Burning boy, p.4
Burning Boy, page 4
In early July 1878, Crane and his mother left New Jersey to spend a few days in Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley (not far from where she was born) to listen to a speech delivered by Frances E. Willard, the secretary of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and to attend the one-hundredth-anniversary reenactment of the Wyoming Valley Massacre, a Revolutionary War battle during which local settlers were attacked and murdered by a combination of British and Indian forces. That was where he met Wheeler, whose background was remarkably similar to his: a father who was a Methodist minister, a mother who was active in the temperance movement. Wheeler’s mother had an appointment with Mrs. Crane at the hotel where he and his parents had spent the night, and the New Jersey woman arrived with her boy in tow.
That was my first meeting with Stevie Crane. He was a pale-faced, blond-headed, hungry-looking boy a bit younger than I, and we struck up an intimacy that was to be renewed when we were in our twenties.
Next day Mrs. Crane and Stevie accompanied us to our town to spend two days as my parents’ guests. The day coach was full and we boys were allowed to ride in the “smoker,” where Stevie blandly (though with some covert backward glances toward the car which held his mother) lighted a Sweet Caporal cigarette and offered me one.… I accepted Stevie’s weed and to my surprise was not sick.
The day following … was a red-letter day for us, with popcorn, toy balloons, rattan canes, and stick candy, and hawkers selling every conceivable gewgaw.…
Yet the peak was to come. Beside the exit gate a fat Pennsylvania Dutchman had set up a keg of beer on an upturned box on which stood a row of glass mugs, with a sign which said: Beer 10 cents. When Stevie took a dime from his pocket and approached it with an air of purpose, my blood chilled. “What are you going to do?” I asked in a hollow undertone. Stevie did not answer. He set down the dime on the box and said, “Gimme one.”
I can still see the man’s rotund face as he bent down over his keg and surveyed Stevie’s diminutive figure. “Hey?” he said.
“I said gimme a beer,” said Stevie.
The man’s fingers had closed on the eloquent coin. “You gimme a beer or gimme back my dime!” said Stevie in a shrill falsetto.
The man held the mug with a dab of foam in it toward him, but Stevie regarded it with fine scorn. “That ain’t half full!” he said indignantly. “You fill it up.”
The tap was turned then and Stevie drank it slowly, while I watched in stupefaction. We walked through the gate. “How does it taste?” I asked.
“Taint any better’n ginger ale,” he said. “I been saving that dime for it all afternoon.”
I was still in a daze when we came to the streetcar. Beer! Right in the crowd, too.… “Stevie,” I whispered as the driver whipped up the horses and the bells clanged, “how’d you dast do it?”
“Pshaw!” said Stevie. “Beer ain’t nothing at all.” Then he added, defensively but emphatically. “How was I going to know what it tasted like less’n I tasted it? How you going to know about things at all less’n you do em?”
Smoking cigarettes at age six. Drinking beer at age six. It is not uncommon for curious children to try such things when they are still considered too young to try them, but nearly all the curious ones conduct their experiments in secret and, for the most part, at a more advanced age than six. Standard tactics: chancing upon a stray pack of cigarettes lying around the house, pulling one out of the pack, lighting up, and then coughing, turning green, or vomiting—in all cases ending with a vow never to smoke again. Not only did Crane smoke again, he was carrying around a pack of cigarettes in his pocket (where and how did he get it?) and had the temerity to light up in public. As for beer, the opportunities for youthful experimentation are probably more abundant: a bottle sitting in the pantry (back then) or sitting in the refrigerator (now), a half-finished glass your father or uncle or big brother has left on the dining room table, and when no one is looking, you take a swig and either enjoy the taste or find it bitter, but again, Crane took his first sip of beer out in the open, where hundreds of people could see him. And no doubt at the precise moment when his mother and Wheeler’s mother were attending a temperance lecture.
I look at the 1879 photograph again, and when I fix my attention on the eyes and what the face seems to be expressing, I see something hidden there, and also, for want of a better word, defiance.
