelter. Such kindness requires no literary embellishment from Elinore: “Poor Carlota Juanita!” she writes. “Perhaps you think she was some slender, limpid-eyed, olive-cheeked beauty. She was fat and forty, but not fair.”
Not that Elinore is against romance, of either the literary or amorous kind. She throws herself into the wedding of Bishey Bennet and “Miss Em’ly,” the sweetheart who took twenty-five years to follow him West from New York State. The bride arrives “a very travel-stained little woman, down whose dust-covered cheeks tears had left their sign.” But all is well once Miss Em’ly is taken charge of by Elinore Stewart, her brisk, self-appointed matron of honor.
The letters convey, sometimes sentimentally but more often like cold water from a canteen, the flavor of the frontier’s closing hours: the toys made from waste paper and women’s hair; the lonesome late-night sadness of a cowpunchers’ camp; the rough German tongue of the camp boss’s wife, who insults the most timid boy in her employ by insulting his father as well: “he waded the creek vone time und you has had cold feet effer since.”
Mrs. Stewart had sent her first letter to Mrs. Coney in order to reassure her (“Are you thinking I am lost, like the Babes in the Wood? Well, I am not”), but the ones that followed from the Burnt Fork post office, a two-mile gallop from the house, are written as much for the sender as the recipient, to help fill up the new vastness that surrounds their author: “I know this is an inexcusably long letter, but it is snowing so hard and you know how I like to talk.” As every letter writer and diarist learns, Stewart can relive her pleasures
by writing them down, so long as she’s willing to pay the forfeit when the time comes to recount her pains. It takes her more than two years to admit to Mrs. Coney that the little boy whose funeral she described was actually her and Mr. Stewart’s firstborn son.
Letters are the trade winds and storehouse of her emotional life, and she expects them to be that for everyone else as well. After finding out that her illiterate seventy-nine-year-old friend Zebulon Pike Parker has never been able to exchange letters with the relatives he left back East decades before, Stewart jumps in and corrects the situation, writing to Parker’s youngest sister and then reciting to him the replies that start arriving.
If Mrs. Stewart sometimes seems to high-hat her own chief correspondent (“I am so glad when I can bring a little of this big, clean, beautiful outdoors into your apartment for you to enjoy”), Mrs. Coney does not appear to have taken offense. She eventually helped get the letters printed in magazine and book form. In 1914, their hardcover publisher insisted on their genuineness, assuring readers that they were being “printed as written, except for occasional omissions and the alteration of some of the names.” Such editorial fidelity doesn’t, of course, rule out bits of embroidery having been performed during the original writing. Elinore Stewart, who also wrote some pieces for
The Kansas City Star
, shows herself a dab, deliberate hand at dialect, narrative shapeliness and literary allusion: references to Shakespeare, Dickens and James Fenimore Cooper find their way into her letters, along with an occasional straining after lyricism: “I saw the moon come up and hang for a while over the mountain as if it were discouraged with the prospect, and the big white stars flirted shamelessly with the hills.”
But all of this conscious composition only highlights the writer’s regard for letter writing itself. Mrs. Stewart dismisses one of her own briefer efforts as a mere “reply,” not to be counted with what she typically tries to produce. Not just length but
detail is
required if letters are to do what they have to do in these days before the easy enclosure of sharp color photographs; it’s the same thing Dickens’s novels had to do before movie cameras could pan all the kingdoms and rooms a reader would never set foot in himself. “I feel
just like visiting to-night,” Mrs. Stewart writes to Mrs. Coney on December 1, 1911, “so I am going to ‘play like’ you have come. It is so good to have you to chat with. Please be seated in this low rocker.” She then invites her imagined guest to look, paragraph after paragraph, at every object and rug in her home.
According to a local-history website, the Stewart house is these days pretty much a shambles and tenanted by animals. But it’s all as it was in its former mistress’s irreverent letters. In them a reader can even now see, hanging on the wall, a match-holder given by Mrs. Coney and described by Mrs. Stewart. “It is the heads of two fisher-folk. The man has lost his nose, but the old lady still thrusts out her tongue.”
