LAFCADIO HEARN
About 1873
Later he secured, for a brief period, a position as private secretary to Thomas Vickers, at that time librarian of the public library of Cincinnati, and here again he found food for his desires in a free access to the recondite matters to which already his genius was tending; but again he was driven by poverty and circumstance into broader fields, and early in 1874 he was working as a general reporter on the Cincinnati Enquirer. His work was of a kind that gave him at first no scope for his talents and must have been peculiarly unsympathetic, consisting of daily market reports, until chance opened the eyes of his employers to his capacity for better things. A peculiarly atrocious crime, still known in Cincinnati annals as the “Tan-yard Murder,” had been communicated to the office of the Enquirer at a moment when all the members of the staff, usually detailed to cover such assignments, were absent. The editor calling upon the indifferent gods for some one instantly to take up the matter, was surprised by a timid request from the shy cub-reporter who turned in daily market “stuff,” to be allowed to deal with this tragedy, and after some demur, he consented to accept what appeared an inadequate answer from the adjured deities. The “copy” submitted some hours later caused astonished eyebrows, was considered worthy of “scare-heads,” and for the nine succeeding days of the life of the wonder, Cincinnati sought ardently the Hoffmannesque story whose poignantly chosen phrases set before them a grim picture that caused the flesh to crawl upon their bones. It was realized at once that the cub-reporter had unsuspected capacities and his talents were allowed expansion in the direction of descriptive stories. One of the most admired of these was a record of a visit to the top of the spire of St. Peter’s Cathedral, where hauled in ropes by a steeple-jack to the arms of the cross which crowned it, he obtained a lofty view of the city and returned to write an article that enabled all the town to see the great panorama through his myopic eyes, which yet could bear testimony to colour and detail not obvious to clearer vision.
It was in this year that some trusting person was found willing to advance a small sum of money for the publication of an amorphous little Sunday sheet, professedly comic and satiric, entitled Ye Giglampz. H. F. Farny contributed the cartoons, and Lafcadio Hearn the bulk of the text. On June 21st of that year the first number appeared, with the announcement that it was to be “published daily, except week days,” and was to be “devoted to art, literature, and satire.” The first page was adorned with a Dicky Doylish picture of Herr Kladderadatsch presenting Mr. Giglampz to an enthusiastic public, which showed decided talent, but the full page cartoon, though it may have been amusing when published, is satire turned dry and dusty after the lapse of thirty-two years, and it may be only vaguely discerned now to refer in some way to the question of a third term for President Grant.
The pictures are easily preferable to the text, though no doubt it too has suffered from the desiccation of time, but Lafcadio Hearn was at no time, one might infer, better fitted for satire than for peddling; Ye Giglampz plainly “jooks wi’ deefeculty,” and the young journalist’s views upon art and politics are such as might be expected from a boy of twenty-four.
The prohibition question, the Chicago fire, a local river disaster, and the Beecher scandal are all dealt with by pen and pencil, much clipping from Punch and some translations from the comic journals of Paris fill the columns, and after nine weeks Ye Giglampz met an early and well-deserved death. The only copies of the paper now known to be in existence are contained in a bound volume belonging to Mr. Farny, discovered by him in a second-hand bookshop, with some pencil notes in the margin in Hearn’s handwriting. One of these notes records that an advertisement—there were but three in the first number—was never paid for, so presumably this volume, monument of an unfortunate juvenile exploit, was once in Hearn’s meagre library, but was discarded when he left Cincinnati.
In the following year Hearn had left the Enquirer and was recording the Exposition of 1876 for the Gazette, and in the latter part of that year he was a regular reporter for the Commercial.
In 1895—writing to Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain—Hearn speaks of John Cockerill, then visiting Japan, and draws an astonishingly vivid picture of the editor who was in command of the Cincinnati Enquirer in the ’70’s. These occasional trenchant, accurate sketches from life, to be found here and there in his correspondence, show a shrewdness of judgement and coolness of observation which his companions never suspected. He says:—
“I began daily newspaper work in 1874, in the city of Cincinnati, on a paper called the Enquirer edited by a sort of furious young man named Cockerill. He was a hard master, a tremendous worker, and a born journalist. I think none of us liked him, but we all admired his ability to run things. He used to swear at us, work us half to death (never sparing himself), and he had a rough skill in sarcasm that we were all afraid of. He was fresh from the army, and full of army talk. In a few years he had forced up the circulation of the paper to a very large figure and made a fortune for the proprietor, who got jealous of him and got rid of him.... He afterwards took hold of a St. Louis paper,—then of a New York daily, the World.... He ran the circulation up to nearly a quarter of a million, and again had the proprietor’s jealousy to settle with.... He also built up the Advertiser, but getting tired, sold out, and went travelling. Finally, Bennett of the Herald sends him to Japan at, I believe, $10,000 a year.
“I met him here to-day and talked over old times. He has become much gentler and more pleasant, and seems to be very kindly. He is also a little grey. What I have said about him shows that he is no very common person. The man who can make three or four fortunes for other men, without doing the same thing for himself, seldom is. He is not a literary man, nor a well-read man, nor a scholar,—but has immense common sense, and a large experience of life,—besides being, in a Mark-Twainish way, much of a humourist.”
Those who knew John Cockerill will find in this portrait not one line omitted which would make for truth and sympathy. One of Hearn’s associates of this period, Joseph Tunison, says of his work:—