Burning boy, p.15
Burning Boy, page 15
Garland was one of those susceptible persons, and Crane immediately dispatched him a copy of the novel, which in its final version bore only a scant resemblance to the manuscript Garland had read six months earlier. Crane’s dedication, which includes another one of his bizarre spelling errors (f’or instead of for), is an essential document concerning how and what he thought about Maggie, and also, I believe, about what he didn’t quite know but had expressed unwittingly in his book.
It is inevitable that you be greatly shocked by this book but continue, please, with all possible courage to the end. F’or it tries to show that environment is a tremendous thing in the world and frequently shapes lives regardless. If one proves that theory, one makes room in Heaven for all sorts of souls (notably an occasional street girl) who are not confidently expected to be there by many excellent people.
It is probable that the reader of this small thing may consider The Author to be a bad man, but, obviously, this is a matter of small consequence to
The Author
Environment, yes, which is there for all but the blind to see and has put Crane squarely in the realist-naturalist-determinist camp for generations of scholars and critics, but what about the word “Heaven” and his conviction that Maggie is with the angels now, in spite of what “excellent people” would suppose, that is, hypocrites who pretend to believe in God but believe in nothing, as personified by the falsely benevolent minister who shuns her? The word “Heaven” opens the door to further speculation about why Crane wrote the book in the first place and why he felt so drawn to the lives of the urban poor. He did not have the impulses of a reformer, took little or no active interest in politics, was not in the business of saving souls, and did not travel through those tumbledown streets in order to collect socio-anthropological data on the habits and customs of the natives. My sense is that he was horrified by what he saw—and fully caught up in it because it thrust him down deep into himself and the subterranean world of his unconscious, the dark, hidden sphere of his childhood and the religion of his parents. Life among the fallen. Not just the fallen lower classes stranded on the Darwinian battleground of capitalism, but the spiritually fallen in the kingdom of a God who might or might not exist. That was why he could tell Garland that Maggie was in heaven. Human beings had souls, and innocent souls were spared the wrath of divine punishment—assuming there was such a thing as divine punishment—and if “excellent people” were destined to land in the heaven they had imagined for themselves, then surely there was a place in it for creatures like Maggie. From early childhood, Crane had been at war with the religion of his parents. He rebelled against it, poked fun at it, dismissed it, and yet it was always there for him, pulsing faintly under his skin, as steady as the air that kept on going in and out of his damaged lungs. With Maggie, he took the first step toward discovering his mission as a writer. From then on, all his most important works of fiction would concern themselves with extreme situations, with matters of life and death: war, poverty, and physical danger. He wrote many other things as well, many of them good things, but the best were always written when he was afraid, trembling in his bones and scarcely aware of what he was doing—or why he was doing it.
Garland was impressed by the little novel and invited Crane to dinner at the apartment on West 105th Street that he was temporarily sharing with his brother Franklin, an actor who was performing in a play at a New York theater. Garland found Crane looking “distressingly pale and thin,” but once the meal was served and the young man had downed his fill of steak and coffee, “he gave out an entirely different expression. He chortled and sang as he strolled about the room … and for an hour or two talked freely and well, always with precision and original tang.”
It sounds as if the boy had been desperately hungry for some time.
Garland also mentions that Crane “never offered to assist with washing the dishes.” Not because Garland thought he was lazy but because Crane struck him “as one remote from the practical business of living.” There is probably some truth in that remark, and how eerily it meshes with Cora’s scribbled note about Crane moving his soldier-buttons around the floor as a small boy: “never picked up buttons after play.”
It was then or soon after that Garland suggested Crane send Maggie to Howells, as well as to a number of prominent reformist ministers and influential figures such as Brander Matthews (writer and theater professor at Columbia), Julius Chambers (writer and newspaper editor), and John D. Barry (novelist, playwright, and theater critic for Harper’s Weekly). They were all solid literary men of their day, and since Garland was the only flesh-and-blood literary man Crane knew, he followed his friend’s advice. The ministers said nothing. According to Linson, Crane told him, “You’d think the book came straight from hell and they smelled the smoke. Not one of them gave me a word. Icebergs, CK, flints!” The writers proved to be a bit less hostile than the clergymen. Most of them said nothing as well, but the mailed packages wound up eliciting some answers—and with those answers some consolation for the monumental, money-sucking flop he had produced.
