Burning boy, p.22
Burning Boy, page 22
Batteries were speaking with thunderous oratorical effect. Here and there were flags, the red in the stripes dominating. They splashed bits of warm color upon the dark lines of troops.…
As he listened to the din from the hillside, to a deep pulsing thunder that came from afar to the left, and to the lesser clamors which came from many directions, it occurred to him that they were fighting, too, over there, and over there, and over there. Heretofore he had supposed that all the battle was directly under his nose.
As he gazed around him the youth felt a flash of astonishment at the blue, pure sky and the sun gleamings on the trees and fields. It was surprising that Nature had gone tranquilly on with her golden process in the midst of so much devilment.
This passage is an exemplary instance of the method Crane employs throughout the book. Henry sees the battery, the riders, and the horses as “tiny” because they are in the far distance and therefore seem exceedingly small from his point of view. The cannons and guns speak “with thunderous oratorical effect” not because weapons can talk but because Henry imagines they are talking. And now that he has been put in a position to observe a wider swath of activity than before, he understands that the fighting is everywhere, not just directly in front of him—a corrective made possible by his new vantage point—and with that greater understanding, he is awed by the fact that the sky is still blue and the sun is still shining even as slaughter reigns on the ground below.
Another instance, as Henry comes across a fallen enemy for the first time:
Once the line encountered the body of a dead soldier. He lay upon his back staring at the sky. He was dressed in an awkward suit of yellowish brown. The youth could see that the soles of his shoes had been worn to the thinness of writing paper, and from a great rent in one the dead foot protruded piteously. And it was as if fate had betrayed the soldier. In death it exposed to his enemies that poverty which in life he had perhaps concealed from his friends.
The ranks opened covertly to avoid the corpse. The invulnerable dead man forced a way for himself. The youth looked keenly at the ashen face. The wind raised the tawny beard. It moved as if a hand were stroking it. He vaguely desired to walk around and around the body and stare; the impulse of the living to try to read in dead eyes the answer to the Question.
By contrast, the second element—what I would term Henry’s fellow soldiers—is filled with dialogue and the rough-and-tumble interactions of a regiment that is forced to march here, march there, then march back to here, all for no apparent reason until the decisive moment falls on them at last. These are the lowly men in the ranks who do what they are told without understanding why they are doing it, and at that moment in the war the 304th is composed of some veterans and a gang of fresh, young troops like Henry who have not yet been tested in battle as the book begins. Grumbling, confused, speculative, and joking, the verbal exchanges between and among the soldiers keep the story firmly rooted in the now of lived experience and prevent it from floating off into the less vivid territories of parable and fable. Their speech is rude and demotic, undercutting the more elevated language of the descriptive passages, and by shifting from one tone to another, Crane propels the narrative forward in a whirl of small, unexpected jolts. One moment, Henry is looking out at the landscape, and the next moment someone is talking, either to him or someone else. A good example of what that talk sounds like comes early in the text, when Henry asks Jim Conklin if he thinks any of the boys will run when the shooting starts. The tall soldier replies:
“Oh, there may be a few of ’em run, but there’s them kind in every regiment, ’specially when they first goes under fire.… Of course it might happen that the hull kit-and-boodle might start and run, if some big fighting came first-off, and then again they might stay and fight like fun. But you can’t bet on nothing. Of course they ain’t never been under fire yet, and it ain’t likely they’ll lick the hull rebel army all-to-oncet the first time; but I think they’ll fight better than some, if worse than others. That’s the way I figger.”
At times, Crane clusters together long sequences of random, anonymous exchanges among the men, isolated fragments filled with rumors, gossip, and nervous chatter, all of it set down in the colloquial dialogue of Northern country speech, a mass of disembodied voices that gives human texture to the small society the youth belongs to, just as the dead and nameless Confederate soldier is granted his own humanity in the description of his worn out, paper-thin shoes. An army is a vast, multiheaded creature in which the individual is swallowed up and depersonalized by the organism as a whole, but by turning his attention to the voices produced by those heads or by fixing his eyes on the heads themselves (“the wind raised the tawny beard”), Crane is forcing us to remember that each one of those heads belongs to a man and that each man is distinct from every other man, an island unto himself, with his own history and his own separate consciousness.
The third element, the thoughts inside Henry’s head, is the story of one such consciousness, and it is the heart of the novel, the element that distinguishes the book from other war stories and turns it into something that transcends its own setting (the battlefield) to become a drama about consciousness itself. As with Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, The Red Badge of Courage is an end-of-the-century anticipation of a new aesthetic that would begin to take hold in the first decades of the next century and lead to such works as Ulysses, Remembrance of Things Past, As I Lay Dying, To the Lighthouse, and numerous other novels grounded in what I would call a passionate interiority that aspires to explore the within of its thinking, feeling subjects. I would not argue that Henry Fleming prefigures Leopold Bloom, precisely, but rather that Crane’s preoccupation with the inner workings of his protagonist’s mind shares many of the same impulses that drove Joyce to dig so deeply into the brain-works of his impotent, meandering hero. One book is short, the other is long. The action in the short book covers several days, the action in the long book begins and ends in just one day, but both books, remarkably, are written in the third person. Contrary to popular wisdom, intimate access does not demand an authorial I. He, as both writers prove, can do the job just as well.
