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The Champion Coiumnidl
A Glimpse of brilliant, half-forgotten Lafcadio Hearn
By "MOUSE" STRAIGHT
TODAY'S newspaper columnists are the aristocrats of the Written Word. Never before in history has it been so falling-off'a-log easy for anyone to turn out Copy. With their keyholes, inside tips, legmen and research staffs . . . with their chrometrimmed Dictaphones or their guiltedged blonde secretaries, the Winchells, Pearsons, Peglers and Hoppers are veritable Willow Runs for Writing.
Yet again and again, into their daily stints of 500 to 1,000 words, there creeps a plaintive bleat against the inexorable obligation to turn out one column every day . . .
The sissies!
Far back in primitive 1878, a spiritual ancestor — equipped only with pen and foolscap — turned out five regular columns!
Pint-sized, half -blind, neurosis-ridden Lafcadio Hearn has never been ranked as a literary tip-topper of the 19th century, though many of his translations from the French, his descriptions of the West Indies, and his stories of the colorful Creoles of Louisiana are unforgettable. No, Hearn can't be listed with Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe or the other giants cf his day, but his feats as a
columnist, during two and a half years with the old New Orleans Item, should make modern journalists blush bright scarlet!
Let the sound effects man, with a whirrrrrrroooooop of his slide whistle, whisk us back to the Item office of 1879 . . .
A puny, self-absorbed man enters almost furtively and hangs up an enormous, broad-brimmed black felt hat. (Contemporaries said he looked like "the stub end of a candle being snuffed out by a pie plate.") Now that he has his hat off, we can observe a long nose and scraggly moustache, if we like, but we'll probably be attracted, instead, to his enormous pop-eyes. One has an ugly film over it. That eye is blind. The other has a myopic stare. Its effective viewing range is limited to inches.
Hearn speaks to no one. Perfectly oblivious to the chattering, clattering office, he paces up and down the cocoa matting of the aisle. Then you know his mind is made up. All the pieces of an editorial, a criticism, or a short story have fallen into place, for abruptly he seizes a pen and a handful of long, narrow sheets of yellow paper. With a sort of eagerness in his strange face, he places the