Chapter V: At Martinique

THE lure of the Sea and of the Unknown was upon Hearn during the entire stay at New Orleans. How deeply it entered his heart is shown in a fragment rescued by his friend, Dr. Matas, which has been kindly sent me. The copy is in print, but when and where it was published we have been unable to learn. It was probably written in 1885 or 1886. As it gives glimpses at once into Hearn's mind, of his fateful desire to roam, of his Nature-love, and, better, of his growing mastery of technic and imagery, I reproduce herewith the fragment, which he entitled:

GULF WINDS

Golden oranges piled up in bins,--apples of the Southern
Hesperides;--a medley of meridional tongues,--silky Latin
tongues and their silkier patois; Chinese buyers yellow as
bananas, quadroons with skin like dead gold; swarthy sailors
from the Antilles; sharp odours of fruit freshly
disembarked;--all the semi-tropical sights and sounds of the
French market. I stood beside an orange-bin; and priced the
fruit. Fifty cents a hundred! While wondering how much the
fruit-vender's profit could possibly be, I was insensibly
attracted by something unusual in his face--a shadow of the
beauty of the antique world seemed to rest upon it. "Are you
not a Greek?" I asked, for there was no mistaking the
metoposcopy of that head. Yes; he was from Zante--first a
sailor, now a fruit-vender; some day, perhaps, he would be a
merchant.

It is among those who sell, not among those who buy, that
the most curious studies of human nature and of the human
face are to be made in the French market. These dealers are
by no means usually French, but they are mostly from the
Mediterranean coasts and the Levant--from Sicily and Cyprus,
Corsica and Malta, the Ionian Archipelago, and a hundred
cities fringing the coasts of Southern Europe. They are
wanderers, who have wandered all over the face of the earth
to find rest at last in this city of the South; they are
sailors who have sailed all seas, and sunned themselves at a
hundred tropical ports, and finally anchored their lives by
the levee of New Orleans. The Neapolitan Italian, the
Spaniard, the Corsican, the Levantine Greek, seek rest from
storm here, in a clime akin to their own and under a sky as
divinely blue, and at a port not far distant from their
beloved sea. For these Levantine sailors hate dusty inland
cities and the dry air of the Great West.

If you, O reader, chance to be a child of the sea;--if, in
early childhood, you listened each morning and evening to
that most ancient and mystic hymn-chant of the waves, which
none can hear without awe, and which no musician can
learn;--if you have ever watched wonderingly the far sails
of the fishing-vessels turn rosy in the blush of sunset, or
silver under the moon, or golden in the glow of sunrise;--if
you once breathed as your native air the divine breath of
the ocean, and learned the swimmer's art from the hoary
breakers, and received the Ocean-god's christening, the
glorious baptism of salt,--then, perhaps, you know only too
well why these sailors of the Levant cannot seek homes
within the heart of the land. Twenty years may have passed
since your ears last caught the thunder of that mighty ode
of hexameters which the sea has always sung and will sing
forever, since your eyes sought the far line where the
vaulted blue of heaven touches the level immensity of
rolling water,--since you breathed the breath of the ocean,
and felt its clear ozone living in your veins like an
elixir. Have you forgotten the mighty measure of that mighty
song? have you forgotten the divine saltiness of that
unfettered wind? Is not the spell of the sea strong upon you
still?

So that when the long, burning summer comes, and the city
roars dustily around you, and your ears are filled with the
droning hum of machinery, and your heart full of the
bitterness of the struggle for life, there comes to you at
long intervals in the dingy office or the crowded street
some memory of white breakers and vast stretches of wrinkled
sand and far-fluttering breezes that seem to whisper,
"Come!"

So that when the silent night comes,--you find yourself
revisiting in dreams those ocean-shores thousands of miles
away. The wrinkled sand, ever shifting yet ever the same,
has the same old familiar patches of vari-coloured weeds and
shining rocks along its level expanse: and the thunder-chant
of the sea which echoes round the world, eternal yet ever
new, is rolling up to heaven. The glad waves leap up to
embrace you; the free winds shout welcome in your ears;
white sails are shining in the west; white sea-birds are
flying over the gleaming swells. And from the infinite
expanse of eternal sky and everlasting sea, there comes to
you, with the heavenly ocean-breeze, a thrilling sense of
unbounded freedom, a delicious feeling as of life renewed,
an ecstasy as of life restored. And so you start into
wakefulness with the thunder of that sea-dream in your ears
and tears of regret in your eyes to find about you only heat
and dust and toil; the awakening rumble of traffic, and "the
city sickening on its own thick breath."

And I think that the Levantine sailors dare not dwell in the
midst of the land, for fear lest dreams of a shadowy sea
might come upon them in the night, and phantom winds call
wildly to them in their sleep, and they might wake to find
themselves a thousand miles beyond the voice of the
breakers.

