Burning boy, p.39
Burning Boy, page 39
I think it is well to go ahead with The Third Violet. People may just as well discover now that the high dramatic key of The Red Badge cannot be sustained. You know what I mean. I dont think The Red Badge to be any great shakes but then the very theme of it gives it an intensity that the writer cant reach every day. The Third Violet is a quiet little story but then it is serious work and I should say let it go. If my health and my balance remains to me, I think I will be capable of doing work that will dwarf both books.
Crane was right on both counts. He did manage to produce stronger work in the years ahead, but he was also correct to assume that any book he published from then on would inevitably be judged by the standard he had set for himself when he was just twenty-three years old. Now he was twenty-four, and as he plunged on with new stories and sketches and various other projects, he understood that the sensation he had caused with his first full-length novel was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it had thrust him into public view and turned him into a writer whose work would continue to attract a substantial audience—and a curse because no matter how much he accomplished in the future, he would never match the success he had already achieved. As the months passed, his position eventually hardened into a tough-minded wariness against the perils of fame—as shown by these anguished reflections, which were printed in a popular magazine in May 1896:
Before “The Red Badge of Courage” was published I often found it difficult to make both ends meet. The book was written during this period. It was an effort born of pain, and I believe that this was beneficial to it as a piece of literature. It seems a pity that this should be so,—that art should be a child of suffering; and yet such seems to be the case.…
Personally, I like my little book of poems, “The Black Riders,” better than I do “The Red Badge of Courage.” The reason is, I suppose, that the former is the more ambitious effort. In it I aim to give my ideas of life as a whole, so far as I know it, and the latter is a mere episode,—an amplification. Now that I have reached the goal for which I have been working ever since I began to write, I suppose that I ought to be contented; but I am not. I was happier in the old days when I was always dreaming of the thing I have now attained. I am disappointed with success. Like many things we strive for, it proves when obtained to be an empty and fleeting joy.
24
Finally Hawker said that he thought “Hearts at War” was a very good play.
“Did you?” she said in surprise. “I thought it was very much like the others.”
“Well, so did I,” he cried hastily. “The same figures moving around in the mud of modern confusion.”
The Third Violet (Chapter XXVI)
The Third Violet is such a radical departure from Crane’s previous work that it could easily be mistaken for the work of another writer. Not just because it abandons the life-and-death issues of his first three books (urban poverty and war) to take on the thoroughly conventional subjects of courtship and marriage, but also because Crane adopts an altogether different narrative method from the one he had been developing and refining over the past four years—the “‘quick’ style” that he referred to in his letter to Hitchcock, as opposed to the “thick style” of his other novels. In the case of The Third Violet, “quick” turned out to mean a story written almost exclusively in dialogue, making the book read less like the novel of manners it purports to be than a screenplay for a film of manners—another one of Crane’s bewildering anticipations of cinematic language—and how curious it is to learn that just as he was finishing his book at the end of 1895, the Lumière brothers were projecting the first moving pictures on a large screen before a paying audience of seven hundred people in Paris (December 28) by means of their newly invented device, the cinematograph. A quirk of historical timing, yes, but something was definitely in the air, and it seems both fitting and uncanny that movies as we know them today were born at the very moment Crane was delivering his most movie-like novel to his publisher. Even if he knew nothing about the Lumière brothers, and even if he could have known nothing about the still-to-be-invented form of writing we now call the screenplay, Crane’s book-in-dialogue draws heavily on his love and knowledge of the theater, and because much of that book is set outdoors in a natural world far too large to be encompassed by a standard proscenium stage, the effect it has on us is now cinematic—necessarily cinematic—and no matter how bizarre it might sound, there is some justification in calling The Third Violet the world’s first screenplay.
The origins of the novel can probably be traced back to the Sunday editions of the New York Press and the New York Times on October 28, 1894, both of which carried pieces written by Crane. Some of the material from the first one, “Stories Told by an Artist,” would be lifted out and used again in the novel, not just the characters based on the “husky lot” of young artists Crane had lived with at the old Art Students League building (Wrinkles, Great Grief, Pennoyer, and Purple Sanderson), but whole sentences and passages as well. In this one, describing the room they all share, only a couple of words have been changed on the journey from newsprint to book:
The flood of orange light showed clearly the dull walls lined with sketches, the tousled bed in one corner, the masses of boxes and trunks in another, a little dead stove and a wonderful table. Moreover, there were wine-colored draperies flung in some places and on a shelf high up, there were plaster casts with dust in the creases. A long stove-pipe wandered off in the wrong direction and then turned impulsively toward a hole in the wall. There were some elaborate cobwebs in the ceiling.
