Burning boy, p.34
Burning Boy, page 34
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Besides the article, Crane also wrote from Nebraska to his Syracuse college friend Clarence Loomis Peaslee, an aspiring writer who published one of the first feature stories about Crane (“Stephen Crane’s College Days,” August 1896), and it was in Peaslee’s article that a portion of the letter Crane sent to him on February 12, 1895, from Lincoln is quoted—which is the only surviving fragment from what seems to have been a long discussion about literature that culminated in these sentences:
As far as myself and my own meagre success are concerned, I began the war with no talent, but an ardent admiration and desire. I had to build up. I always want to be unmistakable. That to my mind is good writing. There is a great deal of labor connected with literature. I think that is the hardest thing about it. There is nothing to respect in art, save one’s own opinion of it.
This is one of Crane’s essential early statements about his work as a writer, and so accurately did it express his true feelings that he recycled some of the same sentences in a letter he sent to Hilliard just days after writing to Peaslee, which bears noting because it clarifies the intended meaning of the word unmistakable. To Hilliard: “I had to build up, so to speak. And my chiefest desire was to write plainly and unmistakably, so that all men (and some women) might read and understand. That to my mind is good writing.” In other words, unmistakable as that which is immediately comprehensible, or not obscure, not fussy, not “literary”: literature as meaning and not mere show. It sounds perfectly sensible today, but back then, in that mostly blank period between the end of the American Renaissance and the beginning of modernism, when literature had been reduced to little more than an exercise in genteel entertainment, Crane’s position was a bold one, especially in his implied dismissal of critics and the marketplace. The writer is the judge of his own work, and if he believes in what he is doing, then he can respect that work and stand by it, regardless of anyone else’s opinion. Crane might have added: And be prepared to duck when they start throwing eggs at you—for in spite of the respect he would eventually gain from others, there were still others who couldn’t resist attacking him, and the more he was respected, the more he was attacked as the years went on.
* * *
During the four months he spent on the road, Crane must have met and talked to dozens of people, perhaps hundreds of people, but only one of them ever took the trouble to record her impressions of the East Coast man’s visit to the West. Willa Cather, just two years younger than Crane, was a senior at the University of Nebraska and the drama critic for the Nebraska State Journal. Two months earlier, she had copyedited the serialized version of The Red Badge of Courage, and when Crane arrived in Lincoln on February first, he and Cather met in the offices of the paper.* On the thirteenth, they met there again and had what seems to have been a rather long conversation, which provided the bulk of the material for Cather’s article, “When I Knew Stephen Crane.” Written in June 1900 (just days after Crane’s death) and originally published under one of Cather’s journalistic pseudonyms, Henry Nicklemann, the piece bears a striking resemblance to its author’s name in that a good part of the text is pure invention.
Cather gives the time of their meeting as the spring of 1894, not the winter of 1895. The weather is “oppressively warm,” not frigid. She is a junior in college, not a senior. Crane’s hair is black, not blond. His eyes are dark, not blue-gray. His serialized book was given to Bacheller through a connection with Howells, not Marshall. He is twenty-four, not twenty-three. He is carrying “a little volume of Poe … in his pocket,” no doubt because she has made Crane dark and wants him to look like Poe or, even more fancifully, to present him as a reincarnation of Poe.
Can anything in her article be trusted? Perhaps some things, but it is difficult to know which ones. “He stated that he was going to Mexico to do some work for the Bacheller Syndicate and get rid of his cough.” Perhaps Crane said those words, perhaps he didn’t. “He was thin to emaciation, his face was gaunt and unshaven … [his hair] shaggy and unkempt. His gray clothes were much the worse for wear.… He wore a flannel shirt and a slovenly excuse for a necktie … his shoes were dusty … and badly run over at the heel.” It is possible that the often poorly dressed Crane looked like this, but Cather’s depiction is so extreme that it is hard not to suspect her of exaggerating for poetic effect (or Poe-etic effect).
Still, Cather is a beautiful writer, and whether she is exaggerating or not, her portrait of a dejected, distracted Crane might have some validity. He was, after all, still waiting to hear from Hitchcock about The Red Badge of Courage, which must have been a cause of anxiety—his future as a writer hanging in the balance—and yet when Cather asserts that he was “entirely idle” during his days in Lincoln, the facts are against her, since we know that Crane was hard at work on his article while still in town, interviewing, among others, Governor Holcomb and L. P. Ludden, the man in charge of coordinating the relief efforts, and then writing the article itself in Lincoln after he returned from his trip to Eddyville and other ravaged zones of the state. Nevertheless, Cather writes impressively—and with apparent conviction:
Crane was moody most of the time; his health was bad and he seemed profoundly discouraged. Even his jokes were exceedingly drastic. He went about with the tense, preoccupied, self-centered air of a man who is brooding over some impending disaster, and I conjectured vainly as to what it might be.… His eyes I remember as the finest I have ever seen, large and dark [sic] and full of lustre and changing lights, but with a profound melancholy always lurking deep in them. They were eyes that seemed to be burning themselves out.