In spite of Crane’s disappointment, he dug in and continued working at his usual hectic pace. At some point before or just after the release of Maggie, he wrote a nimble, well-turned bit of satire and parody about a young clerk in “a little gents’ furnishing store” who sits alone on a stool immersed in what he hopes will be a salacious French novel as customers straggle into the shop and interrupt his reading. The young clerk in “Why Did the Young Clerk Swear?”—yet one more fictional character with no name—skims through seventeen boring, unsexy chapters that describe “a number of intricate money transactions, the moles on the neck of a Parisian dressmaker, the process of making brandy, the milk-leg of Silvere’s aunt, life in the coal-pits and scenes in the Chamber of Deputies,” fixes his attention on passages such as “Silvere was murmuring, hoarsely. He leaned forward until his warm breath moved the curls on her neck,” but when the clerk reaches the end of the book and discovers that it has failed to deliver on its titillating promises, he angrily tosses it aside and says, “Damn!” The sketch was published in the weekly humor magazine Truth and Crane received fifteen dollars for it. After subsisting on a minimal diet for the past several months, often on one meal a day and sometimes on no meal at all, he blew the entire wad on a champagne supper with a bunch of friends.
By pure coincidence, the day the piece was published was also the day when the Pendennis Club held a boisterous party to celebrate the publication of Crane’s book. One of the participants elected himself “a committee for the Advancement and Preservation of Maggie” and managed to talk some of the guests into buying copies, which in all likelihood were the only copies out of the eleven hundred printed that anyone ever bought.* Lawrence mentions taking “a very active part in brewing the huge bowl of punch which constituted the main decoration” and how everyone was “in a highly cheerful state,” producing such an uproar “that the entire neighborhood was soon hanging out of its windows in an effort to determine whether it was a riot or a political convention.” Linson, who was also there, remembers Crane “thrumming chords” on a banjo, “and soon the ‘Indians’ were chanting to the rhythmic pound of a war dance.” At around midnight, the landlady came upstairs to tell the chanters that she rented rooms to “gentlemen, not animals,” and Crane “called through the door while waving a frantic hand behind, compelling quiet. ‘The animals apologize and will return to their cages at once,’ and to us, ‘Cheese it!’” In another variant of the story collected by Schoberlin, what Crane reportedly said was: “Cheese it, for God’s sake! She’ll throw me out if you Indians don’t die. We owe her a month’s rent as it is.”
Someone took a photograph that night at the party. It is an amusing picture and the only document that furnishes visual evidence of life at the boardinghouse on Avenue A. Seven young men sitting or standing around a table cluttered with drinking glasses, a bottle, and other objects too murky to identify, as well as a pair of human skeletons with clay pipes jutting from their mouths, no doubt procured as homework specimens by the medical students who lived there. The skeletons are a wacky touch, a sign of festive, college-boy shenanigans, but, somewhat curiously, at that particular instant no one in the picture seems to be in a “highly cheerful state.” They are all looking off or down and appear to be lost in their own thoughts, except for one of the standing men, who might or might not be looking into the camera, and another who is kneeling or squatting on the floor and studying (or reading) a small stub of paper. This is Lucius L. Button, one of Crane’s good friends, and immediately to Button’s right is Crane himself, sitting in a chair with a banjo stretched across his lap and holding a pipe in his right hand. The pipe is in his mouth, we see the first traces of a tentative, newly grown mustache, and he too is looking down at nothing in particular with a thoughtful expression on his face. Still, there he was, surrounded by others. For a person universally known as “taciturn” and “introverted,” Crane nevertheless thrived on fellowship and filled that need in various ways over the years—by joining a fraternity in college, for example, or playing on baseball teams or going on camping trips with his friends or becoming a member of clubs—and even if he didn’t talk much, he seems to have had a magnetic quality that drew others toward him. As Lawrence writes in his memoir:
His charm, and it was a great one, is difficult to explain. He had a great capacity for friendship, though his circle was always somewhat restricted. His sympathy was felt rather than expressed. His long silences in themselves were pervaded with this elusive factor. He was intuitive, entering into the unexpressed thoughts of his associates without effort. In short, he was a keen natural psychologist, a reader of the minds of men, and to this he owed his remarkable hold on all who got to know him well. When he spoke, it was in a pleasant rather deep drawling voice with quaint idioms of his own manufacture. It was Stephen Crane the man rather than the writings of Crane that exercised such a spell over his acquaintances.
The Pendennis Club celebrates the publication of Maggie. Crane is to the right with the banjo. (COURTESY OF SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY)
Four days after the Pendennis Club book bash, Crane received a letter written by John D. Barry, the first true response from the list of literary men Maggie had been sent to. I can only imagine the mixture of happiness and despair Crane must have felt as he read through Barry’s comments. The Harper’s Weekly drama critic and assistant editor of the Forum (a respected magazine that covered social and intellectual matters) begins politely by thanking Crane for sending the book and adds that he has read it with “the deepest interest.” A promising start, but then the other shoe suddenly drops: “It is pitilessly real and it produced its effect upon me—the effect, I presume, that you wished to produce, a kind of horror. To be frank with you, I doubt if such literature is good: it closely approaches the morbid and the morbid is always dangerous.” Barry goes on for another page criticizing the book as “brutal,” “black,” “unhealthful,” and “unpleasant,” and at the end of the long first paragraph exposes his narrow, moralizing view of art by asserting that “I presume you want to make people think about the horrible things you describe. But of what avail is their thought unless it leads them to work?” That is the crux of Barry’s position: art that dwells on the “horrible” and does not inspire social action is bad for the soul. After lashing into Crane with some further objections concerning style and foul language, Barry concedes that Crane has “real ability” and hopes that he “will try something else.” The condescension is appalling, yet Barry closes off with a friendly overture: “I should like to talk it over further with you and should be most happy to meet you. Won’t you come here some time this week?”
