The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn Volume II Part 36

My back feels to-day as if those little sand-crabs were running over it; but the pain is nearly all gone. I shall be ready for another swim in a day or two.

And that supper at the Grand Hotel! I am awfully demoralized to-day--feeling gloriously well, but not in a working mood. A week more of holidays would ruin me! Discomfort is absolutely necessary for literary inspiration. Make a man perfectly happy, and what has he to work for? Nothing shall disturb my "ancient solitary reign" excepting the friends with whom I yesterday imposed upon the patience of certain crabs,--who suddenly found themselves facing a problem for which all their inherited experience had left them supremely unprepared.

Too soon we shall have winter upon us again; and I shall be struggling with problems of university-student peculiarities;--and I shall be working wonderfully hard at a new book. There will be all kinds of dull, dark, tiresome days; but whenever I want I can call back the summer sun,--simply by closing my eyes. Then, in blue light, between sand and sea-line, I shall discern a U.S. naval officer in Cape May costume, and a Buddhist philosopher, busied making little holes in the beach,--sapping and mining the habitations of small horrified crabs.

Also I shall see a lemon yellow sky, with an amethystine Fuji cutting sharply against it. And many other things,--little dreams of gold.

Affectionately ever, LAFCADIO.

TO MITCh.e.l.l McDONALD

TOKYO, September, 1898.

DEAR McDONALD,--I thought the house would go last night; but we had only two trees blown down this time, and the fence lifted in a southwesterly direction. Truly I was wise not to go to Shinano as I intended: it would have been no easy thing to get back again. And you did well not to try Fuji. It might have been all right; and it might have been very dangerous work indeed. When a typhoon runs around Fuji, Amenomori tells me that it blows the big rocks away like a powder-explosion. Judging from the extraordinary "protection-walls" built about the hut at the mountain-top, and from the way in which the station-house roofs are purposely weighted down, I fancy this must be quite true. A lava-block falling from the upper regions goes down like a bounding shot from a cannon; and I should just about as soon stand in front of a 50-lb. steel sh.e.l.l.

The j.a.panese papers to-day are denouncing some rice-speculator who has been praying to the G.o.ds for bad weather! The G.o.ds do wisely not to answer anybody's prayers at all. City-dwellers would pray for fine weather, while farmers pray for rain;--fellows like me would pray for eternal heat, while others would pray for eternal coolness;--and what would the G.o.ds do when begged by peace-lovers to avert war, and by military ambitions to bring it about? Think of twenty people praying for a minister's death; and twenty others pleading for his life. Think of ten different men praying to the G.o.ds for the same girl! Why, really, the G.o.ds would in any event be obliged to tell us to settle our own little affairs in our own little way, and be d--d! One ought to write something some day about a dilemma of the G.o.ds;--Ludovic Halevy did something of the sort; but he did not exhaust the subject.

Affectionately, LAFCADIO.

TO MITCh.e.l.l McDONALD

TOKYO, October, 1898.

DEAR McDONALD,--I have your delightful letter and throw all else overboard for the moment to send a few lines of greeting and chatter.

I have sent word to Mr. ---- that I can receive no foreign visitors. I run away from the house on days of danger from calls,--and nevertheless I cannot entirely escape. Yet you would have me enter like Daniel into that lions' den of the Grand Hotel, because you are the Angel of the Lord. Well, I suppose I must get down soon,--but I cannot say exactly a day. Better let me come after the fashion of the Judgement,--when no man knoweth.

I am right glad to hear you are well again....

Don't know what my book will turn out to be after a few more months of work. It will be a queer thing anyhow: the j.a.panese part will be interesting enough; but the personal-impression parts do not develop well. And I must work very hard at it. You think that a day or two in the Grand Hotel is good for me once in a while; but you can't imagine what difficulty it is to find any time while the thing is still in pupa-condition.

But what most injures an author is not means and leisure: it is _society_, conventions, obligations, waste of time in forms and vanities. There are very few men strong enough to stand the life of society, and to write. I can think of but one of importance,--that is Henry James;--but his special study _is_ society.

And now for a lecture. (In haste.)

Affectionately, LAFCADIO.

TO MITCh.e.l.l McDONALD

TOKYO, October, 1898.

DEAR McDONALD,--I find myself not only at the busiest part of the term, the part when professors of the university don't find time to go anywhere,--but also in the most trying portion of the work of getting out a book,--the last portion, the finishing and rounding off.

And I am going to ask you simply _not_ to come and see your friend, and _not_ to ask him to come to see you, _for at least three months more_.

I know this seems horrid--but such are the only conditions upon which literary work is possible, when combined with the duties of a professor of literature. I don't want to see or hear or feel anything outside of my work till the book is done,--and I therefore have the impudent a.s.surance to ask you to help me stand by my wheel. Of course it would be pleasant to do otherwise; but I can't even think of pleasant things and do decent work at the same time. Please think of a helmsman, off sh.o.r.e, and the ship in rough weather, with breakers in sight.

Hate to send you this letter--but I think you will sympathize with me in spite of it.

Affectionately, LAFCADIO.

