”Ｉｎｏｒｄｉｎａｔｅｌｙ　　Ｆｏｎｄ　　ｏｆ　　Ｇｏｏｄ　　Ｆｏｏｄ”：　Ｌａｆｃａｄｉｏ　　Ｈｅａｒｎ　　Ａｓ　　Ｇｏｕｒｍｅｔ

”Ｉｎｏｒｄｉｎａｔｅｌｙ　　Ｆｏｎｄ　　ｏｆ　　Ｇｏｏｄ　　Ｆｏｏｄ”：　Ｌａｆｃａｄｉｏ　　Ｈｅａｒｎ　　Ａｓ　　Ｇｏｕｒｍｅｔ

Ａｌａｎ　Ｒｏｓｅｎ

Lafcadio Hearn had two parts of himself to feed—his "hungry ghost" and his hungry stomach. Biographical traces of his hungry ghost might be detected right from the beginning of his life. The spiritual hunger for the father he hardly knew and for the mother-love that was suddenly and irrevocably taken from him; the hunger for social acceptance in a world cruel to the physically impaired or deformed; the hunger for recognition as a writer; the hunger for the sympathy of friends and the love of a family of his own. This is the metaphor Hearn himself used in a letter describing a delightful evening spent with a friend:

At Mason's last night—a Japanese dinner, very elegant and dainty—Koto-playing by Mrs M.

and her sister (one of the sweetest little women I ever met)—a display of fireworks by the boys—

a great big warm moon. One of those evenings that never die: But I fear all these experiences will demoralize me. After rescue, a castaway enjoys too much the food offered; a physician stands by to prevent him eating enough. My ghostly part was really too hungry for such experience, and feels longings not wholesome for it;—sympathy is the supreme delight of life. I ought now to meet some horribly disagreeable foreigners,—so as to have my pleasure checked a little. Besides, I am much too happy to write essays and sketches.1

A good homemade dinner and sympathetic talk in a congenial family atmosphere made for a double punch of pleasure that temporarily filled both of his emptinesses, but in doing so they also robbed him of the hunger to write. For Hearn, artistic success depended on keeping his hungry ghosts hungry, and too much nourishment for the soul was a dangerous temptation that he increasingly avoided.

It is not, however, these metaphorical kinds of hunger that I wish to treat in this paper.

Rather it is the more mundane but no less significant issue of physical hunger, an issue that figures in Hearn's life both privately, as an important aspect of his personal health and happiness, and publically, as a social, political, and economic topic in his literary work. It is an issue that has many sides. To Hearn, food was money: he worked as a waiter, he proposed a business scheme of shipping fruit to the North from New Orleans, and he started his own restaurant, the Hard Times, in the hope of gaining financial independence. Food was health and energy: powerful writing required powerful nutrition, and proper diet was the key to good health and sufficient life force. This was much more than a personal conviction underpinning

his philosophy of life; it also contained geo-political dimensions, for Hearn believed that a nation's ultimate place in the world depended on the diet of its citizens.2 But perhaps most of all, food was pleasure: in his New Orleans period he enjoyed eating good food at various restaurants; he spent considerable time studying about foodstuffs and their preparation; and he wrote frequently about matters of food in scattered newspaper articles and in longer works such as La Cuisine Creole and Two Years in the French West Indies, where he gave lavish literary treatment to its preparation and consumption. Though he may have preferred to keep his "ghosts" hungry, he certainly preferred to keep his stomach full, and for the better part of life he was, like Samuel Johnson, "inordinately fond of good food."3 In this paper I hope to show the unrecognized importance of this side of Hearn, the degree to which the pleasurable aspects of food and eating, the gourmet aspects, engaged his mind and informed his writing. The influence of his impaired visual sense and, more recently, his sense of hearing on what and how he wrote have been investigated.4 In this paper I shall try to show something of Hearn's sense of taste, how his love of "the delicious" was reflected in his life and work. Indeed, the topic's very frequency in his writing compels us to make a closer examination of what he referred to only half playfully as "the solemn question of food."5

Hearn began his verbal love affair with food when he reported on the French Market in New Orleans for readers of the Cincinnati Commercial in 1877. Although the whole market was his topic, the catalogue of foodstuffs formed a significantly large part.6 To broaden appeal through sensual variety, he treats odor and taste as well as appearance:

You never smell an unpleasant odor in the French Market; there is nothing to offend the nostrils, nothing to displease the eye. You inhale —you breathe the odor of delicious coffee from the lunch booths. What coffee it is, too—Oriental in strength and fragrance, but clear as wine.... Here are huge fruits that resemble oranges, but are nearly eight inches in diameter; pomegranates piled up in blushing pyramids; red bananas from Spanish America arranged in towers; figs, ripe and green;

fresh dates; pale green grapes in giant clusters; apples rosy enough to have tempted rosy Eve;.. J

Even in this early example, Hearn is quite conscious of the sound of individual words and words in combination, varying the aural quality of each item's depiction. This concern with how his expressions of food sound is also evident in his private writings, where phrases such as

"debaucheries of beefsteak" and "beefsteak, bread, and Bass's Ale" exist as much for their rhythmical and alliterative qualities as for their content. Visually, too, he plays with shape, giving us "mountains" of vegetables, "hills" of shrimp, and "baskets of live crabs" to follow the

"blushing pyramids," "towers," and "clusters." The use of color is still minimal.