If the photograph was indeed taken in 1879 and not 1878, Crane’s eyes would also bear the memory of an event he had recently witnessed. At the July Fourth celebration in Port Jervis, the festivities were scheduled to begin with the firing of a cannon. Two veterans from the U.S. Colored Volunteer Heavy Artillery, Samuel Hasbrouck and Theodore Jarvis, were put in charge of the operation, but something went wrong and the cannon exploded too soon, blasting the two ex-soldiers into the air and then through the air until they landed some distance away. Both were badly injured, and both men’s faces were severely burned. Jarvis soon died, but Hasbrouck pulled through—blinded in one eye, his face permanently disfigured, a man with no face. Eighteen years later, Crane wrote The Monster, the most powerful and complex of his short novels. The central figure in the story is a black man who rushes into a burning house to save his white employer’s son. The boy is rescued, but the rescuer’s skin is thoroughly scorched by the fire, and thereafter everyone in the town looks upon him as a monster—because he is a man with no face.
At least two other episodes from Crane’s childhood found their way into his fiction. In August 1879, a year after dazzling Post Wheeler with his smoking and drinking exploits, Crane was bitten by a snake on a family camping trip. His brother Wilbur, the almost-but-not-quite doctor, saved him by performing emergency surgery in the woods. That incident, along with another snake incident from the 1890s, resurfaced in a story aptly entitled “The Snake.” More important, one of the best works in Crane’s collection of childhood tales (“The Fight,” in Whilomville Stories, which was going to press when he died) is directly based on something that happened to him as a boy. Again, it is Wilbur who chronicles the event in his memoir from 1900:
One fight of Stephen’s is historic in the family, when as a boy of nine he thrashed the bully of Brooklyn street, Port Jervis, a boy twelve years of age. Mother had recently moved into the neighborhood, and as Stephen was younger and smaller, the bully proceeded to bulldoze him as he bulldozed the other small boys of the neighborhood. Stephen stood it for a while but at some added insult to his boyhood he turned on the bully, and after some preliminary sparring, he tackled him and threw him to the ground, and sat on him until he heard a voice saying, “Let him up Stevie.” Stephen then ran home and threw himself on the lounge and cried for several minutes, while the bully’s mother, who had been watching the scrap, took her hopeful son home and finished the thrashing that Stephen had begun.
There is one last story that strikes me as significant. The source is anonymous, which means that it might or might not be true, but it carries enough conviction and command of detail to be more believable than not. Transcribed by the artist Corwin Knapp Linson, one of Crane’s most loyal friends during his years in New York, and sent to the Crane scholar Melvin H. Schoberlin, it is a short text written by a boyhood neighbor from Asbury Park:
His mother was small, a bright, round, active woman, bird-like in movement, an ardent temperance lecturer. You could not be a temperance worker then and be much at home. His sister Agnes taught public school, a tall, kindly, graceful, brown-eyed woman of magnetic charm, a sweet nature. She mothered the family, but the brood was too much for her. Steve was just out of “knee pants;” small, under-nourished, coming home from school or play, maybe skating on the lake, to find no supper. He would then range the neighborhood for food and companionship, telling tales to the children of the various mothers—mine was one—who often sewed on his buttons.
He was so much younger than his brothers and sisters that he was in effect an only child, much loved by the family but also neglected, with buttons missing from his clothes and a stomach that was often empty, and with so many changes of address during the first years of his life, again and again he found himself in the position of being the lonely newcomer. The earliest surviving literary work written by Crane was composed just after he turned eight. It is an astonishingly good poem for someone that young, but even though its tone is whimsical, there is an ache at the core of it that is finally unsettling.
I’D RATHER HAVE—
Last Christmas they gave me a sweater,
And a nice warm suit of wool,
But I’d rather be cold and have a dog,
To watch when I come from school.
Father gave me a bicycle,
But that isn’t much of a treat,
Unless you have a dog at your heels
Racing away down the street.
They bought me a camping outfit,
But a bonfire by a log
Is all the outfit I would ask,
If only I had a dog.
They seem to think a little dog
Is a killer of all earth’s joys;
But oh, that “pesky little dog”
Means hours of joy to the boys.
The Crane family house, Asbury Park. The building now serves as the headquarters of the town’s historical society. (PHOTOGRAPH BY SPENCER OSTRANDER)
6
Dogs, ponies, soldiers, baseball, football, cigarettes, and telling stories in exchange for food.
Most people outgrow their childhood interests and occupations, but Crane never did. Every item on that list remained a passion for him until the end.
