Burning boy, p.13
Burning Boy, page 13
Chieftain-like stride. Not only does that phrase reaffirm that we are not, strictly speaking, confined to 1890s New York, but it also eliminates all doubt about who reigns as boss of the household.
Husband and wife quarrel. She tells him to butt out of her business, he accuses her of being drunk, and every sentence she utters during their “lurid altercation” is screamed or howled or roared or thundered. The baby hides under the table, Maggie slinks off into the corner to sit with Jimmie, and when the wife emerges as the “victor” of the quarrel, the husband grabs his hat and bolts from the apartment, “determined upon a vengeful drunk,” heading down the stairs as his wife continues to shout at him from the door.
Then Crane delivers this miracle of a sentence: “She returned and stirred up the room until her children were bobbing about like bubbles.” It is so good—and so unexpected—that it stands alone as the single sentence in the paragraph.
The mother prepares dinner, “puffing and snorting in a cloud of steam at the stove,” and the children then scramble to the table and dig into the greasy food, Jimmie “with feverish rapidity,” but “Maggie, with side glances … ate like a small pursued tigress.”
Before long, the mother lapses into the first of many bouts of self-pity that mark her presence throughout the book.
After a time her mood changed and she wept and carried little Tommie into another room.… Then she came and moaned by the stove. She rocked to and fro upon a chair, shedding tears and crooning miserably to the two children about their “poor mother” and “yer fader, damn ’is soul.”
The chapter ends, however, with renewed tumult, as Maggie clears the table and carries the dishes to the sink.
Jimmie sat nursing his various wounds. He cast furtive glances at his mother. His practiced eye perceived her gradually emerge from a muddled mist of sentiment until her brain burned in drunken heat. He sat breathless.
Maggie broke a plate.
The mother started to her feet as if propelled.
“Good Gawd,” she howled. Her eyes glittered on her child with sudden hatred. The fervent red of her face turned almost purple. The little boy ran to the halls, shrieking like a monk in an earthquake.
The intense, blow-by-blow accounts of bedlamite fury carry on through the whole of the third chapter, which concludes with Maggie and Jimmie again huddled together in a corner of the room, their eyes fixed on the “prostrate, heaving body” of their drunken mother asleep on the floor, “for they thought she need only to awake and all fiends would come from below.” Crane has been pounding the reader for more than a dozen pages at this point, but in the fourth chapter he steps back and alters the pace of the narrative. The opening chapters have served as a prologue, a minutely rendered depiction of “A Day in the Life of the Johnsons,” but years have passed now, and Jimmie and Maggie are no longer children. The fourth chapter and the first paragraphs of the fifth combine to form a bridge between the overture and the rest of the book, standing apart in tone, intention, and procedure, but they are essential passages, and without them the novel would not stir us or shake us as deeply as it does, for everything that happens afterward reflects back on what we learn in those pages.
Tommie has died, the father has died, both events tersely reported with no word as to how or when they died, and everything else in chapter IV is given over to a study of Jimmie’s life and character as Crane marches through the catalogue of his observations with cold and merciless understanding, a doctor cutting into his patient’s body with his scalpel, hands steady, eyes alert, digging to the bone.
The inexperienced fibers of the boy’s eyes were hardened at an early age. He became a young man of leather. He lived some red years without laboring. During that time his sneer became chronic.…
Jimmie’s occupation … was to stand on street-corners and watch the world go by, dreaming blood-red dreams at the passing of pretty women. He menaced mankind at the intersections of streets.
On the corners he was in life and of life. The world was going on and he was there to perceive it.…
After a time his sneer grew so that it turned its glare upon all things. He became so sharp that he believed in nothing.
After his father’s death, he becomes a truck driver. Contemptuous of most people, in particular “obvious Christians” and the rich, afraid of “neither the devil nor the leader of society,” he finds a new target for his resentment in the police, raining down curses on them as he drives his horse-drawn truck through the “turmoil and tumble of the down-town streets,” but sometimes, when he goes too far, they “climb up, drag him from his perch and beat him.” He also meddles in the disputes that break out among his fellow drivers in the thick of traffic, occasionally provokes them himself, and more than once has been arrested for fighting. Toward the end of the chapter, we are told that “he began to be arrested” as a little boy and by now has a substantial record, not just for fighting other truckers but for “a number of miscellaneous fights,” barroom brawls, and once “for assaulting a Chinaman.” Further: “Two women in different parts of the city, and entirely unknown to each other, caused him considerable annoyance by breaking forth, simultaneously, at fateful intervals, into wailings about marriage and support and infants.”
