Burning boy, p.31
Burning Boy, page 31
In the fall of 1896, less than a month before Crane headed to Florida on his way to Cuba and abandoned his life in New York for good, he escaped the controversy of the Dora Clark Affair by traveling up to Cambridge, Massachusetts, on two successive weekends to cover Harvard football games for the New York Journal. The first one was played on October thirty-first and pitted Harvard against the team from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, founded seventeen years earlier by Captain Richard Pratt of the United States Army and the first of several all-Indian schools that were established around the country, which put into practice Pratt’s theory of “Kill the Indian: Save the Man.” As Pratt wrote: “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead.” In this benighted attempt to turn Native Americans into true-blue citizens of the Republic by cutting all ties to their ancestral past, the students were encouraged to participate in contemporary sports, and before long they were excelling at football.* The team Crane covered in 1896 was a national powerhouse and trotted onto the field that Saturday afternoon in Cambridge as heavy favorites against Harvard. Crane acknowledges this in the first paragraph of his article: “It was understood beforehand that the Indians were sure winners. Everybody declared that the Harvard team was composed mainly of cripples, and everybody recited the glory of the aborigines.”
Aborigines. It is unclear to what extent Crane is being ironical by using that word, which carries a whiff of racial insult, but whether he is writing from his own point of view or merely aping the language of the anti-Indian majority (Howells and all the others) cannot be known at this early point in the article. Crane’s talent for mockery ran deep, and at one time or another he had already turned his sarcasm on white millionaires, middle-class vacationers in Asbury Park, shambling marchers of the nativist working class, profit-hungry coal brokers, and various others, often mimicking their own language and patterns of thought in order to expose them as hypocrites without calling them that by name. In the second paragraph of “Harvard University Against the Carlisle Indians,” his intentions become even more opaque and confusing:
Fifteen thousand people expected a surprise. They were there to observe how the red man could come from his prairies with a memory of four centuries of oppression and humiliation as his inheritance, with dark years, perhaps utter extinction before him, and yet make a show of the white warriors at their favorite sport.
Crane is reporting not just on a football game but on a clash of civilizations. The inflated rhetoric suggests more mockery, more irony, and more double-edged or even triple-edged thinking, but where in fact does Crane himself stand on the matter? Again, it is difficult to know. One reading establishes that he is well aware of the indignities and abuses Indians suffered from the moment white men started invading their lands. Another reading turns the first reading on its head and seems to be making fun of that sorrowful history, and with the war now lost and possible extinction on the horizon, the only possible revenge is a symbolic one—to defeat the white man at his favorite sport—which trivializes the whole matter of the Indians’ painful past. Is red man a negative term, a positive term, or a neutral term? Depending on how you read the paragraph, it can be any one of them—or all of them.
By the fourth paragraph, the mocking tone swells into pseudo-Romantic bombast, and one senses that Crane doesn’t really care what his position is. He had come to Massachusetts to escape his troubles, and with the gigantic mess still swirling around him in New York, which must have been on his mind, distracting him from his usual focus on the task at hand, he begins to lose his grip on what he is trying to say, assuming he ever knew what it was to begin with.
How old Geronimo would have enjoyed it! The point of view of the warriors was terse but plain: “They have stolen a continent from us, a wide, wide continent, which was ours, and lately they have stolen various touchdowns that were also ours.… If sacrifice of bone and sinew can square the thing, let us sacrifice, and perhaps the smoke of our wigwam camp fire will blow softly against the dangling scalps of our enemies.”
