Au Japon. Amedee Baillot de Guerville

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СКАЧАТЬ a final dramatic encounter with Creelman), Greece, and Turkey, only returning to New York in the late summer of 1897. In November 1897 de Guerville’s wanderings—and his tenure with Leslie’s Weekly—came to an end when he became President and General Manager of The Illustrated American, taking over from Lorillard Spencer, the magazine’s founder. One commentator wrote of the new proprietor, “Mr. de Guerville will enlarge the paper and make it even more progressive than it has been.”28 Oddly enough, de Guerville’s Sino-Japanese War rival James Creelman had briefly managed the same publication in 1892. De Guerville’s tenure was to be brief as well.

      By late 1897, with a new marriage and the partial acquisition of The Illustrated American, de Guerville seems to have recovered from the disappointments of his Sino-Japanese War experience and reached another professional peak. He had an excellent marriage, was editor of a reputable New York magazine, and was a well-known and respected reporter in the intensely competitive New York City scene. As Leslie’s Weekly had once remarked, he was well situated to “make a mark upon his time,” and he was not yet thirty.

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      Reading the range of de Guerville’s work, one receives the distinct impression that he was happiest not behind a desk but independent and on the road. There is always a certain restlessness to de Guerville that he seems unable to elude. Even in his hours of sickness he is constantly on the move, as if it was the search for a cure, not the cure itself, which inspired. His description of himself during these years says much, “Burning with a desire to see, to know, to sense, to comprehend, I dispensed a limitless energy and vitality.”29

      But at the offices of The Illustrated American de Guerville was forced into a more routine, if more harried, existence. By his own characterization, 1897 and 1898 saw him in a swirl of social events and editorial responsibilities—tasks that left him exhausted and often not in bed until nearly morning. His writings during this period seem to effuse a sense of ennui. He revisited old topics or explored uninspiring new ones—“The Plain People of Spain,” “Santa Clause around the World,” “The Women of Japan,” or “Li Hung Chang in Pekin.” His last publication for The Illustrated American, “Woman’s Love in China,” was actually only a translation from a decade old work by Colonel Tchen-Ki-Tong, whom he had once met at a magic lantern show in Tianjin. The only topic that seems to have inspired de Guerville was the growing climate of belligerence towards Spain. Here de Guerville refused to pander to the period taste for sensationalism and jingoism, often using the pages of his periodical to criticize what he saw as a reckless drive towards war, notably on the part of the nation’s press. It was a lofty stand, but it didn’t help sales.

      Despite outward appearances of contented success, beneath the surface things were troubled. The hardships of travel were one thing, but de Guerville was less suited to the exertions of the editorial desk and social circuit. In January, 1898, a fire ravaged the offices of The Illustrated American, also destroying de Guerville’s “private collections”—including an assortment of personal photographs that was described as “probably unsurpassed by any collection in the city”—bringing further stress upon the young manager and editor.30 When de Guerville acquired The Illustrated American, the magazine was already on financially shaky ground, with subscription rates down and competition intense. The fire only compounded the publication’s financial difficulties—and indeed it would not survive the century. Based upon subsequent events, there is also reason to believe that de Guerville’s marriage was not finding its way to a storybook ending.

      With such accumulated stresses, the resurgence of de Guerville’s long dormant tuberculosis is not surprising. According to an obscure later publication by de Guerville, in the spring of 1898 he was revisited by the sickness that for so many years during his active, globe-trotting life had remained in check. As a result he gave up the The Illustrated American in March, 1898, when it was sold in public auction for $5,000, and for several months afterward he sought relief from his ailment in North America, from New York’s Finger Lakes to Florida, but all to no avail. By summer his six-foot frame, sturdy and vigorous in a photo from 1894, had withered to a mere 114 pounds. His left lung was completely eaten away, with the disease also making short work of the right one; his life, in his own words, “hung by a thread.”

      In August 1898, living under his doctor’s prognosis that he would not survive the year, de Guerville opted to quit America altogether for France, wishing to see his mother and his motherland a final time before dying.31

      We must take de Guerville’s own word on these particulars regarding his health, as such intimate details are not found elsewhere. The condition of his lungs aside, that by 1898 his marriage was ailing we can be certain. In late summer of 1898, when de Guerville quit New York City to seek relief from his tuberculosis, he apparently left his young wife behind. Partially as a result of this, in 1900 Laura Spraker de Guerville made a public suit for divorce on the grounds that her husband had abandoned her saddled with his debts. To these accusations she added elliptically and for good measure that she had “learned enough of his life abroad to justify her in bringing suit for an absolute divorce.”32

      Final Wanderings and Writings

      Like many who are sick, I no doubt repressed my illness a long time before it violently manifested itself. From the age of fifteen my life was very difficult and painful. Numerous exhausting trips to Korea, Cochin China, India, Egypt, Morocco, Cuba and all about the world, in all climates and seasons greatly improved my constitution. But feverish with a desire to see, to know, to sense, to comprehend, I expended immense energy and vitality, increasingly undermining my health as I threw myself into unending adventures.33

      One wonders if de Guerville read André Gide. They were both Frenchmen, born the same year. Both were consumptive as well. In 1897, when de Guerville was beginning to struggle with the renewed and vigorous assault on his lungs, Gide published his Les Nourritures Terrestres, a call of affirmation that emerged from Gide’s own battle with the killer disease (“Fevers of bygone days, you consumed my flesh with a mortal consumption . . . O loving beauty of the earth, the flowering of your surface is marvelous! Scenes into which my desire plunges . . . ”).34 Though ostensibly a paean to life on behalf of a young man afflicted, bedridden, and lacking in a life aesthetic, the book came to represent to a whole generation of youth the primacy of lived experience and personal freedom over formal education and the social constrictions of the times. The vocabulary of Gide seems to resonate in de Guerville’s short account of his own struggle with “the white death,” written in 1904, after he too had reclaimed life.

      In August 1898 de Guerville boarded the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse in Manhattan harbor and bid good-bye to the America that had nurtured and molded him over the previous decade. He would never return. He was going back to a Europe and a France he had never completely left behind. His younger brother had joined the invalid in New York to accompany him on a voyage he might very well not survive. By order of the Kaiser, hanging aboard Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, as with all passenger liners of the Hamburg Amerika Line, was a painting ostensibly designed by the Kaiser himself: Die gelbe Gefahr—“The Yellow Peril.” It depicted the Archangel Michael and an allegorical Germany leading the other European powers against an Asiatic (read Japanese) threat rising in the East represented by a golden Buddha.35

      If anything could get the ailing de Guerville across the ocean in speed and comfort it was the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. Launched in 1897, she was the pride of the German commercial fleet, rivaling any ocean liner on the seas. Her massive engines could carry 1,700 passengers across the Atlantic in six days, and to de Guerville in the late summer of 1898 each day was precious. As it was, he was in no condition to enjoy the luxuries the Kaiser Wilhelm offered its coddled passengers. He was delirious from a high fever, unable even to feed himself.

      But despite doctors’ gravest predictions, de Guerville did survive the journey, and the year. He even survived the century. However, what followed were nearly three years of hellish recovery, during which de Guerville often wished himself dead. From Paris de Guerville was dragged and pushed СКАЧАТЬ