It was in the autumn of 1877 that Lafcadio Hearn, with forty dollars in his pocket and a head full of dreams, started for Memphis on his way to New Orleans. Mr. Halstead and Mr. Edward Henderson, editors of the Commercial, and his old friend, Mr. Watkin, were at the little Miami depot to bid him God speed.
Memphis is situated at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. Hearn had to await the steamboat there on its return journey from New Orleans. In those days punctuality was not rigidly enforced, and very often the arrival of the steamer necessitated a wait of several days at Memphis. The only person with whom Hearn kept up communication in the northern city he had left was Henry Watkin. Hieroglyphs of ravens, tombstones, and crescent moons illustrate the text. It is in moments of loneliness and depression, such as these days at Memphis, that the real Hearn shows himself. He becomes now and then almost defiantly frank in his self-revelations and confessions.
On October 28 he dispatched a card bearing two drawings of a raven; "In a dilemma at Memphis" was the inscription under a raven scratching its head with a claw. The other is merely labelled "Remorseful." His finances had, apparently, run out, and in spite of paying two dollars a day for his accommodations, he, according to his own account, had to lodge in a tumble-down, dirty, poverty-stricken hotel.
I have already referred to Hearn's choice of the name of "Ozias Midwinter," as signature to his series of letters contributed at this time to the Commercial. These letters, his first professional work, except "The Tan-yard Murder" and "The Ascent of the Spire of St. Peters," rescued from destruction, show how long hours of unflagging industry spent on achieving a finished style were at last to bear fruit, giving them that extraordinary variety, ease, and picturesqueness which, combined with originality of thought and keenness of judgment, placed him ultimately in the forefront of the writers of the day.
A postcard, written to Mr. Watkin on November 15, 1877, enabled the identification in the files of the Commercial of these "Midwinter" letters.
He approached the Memphis of the Mississippi, he said, dreaming of the Memphis of the Nile, and found but tenantless warehouses with shattered windows, poverty-stricken hotels vainly striving to keep up appearances.... The city's life, he said, seemed to have contracted about its heart, leaving the greater portion of its body paralysed. It gave him the impression of a place that had been stricken by some great misfortune beyond the hope of recovery. When rain and white fogs came, the melancholy of Memphis became absolutely Stygian; all things wooden uttered strange groans and crackling sounds; all things of stone or of stucco sweated as if in the agony of dissolution, and beyond the cloudy brow of the bluffs the Mississippi flowed a Styx flood, with pale mists lingering like shades upon its banks.
"Elagabalus, wishing to obtain some idea of the vastness of Imperial Rome, ordered all the cobwebs in the city to be collected together and heaped before him. Estimated by such a method, the size of Memphis would appear vast enough to astonish even Elagabalus."
Of Forrest, the great Confederate leader, whose funeral took place at Memphis while Hearn was there, he gives a vivid description. "Rough, rugged, desperate, uncultured. His character fitted him rather for the life of the border and the planter. He was by nature a typical pioneer—one of those fierce and terrible men who form in themselves a kind of protecting fringe to the borders of white civilisation."
Then comes a typical paragraph: "The night they buried him, there came a storm.... From the same room whence I had watched the funeral, I saw the Northern mists crossing the Mississippi into Arkansas like an invading army; then came grey rain, and at last a fierce wind, making wild charges through it all. Somehow or other the queer fancy came to me that the dead Confederate cavalrymen, rejoined by their desperate leader, were fighting ghostly battles with the men who died for the Union."
To Mr. Watkin he wrote describing his big, dreary hotel room overlooking the Mississippi whence he could hear the panting and puffing of the cotton boats and the deep calls of the river traffic, but of the Thompson Dean there was not a sign to be seen or heard. In every corner between the banisters of the old stairway spiders were busy spinning their dusty tapestries, and when he walked over the floors at night they creaked and groaned as if something or somebody was following him in the dark.