THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019 61
The author’s stories can’t compete, in sheer horror, with the drama of his own life.
BOOKS
DEARLY DEPARTED
The haunting of Lafcadio Hearn.
BY JONATHAN DEE
ILLUSTRATION BY AGOSTINO IACURCI
I
n his fifty-four years among the liv-
ing, Patrick Lafcadio Hearn wrote
twenty-nine books in just about every
conceivable genre—folktales, travelogues,
novels, cookbooks, translations, dictio-
naries of proverbs—none of which can
compete, in terms of sheer Dickensian
horror and pluck, with the story of his
own life. He was born in 1850 on the
Greek island of Lefkáda (one of the Io-
nian Islands, at the time still under Brit-
ish control), to an Ionian mother named
Rosa and an Irish father, Charles, who
was stationed there as a staff surgeon in
the British Army. Their youthful ro-
mance reputedly grew into love when
she nursed him back to health after he
was set upon and stabbed multiple times
by her brother, who viewed their liaison
as a stain on the family’s honor. They
married and, with their two-year-old
son, relocated to Dublin to move in with
Charles’s family, some of whom consid-
ered their honor pretty well stained, too.
On a leave between overseas postings,
Charles took up with an old girlfriend,
around which time Rosa—pregnant
again, speaking little English, exhibit-
ing symptoms of mental illness—bolted
back to the islands, leaving behind her
son, who was then four years old. Mother
and child never saw each other again;
she spent her last years confined to an
asylum in Corfu. Charles had the mar-
riage annulled, then quickly remarried
and moved to India. The boy, now seven,
never saw his father again, either.
An ignominious and unexpected bur-
den to his family, Paddy, as he was then
known, was reared in the prosperous
Dublin home of his great-aunt Sarah.
“His mind,” in the words of one of his
biographers, was “dominated by horror
from an early age.” He had a crippling
fear of the dark, which was treated by
putting him to bed every night in a pitch-
dark room that was locked from the out-
side. At age thirteen, he was sent to a
Roman Catholic boarding school in En-
gland, where a playground incident
caused a grievous injury to his left eye.
As lasting as the resulting blindness in
that eye was Hearn’s terrible self-con-
sciousness about his disfigured appear-
ance. He was freed from the misery of
that boarding school only when Sarah,
having been bilked by a fortune hunter,
went broke and had to withdraw him.
For the next two years, he lived in an
East London slum with one of Sarah’s
former maids.
It gets wilder. Hearn—who was con-
sidered, by the European standards of the
day, to be of mixed race—was nineteen
when a relative of his father’s, acting out
of some combination of concern and em-
barrassment, gave him a one-way boat
ticket to New York and the address of a
distant relation in Cincinnati. Somehow,
Hearn reached this stranger’s door, where
he was handed a few dollars and was told
to fend for himself. And here the story
of Paddy Hearn, the baroquely unwanted
homeless youth, starts to flower into the
biography of Lafcadio Hearn, the writer
whose reputation would eventually reach
across the world. After starting out as a
printer’s assistant, he lucked into an emer-
gency assignment covering a lurid local
murder, and he did such a bang-up job
that his story was republished in papers
across the country. He parlayed this into
a regular gig as a sort of Weegee of words,
covering the city’s most violent and squalid
stories for the Cincinnati Enquirer, under
the byline “Dismal Man.”
H
e lost that job when his employ-
ers learned that he had secretly
married a biracial woman, Alethea Foley,
who had been born into slavery—a mar-
riage illegal in Ohio at the time. In 1877,
he moved, without his wife, to the more