Sometimes, I doubt not, these swarthy sellers of fruit,
whose black eyes sparkle with the sparkle of the sea, and
whose voices own the tones of ocean-winds, sicken when a
glorious breeze from the Gulf enters the city, shaking the
blossoms from the magnolia-trees and the orange-groves.
Sometimes, I doubt not, they forsake their Southern home
when the dream comes upon them, and take ship for the
Spanish Main. Yet I think most men may wake here from the
dreams of the sea, and rest again. It is true that you
cannot hear the voice of the hoary breakers in the
moonlight,--only the long panting of the cotton-presses, the
shouting of the boats calling upon each other through the
tropical night, and the ceaseless song of night-birds and
crickets. But the sea-ships, with their white wings folded,
are slumbering at the wharves; the sea-winds are blowing
through the moon-lit streets, and from the South arises a
wondrous pale glow, like the far reflection of the emerald
green of the ocean. So that the Greek sailor, awaking from
the vision of winds and waves, may join three fingers of his
right hand, after the manner of the Eastern Church, and
cross himself, and sleep again in peace.

Hearn left New Orleans in July, 1887, and was soon settled at St. Pierre, Martinique. His letters to Dr. Matas form the principal sources of information concerning himself and his work during his stay there. From them I choose a few selections which bear upon his literary labours. At first, of course, all is perfection:

I am absolutely bewitched, and resolved to settle down
somewhere in the West Indies. Martinique is simply heaven
on earth. You must imagine a community whose only vices are
erotic. There are no thieves, no roughs, no snobs.
Everything is primitive and morally pure--except in the
only particular where purity would be out of harmony with
natural conditions. As for the climate, it is
divine--though this is the worst season.

And I have begun to hate all that is energetic, swift, rapid
in thought or action, all rivalry, all competition, all
striving in the race of success. It is just enough to live
here: no, it is too much!--it is more than any ordinary
human being deserves to enjoy. It makes one feel like crying
for joy just to look about one.

Couldn't I induce you to abandon the beastly civilization of
the U. S., and live somewhere down here forever
more,--where everybody is honest and good-natured and
courteous, and where everything is divine? Man was not
intended to work in this part of the world: while you are
here, you cannot quite persuade yourself you are awake,--it
is a dream of eternal beauty,--all the musky winds, all the
flower-months of Paradise! New Orleans is the most infernal
hole in the entire Cosmos. Don't live in it! Confound fame
and wealth and reputation and splendour. You don't need any
of these things here; they are superfluous; they are
obsolete; they are nuisances; they are living curses. Settle
here. Humming-birds will fly into your chamber to wake you
up. What on earth you can find to live for in the U.S. I am
now at a loss to see. You'll get old there;--here you will
remain eternally young: the palms distil Elixir Vitae.

But it is simply foolishness to write to you--because I
can't write about this place. All ambition to write has been
paralyzed--let Nature do the writing--in green, azure and
gold!

(Letter from St. Pierre, July 30, 1887.)

I am not at all sure of my literary future,--I do not mean
pecuniarily, for I never allow that question to seriously
bother me: to write simply to make money is to be a d----d
fraud, so long as one can aim at higher things. But I do
not feel the same impulses and inspirations and power to
create;--I have been passing through a sort of crisis,--out
of enthusiasm into reality and I do not feel so mentally
strong as I ought. The climate had much to do with it in
the beginning, causing a serious weakness of memory;--that
is now passed; but I feel as if _mon ame avait perdu ses
ailes_. Perhaps something healthier and stronger may come
of it; but in the meanwhile I suffer from great
disquietude, and occasional very black ideas; and praise
sounds to me like a malicious joke, because I feel that my
work has been damnably bad. The fact that I _know_ it has
been bad, encourages me to believe I may do better, and
find confidence in myself.

I have enough MS. for a volume of French colonial sketches,
and do not think I will be able to do much more with
Martinique for the present; but I also have accumulated
material out of which something will probably grow. I would
now like to attempt some Spanish studies.

Northern air will do me good, though I do not like the idea
of living in it. But when, after all this stupid, brutal,
never-varying heat, you steam North, and the constellations
change, and the moon stands up on her feet instead of lying
on her back lasciviously,--and the first grand whiff of cold
air comes like the advent of a Ghost,--Lord! how one's
brain suddenly clears and thrills into working order. It is
like a new soul breathed into your being through the
nostrils--after the Creator's fashion of animating his Adam
of clay.

