Is all biography also autobiography?

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As long-term followers will know, the above question worries me (in the canine sense). The reason my Introduction went through so many versions was that half of my test-readers thought there was too much of me in it and not enough of George, but the other half thought the opposite. The inspiration of John Aubrey: My Own Life, as its author Ruth Scurr tells us in her Introduction, was her love of Aubrey’s prose, his mind and her native Wiltshire. These are autobiographical facts. Her book, then, although ostensibly by Aubrey, is an autobiographical artefact, the product of her personal dialogue with John Aubrey. As well as supposedly being Aubrey’s autobiography, it is a fragment of Scurr’s own (for this ability to be two voices at once, see the second entry in my spoof post of 29 April 2015). And I certainly would accept that one reason I chose to write George Calderon’s biography was that, like him, I am a Russianist and intermittent theatre bloke. In my book I work out some of my own values/beliefs, e.g. about acculturation, in dialogue with George’s own values/beliefs expressed in his life as I have researched it.

Now it so happens that I have just read a book which exemplifies the complexity of this subject better than any other, and its complexity is even deepened by the presence of a large amount of fiction. This book is The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn, by the extraordinary creative polymath Roger Pulvers. First published in Japan in 2011, it has just been brought out in London by Balestier Press.

Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904), despite his improbable name and the improbable events of his life, was a real person. But I don’t have to summarise Hearn’s life, because Pulvers has written his own ‘Life of Lafcadio  Hearn’ as his 23-page introduction. This is an exemplary non-fictional Brief Life written with limpid scholarly objectivity. So the book entitled The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn and sub-titled ‘A Novel’, contains biography sensu stricto… 

But the Graeco-Irish Lafcadio Hearn ‘became’ Japanese. He took on Japanese citizenship and ‘became’ Yakumo Koizumi. Actually, I would say, the man Hearn became a fictitious person with a great future ahead of him. To quote from Pulvers’s ‘Life’:

He created an illusion and lived his days and nights within its confines. That illusion was his Japan. He found in Japan the ideal coupling of the cerebral and the sensual, the one constantly recharging the other and catalyzing in him the inspiration to write.

[…]

Following his death in Tokyo, the Japanese crowned him with their ultimate laurel: He became their ‘Gaijin Laureate’, the single greatest non-native interpreter, in their eyes, of their inmost cultural secrets. Even today, Hearn is considered in Japan the foreigner who understood the Japanese in the most profound way.

Make no mistake, Hearn was a very serious anthropologist: the energy, curiosity and aesthetic appreciation with which he collected and wrote about Japanese folklore, customs, ghost stories, etiquette, traditional art and ritual are reminiscent of George’s engagement with Russia and Tahiti. But Hearn’s exquisitely mannered Japan was the Japan of the past. Pulvers’s thesis, as it were, is that the Meiji Japanese did not want this past, they were rushing headlong into occidentalism, nationalism, militarism and imperial aggrandizement. According to Pulvers, Hearn utterly disapproved.

So that is the non-fictional biography of Lafcadio Hearn (pp. 9-31) — always remembering that as Yakumo Koizumi the man Hearn fictionalised himself… Now (pp. 35-217) comes the novel entitled The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn.

The first thing to note here is that it’s a first-person novel and the narrator is Hearn/Koizumi himself. I.e. it is an ‘autobiographical’ novel. The second thing to say is, it’s a fantastically enjoyable and skilfully written short novel.

It is an undivided narrative told in episodes of varying length, but these flow seamlessly into each other and themes are subtly reprised (e.g. suicide). The keynote, though, is unpredictability. Either this is a result of the stunning otherness of Japanese life as experienced by Hearn, or it is a function of Hearn’s own self-dramatising and histrionic temperament. Whichever, what used to be called ‘the absurd’, but which might now be called life’s quantum contingency, is never far away, and to hilarious effect.

Pulvers’s Hearn has a usually imperturbable cat called Edgar [Poe]. In the course of one of Hearn’s many arguments with Japanese about the country’s nature and future, Lafcadio raises his voice and the cat bolts indoors:

‘You see? I even frighten my own cat.’

‘No, it was not you. You do not frighten anybody, professor. It was that.’

Akira pointed to the narrow pebbled path at the foot of the verandah. A frog sat on it with his belly glowing from the inside.

‘He swallow too many fireflies,’ said Akira.

I jumped off my rock unable to contain my laughter. I found myself leaping up and down, first beside the rock, then by the frog, which remained in place all the while. Akira, like the frog, stayed where he was, smiling along with me.