Linson remarks that Crane was touched by Barry’s letter because it was proof of “genuine interest,” but I wonder how sincerely Crane meant what he said. As Lawrence notes: “Any disappointment or rebuff that came to him … he kept to himself … [and] to even appear conscious of a slight would have seemed an unworthy concession.”
As it turned out, Barry and Crane eventually met, and by the next year Barry had become a partisan and defender of Crane’s poetry. It wasn’t that he was a stupid man, but in spite of the fact that he was just five years older than Crane, he stood for the ideas of an older generation, and because he couldn’t see his way past those ideas, he was unable to comprehend what the fledgling author had set out to accomplish in his novella. This was the start of the “beautiful war” Crane would refer to in his letter to Lily Brandon Munroe, the old versus the new, yesterday versus tomorrow, and Barry’s response provides a good example of what Crane was up against as a twenty-one-year-old nobody. He didn’t fit in, and after taking the punches delivered by that letter from March twenty-second, he must have felt battered and quite, quite alone—even if he refused to share his feelings with anyone.
Six days after that, Crane revealed his crumbling self-confidence in a glum note to Howells: “I sent you a small book some weeks ago.… Having recieved [sic] no reply I must decide then that you think it a wretched thing?” Howells wrote back at once, apologizing that he had been too busy to read the book, “but from the glance I was able to give it, I thought you were working in the right way. When I have read it, I will write to you again.” The second letter from Howells has been lost, but without question it was a positive one, and in that letter, along with whatever comments he made about the book, there was an invitation to come to his apartment at 40 West Fifty-ninth Street for a visit. This was an essential moment in Crane’s life, and without that gesture of support from Howells, it is difficult to imagine what path future events would have taken. Except for Garland, the pygmies had all turned their backs on Maggie, and the only one who hadn’t, the sole person besides Garland who had taken the trouble to read the book, had hauled off and knocked the author flat. Now a giant had reached out his hand and pulled Crane up from the floor.
Dressed in a suit he had borrowed from his writer friend John Northern Hilliard or else from his painter friend Nelson Greene (each man had his own version of the story), Crane traveled across town and stayed with Howells well into the evening, but with typical restraint he said almost nothing about the visit to his friends on Avenue A. Johnson wrote that he would “never forget the illumination of countenance and illumination of spirit he displayed” when Crane mentioned the encounter to him, but the only report on the evening comes from Howells himself, in a letter written to Cora seven weeks after Crane’s death and published in the Academy on August 18, 1900.
… talking about his work, and the stress there was on him to put in the profanities which I thought would shock the public from him, and about the semi-savage poor, whose types he had studied in that book. He spoke wisely and kindly about them, and especially about the Tough, who was tough because, as he said, he felt that “Everything was on him.” … Of course I was struck almost as much by his presence as by his mind, and admired his strange, melancholy beauty, in which there was already a foretaste of his early death. His voice charmed me, and the sensitive lips from which it came, with their intelligent and ironical smile, and his mystical, clouded eyes.
The gentle monarch of American writers had given Crane his blessing, and whether the visit with Howells was responsible for it or not, a torrent of work and plans for work soon followed, the at the same time method of attack that makes it difficult to pin down exactly what Crane did when and when he did what, since all his projects were bubbling up in him simultaneously. To begin with, if it indeed begins there, he was mapping out and perhaps writing some pages of George’s Mother, a follow-up novella to Maggie which places the central characters on another floor of the Rum Alley tenement building that appears in the first book. At the same time, he was boasting to Lily about his literary success in the letter he wrote to her early that spring and also writing about his imaginary, eloping Lily in “The Pace of Youth.” Linson happened to drop in on him early one morning at the Pendennis Club, just as Crane was polishing off the last paragraphs of the story. “By a far window sat Stephen, with a towel-like turban about his head. An ink bottle was on the chair beside him, sheets of foolscap on his knees, and with no further ceremony he continued his work. Presently, pages were tossed to me … I read to the end. ‘Like it?’ he asked laconically. Of course I liked it.” When Linson examined the headgear more closely, Crane replied: “The towel? This thing got me going and I couldn’t sleep, so I got up. Been at it all night. I’m all alone in the world. It’s great!”
