East Meets West in Lafcadio Hearn

East Meets' West in Lafcadio Hearn "Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet. Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God' s great Judgment Seat ..." Kipling, "The Ballad of East and West" I know Rudyard Kipling's poem by heart, and it must have been in my mind when I picked a title for this paper. But it was only much later that I realized how much the two men, Rudyard Kipling and Lafcadio Hearn, had in common. Both were alien westerners in eastern lands that they loved. Both lived most of their lives on the brink of blindness. And both saw the East so vividly with the inner eye that they made us see it . Both were exemplars of literary style at a high level. Both left that style as a legacy for children in some of the most dramatic stories ever told. Like many children of my generation, I was brought up on The Jungle Books and the Just So Stories, but I knew nothing at all about the stories of Lafcadio Hearn or about their author until I was working as a children's librarian and storyteller in the Boys and Girls Room at Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh in the 1950s. Forty years later, I am still fascinated by him. Who was Lafcadio Hearn? A new biography. Wandering Ghost : The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn by Jonathan Cott, received a fulllength review in The New Yorker of April 22 (Leithauser) , as one of half a dozen that have appeared over the years since his death in 1904, but none exhaust the possibilities for wonder; one feels there must be yet more to tell. He was born in 1850 on the Greek island of Levkas . His parents were an illiterate woman of unstable temperament and an Anglo-Irish surgeon with the British Army. They named him Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, and the father sent the mother and child to live with grandparents in Dublin. It was an unhappy arrangement for all concerned—the father now posted to the Caribbean; the mother miserable in the northern climate, among strangers with strange ways; the grandparents put off by the alien practices of this passionate, intensely religious, darkeyed woman. When her son was four years old, she returned to Greece, never to be seen again, and the marriage was annulled. He never got over the loss. At the age of forty-three, he wrote of her, "I have memory of a place and a magical time in which the Sun and the Moon were larger and brighter than now. Whether it was of this life or of some life before I cannot tell. . . . And all that country and time were softly ruled by One who thought only of ways to make me happy" (Leithauser 110) . The early loss of his mother may explain in part why so much of his writing is haunted by ghosts, usually benign ones. He seems to have forgiven his mother's desertion, even though he felt, as he once wrote to a friend, "alone, and extremely alone" (Leithauser 110) . But his sensitivity, the cause of much pain, was part of his genius . The other part was his ability to write like an angel. This he must have learned through the demands and opportunities of school. A great-aunt, the only Catholic in the Hearn family, sent Lafcadio to Catholic schools in France and in England, as long as she could afford it, and his reward, as it so often is in such schools, was a command of the use of words, exact, polished- -and often deeply moving. Wordsworth in "Resolution and Independence" called attention to this part of genius, the "Choice word and measured phrase, above the reach/Of ordinary men" (95-96) . And we "ordinary men" resound like a bell when we are struck by the "choice word" of a master bell-ringer. Lafcadio Hearn was one of these. But one of the prices he paid for his schooling was the loss of sight in his left eye after a schoolyard accident. After that, his right eye began to fail as well . When Lafcadio' s great-aunt fell on hard...