The next significant appearance of eating is in "The Little Red Kitten," one of his so-called

"Fantastics," published in the Daily Item on September 24, 1879. It contains only a brief, humorous description of a kitten's eating habits, but it is worth examination in that it intro duces Hearn's abiding concern with the use of food in fiction and with what is good (and good for you) to eat.

It ate beefsteak and cockroaches, caterpillars and fish, chicken and butterflies, mosquito-hawks and roast mutton, hash and tumble-bugs, beetles and pigs' feet, crabs and spiders, moths and poached eggs, oysters and earthworms, ham and mice, rats and rice pudding—until its belly became a realization of Noah's Ark. On this diet it soon acquired strength to whip all the ancient cats in the neighborhood. (II, 220)

The humorous effect of this passage is due not only to the imaginative juxtaposition of things palatable and unpalatable (to humans), it is also due to Hearn's "creative cataloging," his reversing the order of the items with each successive pair and the piling them up pair by pair in the little kitten's belly until the quantity, an almost Rabelaisian surfeit, becomes laughable in itself.

Although he used cataloging throughout his career in a variety of ways and for a variety of effects, one of its most extensive uses was in the food descriptions in Two Years in the French West Indies. In those sketches, written in the late 1880s, his unusual interest in and love of the local food are both readily apparent. To Hearn, the things for sale in the Martinique foodmarket were first of all physically beautiful, a great visual display, and he took pains to evoke the full palette of their subtle colors and the peculiarities of their shapes. In "A Midsummer Trip to the Tropics," he spends two pages describing just the fish and vegetables he saw at the outdoor food market. It is a stunningly executed word picture that transforms a mere catalogue of fish into an extraordinary, extended performance of verbal pyrotechnics:

Such fish!—blue, rosy, green, lilac, scarlet, gold; no spectral tints these, but luminous and strong like fire. Here you also see heaps of long thin fish looking like piled bars of silver—absolutely dazzling—of almost equal thickness from head to tail;—near by are heaps of flat pink creatures;

—beyond these, again, a mass of azure backs and golden bellies Some are very thin round disks, with long, brilliant, wormy feelers in lieu of fins, flickering in all directions like a moving pendent silver fringe;—others bristle with spines;—others, serpent-bodied, are so speckled as to resemble shapes of red polished granite.

Hearn was clearly intoxicated with the visual impressions, and he intended the stylistic effects of the prose to intoxicate the reader as well. Through the range and dynamics of his diction

—words like wormy, dazzle, flicker, and bristle—he imbues the piles of inert objects with a sense of movement and life, creating a still-life that dances before our eyes. In addition to their appearance, however, he was also enamored of the sounds of their names, intensifying the aural qualities used in describing the French Market. There alliterative effects softly echoed and harmonized, while here the sound approaches cacophony, the unfamiliar words strung together for an almost percussive effect.

The balaou, couliou, macriau, tazard, tcha-tcha, bonnique, and zorphi severally represent almost all possible tints of blue and violet. The souri is rose-color and yellow; the cirurgien is black, with yellow and red stripes; the patate, black and yellow; the gros-zie is vermilion; the couronne, red

and black. (Ill, 43-45)

At this stage of his career, food, especially in its raw state, was still grist for his descriptive mill. It provided him with shapes, colors, textures, and sounds with which to create in his readers a sense of the abundance, diversity, and pleasure of unfamiliar, exotic worlds, inebriat ing them with great quantities of his verbal wine. Indeed, he was so impressed by this display of food that he repeated a somewhat condensed version of it in a later piece from the

"Martinique Sketches" called "Ma Bonne":

The perroquet, black with bright bands of red and yellow; the cirurgien, blue and black; the patate, yellow and black; the moringue, which looks like polished granite; the souri, pink and yellow; the vermilion Gouos-zie . . . (IV, 55)

Comparing this with the previous passage, we can see how Hearn has changed his method:

instead of a lexical virtuosity, he now concentrates on creating balanced rhythmical cadences and alliteration to enliven the catalogue. This rendering of the same marketplace is decidedly more prosaic and unadorned, but this should not be attributed to a decline in his enthusiasm.