There is only one thing that impresses him, that strikes fear in him, one thing in all the world that fills him with awe and demands his respect, and every time he chances upon it as he lumbers around the city with his truck and two-horse team, he submits to its power and gets out of the way.
A fire-engine was enshrined in his heart as an appalling thing that he loved with a distant dog-like devotion. They had been known to overturn street-cars. Those leaping horses, striking sparks from the cobbles in their forward lunge, were creatures to be ineffably admired. The clang of the gong pierced his breast like a noise of remembered war.
Jimmie is a thug. Not altogether unsympathetic at times, not altogether incapable of showing an occasional flash of earnest feeling when the stars are properly aligned in the sky, but not often enough, not forcefully enough to contradict the portrait Crane gives of him in the fourth chapter, and nearly everything he does throughout the novel confirms the accuracy of that dissection. As with all the other characters in the book save one, he suffers from the triple disease of violence–hypocrisy–self-pity, and once those microbes enter your system, you can never be cured. Behold the mother. We are reintroduced to her early in the fifth chapter, and the now widowed Mrs. Johnson has turned into the neighborhood drunk, having “arisen to that degree of fame that she could bandy words with her acquaintances among the police-justices,” and whenever she is hauled into court, she “besieged the bench with voluble excuses, explanations, apologies and prayers.” The same woman, only worse. She still rules over her household as its most diseased member, a demented, ranting monarch who cares nothing for her children and everything for herself, but Jimmie is the head of the family now, and out in the world she has become a joke.
Only Maggie is untainted by the virus. Only Maggie is exempt from the illness that is eating away at the others, but why this should be so is never explained, is never even discussed. Crane offers her up as a sacrifice. The book would not be the book without her, and yet the victim who stands at the center of the action says little for herself, and most of the time she is mute. We are allowed into her thoughts, but Maggie is defenseless against the ones who ultimately destroy her, and because she cannot defend herself, she cannot speak—or, because she cannot speak, she cannot defend herself. Either way, one senses she is doomed from the start. The fifth chapter begins with these paragraphs:
The girl, Maggie, blossomed in a mud puddle. She grew to be a most rare and wonderful production of a tenement district, a pretty girl.
None of the dirt of Rum Alley seemed to be in her veins. The philosophers up-stairs, down-stairs and on the same floor, puzzled over it.
When a child, playing and fighting with gamins in the street, dirt disguised her. Attired in tatters and grime, she went unseen.
There came a time, however, when the young men of the vicinity, said: “Dat Johnson goil is a puty good looker.” About this period her brother remarked to her: “Mag, I’ll tell you dis! See? Yeh’ve edder got teh go teh hell or go teh work!” Whereupon she went to work, having the feminine aversion of going to hell.
By a chance, she got a position in an establishment where they made collars and cuffs. She received a stool and a machine in a room where sat twenty girls of various shades of yellow discontent. She perched on the stool and treadled at her machine all day, turning out collars.… At night she returned home to her mother.
One blink later, Pete enters the apartment and the story is launched. This is the same Pete who broke up the stone fight in the first chapter, the sneering sixteen-year-old hellion now transformed into a cocky, snappily dressed bartender whose clothes look like “murder-fitted weapons.” He and Jimmie have recently crossed paths again, and he has come to pick up young Johnson and take him to a boxing match in Brooklyn. Maggie watches Pete sitting on the table with his legs dangling comfortably beneath him, finds herself impressed by his loud clothes and brimming self-confidence, and concludes that “he must be a very elegant and graceful bartender.” When he begins boasting to Jimmie about the pleasure he takes in tossing drunken customers out of his saloon, she is even more impressed and thinks he is “the beau ideal of a man.” Crane then adds: “Her dim thoughts were always searching for far away lands … [and] under the trees of her dream-gardens there had always walked a lover.” Pete, finally taking notice of Maggie, looks at her and remarks, “Say, Mag, I’m stuck on yer shape. It’s outa sight,” and then, knowing that she is listening carefully to him, he amplifies his boasting to a new level with this tender story about his good-hearted impulses toward his fellow human beings:
“I met a chump deh odder day way up in deh city,” he said. “I was goin’ teh see a frien’ of mine. When I was a-crossin’ deh street deh chump runned plump inteh me, an’ den he turns aroun’ an’ says, ‘Yer insolen ruffin,’ he says, like dat. ‘Oh, gee,’ I says, ‘oh, gee, go teh hell and get off deh eart’,’ I says, like dat. See? ‘Go teh hell an’ git off de eart’,’ like dat. Den deh blokie he got wild. He says I was a contempt’ble scoun’el, or something like dat, an’ he says I was doom’ teh everlastin’ pe’dition, an’ like dat. ‘Gee, I says, ‘gee! Deh hell I am,’ I says. ‘Deh hell I am,’ like dat. An’ den I slugged ’im. See?”
