Creole Sketches/Lafcadio Hearn's Cartoons
LAFCADIO HEARN'S CARTOONS
Lafcadio Hearn's first employer in New Orleans is still living—an active old gentleman of eighty-two, who may be found at his desk in the bank any day during business hours. He is Colonel John W. Fairfax, a veteran of the Confederate army, having gone into the war at the age of twenty; and he was a newspaperman of the sixties and seventies.
He was the owner of the Daily City Item when that paper gave Hearn his first employment in the city to which he came so enthusiastically in the winter of 1877-78, and where he so nearly starved before he got that job, in the summer of 1878.
"I remember Hearn very well, indeed," says Colonel Fairfax, "even that first day when he came to us for work. I am not sure whether he came to me in my office on Gravier Street, or whether Bigney — Mark F. Bigney, then managing editor of the Item — sent for me to come and see if we wanted to take him on.
"You see, Hearn was a most unprepossessing object at first sight. That odd rolling eye of his was the only thing you could see at first — enormous, protruding. After you got used to that eye, you saw that his other features were very good, and his face refined. But in addition, when he first presented himself here he was miserably dressed, and even his hands were grimy and his nails black.
"He had had a hard time, you see, since he had come down from Cincinnati; and one reason why Bigney hesitated about taking him on was that we had heard that he had had to leave Memphis on account of his violent Republican ideas. Perhaps I oughtn't to tell that even now — but surely the war is over by this time. In those days, however, it was a serious thing in this part of the world, and it worked against Hearn.
"We took him on, though, and I had such a sort of sympathy for the poor fellow, who looked as if he hadn't had a good meal in months, and who seemed to feel keenly the way the boys treated him, on account of his Republican ideas, and his queer appearance and all that, that I asked him to come up to our house to dinner — not once, but again and again — twice a week, for a good while.
"Just the other day, my wife was recalling the time he first came. Dressed in a blue coat, linen trousers, his coat buttoned up to the throat to hide his shirt — 'wasn't he an odd sight?' said my wife. And shy? Why, that first meal he just sat and crumbled his bread would scarcely eat a mouthful. Ours was a big family, and there were almost always guests; and until he got over his shyness we used almost to ignore him, going on with the family routine as if he were not there, to avoid embarrassing him.
"But when he got over that shyness, he was a charming talker; and we grew attached to him. My daughter used to tease him.
"He wrote editorials for the Item, but most of the political editorials were written by Bigney or by me. When, in the winter of 1881, the Times-Democrat offered him a place on its staff, we had to let him go, because we could not meet the offer. The Item then was only a two-page sheet."
Besides these editorials, and the occasional "Fantastics" which Hearn contributed to the Item between the summer of 1878 and the winter of 1881, a column of book reviews, called "Our Book Table," and a column of advice to young people, somewhat on the order of those of "Ruth Ashmore," "Dorothy Dix," and "Beatrice Fairfax," were conducted for many months by the pen which afterward wrote "Chita"! No wonder Hearn hated journalism.
Strangest of all, the young Irishman who was finding his métier through so many incongruous and distasteful tasks, drew a series of cartoons which appeared daily for more than half a year. They are quaint, grotesque, and crude, but many of them show the same weird suggestiveness to be seen in the odd little sketches with which he illustrated his letters to certain friends, and, like these, remind one of the drawings of Victor Hugo and of that artist whom Hearn so greatly admired, Gustave Doré.
Colonel Fairfax is authority for Hearn's authorship of these cartoons and the verses or prose sketches which accompanied them. In reply to queries about the articles to be ascribed to his queer protégé, the former owner of the Item said: "Hearn did not write the 'Wayside Notes' — that was my column. But I'll tell you what he did write those verses illustrated with woodcuts. They were all Hearn's — his ideas, his verses, his drawings. He drew those cartoons — the first newspaper cartoons in this part of the country — and he cut them with his pen-knife on wood-blocks on the backs of old wooden types, which had been used for advertisements. They were just the right height, you see, to fit into the bed we used the old-fashioned flat-bed press, of course — and every day he would whittle out one of those drawings. Some of them were right interesting, too. You remember those about the old 'Magazine Market gang'? That was a gang of hoodlums that ruled all that part of the city, and the police were powerless. Hearn held them up to ridicule, in these cartoons — the hoodlums and the police — till something had to be done, and the police finally took hold and broke up the gang."
Many of the cartoons were political, a few on phases of national politics, for a Presidential campaign was at its height during the summer and fall of 1880, when this series appeared. Some were about the follies of the municipal officials, especially the Board of Health, whose futile efforts to control the yellow fever and other epidemics were bitterly attacked by the Item in those days.
But the majority of the cuts pictured quaint local customs, or else certain foibles of human nature which have neither season nor place. A dozen or so were devoted to the delineation of special public nuisances, under the head of "Illustrated Letters from the People," and anathematized the churl, the bore, the boy on "The Unspeakable Velocipede," and others whom the letter-writers objected to, as hostile to civic welfare or private comfort.
Some of these "letters" may have been contributed, though the drawings which illustrated them were Hearn's. Others must have been written by Hearn himself, for they are in his most extravagant style.
Colonel Fairfax says that it is possible some of the drawings may have been made by others, but he has no recollection of any one else but Hearn doing this: and he does remember him very distinctly, at work "with a penknife that had two blades, using first the large one and then the small one, to get the effect he wanted on the block."
The woodcuts we have chosen, out of the nearly two hundred which appeared between May 24 and December 10, 1880, have been selected because they illustrate the Creole life which fascinated Hearn in all its features — the "ultra-Canal" life which he ever preferred to the conventional uptown Americanized districts; the humble life of landladies and booksellers, of washerwomen and darkies selling clothes-poles; of queer old men haunted by "ghosteses," of flower-sellers and cemeteries, quacks and hoodlums.
New Orleans
October 27, 1923