Burning boy, p.14
Burning Boy, page 14
On going forward she perceived it to be a huge fat man in torn and greasy garments. His grey hair straggled down over his forehead. His small, bleared eyes sparkling from amidst great rolls of red fat, swept eagerly over the girl’s upturned face. He laughed, his brown, disordered teeth gleaming under a grey, grizzled moustache from which beer-drops dripped. His whole body gently quivered and shook like that of a dead jelly fish. Chuckling and leering, he followed the girl of the crimson legions.
What happens next is utterly obscure. Between the end of this paragraph and the beginning of the next, Crane elides the intervening action, offering no account of what might or might not have taken place, and instead jumps forward to the final image of the chapter. There is a gap, and the reader is left to fill in the account of Maggie’s death for himself. Does the hideous, gargoyle-like creature murder her? Or does she take her own life by drowning herself in the river? Impossible to say. The only thing we know for certain is that Maggie is dead and that her death has occurred off camera or, more precisely, in the space between two sentences, and it is all the more sickening because we are forced to imagine it for ourselves. It’s true that Maggie and the creature are still present in the first words after the final jump—but then what?
At their feet the river appeared a deathly black hue. Some hidden factory sent up a yellow glare, that lit for a moment the waters lapping oilily against the timbers. The varied sounds of life, made joyous by distance and seeming unapproachableness, came faintly and died away to a silence.
Oilily is a proper word, but it sounds strange and awkward here. Say it out loud often enough, however, and it begins to sound like a lamentation.
The final two chapters serve as a double epilogue.
In XVIII, Pete sits with half a dozen prostitutes in a saloon, grows progressively drunker and more slurred as he repeats ad nauseam, “I’m a good f’ler, girls,” professes his love of the universe as he intermittently quarrels with the waiter, declares to Nellie, the “woman of brilliance and audacity,” that he is stuck on her, pulls some cash from his pocket and puts it on the table to prove his noble intentions, since he is, after all, a “goo’ f’ler,” and eventually passes out and falls to the floor. Nellie stands up, stuffs the money into her pocket, looks down at the snoring, stupefied Pete, and says, “What a damn fool.” Then she walks out into the night.
Chapter XIX begins as if Crane were introducing a new character and a new setting, extending his novel into a different territory. “In a room a woman sat at a table eating like a fat monk in a picture.” Who is this woman, and why is she compared to a monk? A monk is not a woman but a man, and why the added detail of “a monk in a picture”? What picture is Crane referring to, and what does it have to do with the story we have been reading? I can only speculate, but it strikes me that he is establishing the last scene of the book by removing the action from contemporary New York and once again evoking an earlier age, one in which, for example, fat monks sat at tables gorging themselves on mounds of food, and since the only monks Crane had ever seen were the ones depicted in Renaissance paintings hanging on the walls of the Metropolitan Museum, to think of a monk was to think of those paintings. But why a monk and not a nun? Because there are no paintings of fat nuns gorging themselves on food. The fat monk is a known character, a familiar type, and because this sentence starts the chapter and stands alone in the paragraph, cutting it off from what comes next, Crane is isolating the image and forcing us to look at it as if it were a painting, in the same way he presented Maggie on the last night of her life in a series of isolated, unconnected images. The power of the image first of all––to make us see what we are looking at and look closely at what we are seeing—and then, after we learn that the woman is in fact Maggie’s mother, we understand that Crane has desexed her, robbed her of her femininity, and turned her into someone who cannot bear children. Therefore, she has become a man, and not just any man but a monk, a man who has sworn a vow of celibacy and is forbidden to produce children, a man who in popular lore has sublimated his sex drive into the pleasures of gluttony, and by turning Maggie’s mother into a celibate, gluttonous man, Crane is silently accusing her of being an unloving, unnatural mother, a mother who has hastened the death of her daughter by refusing to shoulder the responsibilities of motherhood.
