The Outsider by Steve Kemme

Author:Steve Kemme
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
Published: 2023-05-12T00:00:00+00:00

‘I will wed some savage woman she shall rear my dusky race;

Iron-jointed, supple-sinewed, they shall dive and they shall run,—

Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun,

Whistle back the parrot’s call,—leap the rainbows of the brooks,—

Not with Blinded eyesight poring over miserable books.’”161

During his Grand Isle vacation, Hearn wrote Page Baker a long, playful letter filled with information and anecdotes about the resort, the activities and the people.162 For Baker’s amusement, Hearn drew sketches of some of the objects and people he mentioned in his letter. He drew Bisland in the water and, beneath that, drew his face, identifying himself as “Miss Bisland’s A No. 1 Chaperone.”

He dreaded the end of this pleasant respite on the island where he could swim every day. “Alas? the time flies too fast,” he wrote to Baker. “Soon all this will be a dream:—the white cottages shadowed with leafy green,—the cows that look into one’s window with the rising sun,—the dog and the mule trotting down the flower-edged road,—the goose of the ancient Margot,—the muttering surf upon the bar beyond bath-bell and the bathing belles,—the air that makes one feel like a boy,—the pleasure of sleeping with doors and windows open to the sea and its everlasting song,—the exhilaration of rising with the rim of the sun…. And then we must return to the dust and the roar of New Orleans to hear the rumble of wagons instead of the rumble of breakers, and to smell the smell of ancient gutters instead of the sharp sweet scent of pure sea wind…If I could live down here I should certainly live to be a hundred years old. One lives here. In New Orleans one only exists.” To keep his star writer happy, Baker allowed Hearn to return to Grand Isle several more times. Besides swimming and talking to the residents, Hearn also took advantage of the placid, quiet atmosphere of the island to write articles for the Times-Democrat while staying there. He much preferred Grand Isle as a workplace to the newsroom.

In addition to allowing Hearn occasional trips to Grand Isle, Baker helped him attract a publisher for Stray Leaves from Strange Literature. A reader for James R. Osgood & Co. in Boston had rejected Hearn’s manuscript by the time the publisher received Baker’s letter of recommendation. The letter convinced Osgood to reconsider, and the book was accepted. One of the few extravagances Hearn allowed himself in New Orleans was the purchase of exotic books. By the time he wrote Stray Leaves, he had amassed a collection of more than 500 books, some imported from abroad. He boasted to Krehbiel that almost every one of his books would be unfamiliar to the average reader. He culled the stories for Stray Leaves from his personal library. He chose the ancient myths, legends and fables from French translations of ancient literature of Egypt, India, Buddhism, Finland and Moslem nations. Hearn took more liberties in translating these than he did with Gautier’s.

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