Word: lafcadio
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...SELECTED WRITINGS OF LAFCADIO HEARN (566 pp.) - Edifed by Henry Goodman, introduction by Malcolm Covv/ey-Citadel...
...Unless somebody does or says something horribly mean to me," wrote Lafcadio Hearn to a friend, "I can't do certain kinds of work-the tiresome kinds, that compel a great deal of thinking...
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...