Earlier in the book, Jimmie was compared to a monk as well (“the little boy ran to the halls, shrieking like a monk in an earthquake”), and now, in the second sentence of the last chapter, Jimmie enters the room and stands before his mother, who is not named as such but is simply “the woman,” just as Jimmie is simply “the man,” in this instance “a soiled, unshaven man,” and in the third sentence the man says to the woman, “Well, Mag’s dead.”
“What?” said the woman, her mouth filled with bread.
“Mag’s dead,” repeated the man.
“Deh hell she is,” said the woman. She continued her meal. When she finished her coffee she began to weep.
This is extraordinary. A hundred things have happened in eight short sentences, and they have happened so fast that it is almost impossible to take them in on the first reading. Crane is a writer whose work demands to be read slowly and deliberately, sentence by sentence, with brief pauses between the sentences in order to digest the full import of what they contain. The prose can be choppy and disjointed, an unpredictable style that stuns and stings rather than charms, and because it does not induce the spell created by the grand, flowing novels of earlier decades, works by Dickens or Balzac or Tolstoy, you cannot curl up on a sofa and settle into a book by Crane. You have to read him sitting bolt upright in your chair.
By the next sentence, the blubbering woman has lapsed into another fugue of self-pitying sorrow. Without asking a single question about how her daughter died, she begins to act the part of grieving mother. It is a performance, and as the women from her building crowd into the apartment to witness the show, the woman raves on about the little woolen booties Maggie wore as an infant. Her acting is so persuasive that the others commiserate with her, acknowledging what an affliction it is to be the mother of a disobedient child, and soon others are weeping as well, a dozen women weeping and groaning at the same time, each one in a different key, a chaos of tears and groans filling the room as one of the weeping women, dressed in black and identified as Miss Smith, gets down on her knees beside the mourning woman’s chair and begs her to forgive her wicked girl.
“Yeh’ll forgive her, Mary! Yeh’ll forgive yer bad, bad chil’! Her life was a curse an’ her days were black an’ yeh’ll forgive yer bad girl? She’s gone where her sins will be judged.”
“She’s gone where her sins will be judged,” cried the other women, like a choir at a funeral.
“Deh lord gives and deh lord takes away,” said the woman in black, raising her eyes to the sunbeams.
“Deh lord gives and deh lord takes away,” responded the others.
“Yeh’ll forgive her, Mary!” pleaded the woman in black. The mourner essayed to speak but her voice gave way. She shook her great shoulders frantically, in an agony of grief. Hot tears seemed to scald her quivering face. Finally her voice came and arose like a scream of pain.
“Oh, yes, I’ll fergive her! I’ll fergive her!”
The hypocrisy is so blatant and self-damning that it verges on the ludicrous, the laughable. But such is the force of Crane’s bitter ending that laughter dies before it can reach the throat.
8
In a comic bow to William Makepeace Thackeray, Crane called the boardinghouse on Avenue A the Pendennis Club. In Thackeray’s novel, a fatherless country boy goes to London and becomes a writer, and now that the fatherless American boy had left the seashore and arrived in his own big city, carrying no earthly possessions but the pen in his pocket and a handful of pennies in his purse, he was going to become a writer as well—and by no uncertain implication a great one. For the rest of 1892 and into the early weeks of 1893, he worked to finish his first novella in the room he shared with Fred Lawrence, pausing between sentences to stand before the windows that looked out over the East River and Blackwell’s Island, a narrow strip of land on which stood a hospital, a lunatic asylum, and a prison.* Because the world was there for him to see and he was in the world to write about it, he incorporated that prison into the first page of his book and used it as a backdrop to the stone fight between the children of Rum Alley and Devil’s Row: “Over on the Island, a worm of yellow convicts came from the shadow of a grey ominous building and crawled slowly along the river’s bank.” Less than a year after Crane wrote those words, when the Panic of 1893 was beginning to demolish the American economy and millions were being thrown out of work, Emma Goldman was locked up in that same prison for telling a crowd of one thousand people in Union Square to “go into the streets where the rich dwell and ask for work, and if they do not give you work, ask for bread, and if they do not give you work or bread, then take bread.” Such were the times. And such was the city Crane lived in during the rough years of little food and next to no money. His niece Helen R. Crane believed that those hardships broke his health and eventually killed him.