As he sat at the desk with his shoulders drooping forward, his head low, and his long, white fingers drumming on the sheets of copy paper, he was as nervous as a race horse fretting to be on the track. Always, as he came and went about the halls, he seemed like a man preparing for a sudden departure. Now that he is dead it occurs to me that all his life was a preparation for sudden departure. I remember once when he was writing a letter he stopped and asked me about the spelling of a word, saying carelessly, “I haven’t time to learn to spell.” Then, glancing down at his attire, he added with an absentminded smile, “I haven’t time to dress either; it takes an awful slice out of a fellow’s life.”
On the night of the thirteenth, Cather reports, Crane opened up to her and began to talk about the difficulty of sustaining “a double literary life; writing in the first place the matter that pleased himself, and doing it very slowly; in the second place, any sort of stuff that would sell,” with Cather remarking that “in all his long tirade, Crane never raised his voice; he spoke slowly and monotonously and even calmly, but I have never known so bitter a heart in any man as he revealed to me that night.” No one else who wrote about him ever detected such bitterness in Crane, but granting Cather the right to her own opinion, let us assume that Crane was feeling especially bitter just then, frazzled and exhausted from his days in the countryside, in the dumps. A moment or two after that, however, she quotes him as saying something he could not have said because it is a paraphrase of something that was said about him by someone else—the British critic Edward Garnett, who was the husband of the Russian translator Constance Garnett and a friend of Crane’s during S.C.’s last years in England. Crane, as quoted by Cather: “What I can’t do, I can’t do at all, and I can’t acquire it.” Garnett on Crane (from an article published in December 1898): “What he has not got he has no power of acquiring.” We know that Cather was familiar with Garnett’s article (she quotes from it later in her own article), which makes it all the more mysterious why she should have put Garnett’s words into Crane’s mouth. A small, niggling point, perhaps, but further proof that Cather’s memorial piece on Crane was in large measure a work of fiction.
For all that, how interesting it is to learn that the two best American writers of their generation happened to have met at twenty-one and twenty-three in a small newspaper office in Lincoln, Nebraska. Cather would review some of Crane’s lesser works in the years ahead, often harshly, but when she sat down to write about him after his death, she generously gave him his due, describing “The Open Boat” as “unsurpassed in its vividness and constructed perfection” and calling Crane “the first writer of his time in the picturing of episodic, fragmentary life.” As for the other quotation she uses from Garnett in her article, there is no reason to doubt that the Englishman’s words express her feelings about the dead burning boy as well: “I cannot remember a parallel in the … history of fiction. Maupassant, Meredith, Henry James, Mr. Howells and Tolstoy were all learning their expression at an age when Crane had achieved his and achieved it triumphantly.”
* * *
It is unclear exactly when Crane heard from Hitchcock about The Red Badge of Courage, but the letter must have come sometime after his gloomy conversation with Cather (if in fact it was as gloomy as she said it was), for when he pulled into Hot Springs, Arkansas, on February fifteenth, he seems to have been in excellent spirits. He was just passing through, on his way to New Orleans in the morning, but he saw enough of the little resort town to zip out a charming, bubbly, five-page nothing of a story that was published on March third and, for all we know, could have been written on the train as he barreled ahead to his next stop.
The charm of “Seen at Hot Springs” is predominantly a matter of phrasing, tone, and a whimsical understanding of how deeply unimportant the piece is. After the life-and-death issues confronted on the Nebraska prairie, one feels Crane exhaling in the balmy Arkansas weather and joyously winging it from one sentence to the next. A stream of water “looks like a million glasses of lemon phosphate,” the stage men and baggagemen at the railway station badger, roar, and gesticulate, “as unintelligible … as a row of Homeric experts,” and when Crane visits the renowned bathhouses, he concludes that once inside those vaporous enclosures “a man becomes a creature of three conditions. He is about to take a bath—he is taking a bath—he has taken a bath.” By the fourth page, he seems to have run out of things to say about the town, which strikes him as unique in the United States for mixing up so many contrasting elements that it resembles “the North and the South, the East and the West,” and starts spinning a little story about a commercial traveler for a hat firm in Ogallala, Nebraska, and a “youthful stranger with … blonde and innocent hair,” and whether it is based on a real event or spun from whole cloth is of little importance. The two men repair to a saloon for some liquid refreshments. Another man, standing at the bar and “ruffling his whiskers,” offers to “shake” for the drinks. The traveler agrees and they start to gamble, first for a dollar, then for “two bones,” then for “four bones,” until the traveler has won “fifty dollars in ’bout four minutes.” The man with the whiskers vanishes, and the delighted traveler, still standing at the bar next to the youthful stranger with the blond and innocent hair, proposes that they split the money and “blow it,” but the Crane stand-in demurs, perhaps suspecting an intricate con in the making, and ditches the bewildered, irritated traveler with these parting words: “I guess I’ll stroll back up-town. I want to write a letter to my mother.” What a fine, dumbfounding non sequitur that is, but even better is the last sentence of the article—“In the back room of the saloon, the man with the ruffled beard was silently picking hieroglyphics out of his whiskers”—which is surely one of the most beguiling, crackpot sentences Crane ever wrote.