TO MITCh.e.l.l McDONALD

TOKYO, October, 1898.

DEAR McDONALD,--I am very glad that I wrote you that selfish letter,--in spite of the protests of my little wife, who says that I am simply a savage. I am glad, because I felt _quite sure_ that you would understand, and that the result would be a very sweet note, which I shall always prize. Of course, I mean three months at the outside: I have vowed to finish by the year's end, and I think I can. As for letters, you can't write too many. It takes me five minutes at most to write a letter (that is, to you); but if it took an hour I could always manage that.

"Like the little crab,"--yes, indeed. Thursday, three enemies dug at my hole, but I zigzagged away from them. I go in and out by the back way, now, so as to avoid the risk of being seen from afar off.

Ever most affectionately (with renewed thanks for that delicious letter),

LAFCADIO.

TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK

TOKYO, 1898.

DEAR HENDRICK,--Verily I think I ought to be apologizing for my blues. But it is such a relief to write them betimes--when you are sure of a patient hearing. Besides, it may interest you to hear of a small professional scribbler's ups and downs. I used only to pray for opportunity: if I could only get an audience! Now I have one--a small one. An offer of $1200 from a syndicate, which would make for me nearly $3000 here; and plenty of others. _And I can't write._ That is, I can do nothing except what would lower the little reputation I have gained.

In such a case the duty is plainly not to try, but to wait for the Holy Ghost,--or (as I am out of his domain) the coming of the G.o.ds. I am now in a period of mental drought, but have written half of a book that will probably be dedicated to E. H.,--or will certainly unless another incomplete book should be ready first, a book to be called perhaps "Thoughts about Feelings."

I am quite uncertain, however, as to the realization of this latter book. Looking back through my life I find that, with the exception of West-Indian and a few New Orleans experiences, I remember nothing agreeable. It was a rule with me from boyhood to try to forget disagreeable things; and in trying to forget them I made no effort to remember the agreeable,--just because "a sorrow's crown of sorrows is remembering happier things." So the past is nearly a blank. Then another queer thing is my absolute ignorance of realities. Always having lived in hopes and imaginations, the smallest practical matters, that everybody should know, I don't know anything about. Nothing, for example, about a boat, a horse, a farm, an orchard, a watch, a garden.

Nothing about what a man ought to do under any possible circ.u.mstances. I know nothing but sensations and books,--and most of the sensations are not worth penning. I really ought to have become a monk or something of that kind. Still, I believe I have a new key to the explanation of sensations,--if I can find the incident to peg the essays upon,--the dummies for the new philosophical robes. So far the book of reveries consists of only two little chapters. The better part of my life might just as well never have been lived at all. I am only waking up in the h.o.a.riness of age, and my next birth will probably see me a mud-turtle or a serpent, or something else essentially torpid and speechless.

Of course, I can write and write and write; but the moment I begin to write for money, vanishes the little special colour, evaporates the small special flavour, which is ME. And I become n.o.body again; and the public wonders why it ever paid any attention to so commonplace a fool.

So I must sit and wait for the G.o.ds.

Yet a little while, I shall be all hope and pride and confidence; and again a little while, up to my ears in the Slough of Despond. And the beautifully milled dollars and exquisitely engraved notes you talk of will stay in the pockets of practical people.

LAFCADIO.

_Afterthought_

DEAR OLD MAN,--Speaking on the subject of "Life"--have you read "Amiel's Journal" (_Journal Intime_)? If not, I would advise you to, as its fine delicate a.n.a.lysis of things is in pure harmony with your own way of thinking, so far as generalities go. In it there is a paragraph about Germans, of precisely the same tenor as the paragraph in your letter; and there is an admirable a.n.a.lysis of "society," with some severe but just (just at the time written) animadversions upon American society.

It seems to me, however, that neither Amiel nor anybody else has exactly told us what society means. Amiel comes very close to it. I think, however, the real truth would be more brutal.... Is not the charm (and its display) of womanly presence and power the real force? Because it is not really intellectual, this society. Intellectual societies are societies of artists, men of letters, philosophers, where absolute freedom of speech and action and dress are allowed. The polite society only delicately sniffs or nibbles at intellectual life, or else subordinates it to its fairy shows and transformation scenes. I don't suppose for a moment that I am suggesting even the ghost of anything new,--but I wish only to suggest that I think (in view of all this) that n.o.body has ever, in English, dared to say what society really is as a system or display,--to cut boldly into the heart of things. I don't mean to say it is shocking, or wrong, or anything of that sort. It is quite proper in the existing order of things, or else it wouldn't be. But there are evolutional ill.u.s.trations in it....

By the way, a j.a.panese friend tells me I have only _one soul_,--confirming the Oxford beast's revelation. "Why?" I asked. "You have no patience. Those who have no patience have only one soul. I have four souls." "How many souls can one have?" I enquired. "Nine," he said.

"Men who can make other men afraid of them, men of strong will: they have nine souls, or at least a great many."

Good-bye,--I think you have several souls.

LAFCADIO.

TO MRS. FENOLLOSA