Rather the reverse is true: Here in "Ma Bonne," Hearn significantly expands his treatment of exotic food to include not only depictions of the food materials but also recipes, culinary customs, cooking traditions, and folk beliefs—in short, he has written a brief compendium of local food-lore. Through the descriptions of the ingredients, their preparation, and the preparer, he tries to evoke the mood and ambiance of a simpler, more paradisaical way of life.

It was a way of life he believed he had rediscovered in the provinces of Japan, although he never again so lavishly described the subject of food.

For over twenty continuous pages at the beginning of "Ma Bonne," Hearn lets flow the wealth of details that he has gleaned, much from Dr. and Mrs. Matas, on the subject of Creole cuisine. To relieve monotony, he creates slight variations in treatment. For example, when he informs the reader on the wide variety of mangoes a few pages after the fish, the tone turns even more cookbookish. In contrast to his treatment of the fish, there is almost no mention of color and only the briefest mention of size and shape. Practicality takes priority, and instead of sublimely subtle hues he gives the price.

I am acquainted, however, with only a few [varieties]—such as the mango-Bassignac;—mango- peche (or peach-mango);—mango-vert (green mango), very large and oblong;—mango-greffe;—

mangotine, quite round and small;—mango-quinette, very small also, almost egg-shaped;—mango -Zeze, very sweet, rather small, and of flattened form;—mango d'or (golden mango), worth half a franc each;—mango-Lamentin, a highly cultivated variety;—and the superb Reine-Amelie (or Queen Amelia), a great yellow fruit which retails even in Martinique at five cents apiece. (IV, 65 -66)

The style here is expository rather than descriptive, technical rather than poetic. Hearn

seems desirous to let the unusual facts and exotic vocabulary stand for themselves, virtually unadorned by his usual repertory of evocative adjectives. After somewhat disingenuously claiming to know but a few of the wealth of varieties, he drops names by the score, for he intends the sheer accumulation of examples, not the writing, to enrapture. This is not to be a reverie; it is a treatise: accuracy and clarity will do more than soaring adjectives to reveal the charm of the culture. Though more than a few readers may have been numbed by these twenty pages of virtually non-stop recipes and food-lore, Hearn's purpose was clearly to bathe them in exotica, to enchant them, and literally to whet their appetite for the exotic native life of Martinique.

Food also serves as the springboard for welcome digressions into local customs and lifestyle, health tips, even language lessons. Consider these excerpts, all generated from the topic of his after-swim drink.

The cocoyage I like best of all. Cyrilla takes a green cocoanut, slices off one side of it so as to open a hole, then pours the opalescent water into a bowl, adds to it a fresh egg, a little Holland gin, and some grated nutmeg and plenty of sugar. Then she whips up the mixture into efferves cence with her baton-lele. (IV, 48)

The Hearn touch is slight but it transforms the simple recipe into delightful, mouth-watering reading. (Try reading it again without "opalescent" to modify water or "fresh" to modify egg.)

The bavaroise is fresh milk, sugar, and a little Holland gin or rum—mixed with the baton-lele until a fine thick foam is formed. After the cocoyage, I think it is the best drink one can take in the morning; but very little spirit must be used for any of these mixtures. It is not until just before the midday meal that one can venture to take a serious stimulant—yon ti ponch—rum and water, sweetened with plenty of sugar or sugar syrup.

The word "sucre" is rarely used in Martinique—considering that sugar is still the chief product;—the word "doux" (sweet)"is commonly substituted for it. Doux has, however, a larger range of meaning: it may signify syrup, or any sort of sweets—duplicated into douxdoux, it means the corossole fruit as well as a sweetheart. (IV, 48-49)

Next Hearn discusses the general diet of the common people. He is playing the role of a literary chef here, mixing recipes with folk lore and even adding a pinch of spice with a tall- tale called "Pimento Story," translated into English next to the original Creole version.8 He also spends entire paragraphs ranking beans, explaining the uses and varieties of bananas, and occasionally relating some gourmet experience or personal taste preference. Of beans: "The cousscouche is the best of all: the finest Irish potato boiled into sparkling flour is not so good"

(61). Of tropical fruits: "A large number, in spite of delicious flavor, are provokingly stony"

(63).

