Burning boy, p.25
Burning Boy, page 25
And so he commits the third transgression, which is not an overt act as the first two were but a potential act that he keeps to himself as an insurance policy to guard against exposure of his guilt, a small-scale version of the panic that courses through Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment and leads him to commit a second murder in order to cover up the first, for Henry is equally desperate to remove all traces of his original crime, and the person most likely to unmask him is none other than Wilson, formerly known as the loud soldier, now referred to merely as the friend, who he fears will begin asking too many questions about what happened to him yesterday. On the morning after Henry’s return, as the regiment stands at arms awaiting the order to march, the youth remembers the packet of letters Wilson entrusted him with in a moment of weakness prior to their first combat, sobbing with the conviction that he was about to be killed, and although Henry is tempted to say something about it, he stifles the impulse, resolving “not to deal the little blow,” but for all that he is glad.
He now rejoiced in the possession of a small weapon with which he could prostrate his comrade at the first signs of cross-examination. He was master. It would now be he who could laugh and shoot the shafts of derision.
This is an ugly bit of business, a scathing look into the soul of a bloodless manipulator, and when Wilson finally plucks up his courage and asks Henry to return the letters to him, the youth exults in his triumph. He now has the goods on his friend and is home free, safe from the potential humiliation of having to give an honest account of his flight from battle.
His self-pride was now entirely restored. In the shade of its flourishing growth he stood with braced and self-confident legs, and since nothing could now be discovered he did not shrink from an encounter with the eyes of judges, and allowed no thoughts of his own to keep him from an attitude of manfulness. He had performed his mistakes in the dark, so he was still a man.
A man—or a hypocrite? In Henry’s mind, it would seem there is no difference between the two, and therefore all bets are off when it comes to preserving one’s reputation. Still trapped in the adolescent delusion of always looking at himself through the eyes of others, he conceives of manhood not as a state of inner groundedness but as a form of respect granted by other men. If you can hold your head high among those other men, you are a man. No matter that you have committed shameful acts and would be ostracized if anyone knew about them. As long as the others don’t know, you are a man.
Three paragraphs down, the word crops up again as the emboldened youth takes stock of his situation:
There was a little flower of confidence growing within him. He was now a man of experience. He had been out among the dragons, he said, and he assured himself that they were not so hideous as he had imagined them. Also, they were inaccurate; they did not sting with precision. A stout heart often defied, and defying, escaped.
And, furthermore, how could they kill him who was the chosen of gods and doomed to greatness?
There is a breathtaking complexity to these remarks, suggesting both signs of potential change in Henry and a congenital persistence of his egotism and immaturity. Crane comes down hard on the boy, but that doesn’t mean he considers him to be a lost cause. Muddled and groping, perhaps, hemmed in by his conflicts and weaknesses, but nevertheless someone capable of learning from his missteps, even if he has lied in order to wash the slate of his conscience clean, even if the grandiosity of his self-regard is so inflated as to be absurd, for “doomed to greatness” or not, one senses that Henry is evolving by small degrees. It is unlikely that he has it in him to undergo a monumental transformation on the scale of Wilson’s, but he is still young enough to start again, and the conditions for a new beginning are all in place. The lie about the red badge of courage has set him on his feet, the nasty hold he has gained over Wilson will protect the lie and keep him standing, and the question now becomes: Where will he go from here?
The question is answered in the final third of the book as Henry is thrown into the fire again and the story moves from anxiety to action, from fear to rage. Crane’s battle passages are electrifying in their vividness, a sustained onslaught of thirty-six pages that demonstrates his command of large scenes filled with masses of men engaged in a multitude of different activities at the same time. Whether you want to call him a painter or a cinematographer, his ever-watchful eye is in constant motion, swooping in for a close look at a small detail in one paragraph, then pulling back in the next to take in the full panorama, and as he charts the advance, the retreat, and then the second advance of the 304th, his highly controlled language creates a breathless effect: “It was a blind and despairing rush by a collection of men in dusty and tattered blue, over a green sward and under a sapphire sky, toward a fence, dimly outlined in smoke, from behind which spluttered the fierce rifles of enemies.” Or: “On the slope to the left there was a long row of guns, gruff and maddened, denouncing the enemy, who, down through the woods, were forming for another attack in the pitiless monotony of conflicts.” Or: “With his soiled and disordered dress, his red and inflamed features surmounted by the dingy rag with its spot of blood, his wildly swinging rifle and banging accouterments, he looked to be an insane soldier.”
