Burning boy, p.40
Burning Boy, page 40
Few descriptions, then, scarcely a look at the physical world, and not a single moment of introspection, which until now had been Crane’s two most formidable strengths as a writer. As if he had chosen to blindfold himself and then tie his right hand behind his back and compose with his left hand, he had reduced his storytelling options to one method and one method only: the utterances of the human voice. Seventy-five to ninety percent of the novel consists of talk (depending on the chapter), meaning that the book stands or falls on the quality of that talk, and against all odds, how the dialogue reads on the page turns out to be the most captivating element of Crane’s experiment. Again and again, characters repeat themselves, again and again they say “What?” when someone says something to them, and again and again—especially at moments of emotional confusion or distress—they lapse into inarticulate stammering, breaking off their sentences before they can finish them, too flustered to translate their feelings into words. By and large, the dialogue in conventional nineteenth-century novels is coherent, but here as elsewhere Crane ignores convention and uses incoherence to convey uncertainty and psychological turmoil in his characters—to such an extent, at times, that the dialogue begins to resemble the speech patterns found in the plays of Harold Pinter, who didn’t start writing until fifty years after Crane’s death.
“Yes—no. I don’t know.”
“You would rather sit still and moon, wouldn’t you?”
“Moon—blast you. I couldn’t moon to save my life.”
“Oh, well. I didn’t mean moon exactly.”
“Yes, but not—”
Front cover of The Third Violet, published in 1897. (PHOTOGRAPH BY SPENCER OSTRANDER)
“Hold on. You were going to say that she was not like any other woman, weren’t you?”
“Not exactly that, but—”
“What did she say?” whispered the younger Worcester girl.
“Why, she said—oh nothing.”
“Look! Honest now, there’s the stage. See it! See it!”
“It isn’t there at all,” she said.
Gradually, he seemed to recover his courage. “What made you so tremendously angry? I don’t see why.”
After consideration, she said decisively. “Well, because.”
“That’s why I teased you,” he rejoined.
“Well, because—because—”
“Go on,” he told her finally. “You’re doing well.” He waited patiently.
“Well,” she said, “it is dreadful to defend somebody so—so excitedly and then have it turn out just a tease. I don’t know what he would think.”
“Who would think?”
“Why—he.”
“Well, of course I like him, but—but—”
“What?” said Pennoyer.
“I don’t know,” said Florinda.
“Well, I still care for you and so I can only go away somewhere—some place ’way off—where—where—See?”
There are thirty-three chapters in the novel, which averages out to roughly three pages per chapter, and each one is presented as a self-contained scene, a dramatic moment in which two or more characters are caught in the middle of a conversation that advances the story in one direction or another, and once the scene ends, the next chapter begins with a destabilizing jump to another place and another set of characters caught in the middle of another conversation that could be happening an hour later or a day later or the following week. As with a film, the story is told through an accumulation of small bits and pieces, and what the story boils down to is the manner in which it is told, that is, the telling of the story itself, for all the characters in it seem to be aware that they are characters in a story, which demolishes the illusion that the story is an imitation of life, and therefore Crane’s love story is in fact a parody of a love story, a critique of the popular fiction of the day, a book so densely constructed in its word-by-word progress and yet ultimately so thin in substance that it resembles a spider’s web: an intricate, many-faceted marvel that can be swept away with a single thrust of a broom.
Hawker, the bungling, tormented, ill-at-ease suitor, stops for a moment on a walk through the countryside with Grace, points to a waterfall, and then proceeds to tell her the legend of the rocks on the other side of the river—a story within a story, their story at one remove, of course (the of course is essential), which is none other than the same old love story everyone has heard a thousand times before.
“Once upon a time there was a beautiful Indian maiden, of course. And she was, of course, beloved by a youth from another tribe who was very handsome and stalwart and a mighty hunter, of course. But the maiden’s father was, of course, a stern old chief, and when the question of his daughter’s marriage came up, he, of course, declared that the maiden should be wedded only to a warrior of her tribe. And, of course, when the young man heard this he said that in such case he would, of course, fling himself headlong from the crag. The old chief was, of course, obdurate, and, of course, the youth did, of course, as he had said. And, of course, the maiden wept.” After Hawker had waited for some time, he said with severity: “You seem to have no great appreciation of folklore.”
The principal storytelling character in the novel, however, is the man who serves as the link between Hawker and Grace, a foppish, cynical writer named Hollanden, who has left New York to spend the summer at the Hemlock Inn in Sullivan County, as has Grace, along with her sister-in-law and her sister-in-law’s two young children, and with Hawker back on his family’s farm for an extended break from city life, during which he plans to do as much painting as possible, there they all are, in close proximity to one another as the story begins, with Hollanden serving as go-between, prompter, and mischievous creator of the courtship drama that unfolds in the bucolic, Arcadian setting of Crane’s rural nowhere—the classic spot for love stories over the centuries, from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night.