“EVERY DAY HAS ITS REVELATIONS,”
writes Lafcadio Hearn on October 11, 1893, though the geography of his life has been so exotic that any new experience must be fresh indeed to rise to such a level. At the age of forty-three, three and a half years after his arrival in Japan, Hearn is on his third continent. Born in the Greek Islands, raised in Ireland and educated, at least for a time, in England, he landed hard in America at the age of nineteen, settling and then nearly starving in Cincinnati, whose poorest residents he began writing about for two different newspapers. A subsequent decade in New Orleans made Hearn’s literary reputation as a chronicler of that city’s human and culinary gumbo; another two years in the West Indies kept his feet off anything that might come to feel like home ground.
He goes to Japan hoping that “several years’ soujourn” there will allow him to produce magazine articles and “a good book,” but he also needs to find a teaching job, if only to help him learn the language and the “emotional nature” of the Japanese people. A letter of self-introduction to Basil Hall Chamberlain, a British professor of Japanese at Tokyo Imperial University, helps him to land his first position, in Matsue; he will begin a second, longer stint in Kumamoto the following year. While living and working in both places, he continues to write, voluminously, to Chamberlain, imparting
a record of cultural discoveries to a man who had already made most of them, on his own, decades before. No matter: over the course of four years, until his teaching life gives way to a newspaper job in Kobe, Hearn is vivid, astute, preposterous and contradictory in all he notices and feels and pours upon the page. He declares that good letter-writers make bad chess players—spontaneity aiding the one and strategy the other—and explains to his correspondent: “my letters are too prolix and gushy, I know; but if I stopped to polish them, I would never get through, nor would I feel quite honest.”
Much of what he sends does, in fact, suggest careful composition, but the ink on even those letters seems erasable, so prone is their author to revising his first impressions. Early in his stay, he heartily assents to Percival Lowell’s belief that “the Japanese are the happiest people in the world;” he seems convinced that their serenity derives from “the very absence of the Individuality” that forces Westerners to hustle and assert. Within two years, however, Hearn will repeal both pronouncements, having by then seen instances of the native sensitivity being taken to suicidal extremes and having realized that his own cook “wears the mask of happiness as an etiquette.”
All that’s before him shifts and feints; he never feels confident that he’s getting things right. “Paralyzed for lack of certainties” about what he should write—he’s not even “sure of [the] position” he’s taking in a philosophical article on jiujitsu—his mood oscillates perpetually between contentment and loneliness.
His most consistent perspective is a kind of frustrated fascination.
The Atlantic Monthly
will probably never get the kind of material it would like from him, he decides, because real cross-cultural intimacy is impossible here: “If I speak, I am saluted,” he tells Chamberlain. “If I ask a question, I am politely snubbed or evaded.” A foreign teacher in the government schools “is trusted only as an intellectual machine. His moral notions, his sympathies, his intuitions, his educational ideas are not trusted at all.” Still, Hearn manages to get a hangover after drinking sake with his students, and he allows himself to hope that they might be fonder of him than he’s
imagined. More often, though, he entertains Chamberlain with samples of their fractured English and laments the regimentation of their natural impulses.
He rarely finds humor among the Japanese and remains ever struck by their premium on emotional restraint. He swears he’s even observed “a difference between the Western and the Japanese dog! How different the gaze, the intuition, the memory! And how utterly deficient the Japanese dog in gratitude! And how indifferent to the question of who owns him!” The training of a young geisha, audible just beyond Hearn’s garden, is a source of moral and emotional distress: “The child is very young; but she is obliged to sing nearly seven hours every day. I can tell what time it is by the tone of weariness in her voice. Sometimes she breaks down and cries to be let alone in vain. They do not beat her—but she must sing.” On the other hand, the docility of a Japanese baby creates in Hearn a comic feeling of his own spiritual inferiority: “Sometimes I feel downright afraid of it; it knows infinitely too much; and I strongly suspect that it still remembers all its former births.”