Writing as the gourmet not of the rich but of the common man, Hearn celebrates the wonderfully exotic foods available even to the poor. For example, "With four sous' worth of

coulious a family can have a superb blaffe" (IV, 58). And taking on the equally delightful role as the gourmet of shock, he tells about his eating shark meat—"a young shark is very good eating indeed. Cyrilla cooked me a slice one morning: it was quite delicate, tasted almost like veal"(IV, 57)—and about the ver-palmiste: "These worms are sold in the Place du Fort at two sous each: they are spitted and roasted alive, and are said to taste like almonds. I have never tried to find out whether this be fact or fancy; and I am glad to say that few white Creoles confess a liking for this barbarous food" (IV, 59). This was the man who, in his 1875 newspaper article, "Haceldama," had drunk and critiqued fresh cow's blood, and gave it his highest gourmet rating and some of his finest prose:9

And how did it taste? Fancy the richest cream, warm, with a tart sweetness, and the healthy strength of pure wine ... It was a draught simply delicious, sweeter than any concoction of the chemist, the confectioner, the winemaker—it was the very elixir of life itself No other earthly draughts can rival such crimson cream, and its strength spreads through the veins with the very rapidity of wine.10

Although Hearn sometimes enjoyed shocking his readers with accounts of grotesque eating, including graphic descriptions of cannibalism,11 he was equally interested in good, down -to-earth food which could be enjoyed by ordinary people. His prominent work in this category is La Cuisine Creole (1885). Although Hearn never intended it to stand as a work of literature, certain passages are intrinsically interesting and reveal another side of the author. He writes in the introduction that good food can make or break a marriage:

Much domestic contentment depends upon the successful preparation of the meal; and as food rendered indigestible through ignorance in cooking often creates discord and unhappiness, it behooves the young housekeeper to learn the art of cooking.12

If we recall that Hearn's brief marriage to Mattie Foley sometimes turned rocky over the matter of her cooking, the author's advice takes on a new ring of truth.13 This cookbook, he further announces, will "unveil the mysteries" of cooking, and "its many savory dishes are rendered palatable more as the result of care in their preparation than any great skill or expensive outlay in the selection of materials. The Creole housewife often makes delicious morceaux from the things usually thrown away by the extravagant servant." Hearn was always conscious of food's cost, doubtless a carryover from his painfully hungry stint as a new immigrant to the United States, and he seemed to feel that low or reasonable cost added a special flavor to the meal.

Although he was sympathetic to poverty, he was intolerant of carelessness or ignorance in the preparation of food. In the opening remarks of the book's first chapter on soup, he lectures, almost pontificates, in the smug tone of the male chauvinist chef:

Nothing more palatable than good, well-made soup, and nothing less appetising than poor

soup. Now to attain perfection in any line, care and attention are requisite, careful study a necessity, and application the moving force. Hence, cooking in all its branches should be studied as a science, and not be looked upon as a haphazard mode of getting through life. Cooking is in great measure a chemical process, and the ingredients of certain dishes should be as carefully weighed and tested as though emanating from the laboratory. Few female cooks think of this, but men with their superior instinctive reasoning power are more governed by law and abide more closely to rule; therefore, are better cooks, and command higher prices for services.

Hearn did teach himself to cook, as he states in a letter of 1879 to Krehbiel, but his motivation was not gustatory; it was financial—to cut living expenses and save money to start a restaurant.14 Whether he actually used any of the recipes he advocates in La Cuisine Creole is a matter of speculation (one Japanese author consulted a professional chef, who tried mostly unsuccessfully to follow the recipes),15 but it is unlikely that he had personally tried this rather sumptuous one for Grand Brule a la Boulanger:

The crowning of a grand dinner is a brule. It is the piece de resistance, the grandest pousse cafe of all. After the coffee has been served, the lights are turned down or extinguished, brule is brought in and placed on the centre of the table upon a pedestal surrounded by flowers. A match is lighted, and after allowing the sulphur to burn entirely off is applied to the brandy, and as it burns it sheds its weird light upon the faces of the company, making them appear like ghouls in striking contrast to the gay surroundings. The stillness that follows gives an opportunity for thoughts that break out in ripples of laughter which pave the way for the exhilaration that ensues.16

Like a good cigar, pleasant atmosphere and companionship are also valued ingredients for a delicious meal. This recipe, Hearn writes, is "From a Gourmet"—perhaps Mrs. Matas, who was far more likely than Hearn to have had this kind of party—and he might have experienced it at her home. It is a departure from his usual concern with frugality, but it is easy to see why he included it: the juxtaposition of the ghoulish faces in the elegantly appointed dining room would have surely delighted him.

Though he had gained quite a bit of knowledge about higher cuisine, his personal prefer ence was always for plain, good-tasting, nourishing food, in plentiful amounts and at reason able, if not cheap, prices. Discovering restaurants and dining rooms that provided these was a lifetime interest which had likely begun as soon as he could afford to buy a meal.

Before I commenced to keep house for myself, I must tell you about a Chinese restaurant I used to patronize. . . . The charge for a meal was only twenty-five cents—four dishes allowed, with dessert and coffee, and only five cents for every extra dish one might choose to order. I generally ordered a nice steak, stewed beef with potatoes, stewed tongue, a couple of fried eggs, etc.