DOGS. Crane owned several dogs over the years. Toward the end of his life, when he lived in a house with enough space for a private study, he preferred writing with a dog in the room, even though he was often interrupted by having to open and close the door. “A Dark-Brown Dog” is one of his best early stories (1893), “The Black Dog” is one of the first he published (the New York Tribune, July 1892), and in his novel The Third Violet (written in 1895, released in 1897), a dog named Stanley is one of the principal characters. In that same year, 1897, when Crane was covering the Greco-Turkish War as a correspondent for Hearst’s New York Journal and McClure’s syndicate, he rescued a puppy from the battlefield at Velestino and named him “Velestino, the Journal dog.” He and Cora took their new pet with them to England, and when the dog became ill with distemper, all work stopped as the two of them tried to save his life. “For eleven days we fought death for him,” Crane wrote to Sylvester Scovel, a fellow correspondent who had been with him in Greece, “thinking nothing of anything but his life. He made a fine manly fight, with only little grateful laps of his tongue on Cora’s hands, for he knew that she was trying to help him.… We are burying him tomorrow in the rhododendron bed in the garden.” Later on, when Crane and Joseph Conrad became close friends, Crane developed a special fondness for Conrad’s baby son, Borys, and insisted that his father give him a dog, saying that “he must have a dog, a boy ought to have a dog,” and when Conrad failed to deliver the required animal, Crane gave Borys a dog himself. In 1900, the last photograph ever taken of Crane (by Cora) shows him sitting on a bench in front of his house holding his little dog Spongie in his arms.
PONIES. As Crane grew up, the ponies grew into horses and riding became a pleasure that surpassed all others. In a letter sent from Hartwood to Willis Brooks Hawkins in October 1895, he writes: “What can be finer than a fine frosty morning, a runaway horse, and only the still hills to watch. Lord, I do love a crazy horse with just a little pig-skin between him and me.” In 1919, Conrad remembered his American friend as a man who “never appeared so happy or so much to advantage as on the back of a horse,” and in Crane’s 1896 letter to John Northern Hilliard, he ends two pages of remarks about himself and his family by declaring, “My idea of happiness is the saddle of a good-riding horse.” For a short spell after the publication of The Red Badge of Courage, when Crane finally had some money and no longer had to worry about where his next meal was coming from, the first thing he did was to make arrangements to buy a horse named Peanuts.
Almost inevitably, countless horses also appear in his work. To cite just one example, consider “One Dash—Horses,” a story from 1895 set in Mexico and in all likelihood based on a real experience. The American protagonist, Richardson, who fears he is about to be robbed and killed by a bandit, sneaks off in the middle of the night, knowing that his fate rests on how his horse will respond to his commands. “[Richardson’s fingers] were shaking so hard that he could hardly buckle the girth. His hands were invisible mittens.” But then the horse takes off, and “he felt in his heart the first thrill of confidence. The little animal, unurged and quite tranquil, moving his ears this way and that way with an interest in the scenery, was nevertheless bounding into the eye of the breaking day with the speed of a frightened antelope. Richardson, looking down, saw the long, fine reach of forelimb, as steady as steel machinery.”
Three years later, when Crane was in Puerto Rico reporting on the Spanish-American War for Hearst, another Journal reporter, Charles Michelson, closely observed how Crane interacted with horses. Writing in 1926, he remembered:
His horse was always a full partner in Crane’s adventures.… During the Porto Rico campaign he rode a hammer-headed, spur-scarred, hairy-hoofed white beast hardly bigger than a goat, with all the bad habits that could be grafted on original sin by ignorance and bad treatment.… He was always picketed apart from the other horses, for he was both a biter and a kicker, but he and Crane got along like sweethearts. There came the day when we were due to sail for home.… I found Crane. His arm was over the bowed neck of the disreputable pony, and the face he turned to me was stained with tears.… It sounds maudlin and mawkish in the telling, but somehow it did not appear either that afternoon in Porto Rico.
