Mixed Marriage

FATHER AND I--Kazuo Koizumi-- Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).

One of the most interesting of minor U. S. writers, Lafcadio Hearn has never been widely read, nor has his strange career been fully and deeply explored. Of Greek and Irish descent, blind in one eye, Hearn arrived in New York in 1869. Later he lived in Cincinnati where he became involved in a scandal with a mulatto woman; in New Orleans where he won a small reputation as a scholar and journalist; in the West Indies, where he renounced Western civilization. In 1890 he settled in Japan, married a member of a distinguished Samurai family, became a Japanese citizen and professor of English literature at the Imperial University of Tokyo, adopted his wife's family name of Koizumi ("Little Spring"). He produced eleven volumes of interpretation of Oriental life and literature, raised three sons and a daughter.

A reckless bohemian in his early manhood. Hearn had declared his acceptance of paganism as a way of life, and had frequently expressed his distaste for U. S. civilization, for "all that is energetic, swift, rapid ... all competition, rivalry, all striving in the race for success"; had characterized New York as a monstrous "city walled up to the sky and roaring like the sea." Since his death in 1904 the legend has grown that he was a writer whose great natural gifts were frustrated, that his slight and graceful essays are no true indication of his stature. Critics w?ho believe that the U. S. is death to genius have found in his desperate wanderings, in the expressions of loneliness and despair that fill his letters, strong confirmation for their argument.

Very little of Lafcadio Hearn's background appears in his son's reminiscences, largely because, like many sons, Kazuo Koizumi overestimates the extent of the world's familiarity with his father's career. Eleven years old when his father died, Kazuo Koizumi writes of him with affection and candor, draws a portrait of a strict, sensitive, nervous, sometimes self-pitying man who was dominated by fear of an early death, tells an occasional anecdote that throws a cold realistic light on the romance of Hearn's expatriation and marriage. That the son has thought deeply about his father's career and character is readily apparent from the pages of Father and I. That he has brooded over the problem of inter-racial marriage, and questioned the wisdom of his parents' course, is suggested in several speculative paragraphs. Once Hearn contemplated writing an essay on mixed marriage and discussed it with his Japanese wife, who pointed out that he was the product of such a marriage, asked if he considered himself a poor product. When Hearn confessed that he thought he was, she asked: "What about our children? Is it right to acclaim to the world the poor product of such a marriage?" Thereupon Hearn destroyed his manuscript. "I think of that manuscript now," his son remarks frankly, "and imagine all sorts of things."

By the time he had become a Japanese citizen Hearn, no longer a bohemian, insisted that "no boy or girl should ever be left unguarded." His son recalls him as too strict in his morality, declares that at the sight of some modern customs he "would surely have lost consciousness."

Most readers of Father and I, however, will find the book of value for its engaging and artless picture of healthy Japanese childhood, will enjoy Kazuo Koizumi's account of learning to swim, his retrospective delight with the new toys his father bought him, his terror and shame when his new sword was stolen from him by trickery, far more than they will enjoy his tributes to his father's honesty and pride. Like most boys, Kazuo was fascinated by his great-grandfather, sketches a portrait of an eccentric old man that suggests a similar portrait in James Thurber's My Life and Hard Times. Once the old man believed he had forgotten his tobacco pouch at the start of a journey, made his steamship return to shore, only to be embarrassed by the discovery that he had the pouch with him all the time. Kazuo Koizumi does not mention what biographers of Hearn have pointed out: that with his wife's family, Hearn was compelled to support 13 people on his small salary.

Studies with his father darkened young Kazuo's life. Nervous, exacting, impatient, Hearn frequently slapped his son for having learned his lesson badly. Reproached for his severity, Hearn replied: "If I don't teach him as much as I can, my life will not wait." Once when Kazuo was being punished he turned away from his father, and hiding his face left "raindrop-like" tear stains on the glass door of his father's study. Later he came upon his father wiping the glass with one of his socks, "wiping away the stains of my tears, and touching them as if they were wounds and talking out to himself, saying 'Don't think me cruel.' "

Only a week before his father's death little Kazuo began reading his books, found them interesting and easy to translate, was astonished that his severe parent became shy and uncertain as soon as the son became a critic of his works. Indirectly suggesting the pathos of his father's isolation, his inability to fit into the Oriental environment he had chosen, Kazuo writes of his mother: "At times her hysteria was bad and her selfish nature became very noticeable, but these he tried to overlook by considering her finer qualities."

Between the lines of Father and I an informed critic may find evidence of Hearn's disillusionment with Japan, but readers in general, fathers in particular, are likely to close the book with a feeling that a mixed marriage producing so honest and devoted a son as Kazuo Koizumi can scarcely be called a failure.

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