Rough stuff, one would think. Rough enough to scare off even the boldest girl, but Pete’s account of his run-in with the chump (one assumes a wealthy chump) only increases Maggie’s fascination with him. “Here was a formidable man who disdained the strength of a world full of fists. Here was one who had contempt for brass-clothed power; one whose knuckles could defiantly ring against the granite of law. He was a knight.”
Pete is a knight, and Maggie is a damsel in distress longing for the knight to rescue her from the prison of her dreary factory job and carry her off to a place where “the little hills sing together in the morning.”
Madame Bovary, who fed herself on the illusions found in cheap romantic novels, was poisoned by those books in the same way Quixote was driven mad by the books he read. It is not known if Maggie has gone to school (nothing is said about it) or whether she is even capable of reading a book, but her impulses are no different from those of the higher-born Emma Bovary, and even if there are no books in her life, her imagination is fed by stories—the wispiest of fairy tales, dreams no more solid than clouds.
So begins the courtship, which Crane presents in a series of ever more disturbing episodes as the romance inevitably crashes to its end, following the pretty tenement girl and the gallant bartender on their nights and afternoons out together in various music halls and theaters (all vividly drawn, especially Maggie’s identification with the heroines in the melodramas she sees—more fairy tales to dream about), in a Bowery dime museum to gawk at rows of “meek freaks” (their deformities fill Maggie “with awe” and she thinks them “a sort of chosen tribe”), at the Central Park Menagerie, where Pete tries to encourage one of the monkeys “to fight with other and larger monkeys,” and in the Museum of Arts (the Metropolitan), where Maggie looks around her and says, “Dis is outa sight.” The knight is preparing the way for his conquest of the innocent, unsuspecting lady, but even as the romance progresses, Crane handles the physical side of it with utmost discretion, and the only kiss ever referred to is the one Maggie does not give Pete after their first evening out together. However obliquely told, or not told except by implication, Maggie eventually succumbs to her suitor’s loutish charms. In the wake of this supposed crime, she is expelled from the family apartment by her mother and brother, quits her job at the factory, and moves in with Pete (never stated in the text, but more than strongly suggested). The romance is still in the ascendant at this point, and Maggie feels no shame in her altered circumstances, even if the word marriage has never come up. “Her life was Pete’s and she considered him worthy of the charge. She would be disturbed by no particular apprehensions, so long as Pete adored her as he now said he did. She did not feel like a bad woman. To her knowledge she had never seen any better.” Just three weeks after that, Sir Pete has already begun to tire of his lady and her “spaniel-like dependence” on him. When an old flame unexpectedly strolls into his life again, a flashy, self-assured prostitute named Nellie, described by Crane as “a woman of brilliance and audacity,” he turns his back on Maggie and forgets her—as if she had never existed. He doesn’t even feel guilty about it. As with everyone else who suffers from the triple disease, he is a master of self-absolution, for the dogma of those who dwell in darkness has never varied over the ages: Whatever I do is justified—because I am the one who does it.
It is a tragic turn for Maggie, but the deeper, more terrible tragedy of the book is not her seduction and abandonment by Pete but her mother’s implacable heart, which burns hot with hatred even as it sits frozen in her chest, and because Mary Johnson is a woman made of both ice and fire, she does not hesitate to turn against her daughter and denounce her as a child of the devil. After all, what would the neighbors think? The smallest gesture of compassion would have spared Maggie, but neither she nor Jimmie is strong enough to stand up to the matriarch’s tyrannical whims or control her sprees of drunken self-righteousness, and the one time Jimmie’s disgust spills over into a direct challenge, he and his mother duke it out in the apartment and “struggle like gladiators.” As Maggie observes in an earlier chapter: “It seems that the world had treated this woman very badly, and she took deep revenge upon such portions of it that came within her reach. She broke furniture as if she were at last getting her rights.” The rampant woman destroys furniture and battles with her son, but she never lays a hand on Maggie. Instead, she kills her with words—and then, to finish her off, with no words. And who, she says “would tink such a bad girl could grow up in our fambly.”