Perhaps you think I have been a poor correspondent. You can
scarcely imagine the difficulties of maintaining a friendly
chat by letter while trying to do literary work here. Most
people who attempt literature here either give it up after a
short time, or go to the graveyard: there are a few
giants,--like Dr. Rufz de Lavison (who never finished his
Etudes nevertheless), Davey the historian; Dessalles who
suddenly disappeared leaving his history incomplete. But I
fear I am no giant. At 2 or 2.30 p.m. if you try to write,
your head feels as if a heated feather pillow had been
stuffed into your skull. To write at all one must utilize
the morning;--that is given to make the pot boil: one can
write letters only at intervals, paragraph by paragraph, or
between solid chapters of downright wearing-out work.

Nevertheless, one learns to love this land so much as to be
quite willing to abandon anything and everything to live in
it. As in the old Sunday-school hymn, "only man is vile:"
nature and Woman are unspeakably sweet.

I suppose I will not be able to meet you in New York this
fall: you will be too busy. Next summer it will be possible,
I hope. Perhaps you will have the pleasure of a little book
or two from me during the cold weather: I will revise things
in New York. It has been a horrible agony to have my stuff
printed without being able to see the proofs, and full of
mistakes. "Chita" has been a great literary
success--contrary to expectation. I find success is not
decided by the press, nor by first effect on the public:
opinions of literary men count much more, and these have
been better than I imagined they could be. (1887)

Well, I am caught! The tropics have me, for better or worse,
so long as I live. Life in a great northern city again would
be a horror insupportable. Yet I have had great pain here. I
have been four months without a cent of money where nobody
would trust me: you know what that means, if you have ever
had a rough-and-tough year or two: otherwise you could not
imagine it. I have had disillusions in number. I find worst
of all, there is no inspiration in the tropics,--no poetry,
no aspiration, no self-sacrifice, no human effort. Now, that
I can go where I like, do as I please--for I have won the
fight after all,--I still prefer one year of Martinique to a
thousand years of New York. What is it? Am I demoralized; or
am I simply better informed than before? I don't really
know. (1887)

New York, September 29, 1887.[12]

[12] Written during a brief stay in New York,
whither he had gone in the fall of 1887.

Dear Friend Matas:--I am going back to the
tropics,--probably for many years. My venture has been more
successful than I ever hoped; and I find myself able to
abandon journalism, with all its pettinesses, cowardices,
and selfishnesses, forever. I am able hereafter to devote
myself to what you always said was my _forte_: the study of
tropical Nature--God's Nature,--violent, splendid, nude, and
pure. I never hoped for such fortune. It has come unasked. I
am almost afraid to think it is true. I am afraid to be
happy!

_c/o_ Dr. George M. Gould,
119 South Seventeenth St.,
Philadelphia, June 5, 1889.

Dear Friend Matas:--Your letter of March 21 only reached me
to-day, June 5th; but made me very glad to get it. I have
been back from the West Indies about three weeks--do not
know how long I shall stay. It seemed like tearing my heart
out to leave Martinique; and though I am now in one of the
most beautiful cities in the world, among dear friends, and
with the splendid spectacle before me of man's grandest
efforts--not a wild cyclone of electricity and iron like New
York, but a great quiet peace--the tropical Nature with all
its memories haunts me perpetually,--draws my thought back
again over the azure sea and under the turquoise sky to the
great palms and the volcanic hills and the beautiful brown
women. I know I shall have to go back to the tropics sooner
or later.

The effect of the climate, as you know, is deadly to mental
work. Physically, however, I felt better in it,--less
nervous than I ever was before. Only one's will to work is
broken down; and it is better only to collect material there
to work up elsewhere. That sort of work I am busy at just
now. I have a signed contract for publication of "Chita" in
book-form; and the result of my two years' absence will be
forthcoming in a volume of larger size.

You know Philadelphia, I suppose, the beautiful city; and I
suppose you know that physicians here form the leaders of,
and give the tone to, social life. It seems to me but just
that they should,--representing the highest intellectual
rank of civilization when they are really worthy of the
profession.

... As for other people wondering what has become of me;
that is just what I want. I do not care to have any one know
what I am doing till it is done.... I have happily got over
a sort of crisis, however, which isolated me more than I
would have liked to be isolated from the world at large: the
distrust of myself.

Concerning the value of Hearn's Martinique work, I am permitted to quote from a letter written to him on May 24, 1890, by the late Edmund C. Stedman,--and there could be no better judge and critic:

"I will not leave without telling you how much I am your debtor for the fascinating copious record of your life in the Windward Islands, and for your 'Youma'--both of which I take with me to 'Kelp Rock'--and which we shall know by heart ere long. The 'Two Years' came when I was 'moving' in New York, etc.,--so that books and letters, unacknowledged, perforce have piled up on my table. I am grateful for your remembrance and your gifts. _No_ book could please me more than your 'Two Years.' Those Islands are my Hesperides--I had begun a series of poems and lyrics, cast in the Caribees, but your prose poems put mine to shame--and I am glad to listen to your music and leave my own unsung."