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4 / “Wooing the Muse of the Odd”: New Orleans at the Gate of the Tropics In chapter 3, I discussed the fact that George Washington Cable is generally seen as the writer who conjured the uniqueness of New Orleans for the postwar national literary market. Though less well known both then and now, his friend and colleague Lafcadio Hearn shared many of the same literary and cultural values as did Cable. Whereas Cable was a native New Orleanian who returned creatively and physically to the city of his birth after childhood stays in Indiana and, briefly, Mississippi, Hearn was anything but a native. Born in 1850 on the Ionian island of Leucadia (at times called Lefkos or Lafcadio, from which he gained his name) of an Irish father and Greek mother, Hearn spent most of his childhood in Dublin, Ireland, and did not live in the United States until he was a young adult. Hearn’s mother, Rosa Cassimati, was abandoned by his father, Charles Bush Hearn, and later went insane in Dublin, leaving Lafcadio in the care of his great-aunt, Sarah Holmes Brenane. In 1869, Brenane married a man who did not want Hearn around, and he was sent to Cincinnati to live with a distant relative. Hearn would remain there for eight years, working with both the Cincinnati Enquirer and the Cincinnati Commercial until 1877. He would never again live in Ireland or Greece or with any of his family. Such a rootless history, along with Hearn’s fascination with the world’s ghost stories, would lead one scholar to title his biography of Hearn Wandering Ghost.1 When Hearn arrived in New Orleans, originally to write a series of sketches about the city for the Commercial, he found work for the Cincinnati newspaper and the New Orleans Daily City Item. By this time, “wooing the muse of the odd” / 107 Hearn was building a reputation as a journalist with diverse interests, penning searing portraits of Cincinnati’s overlooked slums and racial landscape as well as more lighthearted pieces on local arts and politics. His interest in the connection between race relations and the nation’s unexplored urban spaces fit perfectly with Hearn’s new role as a journalist intent on capturing New Orleans’s quirkiness. This chapter’s title comes from Hearn’s own words concerning his writing about New Orleans, expressed in a letter to a friend: “I am striving to woo the Muse of the Odd, and hope to succeed in thus attracting some little attention.” In a subsequent letter to this friend, he continues, “I think a man must devote himself to one thing in order to succeed: so I have pledged me to the worship of the Odd, the Queer, the Strange, the Exotic, the Monstrous. It quite suits my temperament.”2 While Cable specifically wrote for national audiences, publishing heavily in Scribner’s and its successor, the Century, Hearn’s job as a journalist necessitated that he write for local audiences about timely material. Even so, his focus on the odd, queer, strange, and exotic elements of New Orleanian culture fits well with local color’s emphasis on cultural uniqueness and verisimilitude. Furthermore, Hearn’s position as a traveler allowed him to adopt the familiar local-color pretense of the outsider visiting a foreign locale. As such, his newspaper articles dovetail nicely with the popular southern travel writing that has been explored in detail in the first three chapters, and many of his nonfiction pieces follow the basic patterns of local-color fiction. Hearn’s interest in New Orleanian culture meshes intimately with these genres, while his role a journalist allowed him to alter the formulas behind the local-color depictions, at times breaking down the conventional “us/them” logic of much regional writing. No subject matter aligned better with this new logic than Hearn’s fanatical obsession with creolization. He originally pursued this fascination within “black” and “white” New Orleanian Creole society. These interests eventually led him to the Caribbean, principally the island of Martinique. In Martinique, his interest in creoles becomes a meditation on the potential and dangers of both physical and cultural creolization that he saw in postslavery West Indies and in the streets of New Orleans. This chapter argues that the work of Lafcadio Hearn is idiosyncratic, inconsistent, and romantic, but that his commitment to exploring the issues of intercultural exchange serves as a wonderful illustration of the intersections between the era’s cultural mixing, global circulations...

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