Hawker has already seen Miss Fanhall in the opening pages of the book, but he has no idea who she is. By the time he runs into Hollanden on the morning of his first full day in the country, all he knows is that he crossed paths with a young woman and felt an immense and immediate attraction to her. It happened at sundown the day before, just after he arrived in Nowheresville. As he was disembarking from the train, he accidentally clunked a little boy on the head with his easel (foreshadowing the emotional clumsiness he will display throughout the book—while also telling us what kind of work he does), and then, as Hawker stood on the platform looking for a driver to take him to his parents’ farm, Miss Fanhall (the boy’s aunt) approached him from behind, asking if he knew which stage was the one for the Hemlock Inn.
Hawker turned and found a young woman regarding him. A wave of astonishment whirled into his hair and he turned his eyes quickly for fear that she would think that he had looked at her. He said: “Yes—certainly—I think that I can find it.” At the same time he was crying to himself: “Wouldn’t I like to paint her, though. What a glance—oh, murder. The—the—the distance in her eyes.”
To be attracted to that distance suggests a long struggle ahead, as if Hawker is one of those men doomed to want what they can’t have, manically twisting himself into knots in his quest for the unattainable, but such is the way the artist’s mind works, and how can such a man resist a woman who causes a wave of astonishment to whirl into his hair the instant he sees her for the first time?
Because the farm was in the same direction as the inn, Hawker wound up sharing the stage with Miss Fanhall and the others in her party, but chance saw to it that he was seated across from the two children rather than the astonishing woman. Reminiscent of the obstacles and contortions imposed on the lovers in “The Pace of Youth,” Hawker’s frustration vented itself with an absurd exercise in the art of twist and turn, for even though he wanted to go on looking at Miss Fanhall, he didn’t want to offend her by appearing to be too forward.
Fate had arranged it so that Hawker could not observe the girl with the—the—the distance in her eyes without leaning forward and discovering to her his interest. Secretly and impiously he wriggled in his seat and as the bumping stage swung its passengers this way and that, he obtained fleeting glances of a cheek, an arm or a shoulder.
That was all he managed to see—a few fragments of her—and then he had to get off at the crossroads and finish his journey on foot as the stage rumbled off toward the inn. For all his interest in her, Hawker had not even learned her name—and that, apparently, was the end of that.
After uniting with Stanley the dog and spending the night with his parents and two sisters at the farmhouse, Hawker goes out early the next morning to paint. He knows that his “writing friend” is staying at the inn, but “he could not hope to see Hollanden before eleven, as it was only through rumor that Hollanden was aware that there was a sunrise and an early morning.” So Hawker settles down to business, choosing to plant himself “in front of some fields of vivid yellow stubble on which trees made olive shadows,” for he is a landscape painter, no doubt working in the mode of the French Impressionists, and while he is still struggling to sell his canvases, his reputation has been growing, raising his status to that of a promising new figure who seems poised to take the next step into broader recognition—much as Crane was in the months before the release of his war novel. Unexpectedly however, “a white-flannel young man walked into the landscape.” This is one of the few times anyone’s clothing is mentioned, but how evocative that white flannel is to us today, stirring up a host of images from that turn-of-the-century world when the young men and women who were to become our grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents walked around in their summer whites—a symbol of leisure, indolence, and prosperity, even if one was only a middle-class office clerk or a manual laborer. The young man in white is of course Hollanden, and as Hawker waves “Hi, Hollie” at him with his brush and tells him to “get out of the color scheme,” Hollanden grins and saunters over to his friend, saying how glad he is to see him. After taking a quick look at the canvas portraying “the vivid yellow stubble with the olive shadows” (Crane repeats the words), he suddenly turns his eyes on the painter and asks, “Say, Hawker, why don’t you marry Miss Fanhall?” And with those words the novel bolts out of the starting gate and begins its hectic run around the track.
Hawker had a brush in his mouth, but he took it quickly out and said: “Marry Miss Fanhall? Who the devil is Miss Fanhall?”
Hollanden clasped both hands about his knees and looked thoughtfully away. “Oh, she’s a girl.”
“She is?” said Hawker.
“Yes. She came to the inn last night with her sister-in-law and a small tribe of young Fanhalls. There’s six of them, I think.”
“Two,” said Hawker. “A boy and a girl.”
“How do you—oh, you must have come up with them. Of course. Why, then you saw her.”
“Was that her?” asked Hawker, listlessly.
“Was that her?” cried Hollanden, with indignation. “Was that her?”
“Oh,” said Hawker.
Hollanden mused again. “She’s got lots of money, he said. “Loads of it. And I think she would be fool enough to have sympathy for you in your work. They are a tremendously wealthy crowd, although they treat it simply. It would be a good thing for you. I believe—yes, I’m sure she could be fool enough to have sympathy for you in your work. And now if you weren’t such a hopeless chump—”
“Oh, shut up, Hollie,” said the painter.
