Burning boy, p.106
Burning Boy, page 106
On May nineteenth, the day before the war ended, Crane’s friend and fellow correspondent Sylvester Scovel had this to say about Cora in a letter to his wife, Frances:
“Stephen Crane is here with Mrs. Stewart. I was afraid that she would ruin him, but really her influence has, so far, been the reverse. He has done such good work since that his publishers and others are increasing their offers for future work.
“She went to the front with him; was under artillery fire at Velestino, and was the last non-combattant to leave the place after the battle.
“But poor woman, how will it end. She urges him along, but even if he wished to, he cant marry her, as her husband Sir Donald Stewart, son of the British Commander in Chief of India will not divorce her.
“Stephen was very glad to see me and, I to see him. He is true steel. They took my boat off my hands, and went to the front day before yesterday.
“I don’t know when I shall see them again. If you were here it would be embarrassing if they were here too. Lady Stewart is received by some of the most prominent people and even the Queen may receive her. How’s that for the Greeks who are said to be the only moral people in this part of Europe?”
* That Bass decided to write this article shows the enormous status Crane had achieved by then—a young man so famous that his own bureau chief thought it would interest the public to read about him watching Crane watch his first battle. But such was Crane’s position in America that for every person who admired him, there was another who didn’t, and the attacks that had begun with his first book of poems only doubled and tripled as time went on. Now that he was in Greece reporting on the war (and doing an excellent job of it), his detractors couldn’t resist going after him again. First published in the Lewiston Evening Journal from Maine and then reprinted by the demolition experts at the New York Tribune, this “poem” is one example: “I have seen a battle. / I find it very like what / I wrote up before. / I congratulate myself that / I ever saw a battle. / I am pleased with the sound of war. / I think it is beautiful. / I thought it would be. / I am sure of my nose for battle. / I did not see any war correspondents while / I was watching the battle except / I.” The unrelenting nastiness he was subjected to in his own country was one of the reasons (among several) why Crane moved to England after the war.
* “A Fragment of Velestino” was published as one of Crane’s “letters” for the Westminster Gazette, but the first installment did not turn up in print until June third, well after the end of the war. The editors explained in a prefatory note: “Mr. Stephen Crane’s letters have by some accident been considerably delayed in transmission, but we make no apology for publishing them three weeks after the events to which they relate, since their literary interest, as impressions of the battlefield, are in no way diminished by the lapse of time.” That literary judgment still stands more than a century later, but the communication problems the Gazette refers to were common during the war, and travel was likewise beset with myriad difficulties. As Crane remarked in his one lighthearted report from Greece (“The Dogs of War”—which chronicles the adventures of the small puppy he found on the battlefield): “Volo is, ordinarily, 300,000 miles from Athens. In time of war, it is the square of 300,000. Every route is impossible. All the steamers are on war business. All the carriages have vanished. There are no horses. It requires more energy to travel now in Greece than it does to do a three months’ campaign.”
* In spite of Conrad’s protests, there are clear signs of Crane’s influence on that early phase of J.C.’s work, mostly through Red Badge and primarily on the 1897 novel and Lord Jim (1900). Berryman mentions this casually in his book, as if it were a foregone conclusion, but a number of scholars have looked into the question more deeply and have come up with compelling evidence to support the argument. It is not a matter of imitation, of course, but of influence—the impact Crane’s work had on Conrad’s thinking about his own work as well as the impact their friendship had on his life. For a particularly good article on this subject, see Nina Galen’s “Stephen Crane as the Source for Conrad’s Jim” (Nineteenth-Century Fiction 38, no. 1 [June 1983]).
* Never published in Crane’s lifetime, it did not appear in print until 1929. Why it should have been excluded from the collection is not known, but the simple answer could be that Crane lost track of the manuscript and didn’t know where to find it—not the first time he would have lost something he had written. The fact that he sent a copy to Elbert Hubbard confirms that Crane intended to publish it, but his follow-up letter from January 29, 1898, asking Hubbard whether he had received the poem would suggest that the package had gone astray, since Hubbard routinely published all the poems Crane sent him.
* That same summer (1898), in an action separate from the war with Spain, the American government took possession of the Hawaiian Islands and turned them into a territory of the United States.
* The darlings of the American press during the war, the Rough Riders consisted of one thousand men from all parts of the country, a mix of millionaires’ sons and Arizona sheriffs, cowboys, college athletes, and young intellectuals. To the general public, they embodied the finest virtues of a free democratic society—which necessarily meant, of course, that every member of the unit was white. Crane had nothing against Roosevelt’s untested volunteers and even voiced his admiration for their courage in the Battle of San Juan Hill, but it irritated him that the soldiers of the regular army were mostly ignored by the journalists. In his last article for the World (July 20), which carried the headline “Regulars Get No Glory,” he wrote, “The public wants to learn of the gallantry of Reginald Marmaduke Maurice Montmorenci Sturtevant, and for goodness sake how the poor old chappy endures that dreadful hard-tack and bacon. Whereas, the name of the regular soldier is probably Michael Nolan … the ungodly Nolan, the sweating, swearing, overloaded, hungry, thirsty, sleepless Nolan, tearing his breeches on the barbed wire entanglements, wallowing through the muddy fords, pursuing his way through the stiletto-pointed thickets, climbing the fire-crowned hill—Nolan gets shot.” Soon after the war ended, Crane turned these sentiments into his most powerful short story about the Cuban campaign, “The Price of the Harness,” which Conrad described in a letter to Cora as “magnificent … the very best thing he has done since the Red Badge.”
* These were not the customary duties of a war correspondent but an active participation in the war itself. Unlike some of his friends, Crane never picked up a rifle and fired at the enemy, but he was all in behind the cause of Cuban liberation and did not consider helping that cause to be a conflict of interest. Staunch anti-imperialist that he was—especially British imperialism—he bought into the argument that America had no territorial ambitions in Cuba and did not question it.
* Scovel had gone to Cuba as early as 1895 to report on the insurrection. In 1896, he was arrested by the Spanish, managed to escape, and spent a year with the rebels behind enemy lines. When he returned to Cuba in 1897, following his months in Greece during the Greco-Turkish War and his expedition to the Klondike, the Spanish arrested him again, but he was let go when the American government demanded his release. In spite of the dustup with Shafter, Scovel eventually made his way back to Cuba, settled in Havana with his wife, Frances, and continued writing for the World until 1902. After his resignation, he found other work in Havana and died there in 1905 at age thirty-six.
* With the blessing of their mother, of course, who was now living in London with her seven-year-old daughter, Helen.
* A. E. W. Mason, 1865–1948. An actor and playwright, Mason also wrote popular detective stories and was the author of The Four Feathers, a novel that has twice been adapted into films, one from 1939 starring Ralph Richardson and the other from 2002 starring Heath Ledger.
* Not to be confused with Wilbur’s daughter Helen R., whose 1934 reminiscence of her uncle has been quoted several times in these pages. Helen R. was born eight years after William’s Helen and added the initial to her name to distinguish herself from her older cousin.
* A tentative plan by Crane to leave England again to cover the Second Boer War. Nothing came of it. Similar plans to report from St. Helena and Gibraltar also came to nothing.
Paul Auster, Burning Boy
