A Traveler's Way With Words

Lafcadio Hearn: American Writings
Edited by Christopher Benfey
(Library of America, 848 pages, $40)


Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) is best known as the magisterial interpreter of Japan to the English-speaking world, a role he played after moving there in 1890, marrying a Japanese woman and then publishing a series of books in the West, such as the story collections "In Ghostly Japan" (1899) and "Kwaidan" (1904). But before his expatriation, Hearn was America's ace traveloguist. A generous compilation of his early journalistic writing throughout the New World from the Library of America reveals how powerful this forgotten genre can be.

Hearn's American masterpiece, collected in the Library of America edition, is "Two Years in the French West Indies" (1890). It includes a section called "A Midsummer Trip to the Tropics," an ecstatic but closely observed account of his voyage from New York down to the Lesser Antilles (the string of islands stretching from Antigua to Grenada). The bulk of the book, though, is a 300-page chronicle of Hearn's sojourn on Martinique, where he "fell under the influence of that singular spell which the island has always exercised upon strangers."

Hearn's descriptions of the land and sea are all the more vivid for their almost scientific precision. A vast valley in Martinique, he writes, is "watered by many torrents, and bounded south and west by double, triple, and quadruple surging of mountains, -- mountains broken, peaked and tormented-looking, and tinted (irisées, as the creoles say) with all those gemtones distance gives in a West Indian atmosphere."