Henry is that insane soldier, and as the events of the day unfold in all their teeming chaos, his earlier conception of war is overturned when he loses himself in the frenzy of battle. The dragons have disappeared, along with the supernatural imagery of the first half of the book. He is a young soldier in an army of men and boys fighting another army of men and boys, and there is no Greeklike glory in such a struggle, since war in the mid-nineteenth century is not an arena where men try to prove their moral worth through bravery on the battlefield but a simple matter of life and possible death, a physical confrontation replete with muskets, cannons, and swords to amplify the savagery of direct hand-to-hand combat. Just as fear is an uncontrollable force that overwhelms the intelligence, so too is the fury of battle, which Crane describes as a form of delirium or madness, and how can a man feel responsible for turning himself into a crazed savage when he scarcely knows who he is anymore? Courage is no more an act of will than the cowardice that prompts a man to run from battle, and they both derive from the same irrational source. Yesterday, Henry ran. Today, he finds himself swept up in the madness of battle, consumed by a hatred of the enemy that leads him to perform bravely, at times even recklessly, and yet for all his heroism in combat, his most important victory is the bond he forms with Wilson, the once-loud soldier who stands side by side with him in the battles they fight that day, the two of them equal partners in a common struggle. Still, much of the old Henry remains intact, and he is far from having acquired his friend’s wisdom of perceiving himself as “a very wee thing.” In a crucial episode, Henry overhears one of the officers tell a general that the men of the 304th “fight like a lot ’a mule drivers,” meaning that they are both expendable and insignificant, which throws Henry into a tantrum of indignation, and in the ensuing battle he fights as much from a hatred against his own commanding officers as from a hatred of the enemy. He refuses to think of himself as small. He will not be diminished by anyone—and he must, at all costs, shine.
How much has Henry changed by the end of the novel?
A bit—quite a bit, perhaps—but not as much as he seems to think.
As the last chapter begins, he is marching with his regiment away from the scene of battle, and as his head slowly clears and he can “comprehend himself and his circumstance,” he is able to reflect on what has happened to him over the past two days and “study his deeds, his failures, and his achievements.” The writing in these closing paragraphs is so eloquent and flat-out moving at times that it is hard not to fall under Crane’s spell and accept Henry’s ruminations at face value. But there is much going on beneath the surface, and in order to make sense of the book’s conclusion, careful attention must be paid.
First of all, he is glad to have come through the battle in one piece, to be alive, to know that after having been to “where there was red of blood and black of passion,” he has escaped. This is fundamental, and the unspoken thought underlying his happiness is the fact that he held his ground and did not run, that his fear of battle is behind him. A well-earned victory—and a legitimate cause for celebration.
Then he thinks back on “his public deeds” and the “performances which had been witnessed by his fellows,” actions that seem to go “gayly with music” and give him much “pleasure” as he calls them to mind. Music suggests a military parade down a grand boulevard flanked by a cheering, adoring crowd of onlookers, a fantasy that allows him to indulge in a preening sort of self-congratulation and fulfill his need to shine under the gaze of others. This is Henry in all his adolescent Henryness, but given what he has been through on the battlefield, let us grant him his moment of inner glorification. No sooner does the parade pass by, however, than the text leaps into a startling new register with these blunt remarks:
“He saw that he was good. He recalled with a thrill of joy the respectful comments of his fellows upon his conduct.”
If I understand the word good correctly, Henry is not calling himself a good soldier or a good comrade but a good person, a categorical judgment of his moral worth, but the ironic, puzzling thing about those who are truly good is that they rarely if ever think of themselves as good. They tend to doubt their own goodness, which is what makes them good in the first place, whereas the less than good or only partially good, the ones who blunder about and always find an excuse to forgive themselves for their mistakes, call themselves good without understanding that they are not, in fact, who they think they are. A means of self-preservation, perhaps, or else a form of delusion. Henry is still an unformed, deluded character, and he still needs “the respectful comments of his fellows” to validate himself in his own eyes.
Immediately after that, however, his thoughts turn inward, and for the first time in the book Henry launches into an honest grappling with his flaws, his errors, and his less than shining moments. The memory of his flight from battle surges up in him, he blushes, “his soul flickered with shame,” and once that bad memory departs, it is quickly followed by an even worse memory.
A specter of reproach came to him. There loomed the dogging memory of the tattered soldier—he who, gored by bullets and faint for blood, had fretted concerning an imagined wound in another; he who had loaned his last of strength and intellect for the tall soldier; he who, blind with weariness and pain, had been deserted in the field.…
… Whichever way his thoughts turned they were followed by the somber phantom of the desertion in the fields. He looked stealthily at his companions, feeling sure that they must discern in his face evidence of this pursuit …
For a time this pursuing recollection of the tattered man took all elation from the youth’s veins. He saw his vivid error and he was afraid that it would stand before him all his life. He took no share in the chatter of his comrades, nor did he look at them or know them, save when he felt a sudden suspicion that they were seeing his thoughts and scrutinizing each detail of the scene with the tattered soldier.
This is progress. To feel the sting of such wretchedness, to wallow in such blistering self-contempt for his callous behavior is an encouraging sign of dawning maturity, but pure as Henry’s anguish might be (he was afraid that it would stand before him all his life), there is another element to his distress, another source of panic that has become all too familiar by now: the fear of being found out, the dreadful possibility that others will learn what he has done and expose his secret, which is the same sort of panic that has been chasing him since the start of the book.
His desertion of the tattered soldier is far and away the worst of his crimes, but it should be noted that he never stops to think about the two others: the nonexistent gunshot wound to his head and the scheme to checkmate his friend into silence and submission by bringing up the embarrassing letters. Those transgressions have vanished from his mind—not so much erased as expunged.