Crane’s he is a callow, self-absorbed, acutely sensitive boy endowed with a certain degree of intelligence and thoughtfulness, someone with the ability to understand when he is lying to himself but who nevertheless goes on lying whenever his actions do not measure up to the standards of conduct he perceives in others, dismissing his errors in a long chain of self-serving excuses that are twisted into supposedly rational justifications for his less than honorable behavior. His is an adolescent mind, and Crane, not far removed from his own adolescence, explores its looping trajectories, devious manipulations, and scalding anxieties with such full-bore precision as to make his study of that mind—that adolescent mind—the true subject of his book.
The first chapter presents all three elements in rapid succession and within a few short pages establishes the tone, methods, and procedures of what is to follow. Before the action begins, however, there is the mysterious opening paragraph, written in the neutral voice of the invisible narrator, a complex description of a landscape that seems to be talking about two things at the same time: the passage from night into day and then back to night as well as the passage from winter into spring:
The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors. It cast its eyes upon the roads, which were growing from long troughs of liquid mud to proper thoroughfares. A river, amber-tinted in the shadow of its banks, purled at the army’s feet; and at night, when the stream had become of a sorrowful blackness, one could see across it the red, eyelike gleam of hostile camp-fires set in the low brows of distant hills.
The animism from the Sullivan County tales is back in full force: cold reluctantly passing from the earth; an army casts its eyes upon the roads, rather than the soldiers in the army casting their eyes, as if an army were indeed a single, multiheaded animal; sorrowful blackness; the red, eyelike gleam of fires; and the brows of distant hills. As for the question of time, Crane offers two parallel and simultaneous situations, and as the cold lifts and the fogs dissipate in the first sentence to reveal “an army stretched out on the hills, resting,” one’s first inclination is to assume it is morning and the men (“stretched out … resting”—that is, recumbent and asleep) are about to wake up. And yet the other, parallel reading would suggest that the reluctance of the cold to pass from the earth signifies the end of a long, protracted winter, that “stretched out” refers to the army as a whole camped in the hills, not the individual soldiers, and that “resting” does not refer to sleep but to an absence of activity, to an army waiting to be called into battle. The second sentence, with the landscape changing “from brown to green,” is equally ambiguous, equally double, for the darkness of night eliminates color, and as the first traces of dawn begin to infuse the sky, black land turns to a dim gray-brown before turning green when the sun comes up, but at the same time this movement from brown to green can also denote the transition from winter to spring. In the same sentence, the word “awakened” can also be read both ways, literally awaking from sleep and figuratively becoming conscious of impending action, and “the noise of rumors” could be the words circulating among the men that morning or a general stir of anticipation that has been percolating for days or perhaps even weeks. Roads of liquid mud turning solid is not the work of a single night, however, but part of a longer, slower process, and yet by using the gerund “were growing” instead of “had grown,” Crane is telling us that the process is still going on and that the roads are more solid today than they were yesterday. Then, in the final sentence, everything spins around and suddenly changes direction, for once Crane mentions the river that separates the encampment of this army from the encampment of the other, he heads back into an evocation of night—not just one night but every night—to reveal the menace that lurks in the hills across the water, “the red, eyelike gleam of hostile camp-fires,” in other words, the many eyes of another multiheaded animal: the enemy.
The first page of the manuscript of The Red Badge of Courage. The original title, Private Fleming/His Various Battles, has been crossed out. (COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA)
The stage has been set, but no sooner have we adjusted to the tonalities of the first paragraph than Crane abruptly shifts to another tone in the second with a small bit of comic irony, which introduces us to the second element of the book.
Once a certain tall soldier developed virtues and went resolutely to wash a shirt. He came back from a brook waving his garment bannerlike. He was swelled with a tale he had heard from a reliable friend, who had heard it from a truthful cavalryman, who had heard it from his trustworthy brother, one of the orderlies at division headquarters. He adopted the important air of a herald in red and gold.
“We’re goin’ t’ move t’morrah—sure,” he said pompously to a group in the company street. “We’re goin’ way up the river, cut across, an’ come around in behint ’em.”
First, the vastly inflated, self-mocking rhetoric that attaches “virtues” to the simple act of washing a shirt, then a witty postmortem on the serpentine paths by which rumors travel, and after that a full page is given to the competing opinions of various unidentified soldiers about this fresh rumor, one of dozens that have sprung up over the past several weeks as the members of the company have languished on their hillside, restless and out of sorts. “The blue-clothed men scattered into small arguing groups.… A negro teamster [the only black person in the book] who had been dancing upon a cracker box with the hilarious encouragement of twoscore soldiers was deserted. He sat mournfully down.… ‘It’s a lie! That’s all it is—a thunderin’ lie!’ said another private loudly,” one who defends his position so vociferously that he nearly comes to blows with Jim Conklin as the other men continue to assault Jim with questions and “engaged in spirited debate.” It is a spirited passage as well, and after just a few short paragraphs Crane has managed to thrust the reader into the thick of army life. In no time at all, the book is off and running—only to take another sharp turn an instant later. A new paragraph begins, and as Henry makes his first appearance in the opening line, the third element of the novel is put into play.