The rest of the piece darts this way and that. In the fifth paragraph, Crane goes back to a pre-game encounter with the Carlisle team at their hotel, emphasizing how quiet they were, barely talking to one another as they sat around in their blue-and-red uniforms: “They were remarkably modest in their ways. They were like children, mightily well-behaved and docile children. It required long observation to find in these serene countenances the nerve which the men have displayed to such a tremendous degree.” Crane then gives the lineups of the two squads and launches into a thorough account of the game, which turned out to be a tense affair that resulted in a narrow victory for Harvard by a score of 4 to 0.* Mostly referring to the teams by their school names (Harvard, Carlisle) or their nicknames (the Crimson, the Indians), Crane varies his language in a few spots: “the aboriginal fifteen-yard line,” “the noble red men,” and “simple savages.” Again, it is hard to know if Crane is mocking or mimicking with those epithets, but his use of the word “simple” probably meant something quite different to him than it would mean to us today. Earlier that year, in his autobiographical letter to John Northern Hilliard, he had referred to his father as “a great, fine, simple mind.” He was not calling his father stupid. On the contrary, he meant to suggest something akin to “purity” or “unwavering inner strength.” He seems to have felt a similar kind of admiration for the Carlisle team, but rather than stick to football and the performance of the team on the field, he couldn’t stop himself from branching off into those bizarre, quasi-humorous asides about Indian history and revenge. They are rhetorical lead balloons, undoubtedly in bad taste, but not malicious—just wrongheaded and ill-conceived. Crane did not hate people who were not like himself. He simply didn’t understand them, and rather than make an effort to penetrate their thinking or attempt to see the world through their eyes, he stood back and watched, either with indifference (immigrants) or fascination (Indians) but nearly always with a sense that the person he was looking at was alien to him, an inscrutable Other. So ends his first and second-to-last attempt to write about football: “After the game the Indians moved off through the dusk with all their old impassiveness.” But never does Crane ask why.
His parents had run two schools devoted to educating black men, women, and children in Port Jervis when Crane was a boy, and of all the Others who haunted the periphery of his life, black people were the least alien to him, the ones he felt most comfortable with, to such a point that he welcomed having sex with black women (“I—I think black is quite good”) and put a number of significant, full-fledged black characters into the fiction he wrote during the last three years of his life (The Monster and Whilomville Stories). And yet, for all his democratic impulses and goodwill, black people were still the Other to Crane, and he could never entirely free himself from the racial stereotyping that was rampant in white American culture back then and is still very much with us today.
One work will suffice to expose these blind spots in Crane. Just seven pages long, it happens to be the last newspaper sketch he wrote about New York, and when it was published by the Bacheller Syndicate on December 20, 1896, Crane had already been in Florida for more than three weeks. “STEPHEN CRANE IN MINETTA LANE” is the headline (attesting to the enormous clout he had achieved since publishing The Red Badge of Courage), followed by a different set of sub-headlines in each paper that ran above the article. The one from the Galveston Daily News is probably the most vivid: “Stephen Crane Describes One of New York City’s Most / Notorious Thoroughfares // ITS WORST DAYS HAVE PASSED // But Its Inhabitants Include Many Whose Deeds Are Evil—The / Celebrated Resort of Mammy Ross.”
After the Dutch allowed “partially freed” slaves to farm there in the mid-seventeenth century, Minetta Lane, a narrow, twisting alleyway that connects with Sixth Avenue at one end and MacDougal Street at the other, became a center of black life in New York. “Mannetta” was the name of the brook that ran through there until it was covered up in the early nineteenth century, an Algonquin word alternately translated as “spirit water” and “demon water,” and by 1827, when slavery was abolished in New York, the area became known as Little Africa, with a population of roughly fourteen thousand. As the years passed, it acquired a reputation as one of the most menacing, crime-ridden enclaves in Manhattan. Crane knew all that, and with his startling talent for absorbing new things quickly, he prowled the lane and collected stories about the criminals who had been active there before the police clamped down on them and cleaned up the neighborhood, recounting the exploits of such figures as Bloodthirsty, No-Toe Charley, Black-Cat, and Guinea Johnson, as well as tracking down three aged survivors of the bad old days—Mammy Ross, Pop Babcock, Hank Anderson—and getting them to share their memories with him. It is a lively, expertly written piece, but in spite of Crane’s sympathy for the subjects of his report, it is also riddled with a number of condescending, racist remarks. From the second paragraph:
To gain a reputation in Minetta Lane, in those days, a man was obliged to commit a number of furious crimes, and no celebrity was more important than the man who had a good honest killing to his credit. The inhabitants for the most part were negroes and they represented the very worst elements of their race. The razor habit clung to them with the tenacity of an epidemic, and every night the uneven cobbles felt blood.