Hollanden should not be confused with a matchmaker. He is an inventor, an instigator, a plot builder improvising his story as he goes along, and rather than urge his two characters to fall in love quickly, dash to the altar, and live happily ever after, he wants to make the story as interesting and dramatic as possible, so impediments are just as valuable to him as encouragements, and whenever the story seems in danger of becoming too dull, he throws in another element to spice up the action—by overstating the qualities of a potential rival suitor (Oglethorpe) to discourage Hawker, for example, or by dragging Grace into teasing, circular, nonsensical conversations during which he pretends to bad-mouth Hawker in order to confuse her about the artist’s intentions. Hollanden is the most entertaining figure in the book, a court jester–Cupid armed with a quiver full of pungent, self-deprecating wit-darts, and he is amusing himself on his summer holiday by cooking up a diversion that will distract him from the boredom of tennis, picnics, and more tennis with the tale of a man who woos without knowing how to woo and the woe that follows from his ineptitude, even if his case is far from hopeless, since the object of his desire seems more than willing to be conquered. Hollanden is creating a spectacle, and because every spectacle needs an audience, Crane provides him with one by putting fifteen older women at the Hemlock Inn (fifteen out of a total of forty-two guests), a band of curious onlookers whom Hollanden describes to Hawker as “middle-aged ladies of the most aggressive respectability. They have come here for no discernible purpose save to get where they can see people and be displeased at them. They sit in a large group on that porch and take measurements of character as importantly as if they constituted the jury of heaven.” The women serve as a kind of modern-day Greek chorus, shadowy presences without faces who have been positioned in a back corner of the stage to offer their comments as the story of the protagonists unfolds, involving themselves in the Hawker-Fanhall romance in the same way readers become involved in courtship novels or viewers get hooked on the roller coaster plots, subplots, and sub-subplots of five-day-a-week soap operas. In the second half of the book, when the action shifts to the city, the women on the porch disappear, but their part in the story is handed over to Hawker’s artist friends, who follow the romance with the same avidity as the original onlookers and can scarcely talk about anything else. Aside from the leading man and woman, every other character’s role in the story is to follow the story and speculate on where it is going and how it will come out in the end. Trapped in a self-enclosed mirror-world, the book is ultimately about the expectations one brings to the reading of stories, and—to say it again—what it tells is the story of the story itself.
The novel advances by misdirection, foiled anticipations, and unexpected lurches to one side or the other of the main action. In the early scene when Hollanden walks into the landscape and Hawker sees him for the first time, the suggestion that Hawker marry Miss Fanhall is followed by the jousting conversation between the two men, which concludes at the end of the chapter with Hawker accusing Hollanden of being ridiculous, to which Hollanden replies:
“I’m not ridiculous.”
“Yes, you are, you know, Hollie.”
The writer waved his hand despairingly. “And you rode in the train with her and in the stage.”
“I didn’t see her in the train,” said Hawker.
“Oh, then you saw her in the stage. Ha-ha, you thief. I sat up here and you sat down there and lied.” He jumped from his perch and belabored Hawker’s shoulders.
“Stop that,” said the painter.
“Oh, you old thief, you lied to me. You lied—Hold on—bless my life, here she comes now.”
But she doesn’t come, at least not in the text. We turn the page, fully expecting to see Miss Fanhall approaching them, but Crane gives us something else instead. “One day,” the fourth chapter begins, and there is Hollanden telling Hawker about the fifteen middle-aged women who spend their days sitting on the porch of the inn. This is typical of how Crane proceeds throughout the book—promising something, then rescinding the promise and pushing forward with another line of thought, threatening to trip us with the numerous holes he leaves in the narrative ground, and because of that unstable ground, we are kept continually off-balance and on our guard, unsure of our footing and therefore unable to predict what will happen next, even though the story we are reading is an utterly conventional one at heart, a string of a hundred of courses that thread sinuously through all thirty-three chapters of talk and more talk and still more talk until the book comes to its unexpectedly ambiguous conclusion.
By the second page of the fourth chapter, apropos of nothing, Hollanden suddenly blurts out something.
“By the way,” he added, “you haven’t got any obviously loose screws in your character, have you?”
“No,” said Hawker, after consideration. “Only general poverty—that’s all.”
“Of course, of course,” said Hollanden. “But that’s bad. They’ll get on to you—sure. Particularly since you come up here to see Miss Fanhall so much.”
This is how we find out that Hawker has already begun his courtship of the astonishing woman—indirectly, at one remove, with the entire business having been conducted offstage, in other words, beyond the perimeter of the book, which digs yet one more hole in the narrative ground we are walking on. What follows from that revelation is a dialogue between the two young men that carries on until the end of the chapter and demonstrates the sharp difference in their personalities—Hollanden’s buoyant playfulness as opposed to Hawker’s stuffy rectitude and quickness to anger—as well as showing Hollanden’s mind at work as he puts together his “dramatic situation” and counsels Hawker on how to fit into the “play” that is in fact his own life (as conceived and directed by Hollanden), and when Hawker is reduced to stuttering incoherence as the scene draws to a close, the meaning of the book’s title is unveiled in the final sentence.
“What’s the matter with you? Haven’t you ever been in love before?”
“None of your business,” replied Hawker.
Hollanden thought upon this point for a time. “Well,” he admitted finally, “that’s true in a general way, but I hate to see you managing your affairs so stupidly.”