There was a youthful private who listened with eager ears to the words of the tall soldier and to the varied comments of his comrades. After receiving a fill of discussions concerning marches and attacks, he went to his hut and crawled through an intricate hole that served as its door. He wished to be alone with some new thoughts that had lately come to him.
For the next five and a half pages, Crane casts a backward glance at the youth’s history and the various circumstances that have led him to this moment. It is the only passage in the novel that is not situated in the present, but as is the case with the fourth chapter of Maggie, which closely examines Jimmie’s character and his troubled early career as a “young man of leather,” the facts offered here are essential to understanding the inner drama that unfolds throughout the rest of the novel.
“Of course,” as Crane emphatically puts it, Henry “had dreamed of battles all his life—of vague and bloody conflicts that had thrilled him with their sweep and fire.” He had apparently read Homer at some point, or at least had become familiar with the contents of the Iliad, but while he had imagined himself performing heroic deeds in battle as a young boy, he also began to suspect that the age of war had passed. “He had long despaired of witnessing a Greeklike struggle. Such would be no more, he had said. Men were better, or more timid. Secular and religious education had effaced the throat-grappling instinct, or else firm finance held in check the passions.”
Still, after the outbreak of the Civil War, “he had burned several times to enlist,” for even though the accounts of the battle were not “distinctly Homeric … there seemed to be much glory in them.” The problem was his mother, who had opposed his joining up, and as the only son of a widowed woman with few resources, he had submitted to her argument with its “many hundreds of reasons why he was of vastly more importance on the farm than on the field of battle.” In the end, however, inflamed by “the newspapers, the gossip of the village, [and] his own imaginings,” he had rebelled against his mother and enlisted.
Continually projecting idealized outcomes onto anticipated events, the immature Henry had not prepared himself for his mother’s complex, guarded reaction when he returned to the farm dressed in his uniform. She was milking one of the cows, and after pausing for a moment to say, “The Lord’s will be done, Henry,” she had gone back to her milking and then, unexpectedly, had shed some silent tears. Later, when he was about to leave the farm for good and begin his training, she had further disappointed him
by saying nothing whatever about returning with his shield or on it. He had privately primed himself for a beautiful scene. He had prepared certain sentences which he thought could be used with touching effect. But her words destroyed his plans.
Those words consisted of a long, Polonius-like stream of admonitions and encouragements, heartfelt but crammed with platitudes, counseling Henry to remember that he was “jest one little feller amongst a hull lot of others,” to keep quiet and do what he was told, not to worry if he had to be killed or do a mean thing because the Lord would take care of her and all the other women who had to “bear up ’ginst sech things,” to remember the socks and shirts she had made for him along with the cup of blackberry jam she had put in his bundle “because I knew yeh like it above all things,” and, finally, to watch out and be a good boy.
These were not the words Henry had been expecting her to say, and he listened to them “with an air of irritation,” at last departing with a sense of “vague relief.”
Still, when he had looked back from the gate, he had seen his mother kneeling among the potato parings. Her brown face, upraised, was stained with tears, and her spare form was quivering. He bowed his head and went on, feeling suddenly ashamed of his purposes.
He will think about the farm from time to time in the months ahead, occasionally even long to be back there, but except for a couple of momentary flashes (once about food when he is hungry, once when he imagines himself spinning stories about his exploits to a group of women), Crane does not suggest that Henry is thinking about his mother. A devoted son would sit down and write an occasional letter, but never do we see him with a pen in his hand.
In what could be a remnant from the potboiler version of the novel—and left in as a brief, winking allusion to the sort of book Crane had become determined not to write—the next scene takes Henry to his school for a round of farewells with his classmates.
They had thronged around him with wonder and admiration. He had felt the gulf now between them and swelled with calm pride. He and some of his fellows who had donned blue were quite overwhelmed with privileges for all of one afternoon, and it had been a very delicious thing. They had strutted.
A certain light-haired girl had made vivacious fun at his martial spirit, but there was another and darker girl whom he had gazed at steadfastly, and he thought she grew demure and sad at the sight of his blue and brass. As he had walked down the path between the rows of oaks, he had turned his head and detected her at a window watching his departure. As he perceived her, she had immediately begun to stare up through the high tree branches at the sky. He had seen a good deal of flurry and haste in her movement as she changed her attitude. He often thought of it.
The dark-haired girl turns out to be a red herring, for even if the youth thinks of that final moment often, those thoughts never surface anywhere throughout the remainder of the book. She darts in and out of his mind just once, but that is all. So much for the love-story subplot of the traditional war novel. A fluttering instant of expectation—and then poof.