To complete the picture, it should be noted that Crane’s affection for horses extended beyond horses themselves to include their cousins. When he and Linson were commissioned by McClure to go to Pennsylvania in 1894 to gather information for their feature article “In the Depths of a Coal Mine” (Crane as reporter, Linson as illustrator), Crane devoted several paragraphs to the mules who were condemned to work in the ink-black darkness underground. “The stable was like a dungeon. The mules were arranged in solemn rows. They turned their faces toward our lamps. They made their eyes shine wondrously, like lenses. They resembled enormous rats.” Crane learns that the mules are often kept in the dark for years on end and then adds: “Usually when brought to the surface, these animals tremble at the earth, radiant in the sunshine. Later, they go almost mad with fantastic joy. The full splendor of the heavens, the grass, the trees, the breeze breaks upon them suddenly.” In Mexico the following year, he wrote “How the Donkey Lifted the Hills,” a twelve-hundred-word fable that tells how the donkey became man’s primary beast of burden. It concludes: “So now, when you see a donkey with a church, a palace, and three villages upon its back, and he goes with infinite slowness, moving but one leg at a time, do not think him lazy. It is his pride.”
SOLDIERS. Crane’s adolescent ambition was to go to West Point and pursue a career in the military, but his brother William talked him out of it, arguing that it was unlikely there would be a war in his lifetime. Needless to say, that did not prevent Crane from continuing to think about soldiers and war. In addition to The Red Badge of Courage, he wrote twenty-four stories on the subject and filed more than sixty dispatches as a war correspondent from Greece, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.
BASEBALL. Another one of Crane’s adolescent ambitions was to become a professional baseball player. Small and wiry (about five foot seven and 125 pounds as an adult), he played catcher and hit for a high average, though with little power even by the standards of those deadball times. Elected captain of both his boarding school team and the Syracuse varsity during the one spring he was enrolled there (the youngest team captain in American college baseball), he was generally considered to be an excellent all-around player, in spite of his physical limitations. Mostly catching bare-handed in high school (as reported by classmate Abram Lincoln Travis in 1930), Crane eventually “secured a heavy buckskin glove which he used effectively and so saved much iodine and witch hazel which he had used before.” A pitcher on the Syracuse team (Mansfield J. French, writing in 1934) described his battery-mate as
very quick and active on his feet, his body was slender, his shoulders somewhat drooping, his chest not robust and his knees inclined somewhat to knock together.… He played ball with a fiendish glee. Usually of a quiet and taciturn mien, on the ball field he was constantly in motion, was free of speech, wantonly profane at times.… He was first tried out as a catcher and proved to be, in his ability to hold the ball, the best candidate for that position. His throwing arm was weak, however, and although he threw with his whole body, he was unable to line the ball down to second base in acceptable form … The strain upon the ligaments of his shoulder would, at times, cause him to double up with pain.
Regardless of these throwing problems, another classmate (Clarence Loomis Peaslee, writing in 1896) confidently asserted, “He was the best player of the nine, and one of the best catchers that the University ever had.”
Crane also “loved talking baseball” (French), and long after he had stopped playing on organized teams, the first thing he would do when he opened the morning paper was turn to the baseball scores. After dumping college and heading off for Asbury Park in the summer of 1891, baseball turned out to be the glue that sealed his first important literary friendship. Hamlin Garland (1860–1940) is mostly forgotten today, but at the time he was considered a promising young advocate of the “new realism,” and in a long productive writing life that included works of fiction, autobiography, and criticism, he was so well thought of that twenty years after Crane’s death one of his now-forgotten books was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In August, he came to the Jersey Shore to deliver a lecture on William Dean Howells, and Crane, who was again working for Townley’s news agency, covered the event for the Tribune. After the article was published the next day, Garland was sufficiently impressed to want to meet the author. The young man from the Dakota Territory and the younger man from the East Coast hit it off during the time Garland spent in the neighborhood, not just because of their shared tastes in literature but because of their common interest in baseball. Garland had been a pitcher, and what better person to discuss the finer points of moundsmanship with than catcher Crane? The two of them therefore discussed baseball as well as books, sometimes discussing books even as they were tossing a ball back and forth, and for the next several years, as Crane struggled to find his footing in New York, Garland stood behind him, in one crucial instance urging Crane to send a copy of the self-published Maggie to Howells, which proved to be a significant turn in Crane’s life, for even though the rest of the literary world had ignored the book, Howells was impressed by it, and given that he was the leading novelist and critic of the moment, his support meant everything.