Everything is cooked before your eyes, the whole interior of the kitchen being visible from the dining table; and nothing could be cleaner or nicer. I asked him how long he had kept the place;

he answered, "Seven years"; and I am told he has been making a fortune even at these prices of

five cents per dish. The cooking is perfection. (XIII, 193-95)

In another example of Hearn as restaurant guide, we see his typical, general preference for the vitality and natural richness of things Southern. Notice his choice description of the cream cheese:

Early in the morning I visit a restaurant [in the French quarter], where I devour a plate of figs, a cup of black coffee, a dish of cream-cheese—not the Northern stuff, but a delightful cake of pressed milk floating in cream—a couple of corn muffins, and an egg. This is a heavy breakfast here, but costs only about twenty-five cents. (XIII, 164)

Hearn wrote up the information he had gleaned from his restaurant-hopping and sent that north, too, to his old newspaper, the Cincinnati Commercial, as an article called "How to Eat Cheaply in New Orleans." Though Elizabeth Stevenson treats the article as an example of Hearn's personal "scrimping,"17 it is equally an example of Hearn as the gourmet of the poor.

How wholesome and delicious he makes such low-budget eating-houses seem with just a few well-chosen adjectives:

Each market-house has its own long, marble-topped coffee-stand, with a dozen fat-bellied sugar-bowls marshaled in shining rows. Here, for five cents you may purchase an excellent cup of coffee, with a plate of doughnuts; and for five cents more a long loaf of sweet and milky-white French bread. That makes a good ten-cent breakfast. Then for dinner fifteen cents will purchase you meat, vegetables, coffee and bread ad libitum.1*

And for those with a slightly higher budget, there was Creole-style gourmet dining at the Four Seasons restaurant, where seventy-five cents buys a dinner "dainty enough to satisfy the most blase appetite—first-class Parisian cookery, with a bottle of claret, a rich cup of black Mocha, and a clear cigar to aid digestion. For no true French Creole considers his restaurant dinner complete without a fragrant cigar, to be smoked with the fine cup of black coffee."19

Hearn's greatest culinary discovery in New Orleans, however, was not a restaurant but a boarding-house run by a motherly Irishwoman named Mrs. Courtney. According to Tinker, a friend of Hearn named Thomas Colvert took him there, and it was love at first chew.20 He moved his quarters to be near her dining room and started taking all his meals there, often in a private dining room where he could eat unobserved by the other guests. "It was here that she served him herself, kept his glass full of good red wine and cut up his meat, being careful to remove all fat as he could never bear the taste of it."21 Her cooking became the new standard for Hearn. Writing to her from a vacation in Grand Isle, her menu versus his current fare is a primary topic:

I miss your nice beefsteaks, nice legs of mutton, nice cooking. Very little meat here,—and no

eggs. Nothing but oysters, croakers, red fish, sheephead crabs. I am going to turn into a fish and get scales! But we have plenty of cow's milk and biscuits and butter. The butter is not very good, and the cows eat so much wild camomile that the milk is a little bitter; but I have got to like it.22

He also wrote to Page Baker that the food was "superb"—which meant that it was "solid, nutritious, and without stint." This last element was always important to his rating scheme, for no matter how fine the flavor, he could not feel satisfied without sufficient volume. As Mrs.

Baker noted in her reminiscence of her husband and Hearn at Grand Isle:

The waiters were not efficient; and it was one of Mr. Baker's self-imposed tasks to see that his friend got enough to eat. He ate as much as two men, and it was not always easy to keep the waiters up to the mark in supplying his wants.23

Yet it was always Mrs. Courtney's board that set the standard of cuisine for Hearn wherever he traveled in those days. On a trip to Florida, his companion Charlie Johnson scribbled this on the back of Hearn's letter to her:

You have no idea how both Mr. Hearn and myself thought of you all day yesterday, while we were cracking our teeth and jaw-bones on alligator skin beefsteak and nondescript food of all possible and impossible sorts. We had glorious visions of the luscious meals we gorged with at your house continually before our eyes.24

After moving to Japan, Hearn's enthusiasm for the topic of good places to dine seems to have diminished considerably, but not totally. Scattered references in letters advise friends on where to dine in Oki and in Kumamoto, for example, but the mention is always brief and he no longer describes the fare or the price. Moreover, the highly stylized catalogues of food so prominent in the literary work of his New Orleans and Martinique days reappear in the Japanese writings as only the barest shadows of their former selves.25 Here is his fullest, describing the food offered to the returning dead at the Bon Festival:

These offerings consist of the foods called somen, resembling our vermicelli, gozen, which is boiled rice, dango, a sort of tiny dumpling, eggplant, and fruits according to season,—frequently uri and saikwa, slices of melon and watermelon, and plums and peaches. Often sweet cakes and dainties are added. Sometimes the offering is only O-sho-jin-gu (honorable uncooked food); more usually it is O-rio-gu (honorable boiled food); but it never includes, of course, fish, meats, or wine.

