Word: lafcadio
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...Fitch were turning out popular confections. Saltus believed that only three qualities mattered in fiction: "Style, style polished and style repolished." Fitch was a chameleon "who changed his color with the feminine tastes of the time." In Philadelphia, Agnes Repplier tatted spinsterish essays on tea and cats. Down South, Lafcadio Hearn haunted the French quarter of New Orleans, looking for the exotic...
...Paris, Littérateur André (The Counterfeiters) Gide, 81, motored to the Comédie Française to sit in a red velvet seat and mastermind every rehearsal of the first stage adaptation of one of his novels, Lafcadio's Adventures, written 36 years ago. A satire about a motiveless murder, the play is due to open next week...
Quivering Nostrils. Lafcadio Hearn was a sight to see, and he knew it. One eye was blind and covered with a milky film; the other was "myopic and protruding, so that it looked like the single eye of an octopus." A short (5 ft. 3), slight man with a scraggly mustache, he made some people think of "a distorted brownie." The nostrils of his long aquiline nose quivered constantly, picking up odors that most people could not smell at all. Odors were his great passion. During his New Orleans period, he translated every article he could find in French periodicals...
...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...
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...