Turned away by her mother and brother, then turned away for the last time by Pete, whose parting words to her are “Oh, go teh hell,” Maggie walks out of the saloon and wanders around the streets, so dazed by what has happened to her that the only question she can ask herself is “Who?” Not what or how or when—but who, for now that she has lost her bearings and has nowhere to go, she is beginning to disappear from herself, as if she were dissolving into a formless blot of nothingness. Eventually, she comes upon a stout man dressed in a “silk hat and a chaste black coat” whom she recognizes as a minister. “The girl had heard of the grace of God and decided to approach this man,” but the beaming, benevolent-looking messenger of the Lord sidesteps her with “a convulsive movement” and walks on, thus saving his respectability instead of trying to save her soul, “for how was he to know there was a soul before him that needed saving?”
When the next chapter begins, several months have passed. Maggie, now “one of the painted cohorts of the city,” is out on a wet night as the theaters are disgorging their patrons onto the “storm-swept” sidewalks. The chapter is just three pages long, but it is the best chapter in the book, a tour de force in which a brilliant formal idea coupled with an almost perfect execution of that idea manages to convey, in just a few minimal strokes, the grim, solitary life of a girl of the streets. With great moral insight, but also with great artistic acumen, the young author holds back from mentioning Maggie’s name in any one of the sentences he writes about her in those three pages. Her identity has been erased by her new calling, she has been turned into an anonymous, almost nonexistent being, a no one who has ceased to merit the dignity of a name, and from beginning to end she is referred to simply as “the girl.” Nor does Crane presume to tell us what she is thinking, as he has done until now whenever she appeared in earlier chapters. The images do the work for him, and because those images are so precisely rendered into words, we enter a state of heightened visual awareness, an ultra-visuality, as it were, and, as I have suggested before, the effect is eerily cinematic. An implausible, anachronistic film is suddenly playing before our eyes, and as Maggie’s slow march to death begins, we follow her as if tracing the course of her life in the streets through a series of eleven harsh jump cuts, watching her pass from one potential customer to the next, each one shabbier and poorer than the one before him, each street she walks down darker and more menacing than the one before it, and whether this is all happening on that one night or over a succession of many nights is not important, for we live it in the Now of the images Crane is presenting to us, just as films are always experienced in the Now, whether they are flashing forward into the future or back into the past, and there is the first potential customer of the night, “a tall young man smoking a cigarette with a sublime air,” a chrysanthemum in the buttonhole of his tuxedo jacket, looking bored, then looking interested, then abruptly losing interest when the girl comes closer and he sees that she is “neither new, Parisian, nor theatrical,” and then the paragraph ends and Crane jumps immediately to the next man, “a stout gentleman, with pompous and philanthropic whiskers,” whose broad back “sneers” at the girl as he walks on past her, and then jumps to the next, “a belated man in business clothes,” who accidentally bangs into her shoulder, apologizes, tells her to “Brace up, old girl,” and rushes off to wherever he is going, and then the next, “a young man in light overcoat and derby hat,” who returns her glance with a mocking smile, saying, “Come on now, old lady, you don’t mean to say that you sized me up as a farmer?,” and then the next, “a laboring man … with bundles under his arm,” who pleasantly answers her remarks (not recorded on the page), observing, “It’s a pleasant evenin’, ain’t it?,” and then the next, “a boy … hurrying by with his hands buried in his overcoat,” who answers her smile with a smile of his own and then waves good-bye, saying perhaps another night, and then the next, “a drunken man, reeling in her pathway,” who roars, “I ain’t got no money, dammit,” and then the next, “a man with blotched features,” and then the next, “a ragged being with shifting, blood-shot eyes and grimey hands.” Then, after the next jump, the girl is walking on alone as she enters “the blackness of the final block.” When she is almost at the river, she sees “a great figure” standing before her in the near distance.