Clear water is given to the shadowy guest... tea is poured out every hour for the viewless visitors, and everything is daintily served up in little plates and cups and bowls, as for living guests, with hashi (chopsticks) laid beside the offering. So for three days the dead are feasted. (V, 123-24)

For better or worse, the stylistic virtuosity, if not the passion, of the Martinique descriptions is all but gone. This is not to say that Hearn was no longer interested in food, or not interested in Japanese food. He was vitally interested in it in so far as it affected his health and for what it revealed about the Japanese people and culture, but he had little to say as a gourmet. He boasted that he had "become so accustomed to Japanese food and habits that it would now be painful for me to change them. The only extras, besides sake, which I take, are plenty of fried and raw eggs" (XIV, 114). But there were only a few foods that he singled out for gustatory praise. One was pickled radish (daikon), something he seemed to believe no Westerner could actually like, but rather than "delicious," he implied that it was "queer":

Would you be horrified to learn that I have become passionately fond of daikon—not the fresh but the strong ancient pickled daikon? But the European Stilton cheese, or Limburger is surely quite as queer. (XIV, 160)

Japanese tea was also wonderful, "a pale straw colour, without sugar or milk, and once used to it, you cannot bear the sight of European tea anymore" (XIV, 197). Japanese sweets also earned Hearn's epicurean approbation:

Japanese confectionery, though delicious, never nauseates through over-sweetness;... the quantity of sugar used is very much less than with us. One never gets tired of kwashi; but plumcake and bonbons in the West need to be sparingly used. Perhaps we want too much sweetness of all kinds.

The Japanese are in all things essentially temperate and self-restrained—as a people. Of course, Western notions and examples begin to spoil them a little. (XIV, 378)

As a steady diet, however, Hearn was forced to abandon Japanese cuisine after about a year of apparent digestive misery. The confession in a letter to Baker barely disguises his disdain for the Japanese menu:

The fact is I lived for one year exclusively on Japanese food, which Europeans, among others Mr.

Chamberlain, consider almost impossible. I must confess, however, that it broke me down. After twelve months I could not eat at all. You know Japanese food is raw fish and fresh fish, rice, bean -curds (they look like custard), seaweed, dried cuttle-fish—rarely chicken or eggs. In short, of five hundred Japanese dishes, the basis is rice, fish, beans, lotus, various vegetables, including bamboo shoots, and seaweed. . . . But I had to return to the fleshpots of Egypt. I now eat Japanese food only once a day; and morning and evening indulge in beefsteak, bread, and Bass's Ale. (XIV, 197)

Though Hearn knew eating beef and bread was the culinary equivalent of a Western-style house and a frock coat (both of which he hated), he could not choose but to sacrifice his principles for the sake of health and vitality. It was a blow to his credentials as the ultimate Japanophile, but he once again became enthusiastic about food, Western food, at first prepared under his guidance with the plentiful foreign ingredients now available to him in Kumamoto.26

He even invited Chamberlain and Mason to visit him in that far-off city by enticing them with

"beefsteak, potatoes, roast chicken" to eat and "whisky, Bass, or Guinness" to drink (XVI, 302, 309). Japanese food became a topic to write about only to help explain some other issue that he was exploring. Consider this passage on the Japanese sense of touch in "Frogs" from Exotics and Retrospectives'.

Remembering that the race has been living for ages upon food which seems tasteless to the Western palate, and that impulses to such action as hand-clasping, embracing, kissing, or other physical display of affectionate feeling, are really foreign to Far-Eastern character, one is tempted to the theory that gustatory and tactual sensations, pleasurable and otherwise, have been less highly evolved with the Japanese than with us. But there is much evidence against such a theory; and the triumphs of Japanese handicraft assure us of an almost incomparable delicacy of touch developed in special directions. (IX, 126) (my italics)

One item on the Japanese menu that Hearn did discuss spiritedly was not food but sake, giving it the kind of stylistic attention he had not used on food or drink in years:

One becomes fond of Japanese sake (rice-wine); but it can only be eaten [sic] with Japanese food. A barrel of the best costs about three dollars and a half. It is extremely deceiving. It looks like lemonade; but it is heavy as sherry. Happily it has not the after-effects of sherry. There is no liquor in the world upon which a man becomes so quickly intoxicated, and yet none of which the effects last so short a time. The intoxication is pleasant as the effect of opium or hasheesh.