The artists are in the book because the principal male character—the suitor in the love drama that occupies much of the story—is a painter named Hawker (William to his family, Billie to everyone else), and Wrinkles and Company live across the hall from his studio and are among his closest friends. Hawker seems to have been modeled partly on Linson (a country boy from Sullivan County who has studied art in Paris), but the name itself is undoubtedly a nod to another friend of Crane’s, Hawkins, with the added twist of transforming it into the verb to hawk (peddling goods by calling out in the street to promote your wares), which neatly sums up the pressure on artists to earn enough money to survive. In Billie Hawker’s case, that meant returning to New York from his studies in Paris and being obliged to crank out “the beautiful red and green designs that surround the common tomato can” until his own paintings began to be noticed.
The article that appeared in the Times that day was Crane’s interview with Howells (“Howells Fears the Realists Must Wait”), which was conducted about eighteen months after their first meeting and serves up Howells’s views on the state of contemporary American fiction as Crane (who identifies himself simply as “the other man”) sits there listening to the Great One talk and chimes in with an occasional comment of his own. “Ah,” says Howells, “this writing merely to amuse other people—why, it seems to me altogether vulgar. A man may as well blacken his face and go out and dance on the street for pennies. The author is a sort of trained bear, if you accept certain standards. If literary men are to be the public fools, let us at any rate have it clearly understood, so that those of us who feel differently can take measures. But on the other hand a novel should never preach and berate and storm. It does no good. As a matter of fact a book of that kind is ineffably tiresome.”
By contrast, Howells believes “it is the business of the novel to picture the daily life in the most exact terms possible with an absolute and clear sense of proportion. That is the important matter—the proportion.” It sounds good, but because he has yet to define what he means by proportion, it is still rather vague at this point, and after he has rambled on for a little while, the other man interjects: “I suppose that when a man tries to write ‘what the people want’—when he tries to reflect the popular desire, it is a bad quarter of an hour for the laws of proportion.” Rather than give his young friend a straight answer, Howells launches into a gentle harangue on one of his pet peeves—the love story, or, as he puts it, “the hosts of stories” that begin when the hero sees “a certain girl” and end abruptly when he marries her. “Love and courtship was not an incident, a part of life—it was the whole of it. All else was of no value. Men of that religion must have felt very stupid when they were engaged in anything but courtship. Do you see the false proportion?”
At last, Howells is beginning to make sense. To talk about one thing to the exclusion of all others is to lose a sense of proportion—which leads to the writing of bad books that do not reflect the reality of lived experience. He goes on: “Here and there an author raised his voice, but not loudly. I like to see novelists treating some of the other important things in life—the relation of mother and son, of husband and wife, in fact all these things that we live in continually.”
The other man then remarks that there must be “two or three new literary people” who have taken that approach, but then he adds: “Books along these lines that you speak of are what might be called unpopular. Do you think them to be a profitable investment?”
Howells insists that they are and that it is all “a question of perseverance—courage. A writer of skill cannot be defeated because he remains true to his conscience. It is a long serious conflict sometimes, but he must win, if he does not falter.”
It sounds as if Howells is talking directly to Crane here, encouraging him to take heart in his own future, but Crane refuses to share the master’s optimism.
“Mr. Howells,” said the other man suddenly, “have you observed a change in the literary pulse of the country within the last four months. Last winter, for instance, it seems that realism was almost about to capture things, but recently I have thought that I saw coming a sort of counter-wave, a flood of the other—a reaction, in fact. Trivial, temporary, perhaps, but a reaction, certainly.”
Surprisingly, Howells does not disagree with him, and as the interview comes to a close, he says, dropping “his hand in a gesture of emphatic assent, ‘What you say is true. I have seen it coming.… I suppose we shall have to wait.’”