Nevertheless, the city was there for the taking, and he took whatever he could. According to Lawrence, he and Crane often ventured downtown to various entertainment spots on the Bowery, “then in the heyday of its multicolored existence,” as well as the Atlantic Garden and Blank’s, where they “could enjoy good music and passable variety at the cost of a few glasses of beer,” Koster & Bial’s “huge music hall” on Twenty-third Street, and dance performances by the famous Carmencita (later captured on film by Edison in one of the world’s first movies) and Loie Fuller, a former headliner with the Folies Bergère who became the living emblem of Art Nouveau. Some of these places, or ones much like them, found their way into Maggie, but Lawrence was not the only person who accompanied Crane on his nighttime excursions, and beyond the operettas in popular music halls, there were the full-scale operas he attended, the recitals and concerts, and, to feed his ever-growing passion for it, as many jaunts to the theater as his resources would allow. Within a year of his arrival, he had dashed off “Some Hints for Play-Makers,” a humor piece that could have been written only by someone who had sat through his fair share of duds (“Second Recommendation: ‘A society play. Entitle this anything you please, so long as the one you hit upon does not refer … to anything connected with the drama’”), but when the plays were good, he was exultant. To Garland, after attending a performance of Gerhart Hauptmann’s Hannele the following spring: “As an irresponsible artistic achievement it’s great. I sat and glowed and shivered.”
Once Maggie was finished, Crane followed the suggestions of Garland and Johnson and submitted the manuscript to both Gilder and Hitchcock. The editor of the Century Magazine, an advocate of tenement reform who had known Crane’s father and had visited the Crane household during S.C.’s childhood, was appalled by the language and rejected the book. Hitchcock, who would later publish several of Crane’s works, told Johnson that “the boy has the real stuff in him” but felt the novel had no commercial prospects and turned it down as well. Whether Crane submitted the manuscript to other publishers is not clear, but if he did, the answers he received were all negative. There were only two options left to him: either bury the manuscript in a drawer and forget about it or publish the book himself.
Whitman had done it with Leaves of Grass, Melville had done it with his late collections of poems, and now Crane followed their example and joined the ranks of self-published authors—a venerable if somewhat tainted American tradition. To go down that road might help repair a damaged ego, but at the same time, once you put your foot on it, you discover that the road is hexed, and whoever walks on it becomes invisible.
William, the man with many daughters, helped Crane find the money to cover the printing costs by engineering an arrangement that wound up adding to his own net worth. It is possible that he also dipped into his bank account to provide whatever extra funds were needed, but that is only speculation. I would like to think he did, if only because a man who stood up so bravely to a lynch mob deserves every benefit of the doubt, but when it came to money matters William was tough and tight, as stern as a well-oiled calculating machine, and I can also imagine him driving a hard bargain with his little brother, not through any devious intentions but simply because that was how his mind worked. What he proposed was that Crane relinquish his one-seventh share of their mother’s house along with the Pennsylvania coal mine stocks he had inherited in exchange for cash at fair market value. Crane, who had no talent for thinking about or handling money (it went on slipping through his fingers to the end of his life), cared only about his book and accepted William’s terms. Rather than ask around at a number of print shops to find out the going rate for producing small books such as his, he impulsively went to the only one he was familiar with, a shop on lower Sixth Avenue that he had walked past often on his rambles through the city. According to Lawrence, “they set a price and it was agreed to without demur.” At $869, Crane was vastly overcharged. Nor was he put out when the printer read the book and informed him that the company’s name—out of common Christian decency—would be kept off the title page, which meant that Crane’s self-published book would, in effect, be published by no one. He didn’t seem to care. He had traded his inheritance for a chance to be in print, and because it was the only chance available to him, he forked over the money without giving it another thought.*