His Japanese wife and child, both acquired in fairly short order, provide him with considerable happiness if no permanent immunity from surges of lonesomeness. (Hearn makes no mention to Chamberlain of the African-American wife he had during his Cincinnati days.) The rituals of his current household are described with a tender, appreciative precision that bespeaks, despite the above, at least a
little
susceptibility to geishalike behavior: “always, according to ancient custom, the little wife asks
pardon for being the first to go to sleep
. I once tried to stop the habit—thinking it too humble. But after all it is pretty,—and is so set into the soul that it could not be stopped.”
Hearn is a kind of one-man
National Geographic
, replete with observations both pedantic and sharp. He inclines toward the production of theories on just about everything, most of them exuberant, a few of them crackpot. He declares, for instance, that “a man can scientifically triple the assimilating capacity of his stomach,” and that he can “read all day without fatigue” by lying on the floor and holding a book above his head.
Published in 1910, his letters to Chamberlain give us only one side of what a reader suspects was a one-sided exchange to begin with. We get discourses on the nature of parody; musings upon Wordsworth (for all his coldness “we have to love him”); a consideration of when to use foreign expressions in one’s writing. Hearn is all for it: “I write for beloved friends who can see colour in words, can smell the perfume of syllables in blossom.” His greatest literary love—to the point of near-constant evangelism—is Kipling, though enthusiasm is his natural readerly condition (“Oh! I love Heine”) and overstatement his favorite rhetorical mode (“one of the most touching things in all literature”).
The riddle of Japan—its willful impenetrability, signified by the way its people wear their European-style clothes “only outside the house”—remains his chief subject and bafflement. And yet, for all that he would like to be let in on its secret, he seems to concede that he shouldn’t even be prying into it. He judges the opening of Japan by Commodore Perry, less than fifty years before, to be on balance “a crime.” The West is infecting the new Japan with “the frank selfishness, the apathetic vanity, the shallow vulgar scepticism” that have the country’s former charm and gentleness “evaporating more rapidly than ether from an uncorked bottle.” Hearn would prefer the old reverence for the emperor and the former (quite ungentle) “military spirit;” he wishes for a “return to autocracy” as the antidote to “Beastly modernization!”
The most corrupting Western import is Christianity, whose missionaries are Hearn’s recurring villains. Someone needs to write the truth about them, or better yet, he tells Chamberlain, put them “on a small ship” that can be “scuttled at a reasonable distance of one thousand miles from shore.” Hearn admits to being “rabid” on the subject—the Jesuits did a nasty job on him when he was young—but even so, he dislikes
“shallow atheists;”
he admits the underlying metaphysics of all material fact, and acknowledges the religious longings of “that much bescratched thing called my soul.” Early in his stay, Hearn sees the old Japan’s virtues embodied in Shinto, though as time goes on its appeals “to tradition and race feeling” seem less attractive than Buddhism’s “appeal to the human heart.”
Setting aside his approval of militarism, Hearn tells Chamberlain that he is “not altogether in sympathy with the worship of Force in our century.” At times, in fact, he sounds like his born-too-late American contemporary, Henry Adams, as he laments the absence of “angels and demons and gods” in a new world of “electricity, steam, mathematics.” And yet, he also misses the modern West from which he’s currently absent, “a world charged with spirit, like a dynamo with lightning,” and he startles the contemporary reader’s eye with this 115-year-old postscript: “I wish it were 1994,—don’t you?”
While we read the letters, our own knowledge of the future, necessarily greater than his, is a kind of deadly superiority (“Nagasaki is the prettiest seaport I ever saw,” he writes on July 22, 1893), but Hearn’s mind is nothing if not fearless in its own forays far ahead, as when he predicts the demise of the gluttonous white race: “There is something very sinister in the fact that the cost of life to an Englishman is just about twenty times the cost of life to an Oriental.” Hearn is in fact willing to push things toward the longest and gloomiest planetary view: “What is even the use of the life of a solar system—evolution, dissolution,—re-evolution, re-dissolution, forever more?” Buddhism, he supposes, can help a little.