Then, in one of those mental contortions that necessity seems to demand in the face of unbearable guilt, Henry solves his problem by simply jumping over it.
“Yet gradually he mustered force to put the sin at a distance.”
Rather than go on tormenting himself for the rest of his life, he chooses to bury the thing he has done and never return to the grave. Has he repented enough to justify this act? Perhaps he has, perhaps he hasn’t, but it is certain that Henry believes he has, and once he manages to put the sin at a distance, the tenor of his thinking undergoes a profound shift, and the book ends in a beautiful if strange gush of soaring contradictions and puzzlements.
Yet gradually he mustered force to put the sin at a distance. And at last his eyes seemed to open to some new ways. He found that he could look back upon the brass and bombast of his earlier gospels and see them truly. He was gleeful when he discovered that he now despised them.
With this conviction came a store of assurance. He felt a quiet manhood, nonassertive but of sturdy and strong blood. He knew that he would no more quail before his guides wherever they should point. He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man.
There is no doubt that his ideas of war have changed and that he is no longer terrorized by the thought of dying in battle, but do these illuminations now qualify him to join the ranks of manhood? Not yet. He has taken some small steps in the right direction, but he still has a long way to go, for declaring himself to be a man is of the same order as declaring himself to be good, a hopeful assertion, perhaps, but by no means proven yet.
In the penultimate paragraph, Henry’s thinking goes into a weird flight of hyperbolic imagery, wonderfully seductive and convincing as it moves from sentence to sentence but at the same time increasingly unmoored as it wobbles farther and farther from his actual circumstances at that moment.
It rained. The procession of weary soldiers became a bedraggled train, despondent and muttering, marching with churning effort in a trough of liquid brown mud under a low, wretched sky. Yet the youth smiled, for he saw that the world was a world for him, though many discovered it to be made of oaths and walking sticks. He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle. The sultry nightmare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a lover’s thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks—an existence of soft and eternal peace.
These are the dreams of a boy, and they make it sound as if the war is over when in fact it is just beginning for Henry and the other boys in his company. There are more battles to be fought ahead, and in order to acquit himself well—as he has done in today’s fighting—he will have to turn himself into a savage again and plunge back into the red sickness of war. Henry is still a boy, but that doesn’t mean he lacks the potential to become a man. Almost certainly, he will become a man—as long as he isn’t killed in another battle the next day, or the next month, or the next year.
In the final sentence of the book, the invisible narrator returns to report on the conditions brewing in the sky.
“Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds.”
Light mixed with dark. Dark mixed with light. The doubleness of the real.
14
in the depths of a coal mine.
In May 1894, not long after Crane had submitted The Red Badge of Courage to McClure and was still counting on a prompt decision about the book, he and Linson were hired by McClure to travel to Scranton, Pennsylvania, to report on conditions in the coal mines. Payment would come only after the article was published, and with Crane’s purse in its usual hungry state, he borrowed fifty dollars from Linson to cover the costs of the trip. Once again, it was a loan he never paid back.
The assignment came to him through a recommendation from Garland, who had just written a piece for McClure’s Magazine on Homestead in the aftermath of the vicious strike that had taken place at Carnegie’s steelworks, and so off Crane and Linson went, armed with pens and pencils to write the report and draw the pictures that would accompany it. They stayed at a hotel in Scranton called the Valley House, visited the Oxford mine on the first afternoon, and that evening, through a local artist friend of Linson’s, John Raught, were put in contact with James Young, foreman of the Dunmore mines, who arranged a trip to Number Five for them the next morning. On one of their evenings in town, they also managed to pay a call on Crane’s maternal uncle Reverend Luther W. Peck, D.D., a genial old man who talked to them at length about his passion for butterflies.
One asks: Was Crane thinking about the coal mine stocks owned by his family or the shares he had inherited and then sold to his brother in order to publish his first book? Probably. Much had happened to him since then, but Maggie had come into the world just fourteen months earlier, and now, having washed his hands of coal mines, here he was traveling deep under the earth to write about them.
It is one of Crane’s strongest and most vivid reports, a closely observed first-person account of what it feels like to approach, enter, and go down to the bottom of a pit more than one thousand feet under the ground where an army of men, boys, and mules is toiling to extract ton after ton of anthracite from the bowels of a torch-lit hell. Crane moves through the experience in a methodical, step-by-step manner, beginning with the landscape surrounding the mine, the breakers that “squatted upon the hillsides and in the valley like enormous preying monsters eating of the sunlight, the grass, the green leaves,” takes note of the other structures grouped around the central building, the “sheds, engine-houses, machine-shops, offices, [and] railroad tracks,” and then pauses to take in the spectacle of the “little slate-pickers,” the young boys in ragged shirts with “shoulders black as stoves” who are responsible for plucking chewed-up fragments of coal from the troughs that carry the chunks up from the bottom, and as Crane watches the boys go about their work he comments:
