Burning boy, p.41
Burning Boy, page 41
Rage flamed into Hawker’s face and he cried passionately, “I tell you it is none of your business.” He suddenly confronted the other man.
Hollanden surveyed this outburst with a critical eye and then slapped his knee with emphasis. “You certainly have got it. A million times worse than I thought. Why, you—you—you’re heels over head.”
“What if I am?” said Hawker, with a gesture of defiance and despair.
Hollanden saw a dramatic situation in the distance and with a bright smile he studied it. “Say,” he exclaimed, “suppose she should not go to the picnic to-morrow. She said this morning she did not know if she could go. Somebody was expected from New York, I think. Wouldn’t it break you up, though! Eh?”
“You’re so dev’lish clever,” said Hawker with sullen irony.
Hollanden was still regarding the distant dramatic situation. “And rivals, too. The woods must be crowded with them. A girl like that, you know. And then, all that money. Say, your rivals must number enough to make a brigade of militia. Imagine them, swarming around. But then it doesn’t matter so much,” he went on cheerfully. “You’ve got a good play there. You must appreciate them to her—you understand—appreciate them kindly like a man in a watch-tower. You must laugh at them only about once a week and then very tolerantly, you understand—and kindly—and appreciatively.”
“You’re a colossal ass, Hollie,” said Hawker. “You—”
“Yes—yes—I know,” replied the other peacefully. “A colossal ass. Of course.” After looking into the distance again he murmured: “I’m worried about that picnic. I wish I knew she was going. By heavens, as a matter of fact, she must be made to go.”
“What have you got to do with it?” cried the painter in another sudden outburst.
“There—there,” said Hollanden, waving his hand. “You fool. Only a spectator, I assure you.”
Hawker seemed overcome then with a deep dislike of himself. “Oh, well, you know, Hollie, this sort of thing—” He broke off and gazed at the trees. “This sort of thing—It—”
“How?” asked Hollanden.
“Confound you for a meddling, gabbling idiot,” cried Hawker suddenly.
Hollanden replied: “What did you do with that violet she dropped at the side of the tennis court yesterday?”
The mysterious first violet. Dropped by accident or design by Miss Fanhall, and if by design as a gesture of—what? It is too early to tell. Perhaps as a token of affection—but to whom? Hollanden seems to imply that Hawker picked it up or might have picked it up—but not even that is certain at this point. Much later, we will learn that the artist has indeed pocketed the violet, and by the time Miss Fanhall offers him a second one on the day she leaves the inn to return to the city, Crane has delineated the first stage of their bumpy, hot-and-cold, yet ever more serious romance—as orchestrated by the chortling, whimsical Hollanden.
Who is this devilish young man in the white flannel? Or, as one of the young female guests at the inn asks him at the beginning of chapter IV, “What makes literary men so peculiar?” After telling her that “I’ve inquired of innumerable literary men and none of ’em know,” he switches direction and offers to give them his “personal history,” which is met by the young Worcester girl’s older sister with an enthusiastic “Oh, do!” (In the speech that follows, note how Crane uses the term invented by Howells in their interview from the previous October: trained bear.)
“Well—you must understand—I started my career—my career, you understand—with a determination to be a prophet, and although I have ended in being an acrobat, a trained bear of the magazines, and a juggler of comic paragraphs, there was once carven upon my lips a smile which made many people detest me, for it hung before them like a banshee whenever they tried to be satisfied with themselves. I was informed from time to time that I was making no great holes in the universal plan, and I came to know that one person in every two thousand of the people I saw had heard of me, and that four out of five of these had forgotten it.… Meanwhile I created a gigantic dignity, and when men saw this dignity and heard that I was a literary man they respected me. I concluded that the simple campaign of existence for me was to delude the populace or as much of it as would look at me. I did. I do. And now I can make myself quite happy concocting sneers about it.…”
“I don’t believe a word of it is true,” said Miss Worcester.
“What do you expect of autobiography?” demanded Hollanden.
He is Crane’s nightmare double—the sellout writer who has given in to the demands of the marketplace, an extreme example of the sort of person he does not want to become, and consequently the embodiment of his worst fears about himself. And yet, how jovial Hollanden is, how comfortable in his derision of himself and others, so resigned to his mediocrity that he seems almost happy about it, as if, in having given up the struggle to turn himself into a prophet, an immense burden has been lifted from his shoulders, freeing him to cavort as irresponsibly as the nincompoops of fashion who appreciate his comic paragraphs. Or so it would appear from listening to him talk, but the Worcester girl sees right through him, understanding that he doesn’t mean a thing he is saying. Then comes his witty rejoinder, “What do you expect of autobiography?,” meaning that when one tells (or writes) about one’s “personal history,” the result will be no less a literary artifact than the words found in any piece of fiction, which happens to be true and which can also be read as a comment from Crane about his own book, for even if The Third Violet draws liberally on elements from his own life, it is not, strictly speaking, an autobiographical novel, even though the two principal male characters are both artists, each of whom represents something about his own conflicts in trying to establish a place for himself in the literary world. As for Hollanden, his true feelings are perhaps best expressed in a subsequent conversation with Oglethorpe when Hawker’s supposed rival, the all-but-perfect candidate to win Miss Fanhall’s hand in marriage (for he is widely considered to be the richest, handsomest, most likable fellow on the face of the earth), oafishly contends
that the men who made the most money from books were the best authors. Hollanden contended that they were the worst. Oglethorpe said that such a question should be left to the people. Hollanden said that the people habitually made the wrong decisions on questions that were left to them. “That is the most odiously aristocratic belief,” said Oglethorpe.
“No,” said Hollanden. “I like the people. But, considered generally, they are a collection of ingenuous blockheads.”
“But they read your books,” said Oglethorpe, grinning.
“That is through a mistake,” replied Hollanden.
For once, Hollanden seems to be telling the truth. And then again, perhaps he isn’t, and it is precisely the doubt embedded in this perhaps that makes him such an intriguing character. The self-negating force of his ironies spins round and round in an ever-deepening whirlpool of more ironies and contradictions, and the reader must be cautious in taking anything he says at face value. What he has just told Oglethorpe is that he knows the difference between good writing and bad writing and that any reader who thinks he is a good writer is wrong. Does he mean this? Probably. But if he does, that would also imply that Hollanden is bitter about his failure to live up to his earlier ambitions, and not once in the book does Crane show that bitterness. Hollanden never removes his mask, and because of that we can never fully trust what he says.
Hawker is another sort of artistic animal—dedicated, focused, driven by a burning compulsion to turn his canvases into weapons of the truth. His artist friends have a deep admiration for what he does, which is a convincing sign of how uncommonly gifted he is, but as with most people who push toward higher and higher levels of excellence, Hawker is uncommonly hard on himself, and no matter how good or admired his paintings might be, he is rarely satisfied with them. That is the paradox every genuine artist is forced to grapple with: to live in a state of perpetual doubt and yet to forge on from painting to painting or book to book in the hope of doing better the next time, and then, even when it is better, to feel another surge of disappointment at not having made it better enough. In that respect, Hawker’s inner trajectory as an artist closely resembles Crane’s, but there are a number of external resemblances as well, especially in Hawker’s early struggles with poverty and neglect, which he talks about several times in his conversations with Miss Fanhall. One instance, from chapter VIII:
“But, still, the life of the studios—”
Hawker scoffed. “There were six of us. Mainly we smoked. Sometimes we played hearts and at other times poker—on credit, you know—credit. And when we had the materials and got something to do, we worked.”
After he tells her about painting the red-and-green designs on the common tomato can and then graduating to corn and asparagus, Miss Fanhall repeats her opening remark, as does Hawker:
“But, still, the life of the studios—”
“There were six of us. Fate ordained that only one in the crowd could have money at one time. The other five lived off him and despised themselves. We despised ourselves five times as long as we had admiration.”
“And was this just because you had no money?”
“It was because we had no money in New York,” said Hawker.
“Well, after a while, something happened—”
“Oh, no, it didn’t. Something impended always, but it never happened.”
Another instance, from chapter XXIX, after Miss Fanhall has asked him to tell her about his beginnings as a painter:
“Well, I started to study when I was very poor, you understand. Look here, I’m telling you these things because I want you to know, somehow. It isn’t that I’m not ashamed of it. Well, I began very poor, and I—as a matter of fact—I—well, I earned myself over half the money for my studying and the other half I bullied and badgered and beat out my poor old dad. I worked pretty hard in Paris and I returned here expecting to become a great painter at once. I didn’t, though. In fact, I had my worst moments then. It lasted for some years.… However, things got a little better and a little better, until I found that by working quite hard I could make what was to me a fair income.…”
“Why are you so ashamed of this story?”
“The poverty.”
“Poverty isn’t anything to be ashamed of.”
“Great heavens, have you the temerity to get off that old nonsensical remark. Poverty is everything to be ashamed of. Did you ever see a person not ashamed of his poverty? Certainly not. Of course when a man gets very rich he will brag so loudly of the poverty of his youth that one would never suppose that he was once ashamed of it. But he was.”
“Well, anyhow, you shouldn’t be ashamed of the story you have just told me.”
“Why not? Do you refuse to allow me the great right of being like other men?”
“I think it was—brave, you know.”
“Brave—nonsense. Those things are not brave. Impression to that effect created by the men who have been through the mill for the greater glory of the men who have been through the mill.”
“I don’t like to hear you talk that way. It sounds wicked, you know.”
“Well, it certainly wasn’t heroic. I can remember distinctly that there was not one heroic moment.”
“No, but it was—it was—”
“It was what?”
“Well, somehow I like it, you know.”
In Hawker, Crane is not presenting a portrait of himself so much as conjuring up a kindred spirit, a fellow artist who approaches his art with an intensity similar to his own and has lived through humiliations similar to the ones he has experienced himself, but even though they share some personality traits as well (shy, bottled up, awkward around women), there is an essential difference between them that in the end makes all the difference: Crane had a sense of humor and Hawker does not. Even in his darkest moments of penury and hunger, Crane had it in him to step back from himself and mock his destitution with the zany, puffed-up verses of “Ah, haggard purse, why ope thy mouth,” whereas Hawker would be utterly incapable of such a gesture. He is grim, whereas Crane often smiled through his troubles. He is quick-tempered and embattled, whereas Crane was mostly calm and collected, with an ability to make people laugh at his jokes, but Hawker doesn’t smile, and he never tells a joke. So much for the autobiographical element of the novel, for what, after all, can we expect of autobiography? Crane has used parts of himself to fashion two characters named Hollanden and Billie Hawker, but they are both inventions, and The Third Violet is a novel, a work of the imagination that follows the ins and outs of a love story that never happened anywhere but inside the author’s head.
Hollanden’s interference complicates that love, as does the arrival of Oglethorpe, but the biggest obstacle standing between the two lovers comes from Hawker himself, for in spite of having moved up the social ladder (earning “a fair income”), he is intimidated by Miss Fanhall’s wealth or, rather, to be more precise about it, by the class she was born into and seems to represent (the distance in her eyes is also the distance that separates them socially), and no matter how glorious his position might become in the future, Hawker can never escape the story of his humble background and the shame of his early struggles. Rich girl that she is, however, Miss Fanhall is not a snob, and she has no impulse to look down on that humble background or condemn those early struggles and is, quite frankly, baffled by Hawker’s attitude. Why shame? If you have done nothing wrong, how can you possibly feel shame? Nevertheless, that is the word Hawker uses, but what he actually means by it is self-hatred, which twice earlier in the text has been called “a deep dislike of himself.” In other words, Hawker is at odds with himself, and in his pursuit of Miss Fanhall that condition exposes him as a man equally torn between love and anger, so that the more enamored he becomes of the girl with the distance in her eyes, the more contentiously he behaves with her—to such a degree that when she tells him that “poverty isn’t anything to be ashamed of,” he dismisses her remark and interprets it as a sign of condescension. In a fascinating reversal of roles, the tortured, self-tormenting painter is the one who turns out to be the snob.