It is a soft, pleasant, luminous exhilaration: everything becomes brighter, happier, lighter;—then you get very sleepy. (XIV, 197-98)

The well-chosen adjectives, the hyperbole, even the mention of price are reminiscent of his treatment of food in New Orleans. But his heart was no longer in it. As he grew older, physical eating, gourmet or otherwise, became less important to him. When he described the pleasures of taking sake in "Of A Dancing Girl," it was the effect on the mind—not on the tastebuds—

that intrigued him:

And always they [geishas] pour the wine—that warm, pale yellow, drowsy wine which fills the veins with soft contentment, making a faint sense of ecstasy, through which, as through some poppied sleep, the commonplace becomes wondrous and blissful, and the geisha Maids of Paradise, and the world much sweeter than, in the natural order of things, it could ever possibly be. (VI, 213)

As he began to live more and more inside his mind, he was at times almost oblivious to what he put into his mouth. Kazuo recalled in Father and I that sometimes Hearn "would absent -mindedly put cube sugar in his soup and pepper in his coffee, or ask what it was that he had just eaten."27 And Setsu remembered how he would forget that he had not yet eaten dinner, believing that he had already finished.28 When he wrote about eating in "Ululation," it was to

emphasize the cyclical nature of existence and the destiny of all things to eat and re-eat each other:

Only by eating each other do beings exist!... life is fed by continual murder ... the eating of flesh and the drinking of blood. All life, to sustain itself, must devour life. . . . Be, if you will, a vegetarian: none the less you must eat forms that have feeling and desire. Sterilize your food; and digestion stops. You cannot even drink without swallowing life. Loathe the name as we may, we are cannibals;—all being is essentially One; and whether we eat the flesh of a plant, a fish, a reptile, a bird, a mammal, or a man, the ultimate fact is the same. (IX, 305)

From this passage it might seem that Hearn's spiritual growth had gradually led him to see beyond the physicality and sensuality of food, to an ascetic conception of it that transcended its pleasure-giving role, but this was only true in his more philosophical moments. As Stevenson points out, after experiencing grave hunger in Cincinnati and again in New Orleans, Hearn would always carry a fear of starving.29 Perhaps that was why he could still write a letter to a friend which virtually shrieked with gustatory pleasure: "That whisky! Those cigars!

That wonderful beefsteak! Those imperial and sinfully splendid dinners!"30

Though we might think of him as having ultimately become a kind of "gourmet of the spirit," a seeker of food mainly for the mind or the hungry ghost, he also continued to experience and appreciate the world with the mind of the gourmet, through the idea of the pleasures of taste. Consider these thirty-odd instances from Hearn's writing where he uses

"delicious" or "deliciously" purely metaphorically to extol totally non-edible things:

Visual things:

delicious tint/delicious haze/delicious view/delicious garden/delicious colored prints/smiled deliciously/delicious laquer-work/delicious flower/delicious town/delicious color.

Emotional or sensual things:

delicious surprise (2)/deliciously new/delicious sensation/delicious . . . agony/delicious temp tation/delicious experience/delicious [way of caressing] /delicious Japanese child's life.

Literary things:

delicious vividness [of poetic expression]/delicious writer/delicious financial characters/deli cious letter (2)/delicious [translations of Heine]/delicious humour [in Loti]/"n'arriveraient pas" to me is delicious/delicious Fairy tales/your delicious rendering/delicious poetry in the boys/your delicious comments.31

As the above lists reveal, to convey his highest level of enjoyment or approval, "delicious"

was the word Hearn often chose. It seems to have embodied his deeply rooted gourmet's desire, conscious or unconscious, to ingest, savor, digest, and ultimately become one with the things he liked. Beautiful sights, beautiful feelings and, most of all, beautiful writing—be it poetry, a

letter, or comments in the margin of a book—were the things that continued to nourish and delight him throughout his life. "Oh, for a lodge in some vast wilderness! —provided with a good table and a regular supply of reading from Murray's circulating library!" he once called out to a friend (XIV, 277). Good books and good meals, with no distractions. This was one version of Hearn's idea of earthly paradise: a place where all his hungry parts might be fed.

1 Letter to Basil Hall Chamberlain dated July 20,1894 in The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1922), Vol. XVI, 226-27. Hereafter referred to as Works.

2 See Hearn's speech delivered at the Fifth Higher School, The Future of the Far East, January 1894.

3 E. L. Tinker, Lafcadio Hearn's American Days (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head Ltd., 1925), p.181.

4 See Masahiko Nishi, Lafcadio Haan No Mimi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1994) (in Japanese). English title:

Lafcadio Hearn's Ears.

5 Unpublished letter to Basil Hall Chamberlain dated July 17, 1891 from the C. Waller Barrett Collection at the University of Virginia.

6 This is an early instance of what Carl Dawson calls Hearn's "lifelong love of naming" in Lafcadio Hearn and the Vision of Japan (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 63.

7 Occidental Gleanings by Lafcadio Hearn, Vol. 1, collected by Albert Mordell (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1925), pp. 170-71.

8 Hearn was surely conscious of the analogy between the making of interesting things to eat and the making of interesting things to read. In this sketch he almost seems to be trying to create a literary gumbo from the variety of material he has collected.

