Word: hearn
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Entire Family. Peripatetic Hearn was completely bowled over by Yokohama -"A world where everything is upon a smaller and daintier scale . . . where all movement is slow and soft, and voices are hushed." His shortness no longer embarrassed him: Japan was a "realization . . . of the old [folklore] dream of a World of Elves." He loved Japanese ideographs, Japanese "delicacy," the "atmospheric limpidity" of the Japanese climate...
With his wife's help (he never mastered Japanese), Hearn translated dozens of legends and poems, composed scores of essays and sketches on Japanese life. In the essays prepared for the eyes of Western readers, he remained his adopted country's devoted partisan to the end. Loyally, he painted his adopted country as a peace-loving land menaced by the West. Wrote Hearn: "An evil dream comes oftentimes to those who love Japan: the fear that all her efforts are being directed, with desperate heroism, only to prepare the land for the sojourn of peoples older by centuries...
...River-Bed. Unofficially, in his letters, Lafcadio Hearn told a different story. "It seems as if everything had suddenly become clear to me, and utterly void of emotional interest," he wrote a few years after his arrival. "There are no depths to stir, no race-profundities to explore: all is like a Japanese riverbed . . . never filled but in times of cataclysm and destruction." The Japanese government added to his disillusionment by easing him out of his university job. In the last years of his life he often longed to escape both family and country. He never did. A heart attack...
...Selected Writings will "give readers a chance to assess Critic Cowley's statement that Hearn's "folk tales are the most valuable part of [his work] ... He is the writer in our language who can best be compared with Hans Christian Andersen and the brothers Grimm." Many readers will cast their votes in favor of the blunt, naturalistic American Sketches, where Author Hearn's florid prose frames some breathtaking sights in19th Century Cincinnati's Sausage Row and the New Orleans voodoo belt...
Through a shrewd winnowing of repetitious and overwritten pieces, Editor Goodman manages to show Hearn at his best, but still does not succeed in lifting him into the first rank of19th Century U.S. writers. Lafcadio Hearn's brightest virtues were the human compassion that sweetened all of his work, and his ability to spin out atmosphere like yard after yard of fine Japanese silk...