If Crane had been investigating a band of white criminals, he would not have commented on their race. If anything, he might have said that “they represented the very worst elements of humanity,” but black people cannot be seen as representative of humanity. They represent only themselves—and they are a race apart, eternally banished from the domain of the universal, which belongs only to whites. As for the man known as Bloodthirsty, who is still at large and wanted for murder, Crane describes him as “a large negro and very hideous,” with “a rolling eye that shows white at the wrong time.” During his drunken sprees before he vanished from the lane, Bloodthirsty “would rave so graphically about gore that even the habituated wool of old timers would stand straight.” A few pages after that, the dapper Hank Anderson is called “the guiding beacon” of “the dusky aristocracy of the neighborhood.” “Wool,” “dusky,” and “rolling eye” were in current use well into the twentieth century and persist even today. They are small, offensive markers that signify a deeper, often unconscious prejudice of white against black, and I doubt that it ever even occurred to Crane that clichés of that sort can wound. One wants to forgive him for these lapses, since the rest of the article is mercifully devoid of such ingrained bias, but then, in the final paragraph, he resorts to the biggest, most offensive cliché of them all, and there he leaves us, standing on the stage of a two-bit minstrel show.
But they are happy in this condition, are these people. The most extraordinary quality of the negro is his enormous capacity for happiness under most adverse circumstances. Minetta Lane is a place of poverty and sin, but these influences cannot destroy the broad smile of the negro, a vain and simple child but happy. They all smile here, the most evil as well as the poorest. Knowing the negro, one always expects laughter from him, be he ever so poor, but it was a new experience to see a broad grin on the face of the devil.
The vast majority of his white readers would have swallowed this without a second thought. As for Crane himself, it is almost certain that he thought he was being kind.
LOOKING AT WOMEN. The thwarted, failed romance with Lily Brandon Munroe. A brief infatuation with Nellie Crouse, a stunningly attractive but shallow upper-class girl from Akron, Ohio, whom he met once—only once—at a New York tea party he was taken to by his friend Lucius Button (also from Akron) and to whom he wrote seven long, rambling letters between December 31, 1895, and March 1, 1896, in a frantic, short-lived effort to win her affections. His head had been turned by a pretty girl, he lunged, the girl eluded him, and that was that. And then, finally, during his last months in New York before absconding to Florida, he fell for a twenty-one-year-old prostitute named Amy Leslie, lived with her for a time, seemed to be genuinely in love, but ultimately slipped away from her under obscure circumstances.