9 Paul Murray writes: "The man who allegedly drank blood in a Cincinnati slaughter-house liked to drop the fact that he had eaten worms in the West Indies; he told his readers casually that they tasted like fried almonds when cooked alive." A Fantastic Journey: The Life and Literature of Lafcadio Hearn (Sandgate:

Japan Library, 1993), p. 93. Here Hearn claims not to have eaten these worms.

10 Quoted from Jon Hughes, ed. Period of the Gruesome: Selected Cincinnati Journalism of Lafcadio Hearn (New York: University Press of America), p. 198.

11 I have treated this matter at length in a previous article called "Hearn and the Gastronomic Grotesque,"

Memoirs of the Faculty of General Education, Kumamoto University, 1994.

12 La Cuisine Creole (New Orleans: F.F. Hansell, 1885). Introduction.

13 See Jonathan Cott's Wandering Ghost (New York: Knopf, 1991), p. 89.

14 The cook was not Hearn but his "pard" (Works, XIII, 188-89). A full account of this venture is found in E. L. Tinker, Lafcadio Hearn's American Days.

15 Tsunoda Yozo, "Lafcadio Hearn and Creole Cuisine," Herun, No. 27, 1990, pp. 46-47 (in Japanese).

16 La Cuisine Creole, pp. 245-46.

17 Elizabeth Stevenson, Lafcadio Hearn (New York: Octagon Books, 1979), p. 81.

18 "New Orleans Letter" in The Commercial, January 7, 1878. Text from Occidental Gleanings, p. 238.

19 Occidental Gleanings, p. 237.

20 Tinker, p. 191.

21 Tinker, p. 197.

22 Tinker, p. 218.

23 Tinker, p. 364.

24 Tinker, p. 224.

25 His relative lack of enthusiasm shows in a letter to Hendrick dated January 1892. Describing New Year's

Day food, Hearn writes: "For the guests are dishes of raw fish, and others which it would take too long to describe, and hot sake" (my italics). Works, XIV, 185.

26 Letter to Nishida Sentaro dated 1891. Works, XIV, 172. "But with any Izumo cook, living is just as cheap as in Matsue; and there is much good bread and meat and sake and food of all kinds."

27 Kazuo Koizumi, Father and I: Memories of Lafcadio Hearn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935) p. 164. Also see my "Hearn and the Gastronomic Grotesque," op. cit.

28 Koizumi Setsuko, Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), pp. 44-45.

29 Stevenson, p. 89.

30 Letter to Mitchell McDonald dated January 1899. Works, XV, 159. An earlier letter dated July 1894 to Chamberlain describes Hearn's "indulging in debaucheries of beefsteak, whiskey and lemonade, gin and ginger ale and beer" while visiting Mason in Yokohama. Works, XVI, 216.

31 Here is a fuller list with references in Works:

V 4 the delicious surprise of the first journey [My First Day]

V 17 the same delicious tint as the sky [My First Day]

V 17 all which is truly and deliciously new [My First Day]

V 26 all [city and bay] visible in one delicious view V 163 vapory gold through the delicious haze [Chief City]

VI 213 poems, expressing a natural emotion with delicious vividness VI 396 my home, with its delicious garden [Sayonara!]

VII 61 delicious colored prints accompanying her text [At Hakata]

VII 316 The father smiled deliciously [From a Traveling Diary]

VIII 47 the nameless delicious sensation [Notes of a Trip to Kyoto]

IX 175 [buried loves] fluttering in some delicious filmy agony [A Serenade]

XIII 82 the perpetual and delicious temptation of the sea [Baker, 1884]

XIII 308 What a delicious writer you are! [W.D. O'Connor, 3/84]

XIV 161 to think of Japan . . . will be a delicious experience for you [BHC]

XIV 169 There are delicious financial characters in [Zola] [Hendrick, 10/91]

XIV 378 [Japanese child's] way of caressing is none the less delicious XV 131 thanks for that delicious letter [Mitchell McDonald, 10/98]

XV 173 gratitude for the delicious letter and delicious flower [Fenollosa, 4/99]

XV 326 old, delicious laquer-work [BHC, 10/90]

XV 463 [translations by Emma Lazarus] were delicious [BHC, 7/93]

XVI 140 delicious humour also in Loti /"n'arriveraient pas" ... is delicious XVI 174 what a delicious town

XVI 195 delicious Fairy tales XVI 212 your delicious rendering

XVI 215 There is, after all, delicious poetry in the boys [BHC, 7/94]

XVI 224 I read all your delicious comments on the margin [BHC, 7/20/94]

XVI 283 delicious color [of awata-ware pottery] [Mason, 7/30/92]

XVI 317 The delicious Japanese child's life globes into yours [Mason, 1892?]

XVI 381 A delicious surprise—though one that gave some pain [BHC, 8/95]