Burning boy, p.26
Burning Boy, page 26
The slate-pickers, all through this region, are yet at the spanking period. One continually wonders about their mothers and if there are any school-houses. But as for them, they are not concerned. When they get time off, they go out on the culm-heap and play base-ball, or fight with boys from other breakers, or among themselves, according to the opportunities. And before them always is the hope of one day getting to be door-boys down in the mines and, later, mule boys. And yet later laborers and helpers. Finally when they have grown to be great big men they may become miners, real miners, and go down and get “squeezed,” or perhaps escape to a shattered old man’s estate with a mere “miner’s asthma.” They are very ambitious.
Meanwhile, they live in a place of infernal dins. The crash and thunder of the machinery is like the roar of an immense cataract. The room shrieks and blares and bellows.… All the structure is a-tremble from the heavy sweep and circle of the ponderous mechanism. Down in the midst of it, sit these tiny urchins, where they earn fifty-five cents each day.… They have this clamor in their ears until it is wonderful that they have any hoodlum valor remaining. But they are uncowed; they continue to swagger.
A few minutes later, Crane and Linson are hurtling downward in an elevator to the bottom, clinging to the iron bars to steady themselves “as the dead black walls slid swiftly by.… When the faculty of the balance is lost, the mind becomes confusion. The will fought a great battle to comprehend something during this fall, but one might as well have been tumbling among the stars.” As their guide leads them through the tunnels, Crane is struck by how the men they encounter, with their blackened faces and equally blackened clothes, are discernible only by their eyes and teeth, which shine “white as bleached bones,” and how, in the first mine, they “speedily lost all ideas of time, direction, and distance.” As noted earlier, there is a long passage about the mules in their stable, which he compares to a dungeon and the mules themselves to “enormous rats” (here), but also some remarks on the dangers of gas leaks and another long passage on the detonations set off in the nether zones of the colliery, which he correctly judges to be the soul of the enterprise—and also its most perilous aspect.
Crane at the Scranton coal mine with Linson, spring 1894. (COURTESY OF SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY)
There is booming and banging and crashing until one wonders why the tremendous walls are not wrenched by the force of this uproar. And up and down the tunnel, there is a riot of lights, little orange points flickering and flashing. Miners stride in swift and sombre procession. But the meaning of it all is in the deep bass rattle of a blast in some hidden part of the mine. It is war. It is the most savage part of all in the endless battle between man and nature. These miners are grimly in the van. They have carried the war into places where nature has the strength of a million giants. Sometimes their enemy becomes exasperated and snuffs out ten, twenty, thirty lives. Usually she remains calm, and takes one at a time with method and precision. She need not hurry. She possesses eternity. After a blast, the smoke, faintly luminous, silvery, floats silently through the adjacent tunnels.
Crane was appalled, not only by the conditions under which these men worked and the low wages they were given (three dollars a day for the miners, a dollar and twenty-five cents for their laborer assistants), but also by the greed of the profit-driven mine owners who perpetuated this system of exploitation, and for once he lost his composure and took sides, blasting forth with an angry, sarcastic rant toward the end of the article. First:
One cannot go down in the mines often before he finds himself wondering why it is that the coal-barons get so much and these miners, swallowed by the grim black mouths of the earth day after day get proportionately so little.
Second:
While I was in Wilksbarre, there was an accident at a mine near there that threatened the lives of about twenty coal-brokers and other men who make neat livings by fiddling with the market. The elevator and the fan became paralyzed so that the visitors were menaced with death from gas in a mine ten hundred feet deep. The miners helped them up ladders to the surface. Upon their arrival, they promptly fainted or agitatedly drank whiskey, according to their dispositions. They were weak with the horror of it.
Third:
I hasten to express my regards for these altogether estimable coal-brokers and there is of course no doubt that there was the usual proportion of good and generous men among them but I must confess to a delight at for once finding the coal-broker associated in hardship and danger with the coal-miner. I confess to a dark and sinful glee at the description of their pangs and agonies. It seemed to me a partial and obscure vengeance.
Fourth:
If all men who stand uselessly and for their own extraordinary profit between the miner and the consumer were annually doomed to a certain period of danger and darkness in the mines, they might at last comprehend the misery and bitterness of the men who toil for existence at these hopelessly grim tasks. They would begin to understand then the value of the miner, perhaps. Then maybe they would allow him a wage according to his part. They will tell you all through this country that the miner is a well-paid man. If you ask the miner about his condition he will tell you, if he can confide in you, that the impersonal and hence conscienceless thing, the company
The rest of the passage is missing because the next two pages of the original manuscript have been lost, and not one word from any of these four paragraphs was ever published. Even McClure, with his muckraker’s heart and insatiable love of controversy, felt that Crane had gone too far, and so, without telling his twenty-two-year-old author what he was planning to do, he pulled out his editor’s knife and cut that material from the piece. When the pared-down version of “In the Depths of a Coal Mine” was published in July, Linson reports that after Crane looked it over, he grunted, tossed it aside, and said, “The birds didn’t want the truth after all. Why the hell did they send me up there then? Do they want the public to think the coal mines gilded ball-rooms with the miners eating ice-cream in boiled shirt-fronts?”