Although Hearn is always referring to the impassivity of Japanese faces, he is also constantly discovering their own ability to laugh:

I stopped under a large tree by a paddy field. The farmers were working among their rice plants […] the tree resounded with a veritable string section of cicadas. I approached the trunk and looked up. I started to shinny up the trunk, but the cicadas still did not stop their trilling. I was some six feet off the ground, with my head entirely inside the tree. I could see hundreds of them, a black mass. Resting my knee in the fork formed by two branches I removed my hat — it was even hotter in the tree than outside it — and waved it above my head, screaming to the players at the top of my lungs […] This not only satisfied me enormously, but it also shut up the cicadas. When I slid down the trunk and covered my head again, however, they resumed their music. The farmers, crouched in their paddies, stared at me with bulging faces, as if I were a Basque ghost. I doffed my hat to them, and a cicada flew out of it. They laughed raucously at this, and so did I. We had, indeed, found common ground in unsuspected juxtaposition. Who could now say that I was not,  finally, on my own home ground?

Amongst other things, Pulvers has been a distinguished actor and playwright. His impersonation of Hearn’s voice (which we already know from samples of his prose) is impeccable and the dramatic pace of his prose unstoppable.

In Pulvers’s version, Hearn is a kind of Cyclops, always struggling with the difficulties of his gammy eye. Some might say that The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn is a picaresque novel (it contains, for example, a cartoon American of part-Russian origins with the name Pectopah, which is simply how tourists pronounce the Cyrillic of the Russian for ‘restaurant’). But there is also great beauty in the autobiography of Lafcadio Hearn, for instance in a scene where he accompanies Japanese to a sea-washed cave with a statue of Jizo (‘He protects dead children when they cross the river Sanzu and enter the other world’), surrounded by votive plaques left by parents and piles of round stones supposedly ‘left by the dead children themselves in the middle of the night’. Equally, no cultural holds are barred. One of the supreme scenes in the novel is when Hearn makes ‘a fatal mistake, succumbing to admiration’ and attends a soirée given by an American missionary at ‘a palace in Shirogane such as only the wealthiest and most long-established Japanese families could aspire to own’. Whilst grace is being said, Hearn/Koizumi fantasises that he is in the missionary’s study showing him a book of Japanese prints that become increasingly pornographic. The missionary is hypnotised by their ‘realism’ and one of them is described in explicit lurid detail. At that point, ‘the kerosene lamp exploded’!

Hearn is utterly counter-suggestible. ‘The Japanese have the phrase kanzen muketsu, which means “absolute perfection”. But I had thought up kanzen yuketsu, “absolute imperfection”. This had been my ideal.’ In a skilled pair of hands like Pulvers’s, caprice is always refreshing, exciting, mesmerising, comic or farcical. But by the end of the novel, Hearn says, ‘even this ideal made no sense to me at all’. The end is dark. The pupils of Sensei Hearn literally march away from him into the holocaustic future:

A parade was in progress on the campus. I stood, breathing with some difficulty, and walked to the window. There, passing below the tall cherry tree, were students and teachers of the university formed into two straight lines. Some were grasping flags in their fists. One student, with head shaven clean like a monk’s, held an effigy of a Russian soldier, a short sword, sticking out of its belly, flapping up and down as he brandished his effigy high in the air.

I would never dream of defining or over-analysing such an exuberant, Protean creation as this novel. But clearly it manages to be a number of things at once. If the novel part is a novel (which it self-evidently is), then it is a fictive autobiography. But if it is fictive can it have any claim to biographical value?

I would say it can. Even though many of the characters must be fictitious, and I assume all the dialogues are made up, the bare bones of documented (‘historical’) events do run through The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn. But above all the novel embodies the most important biographical facts: Hearn’s psychological insecurity, his cultural self-assimilation, and the nature of contemporaneous Japan. It reads as a novel, but is also truthful biography. It is, if you like, what Doestoevsky called ‘realism in the higher sense’.

Finally, it is a fair guess that The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn is autobiographical not just because its narrator is Hearn himself. Roger Pulvers, with several decades of intimate experience of Japanese life, is surely in a dialogue here with Hearn (and, of course, Japan). Thrust as a nineteen-year-old orphan on America’s shores, Hearn eventually developed intense Americanophobia and moved to Japan. Pulvers himself gave up his American citizenship in 1976. His own autobiography, to be published on 15 March 2019, is entitled The Unmaking of an American: A Memoir of Life in the United States, Europe, Japan and Australia. It will surely be as fascinating as his novel.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’  Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.