He rode that wave of exultant good humor on into New Orleans, and three days after his arrival he sent off a zinging nonsense letter to Linson in a mashup of Creole, German, and clunky beginner’s English:
Mon ami Linson: Friedweller die schonënberger je suis dans New Orleans. Cracked ice dans Nebraska, terra del fuega dans New Orleans. Table d’hotes sur les balconies just like spring. A la mode whiskers on the citizens en masse, merci, of the vintage de 1792.
Frequented I all the time here again l’etoile de Virginitie sur St. Louis Street. Sic semper tyrannis! Mardi gras tres grande but it does not until Tuesday begin. Spiel!
He had never been so far from home. Untethered, unpressed, liberated from all responsibilities to anyone but Bacheller and himself, it was the first time in three and a half years that he could stop worrying about where his next dollar and his next meal were coming from. More than that, he was on the move, living out his old dream of escaping the narrow, cobbled streets of New York for the unearthly expanses of the American West, and with his poems on the brink of publication and his war novel finally accepted, why wouldn’t he have been feeling giddy over this sudden turn in his fortunes? The Hot Springs article and the letter to Linson are signs of a young man punch-drunk with happiness, and while the articles he produced for Bacheller were mostly undistinguished, the value of the trip for Crane was immeasurable: four months of new impressions and new thoughts that would generate a remarkable effusion of stories after he returned to New York, first the terrifically good, tightly wrought Western and Mexican tales from 1895–96 (“One Dash—Horses,” “The Five White Mice,” “A Man and Some Others”) and then the two narrative astonishments from 1897–98 (“The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” which is set in Texas, and “The Blue Hotel,” which takes place during a Nebraska blizzard identical to the one he experienced in Eddyville). If not for the trip, none of these works would have been written, meaning that if not for the trip that inspired those works (among the best he wrote), Crane never would have become Crane.
He knew that the Wild West of his boyhood was dead. The frontier had been pronounced officially closed after the 1890 census, and with no more virgin territory to be explored and conquered, no more Indians to be rounded up and killed, no more gunslingers to square off against one another in saloons and dusty corrals, progress was coming in the form of Civilization. Crane arrived in the region on the cusp of these changes, changes he would later exploit to great effect in his two Western masterpieces, but even as the towns grew into cities and commerce spread, the landscape stood there in all its cosmic grandeur, and whatever encroachments the East was making on the West, the West was still a place apart, another America from the one Crane had known in New Jersey and New York. Six months after his return, he wrote to his friend Hawkins from Port Jervis:
I have always believed the western people to be much truer than the eastern people. We in the east are overcome a good deal by a detestable superficial culture which I think is the real barbarism.… Damn the east! I fell in love with the straight out-and-out, sometimes-hideous, often braggart westerners because I thought them to be truer men and, by the living piper, we will see in the next fifty years what the west will do. They are serious, those fellows. When they are born they take one big gulp of wind and they live.
It wasn’t that he slacked off on his work for Bacheller—fourteen articles in four months hardly qualifies as a dereliction of duty*—but he was distracted by his own excitement, I think, and it turned out that the job of travel writer was not well suited to his talents. Crane was best when he was telling stories, even the smallest of stories, such as an account of a traffic jam on a New York street, but now that his assignment was to travel from place to place and collect bits of local color, he seems to have been at loose ends, or at least uninspired, which gives the sketches a rather dogged, workmanlike feel. The articles are uniformly well written and often entertaining, more than good enough to have pleased Bacheller, but except for two or three of them, they lack Crane’s customary spark.
Not much is known about what he was up to during those four months. He dawdled in New Orleans for fifteen or sixteen days, notably working on a freshly typed version of The Red Badge of Courage that Hitchcock express-mailed to his hotel, and before Crane sent it back to D. Appleton and Company he revisited the novel with enough detachment and clarity of mind to cut out one of the chapters, discard the final paragraphs of several others, trim roughly two thousand words from the text as a whole, and make—as he put it to Hitchcock—“a great number of small corrections.” When he wasn’t tinkering with his manuscript, he was attending two opera performances, suffering through a case of dyspepsia (according to Linson’s memoir), and looking over a copy of Copeland and Day’s publishing prospectus for The Black Riders (complete with flattering excerpts from Garland’s review of Maggie), but other than the two dispatches he sent off from New Orleans, the rest of his stay at the Hotel Royal is a blank. The first article is a laudatory piece about the historical importance and current state of opera in the city, and the second is a detailed, blow-by-blow report of the Mardi Gras celebration on February twenty-sixth, which must have been wired in a bit behind schedule, since Bacheller didn’t publish it until the next Mardi Gras rolled around the following year. Then he was off to Texas, arriving on March fifth in Galveston, where he spent most of the day in two long drinking sessions with local big shots, first the mayor and then the managing editor of the Galveston Daily News. Afterward, he described the experience in a letter to his artist friend James Moser:
