Why Lafcadio Hearn matters
As we get closer to our Tribute Dinner to Lafcadio Hearn, held at The Delachaise Thur. July 19th, I figured it's time to explain why I'm interested in this writer. Sometimes a thing can be clearly analyzed, and sometimes it's a feeling. For me in the case of Hearn, it's more of a feeling and a sense of historical duty. Let's see if I can untangle the various threads of my appreciation for Hearn.
First, I am drawn to his quest, which was never fully realized, to find home. Biographer Jonathan Cott captured this sentiment exactly in the title of his book on Hearn, calling it "The Wanderings of a Ghost." Lafcadio was born to be unsettled, and his childhood left troubles that shaped his entire life, even beyond his disfigurement and loss of an eye in a kids' game gone awry. His parents were unable to stay together, and it seems their love was doomed once removed from the Greek island where his mother, Rosa, lived and where he was born. Life in Dublin did not seem to go well for him, and he seemed to bear a grudge against Catholic zealotry ever after; once his father was gone, his life teetered into poverty and, like so many Irish people, emigration to the US was his only viable option.
Hearn remained an uneasy son of the universe in Cincinnati. His writing for the newspapers there is terrific, but he seemed haunted by personal regrets. His marriage to a half-Irish, half-African American woman proved frustrating and fell apart. His best asset as a journalist remained his ingrained status as an outsider in every situation. Because he had no "tribe" of allegiance, he was freed to perceive things according to his own idiosyncratic intelligence as a keen observer of the human circus.
When he moved down to New Orleans in 1877, something definitely clicked into place for him, as it does for so many people who are headed toward falling off the edge of the world. When you read Hearn's accounts of New Orleans, it's shocking and not at all surprising that so many of the same problems plague New Orleans today. Corrupt politicians and police, rampant violence, the community's indifference toward its poor citizens, problems with storms, flooding and pestilence -- all figure into Hearn's raging satire against those he saw as either complacent and/or responsible for these social ills. Yet he clearly was drawn into the otherworldliness of New Orleans, its beauty and langourous tropical lifestyle. The myriad permutations of Creole culture, which had extra resonance for him because it represented a culture made in the face of displacement and despite refugee status from a place one cannot return to or never knew, fascinated Hearn. He collected aphorisms in Creole French, noting how language shifted from the place to place. As an outsider, he appreciated the skill by which Creoles kept their culture apart, held their society's secrets at a higher plane. He knew, though, that he was documenting something that was disappearing, and that certainty exerted a bewitchment over him as the moth drawn to the flame.
His lush descriptions changed the way the world saw New Orleans. He captured the beginning of the slide from power of the city (previously widely known as the Queen of the South, now sliding toward the back waters of Tanganyika) as the toll of Reconstruction, the loss of French cultural dominence, and the end of the use of the Mississippi River as the prime conduit of people and dreams towards New Orleans put our penchant for decay front and center. New Orleans was always a city as haunted as Hearn, and it has become a city unable to shake its ghosts to reclaim its prosperity as an American city, because it has never been an American city (no matter what the documents of the LA. Purchase of 1803 indicate). New Orleans belongs to the world, to the mighty Mississippi River, to that certain kind of artistic person who would fall off the edge of the world if New Orleans didn't exist, to the ghosts of the past who determine the present.
Hearn wrote a Creole cookbook, which he regarded as part of his Creole anthropological studies. It is the first cookbook based on the cuisine of New Orleans, but mistakes in the publishing side doomed it to poor sales initially. Hearn also had a disastrously brief interlude as a New Orleans restaurateur, running a cheap poor man's diner, but losing his investment when his so-called partner ran off with the profits and left him with the lease to a restaurant with no working cooks. Although Hearn's cookbook is not particularly useful to me as a contemporary chef, I feel an extra sense of recognition for his determined curiousity about New Orleans cuisine. It's not always easy cookin' in New Orleans with an outsider's perspective.
Eventually, his acclaim as a writer, journalist and anthropologist took him on his last adventure to Japan. He stranded himself in a battle with Harper's over his pay for writing articles, and gradually found a way to adopt himself into a hermetic society. His keen powers of observation served as his passport to the Japanese heart, and he collected stories of ghosts and mysteries which characterize so much of his work. He faithfully saw Japan on literary terms that bridged the overwrought curiousity of the West with the insular customs of Japan; the result were his powerful folktales that told a pyschic truth both sides could recognize.
I think the Japanese were surprised that Hearn learned to live by Japanese codes, adopting a new name, Koizumi Yakumo, and remaining to teach English at prestigious Japanese universities. It was another act of the lifelong chameleon to find his home in the universe.
As a cook, as with readers of Hearn, his life provides a rich treasure trove of materials to contemplate. He frequently wrote about food and food production, and the sheer span of his footsteps around the globe makes for a compelling series of intertwining food customs. My task with our upcoming tribute dinner has been to craft a menu that touches on these far-flung places with a touch of reality, while preserving a sense of otherworldliness and time out of place sensations. My first example will be had in our amuse-bouche, a flounder sushi, made with shortgrain Japanese rice imbued with rose petal, sake, and seaweed. Why? Because the island of Hearn's birth and his namesake place, Lefkas in the Ionian Greek isles, is known for their roses, especially for a unique rose vinegar. Obviously, a touch of vinegar makes sushi rice what it is, so we will present a culinary fact of Lafcadio's birthplace transposed into the emblematic food --sushi -- of the place where he drew his final breath.
We'll see how it goes. I hope with this little essay to transport you a few steps into my twilight world with Lafcadio Hearn. It's a world brimming with deceptive appearances, forgotten fascinations, and conjured flavors. Perhaps it will inspire a few more readers to slip inside the pages of Hearn's books, and if so, my goal will be accomplished!