One year after the article was published, Crane began working on a novel that sought to reexamine the issues he and Howells had touched on in their conversation: the dilemma of pursuing art in a culture dominated by the pursuit of money (the conundrum of art versus commerce or art as commerce) and the conflict between artistic integrity and popular taste (the perils of becoming a trained bear). These were deeply personal issues to Crane—the beautiful war he had been engaged in ever since his move to New York—but, then, as if in defiance of Howells, or at least disregarding Howells’s open contempt for the courtship novel, Crane chose to wrap those issues inside a story about a young artist’s quest for love, as if to prove that he could pull off such a book without turning into a trained bear. A difficult challenge, but Crane was still just twenty-three when he started writing his little romance, and after toiling on a book drenched in the violence of war, followed by another book set in the New York slums, he must have been hungry to try something new, to write against himself and see where the experiment took him. Banal as the subject might have been, it too was a deeply personal one for Crane, and now that his courtship of Lily Brandon Munroe had ended in failure, he took it upon himself to fictionalize his own experience and tell the story of a struggling painter from a family of no wealth who falls for a beautiful and spirited young woman born into great wealth, a boy raised on a farm in love with a New York heiress. Lily was the primary source (their initial meeting at a resort hotel, Crane’s visits to her father’s house in the city, both of which are echoed in the novel), but Ernest Hemingway’s future mother, Grace Hall, also must have played a part in the creation of Grace Fanhall, and then there was Nellie Crouse, the rich, attractive girl from Akron, Ohio, whom Crane had met just once at a New York tea party but who was surely in his thoughts as well, since he began courting her by letter immediately after the book was finished.
As for the bare-bones plot, it seems to owe something to Verdi’s La Traviata. The heroine, whose name is Violetta, gives Alfredo a camellia in the first act as a sign of her growing affection and asks him to come back as soon as the flower has begun to wilt, that is, to come back the next day, and Crane’s manipulations of the three violets in his story serve a similar erotic purpose.
The book is divided into two distinct halves, the first one set in the countryside of Sullivan County and the second one in New York City, the two places in the world Crane was most familiar with, his two homes. The Hawker farm is modeled on Edmund’s house at Hartwood (where Crane wrote most of the novel), and Hawker’s New York studio is located in what seems to be an exact duplicate of the old Art Students League building, where Crane had lived and starved and written several of his early books.
What was not familiar to him, however, was the narrative territory he had chosen to enter with his new project, but just as he had turned the conventions of the war novel inside out with The Red Badge of Courage, he was now proposing to do the same with the novel of manners—by dramatically different means. In the earlier instance, he had taken a subject that normally lends itself to objective accounts of physical action and transformed it into a story about consciousness and the inner life, and now, almost perversely, but with a similar kind of daring, he set out to dismantle the love story, which is normally about feelings, perhaps only about feelings, and transform it into a novel of pure action. As he had done in his previous books, Crane began by stripping out everything that was not relevant to his purpose. We know that every character in the book thinks Grace is beautiful, for example, but we have no idea what she looks like, whether tall or short, blond or brunette, with straight teeth or crooked teeth, nor are we ever told what any of the other characters look like, nor what clothes they wear from scene to scene, nor what happens to their faces when they smile, nor much of anything about the houses and rooms they live in—the plentitude of details that provide the meat and bone of the classic novel of manners. Here, in an abrupt reversal of norms, the most vivid physical presence in the book belongs to the one character who cannot speak: Hawker’s dog, Stanley, described as “a large orange and white setter” who expresses emotion “by twisting his body into a fantastic curve and then dancing over the ground with his head and his tail very near to each other.” More than that, Stanley can think, and from time to time Crane even lets us in on his thoughts, as when the dog is “wagging his tail in placid contentment and ruminating upon his experiences.” By contrast, the two-legged characters are opaque, and Crane never ventures inside them as he did with Henry Fleming, George Kelcey, and Maggie Johnson in his other novels. They think, of course, but their thoughts are revealed to us only through what they say to one another in the conversations that inform the action of the book, that form the action of the book, and the one time Crane is about to go inside’s someone head and tell us what the expression on his face could mean, he pulls back at the last second—“in his eyes was a singular expression which perhaps denoted the woe of the optimist pushed suddenly from his height.” The perhaps undercuts any certainty about what the man is actually thinking. As with the characters in a screenplay, the men and women in The Third Violet are all surface, and because Crane gives us almost nothing to see of that surface, we must imagine them for ourselves. The curious power of this bare, enigmatic book is that the reader, in the act of reading it, is also writing it along with Crane, and one by one all the blanks get filled in.