Those were Crane’s most serious entanglements between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, the ones that are known, in any case, although there could have been others, perhaps several others that have never come to light. A perplexing, unexplained letter written to his friend Willis Brooks Hawkins on March 15, 1896, full of apologies for an apparent wrong he had committed against him, begins with the words “It was a woman! Don’t you see? Nothing could so interfere but a woman” and ends with “I am sure, of course that you have been very much offended but it is a woman, I tell you, and I want you to forgive me,” but who that woman was remains a puzzle.* Then there is an intriguing bit of conjecture that revolves around a young woman named Grace Hall. A wealthy midwesterner who came to New York to study voice and prepare for a career in opera, she traveled in the same Art Students League social circle as Crane, but the extent of their involvement with each other is one more blank in Crane’s story. And yet, how to ignore this curious link: the love object of the central character in The Third Violet (written in 1895) is named Grace Fanhall, which seems to point directly to Grace Hall herself. Evidence of another entanglement?—a crush?—or merely a name that suited his purposes? In what must have been a disappointing turn for her, the real Grace Hall had to abandon her career as an opera singer because of a childhood illness that had damaged her eyes and made them inordinately sensitive to theater lights. So she returned to Oak Park, Illinois, and married her fiancé, Dr. Clarence Hemingway. Her second child, born in 1899, was named Ernest, who held Crane in the highest regard after he became a writer himself.*
Three respectable, well-bred women born into comfortable surroundings, but also a woman with no resources or background who rented out her body to cash-paying customers in order to keep herself clothed and fed, and, as we already know, Amy Leslie was not the first prostitute to have put her arms around Crane. The question, however, is how many had there been before her and how often had his nights ended (or begun) with a trip to a brothel. Five times a week? Five times a month? Five times a year? No one can answer that question because there isn’t enough information to answer it, which leaves us with yet one more blank. Journalist John Northern Hilliard (1872–1935), an intense admirer of both Crane and his work, wrote in 1922 that his friend
had a hankering after the women. He took up with many a drab and was not overly particular as to her age, race or color. Many a time I have heard him say that he would have to go out and get a nigger wench “to change his luck.” Time and again he would bring a lady from the streets to his room. He had no eye for women of his own class or station. He preferred the other kind. I can understand this. Women of his own class would have given him nothing. In the slums he got life. He got the real thing, and that was what he was always looking for—the real, naked facts of life.
Hilliard is both right and wrong. He clearly knew nothing about Lily Brandon Munroe (which proves that he was less intimate with Crane than he thought he was), and as for the ugly term “nigger wench,” we have only his word (written long after the fact) that Crane actually used it, and even if Crane did, he might have said it to impress the impressionable Hilliard, who seems to have been a young bohemian hell-raiser with a fondness for that kind of loose, masculine talk—although, in light of Crane’s remarks about “happy grinning negroes,” anything is possible.† On the other side of the ledger, there is a second, independent account that confirms what Hilliard says about Crane’s habit of inviting streetwalkers to come in out of the cold and accompany him back to his room. Harry B. Smith (1860–1936), a composer and music-critic friend of Willis Brooks Hawkins’s, was asked to join Hawkins and some other men for an evening of poker at Crane’s apartment in late 1895 or 1896. He later wrote,
My impression is that the building … was somewhere in the West Twenties. We went to the top floor, an extensive loft. In one corner was a bedroom partitioned off.… There was no literary pose about Crane. He seemed to be what Hawkins had said—“just a kid”; but thin, pallid, looking like a consumptive. We played cards till two or three o’clock in the morning and, as we started for home we passed the window of the partitioned bedroom. A girl was asleep in the bed.
“Gosh!” said Crane. “I didn’t hear her come in.”
There were facetious comments. “Is it Maggie?” asked one of the ribald, referring to Crane’s story.
“Some of her,” said Crane.
A different side of Crane is revealed by a story told in the mid-twenties by journalist Robert H. Davis (1869–1942), who met Crane for the first time one chilly night as Davis was standing under the Sixth Avenue El at Broadway and West Thirty-third Street with another reporter, who happened to know Crane. Just then, as if he had materialized out of thin air, there was Crane himself, walking down the street with his eyes “bent upon the pavement,” and because Davis was familiar with Crane’s work and considered himself a fan, he asked his friend to introduce him. “I pressed his thin veal-like hand with unfeigned warmth,” Davis writes, and before the three of them had a chance to say much of anything to one another, the reporter dashed off to another appointment, leaving Davis alone with Crane. They chatted for a minute or two, and after learning that Davis was also a minister’s son, Crane remarked dryly on how much the world exulted whenever a minister’s son was “overtaken by misfortune.” “This is the point of view,” he continued. “The bartender’s boy falls from the Waldorf roof. The minister’s son falls from a park bench. They both hit the earth with the same velocity, mutilated beyond recognition.”