The most pertinent episode in the first half of the novel occurs in chapter XIV, when Hawker and Grace are walking through the woods not long after he has finally found the courage to announce that he “cares” for her, which for him carries all the weight of a declaration of love. Lagging behind the others in the group, they run into Hawker’s father and (at Grace’s request) hitch a ride with him back to the inn in his oxcart. Hawker the snob is embarrassed by this chance encounter between aristocrat and peasant, but the egalitarian, open-hearted Grace is charmed by it, and as the “tall and tattered” farmer drives them to their destination, talking easily and amiably with the society girl sitting next to him on the plank in front, his wincing, unhappy son stands silently in the back. By the next morning, the Oxcart Incident has become the talk of the front porch at the inn, and one of the gossiping women insults Grace by complimenting her on her “prank.” “Prank?” Grace asks, and the woman replies: “Yes, your riding on the ox cart with that old farmer and that young Mr. What’s-his-name, you know. We all thought it delicious.” Agitated by the woman’s rudeness, Grace marches off in a snit, and later that morning Hawker, unable to understand the true reason for her indignation (her attraction to him, her sympathy for his good father), tries to appease her by shouldering the blame for the woman’s insult.
“I know what Mrs. Truscot talked to you about.”
She turned upon him belligerently. “You do?”
“Yes,” he answered with meekness. “It was undoubtedly some reference to your ride upon the ox wagon.”
She hesitated for a moment and then said: “Well?”
With still greater meekness he said: “I am very sorry.”
“Are you—indeed?” she inquired loftily. “Sorry for what? Sorry that I rode upon your father’s ox wagon, or sorry that Mrs. Truscot was rude to me about it?”
“Well—in some ways it was my fault.”
“Was it? I suppose you intend to apologize for your father’s owning an ox wagon, don’t you?”
“No, but—”
“Well, I am going to ride in the ox wagon whenever I choose. Your father, I know, will always be glad to have me. And if it so shocks you there is not the slightest necessity of your coming with us.”
A moment later, she tells him that she and her family will be leaving the inn next week. The blindsided Hawker can scarcely believe what he has heard, and then, to emphasize the depth of her irritation with him, Grace casually says that she meant to tell him earlier but it kept slipping her mind. Following that hurtful disclosure, she augments the hurt by pretending to have forgotten what he told her yesterday (“I care for you, of course”), and when he accuses her of not remembering on purpose, she calls him “a ridiculous person … more ridiculous now than I have yet seen you.” Then she stomps off to the tennis courts with Hollenden, who has promised to teach her a new stroke called “the slam.”
Her slam of the obtuse Hawker is fully justified at this point, but all is not lost, and the rattled suitor is far from ready to give up. On the last evening before Miss Fanhall’s departure, Hawker returns to the inn, chastened but still determined, and in spite of the presence of several other people around her, among them Oglethorpe (who has come and gone and come back again), he does his best to convey his feelings to her under those constrained circumstances. “I shall miss you,” he says; “This has been quite the most delightful summer of my experience,” he says; “I shall miss you,” he says again; “It will be very lonely here,” he says; “I dare say I shall return to New York myself in a few weeks,” he says, and Miss Fanhall stiffly replies, “I hope you will call,” which he answers with an equally stiff “I shall be delighted,” and for once the reader can sympathize with him and feel the agony of his predicament. Some moments later, as she is about to go in and retire for the night:
