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Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn, by Jonathan Cott
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Interweaving selections from letters, articles, essays, confessions, and stories, the author creates a well-rounded portrait of Lafcadio Hearn.
- Sales Rank: #975469 in Books
- Published on: 1991-01-16
- Released on: 1991-01-16
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 438 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Best remembered for his writings on Japan, where he settled in 1890, Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) is too often pigeonholed as a decadent aesthete or a stylist of overripe prose. Interweaving generous selections from Hearn's own letters, articles, essays, confessions and stories in this moving, superlative biography, Cott ( The Search for Omm Sety ) gives us all sides of the man--the muckraking Cincinnati, Ohio, journalist of Zola-esque realism; the ethnographer of tropical Martinique, Creole folkways in New Orleans and Japanese Buddhism; the mordant humorist; and the unabashed sensualist. The Greek-born, half-Irish bohemian also exposed America's hypocrisies concerning sex and race, prejudices which he experienced firsthand in his short-lived first marriage to a mulatto woman in Ohio. Paradoxically, in coercive, traditional Japan, where he married a submissive young Japanese woman, freewheeling individualist Hearn found his "land of dreams" and felt the spirit of ancient Greece flickering in sacred shrines and groves. Illustrations.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
About the Author
Jonathan Cott is the author of ten previous books, including The Search for Omm Sety: A Story of Eternal Love. He is a contributing editor of Rolling Stone magazine and Parabola
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
[From the Introduction.]
In allowing this voice to manifest itself, I hoped to present the story of a Greek-Anglo-Irish child abandoned by his parents when he was five years old; who was partly blinded when he was sixteen during a schoolboys' game; who felt for most of his life like a social misfit; who, as an adolescent, dared to reject completely his Catholic upbringing because of his ardent belief in the ancient Greek gods; who, at various times of his life, found himself destitute, homeless, and sleeping on the streets and alleyways of London, Cincinnati, and New Orleans; who broke social taboos and antimiscegenation laws with his sexual predilection for mulatto and black women; and who gradually developed into a remarkable, disciplined, mostly self-taught bohemian man of letters--a model for more recent bohemian writers such as Jaime de Angulo, Gary Snyder, and Henry Miller, the last declaring: "My passion for Japan began with Lafcadio Hearn."
In dealing with such a life, about which most casual readers of Hearn knew little or nothing, I also hoped to avoid the often racist, prudish, and provincial comments--as well as the all-embracing reductionist psychologizing (Oedipus complex, inferiority complex, puer complex) or etiological theorizing (Hearn's genius/weakness as a function of his myopia)--that pervade many of the previous biographies about a writer whom many critics, at one time or another, have spoken of as "a sensual Romantic," "a decadent aesthete," "a morbid genius," "a rootless cosmopolite," "a bohemian misfit," "a frightened escapist," "a wandering dreamer."
To be a wanderer, the novelist Marguerite Yourcenar once remarked, "requires an ability to take pleasure in the outer spectacle of things combined with a definite willingness to go beyond that spectacle in order to discover the often hidden realities underneath. Every traveler is Ulysses and ought to be Proteus as well."
Most helpful customer reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Disappointing as a biography, better as a reader
By Kay A. Douglas
I had expected Wandering Ghost to be a standard biography, but the number of long passages taken from Hearn's writings made me wonder what the author's intent was. At least half (or more) of the book is comprised of these lengthy passages from Hearn's newspaper work and other writings.
At times these quotes serve to move the book forward, but more often than not they bog it down, as in the inclusion of an entire newspaper story about a sensational murder -- some 13 pages that, while they served as a good illustration of Hearn's more florid prose style, served very little purpose biographically. The quoted passages are so numerous and at times so extraneous that it is frustrating to read this book as a biography. It's especially irksome when a five- or six-page lengthy quote is used when a one- or two-paragraph one would have easily sufficed.
Perhaps the problem is that I didn't pay sufficient attention to the publisher's description of Wandering Ghost as containing "generous selections" from Hearn's work, but even that did not prepare me for the amount of quoted material. Given the richness of the subject and wealth of material that Hearn left behind, it seems a shame that a more lucid biographical account of his life was not attempted.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Home is where the heart is
By Zack Davisson
I wasn't prepared for what an excellent book this was. I have long been a fan of Lafcadio Hearn's Japan-themed books, and was interested in learning more about him and about what brought him to the country so long ago. But I figured the rest of his story would hold little interest for me.
Jonathon Cott has proven me wrong. "Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn" shows a truly fascinating character, one who was eternally searching for somewhere to belong, one who's tastes and fashions were completely out of synch with the time he lived in, one who was chasing a dream so distant that he could only find it in the most remarkable of places, only to hold it for awhile and watch it slowly slip away.
Born of a Greek mother and an Irish father, Hearn was never accepted as a child. A half-breed, he was shunted from relative to relative until finally shipped off to the US to make his own way. There, his unique racial status allowed him access to both the white cities and the black ghettos, and his skills as a writer got him a job translating the forbidden culture for the newspapers. An acclaimed journalist, he accrued some degree of success until his then-illegal marriage to a black woman saw him fired, disgraced, and exiled to New Orleans. His mania for writing, his passion for "exotic" women, and his desire to go to the hidden corners of society to record and experience native folklore and traditions soon made him a pariah, and he was exiled again. After trying several tropical islands, hidden paradises and various adventures, an opportunity opened up for him to journey to the mysterious and unknown Japan. There he found acceptance, family, and his own peace at last.
What is truly remarkable about "Wandering Ghost" is that it is an auto-biography as much as a biography. It is filled with Hearn's writings; newspaper articles, personal letters, sketches on interesting characters and places, thoughts and reflections, a glimpse inside his head. Cott originally began with the idea of publishing some of Hearn's non-Japan related writing, but was overcome by the sheer bulk of it all and decided to sift through them and shape them into Hearn's story. Seeing all of this, I gained much more respect for Hearn as a writer as opposed to a mere chance observer of the fading Japanese culture.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Good Introduction to Hearn
By Kevin M. Derby
I'm not exactly sure what to make of "Wandering Ghost" by Jonathan Cott. The book is torn between being a creative biography and an anthology of Hearn's writings. Either way, it serves a good introduction to Hearn. But there are problems. Hearn lived a fascinating life-time in Greece, Ireland, France, England, Cincinnati, New Orleans, the islands, then off to Japan. Sometimes Cott is content to leave the narrative for pages at a time for a quite from Hearn. Parts of Hearn's life pass by the blink of an eye. While Hearn aficionados will enjoy the book, they will also be frustrated, especially scholars on the trail of footnotes and sources. Drawing from letters and essays, this work may be best appreciated as an introduction to Hearn and will inspire new interest and appreciation for this haunting writer who linked East and West and had insights into many worlds. Hearn was also close to a diverse group of people (a former slave was his common life wife for example and he was married to a Japanese woman). While I appreciate the flowing narrative, I would have enjoyed a bit more insight and analysis into Hearn's life and work. Despite these quibbles, this book is a good introduction to one of the most fascinating writers of his times.
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