15
poems.
Early on in that year of years, roughly from January to the middle of March, while still working on his novel but not yet contributing regularly to the Press, Crane took a sudden, unexpected swerve in another direction, and just like that, without rhyme or reason—literally without rhyme, though perhaps not without reason—he found himself writing poems, one poem after another until there were more than enough of them to make a book. They were mostly short, some consisting of just three or four lines, and all of them were oddly worded, enigmatic, and infinitely strange. They didn’t look like poems or sound like poems, and even Crane himself rarely called them poems, preferring to use the more humble term he invented for them, “lines,” although “lines” was occasionally transformed into “pills,” no doubt as in bitter pills, and yet, for all that, his lines and pills were most definitely poems.
Many red devils ran from my heart
And out upon the page.
They were so tiny
The pen could mash them.
And many struggled in the ink.
It was strange
To write in this red muck
Of things from my heart.
Where did they come from? When Linson asked him that question, Crane pointed to his forehead and answered: “They came, and I wrote them, that’s all.” A few weeks later, when he showed some samples to Garland, his friend, “astounded by their power,” asked if he had written any others, and again Crane pointed to his head, this time his temple, and replied: “I have four or five up here, all in a little row. That’s the way they come—in little rows, all ready to be put down on paper. I wrote nine yesterday.” A year after that, when the poems had been assembled and published as a book by the Boston firm of Copeland and Day, Hawkins “asked him how he came to hit upon that peculiar form of verse,” and Crane answered: “I don’t know. It just seemed to be the perfectly honest way of expressing what I felt at the moment.… I have a sneaking idea that those feelings which cannot be expressed satisfactorily in prose should be put into verse. I couldn’t have written those things in prose form … any more than I could have chewed up green paper and spit out ten dollar bills.”
If I should cast off this tattered coat,
And go free into the mighty sky;
If I should find nothing there
But a vast blue,
Echoless, ignorant,—
What then?
Except for some lost poetry written in college and the comic lament about his haggard purse that was tossed off and then crumpled up in Linson’s studio, Crane’s energies of the past few years had been concentrated on prose, and the several forms his prose had taken—novels, stories, satires, sketches—had all been marked by the same abundant, image-laden, muscular style. The poems that came spilling out of him in early 1894, however, were all skin and bone, stripped down to the barest, most elemental articulations, so aggressively anti-lyrical and primitive that the poetry in them is finally less apparent than it is in the prose.
A man feared that he might find an assassin;
Another that he might find a victim.
One was more wise than the other.
Crane’s tiny pills stood in such radical opposition to the florid, ultra-literary poems that passed as good poetry in America at the time that he often recoiled at the mere mention of the word “poet,” which he said “continually reminds me of long-hair and seems to be the most detestable form of insult.” Crane’s aversion to the “poet,” however, should not be construed as an aversion to poetry itself. In fact, he had read more than his fair share by then, not just the already mentioned Keats but Burns, Shelley, Browning, Dryden, et al., along with ample doses of Shakespeare, and he had no trouble manufacturing conventional rhyming verses when the spirit moved him, as in this jeering quatrain composed at school after he had been compelled to read (and perhaps memorize) Longfellow’s dreadful “A Psalm of Life,” and how prophetic that it should attack the very thing his later poems would also attack—and sometimes be attacked for: “Tell me not in joyous numbers / We can make our lives sublime / By—well, at least, not by / Dabbling much in rhyme.” To a substantial share of the poetry-reading public, this hostility to convention turned him into a barbarian outlier, a self-taught bumpkin who had failed to grasp the first thing about verse techniques, but the passage of time tells a different story, and in 1950 John Berryman would calmly assert that “Crane is the most important American poet between Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson on the one side, and his tardy-developing contemporaries Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost with Ezra Pound on the other.”*
“Think as I think,” said a man,
“Or you are abominably wicked;
“You are a toad.”
And after I had thought of it,
I said, “I will, then, be a toad.”
His first critics were his roommates, the rowdy, wisecracking artists who lived with him on East Twenty-third Street, and much as they stood by Crane as a friend and fellow artist, they found his weird, gnomic concoctions ripe for abuse. Uncharacteristically upset, he complained about it to Garland: “I wanted to write some more last night but those ‘Indians’ wouldn’t let me do it. They howled so loud over the other lines that they nearly cracked my ears.… They think my verses are funny. They make a circus of me.”