What he did care about was offending his family, however, and possibly being arrested for breaking the vice laws (as some friends warned him), so he concocted a pseudonym for himself and published the book under the name of Johnston Smith. Accounts vary on how he hit upon that solution, but according to his friend Linson, Crane’s reasoning was simple enough: “Commonest name I could think of. I had an editor friend named Johnson, and put in the ‘t,’ and no one could find me in the mob of Smiths.” According to Johnson himself, Crane discovered that there were more Smiths and Johnsons in the New York directory than any other name and added the “t” as a flourish to throw snooping busybodies off his scent. Post Wheeler, on the other hand, remembered that he was the one who suggested it to Crane—as a joke. It hardly matters now who originated the idea of Johnson-Smith, but an attentive reader will notice that among the few last names mentioned in the novel (both Pete and Nellie are referred to by their first names only, for example), the most prominent ones are Johnson and Smith, as in Maggie Johnson and Miss Smith, the woman in black who appears at the end and implores the grieving woman to forgive her “bad, bad chil’.” I wonder if Crane was even aware of this overlap. What is clear in both instances, however—both for Crane the pseudonymous author and for the characters in his book—is that the names are bland and generic, not because Mr. Smith lacked the imagination to invent more striking ones but because he was reluctant to assign names to his characters at all, feeling more comfortable with epithets such as “a woman of brilliance and audacity,” since he saw his characters as quasi-mythological types, embodied representatives of various human attributes, each one individuated by means of his or her own distinct personality but also objectified and continually watched from a certain distance throughout the book. This tendency would vanish in Crane’s later fiction, but in his early work it is quite pronounced—to such an extent that he, the author of the book, chose a name for himself that was hardly even a name, a name that turned him into anyone, one more anyone lost in a mob of Smiths.
The finished book was ready in late February or early March. Eleven hundred soft-bound copies with a cover of red type set against a yellow background, three parallel red bands at both the top and bottom, and in the upper-right-hand corner a figure announcing the price at fifty cents per copy, a heftier sum than the standard ten or twenty-five cents that soft-cover books sold for at the time and not an insignificant amount when you consider that a dollar then was the equivalent of twenty-eight dollars today. Yellow: the color of the new and the radical in that era of shifting artistic perspectives, the color of the Decadent movement, the color of sexually provocative French novels, the color of Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde, and the short-lived but never forgotten Yellow Book. The year of Maggie, 1893, was also the year when Knut Hamsun’s slightly younger contemporary Edvard Munch, another renegade from Norway, painted The Scream, and Crane’s book was yellow because he felt that he too was taking part in the renegade spirit of the age. But a book has to sell some copies, or at least get talked about in the press, to make any kind of mark on the world, and Maggie neither sold nor got talked about. Whitman, an experienced journalist by 1855, promoted his self-published book by publishing a number of enthusiastic, self-written reviews under different pen names to spread the word of his genius—and also by sending one of the 795 first-edition copies of Leaves of Grass to Ralph Waldo Emerson, after which he plucked a sentence from Emerson’s warmhearted response and stamped it on the spine of the second edition: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” The much younger and less aggressive Crane lacked Whitman’s talent for advertising. The one stunt he came up with, as reported by his Syracuse classmate Frank Noxon, was to hire four men “to sit all day in front of one another in New York elevated trains, reading intently and holding up the volume so that passengers would think the metropolis was Maggie-mad.” The marketing campaign fizzled, but that pathetic, funny, juvenile effort to stir up interest in his book proves that for a short time after publication Crane still had hope that Maggie would succeed. The New York papers were silent. Only one early review popped up anywhere in the world—in the Crane family’s provincial hometown newspaper, the Port Jervis Union. The reviewer predicted that the pathos of Maggie’s story “will be deeply felt by all susceptible persons who read the book.”