If there is a witness to my little life,
To my tiny throes and struggles,
He sees a fool;
And it is not fine for gods to menace fools.
Once, when Linson was visiting him, Crane “pointed to a pinned-up squib on the wall with a graphic profile of himself above it.… ‘See what they do to me,’ he said with a grin. ‘They think I’m a joke, the Indians! They pin up these slams about me when I’m out. They make me ill!’” Writing from what he confessed was “slipping memory,” Linson recalls that Crane also said (more or less): “The mutts yowl like bobcats when I try to write, but I’ll get my innings. I’ll put ’em in a book, the lobsters. They’re a husky lot.” A year and a half later, Crane did put them in a book, each one renamed and disguised but nevertheless drawn directly from those impoverished days at the old Art Students League building, and there they all are in The Third Violet, the last of Crane’s novels set in New York and by far the most autobiographical work of fiction he ever published.
“Truth,” said a traveller,
“Is a rock, a mighty fortress;
“Often have I been to it,
“Even to its highest tower,
“From whence the world looks black.”
“Truth,” said a traveller,
“Is a breath, a wind,
“A shadow, a phantom;
“Long have I pursued it,
“But never have I touched
“The hem of its garment.”
And I believed the second traveller;
For truth was to me
A breath, a wind,
A shadow, a phantom,
And never had I touched
The hem of its garment.
Even Howells was perplexed, and in a brief letter sent to Crane early that fall he admitted that “these things are too orphic for me. It is a pity for you to do them, for you can do things solid and real, so superbly.… I do not think that a merciful Providence meant for the ‘prose-poem’ to last.”
Once, I knew a fine song,
—It is true, believe me,—
It was all of birds,
And I held them in a basket;
When I opened the wicket,
Heavens! They all flew away.
I cried, “Come back, little thoughts!”
But they only laughed.
They flew on
Until they were as sand
Thrown between me and the sky.
But the poems had their early supporters as well, Linson and Garland to begin with and soon after John D. Barry, the same man who had written the supercilious letter debunking Maggie the year before. The poems excited him, however, and more than anyone else he was responsible for bringing them into the world—first by standing up and reading portions of Crane’s manuscript to the assembled guests at an important New York literary gathering in April, and then by putting Crane in contact with the Boston firm that eventually published his poems in a lavishly designed book the following year. Barry’s help was indispensable, although he was probably wrong to suppose that Crane had been influenced by Emily Dickinson.* He based that theory on an event that might or might not have happened, but if it did happen, he was the only person who seemed to know about it. According to Barry, when Crane first visited Howells in 1893, “Mr. Howells took from his shelves a volume of Emily Dickinson’s verses and read some of them aloud. Mr. Crane was deeply impressed … afterward he showed me thirty poems in manuscript [which] furnished the bulk of the volume entitled The Black Riders. It was plain enough to me that they had been directly inspired by Miss Dickinson.” Although Howells might have read Dickinson out loud to Crane, he never mentioned it to anyone, and neither did Crane, who is not known ever to have spoken or written a single word about Dickinson. That isn’t to say that Barry deliberately lied. Perhaps Howells did talk to him about it—to him and no one else—or perhaps he heard the story secondhand, but the more important thing to consider is this: in spite of certain superficial resemblances—their brevity and concision, their disdain of traditional forms, their emphasis on asking big questions rather than small questions—Dickinson and Crane have almost nothing in common as poets.
There was a man who lived a life of fire.
Even upon the fabric of time,
Where purple becomes orange
And orange purple,
This life glowed,
A dire red stain, indelible;
Yet when he was dead,
He saw that he had not lived.
Other supporters looked for other influences to account for the birth of Crane’s bizarre little lines. One camp pointed to the French Symbolists (he had never read them), another saw his poems as a condensed form of Whitman (free verse, no rhymes), and yet another, considering him to be “the Aubrey Beardsley of poetry,” imagined Crane to be a follower of the Decadents. They were all wrong. For better or worse, Crane’s poems have no literary antecedents, and whether they are good poems or bad poems or merely eccentric poems, they plant themselves in the mind and are not soon forgotten. What Crane called a “poetic spout” had been opened, and out came the poems, or lines, or pills, which were in fact rhythmic eruptions from the jungle of his unconscious, blasts of psychic energy that could be sustained only for brief, ecstatic intervals, and when the first one passed, the second one came, and then the third and the fourth and the fifth until, after a couple of months, the spout ran dry.
Black riders came from the sea.
There was clang and clang of spear and shield,
And clash and clash of hoof and heel,
Wild shouts and the wave of hair
In the rush upon the wind:
Thus the ride of sin.
