Burning boy, p.43
Burning Boy, page 43
“Well,” replied Pennoyer, “I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do, Penny. Go ahead and tell me.”
“Well—”
“Go ahead.”
“Well, she is rather handsome, you know.”
“Yes,” said Florinda, dejectedly. “I suppose she is.” After a time she cleared her throat and remarked indifferently: “I suppose Billie cares a lot for her?”
“Oh, I imagine that he does. In a way.”
“Why, of course he does,” insisted Florinda. “What do you mean by ‘in a way’? You know very well that Billie thinks his eyes of her.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. You know you do. You are talking in that way just to brace me up. You know you are.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Penny,” said Florinda, thankfully, “what makes you so good to me?”
“Oh, I guess I’m not so astonishingly good to you. Don’t be silly.”
“But you are good to me, Penny. You don’t make fun of me the way—the way the other boys would. You are just as good as you can be. But you do think she is beautiful, don’t you?”
“They wouldn’t make fun of you,” said Pennoyer.
“But you do think she is beautiful, don’t you?”
“Look here, Splutter, let up on that, will you? You keep harping on that one string all the time. Don’t bother me.”
“But, honest now, Penny, you do think she’s beautiful?”
“Well, then, confound it—no. No. No.”
“Oh, yes you do, Penny. Go ahead now. Don’t deny it just because you are talking to me. Own up now, Penny. You do think she is beautiful!”
“Well,” said Pennoyer, in a dull roar of irritation, “do you?”
Florinda walked in silence, her eyes upon the yellow flashes which lights sent to the pavement. In the end she said: “Yes.”
“Yes, what?” asked Pennoyer sharply.
“Yes, she—yes, she is—beautiful.”
“Well, then?” cried Pennoyer, abruptly closing the discussion.
Florinda announced something as a fact. “Billie thinks his eyes of her.”
“How do you know he does?”
“Don’t scold at me, Penny. You—you—”
“I’m not scolding at you. There! What a goose you are, Splutter. Don’t for heaven’s sake go to whimpering on the street. I didn’t say anything to make you feel that way. Come, pull yourself together.”
“I’m not whimpering.”
“No, of course not; but then you look as if you were on the edge of it. What a little idiot!”
In spite of certain hints and in spite of certain expectations founded on those hints, it seems clear now that Florinda never had a chance with Billie. But what of Billie’s chances with Grace? We will not know the answer until the final sentence of the book, and even then the resolution will be murky, with multiple, contradictory interpretations radiating out from that fiendishly complex last moment.
They have talked to each other twice so far, both times at the Fanhall mansion, which has been presented as a prison-like fortress, a barren environment devoid of people and objects, a vacuum of pure mental space that has been set apart from the physical world for the sole purpose of allowing the lovers to talk—as if on an empty stage. Other than noting a chandelier that gleams “like a Siamese headdress” and lace curtains that sweep down “in orderly cascades, as water trained to fall mathematically,” Crane tells us nothing about where we are, and during those first two visits to the house, we have no idea whether Hawker and Grace are standing or sitting while they talk.
On the first visit, Hawker’s anxiety makes him so tense that he can’t get his “tongue to wag to his purpose.” He begins by reversing himself on his opinion of the play, conceding that, yes, it is no more than the same old characters wallowing “in the mud of modern confusion,” then continues to sabotage the visit with a word storm of clumsy, inappropriate comments, and Grace, still miffed over the oxcart dispute, is no more than coldly polite to him during their testy, unsatisfactory encounter. The second visit goes more smoothly, building up to Hawker’s confession about his early struggles and Grace’s sympathetic remarks about his bravery, which in turn induces her to visit Hawker’s studio with Hollanden and one or two others, but that scene takes place off camera, as it were, with the lens pointed at the den dwellers across the hall as they listen closely at their closed door and manage to hear nothing but “a dulled melodious babble” coming from the other room. The chapter ends with Florinda standing at the window and looking down at Grace as she leaves the building—a crushing moment for poor Splutter—but Crane has left us in the dark about any further developments in the Hawker-Fanhall romance.
Toward the end of the book, Hollanden reemerges as a principal player in the action. Before Pontiac turns up in the restaurant scene—a brilliantly orchestrated bit of business, with Hollanden talking to Hawker in one part of the room as a violent quarrel breaks out in another—we learn how disappointed the writer has become with his friend’s behavior: “You will become correct. I know you will. I have been watching. What’s the matter with you? You act as if falling in love with a girl was a most extraordinary circumstance.” After pausing to comment on the fight, which is taking place behind Hawker’s back, Hollanden continues: “You have got an eye suddenly for all kinds of gilt” (guilt about gilt in the Gilded Age?) and then delivers this harsh judgment: “You are in the way of becoming a most unbearable person.” When Hawker tries to defend himself, insisting that he hasn’t changed at all, his companion cuts him off. “‘You are gone,’ interrupted Hollanden in a sad voice. ‘It is very plain. You are gone.’”
Gone or not, Hawker is in a bad way, and when we see him standing before a newly finished canvas in the penultimate chapter, several months have gone by and snow is falling on the great stone city. In an earlier chapter, we have already witnessed him hard at work on another canvas, going at it “fiercely, mercilessly, formidably”—as if “thrusting with a sword”—but now, as he looks over his most recent painting, he is revolted by what he has done. Hollanden walks into the studio, and when he sees the scowl on Hawker’s face, he asks, “What’s wrong, now?” Everything is wrong, and with words similar to the ones Crane spoke to his friend Ned Greene about not being able to write anymore, Hawker tears into his own work, calling the picture “vile” and then declaring, “I can’t paint. I can’t paint for a damn. I’m not good. What in thunder was I invented for, anyhow, Hollie?” Hollanden calls him a fool, an idiot, but suspecting that Hawker’s meltdown has something to do with Grace, he says, “Just because she—” Before he can finish, Hawker interrupts and says that she has nothing to do with it, although she, now that they are on the subject, doesn’t “care a hang” for him, in fact doesn’t even care “an old tomato can” for him, and why should she? By way of response, Hollanden begins lecturing Hawker on the irrationality of women, reprising that stale, ever-popular argument men have been broadcasting for centuries to assert their superiority over women, but Hollanden is a true believer and stands by the argument, concluding that “the safety of the world’s balance lies in woman’s illogical mind” and “thank heaven for it”—to which Hawker replies: “Go to blazes.”
Title page of The Third Violet and list of Crane’s previous books published by D. Appleton and Company, along with extracts of reviews, on facing page.(PHOTOGRAPH BY SPENCER OSTRANDER)
Again the house. Again the chandelier, which Hawker studies with “defiance and hatred” as he enters the blank room, sits in a chair (the first mention of a chair), and waits for the encounter to begin. Then it begins. Grace has not entered the room, she is simply in the room as Hawker starts the conversation by telling her that “perhaps” he is going away. Astonishment, followed by a decorously worded “We shall be sorry to lose you.” The we spares her from any obligation to express her own feelings about his impending trip as she dissolves into a generalized Fanhalldom that includes her sister-in-law and the children (we have already learned that her older brother, presumably the husband of the sister-in-law, is dead, and Crane says nothing at all about her parents, who could be dead themselves or lurking in another room). Hawker reminds her that he once told her that he cared for her and that even now he still cares for her and will carry the two violets with him as a way to remember her on his travels, which will take him far from New York and could go on for a long time, possibly forever. After that cornball moment of operatic excess, she tugs at her gown, removes a third violet, and “thrusts it at him,” which he interprets as a gesture of “supreme insolence.” Suddenly annoyed, suddenly on the verge of anger, he sounds a further operatic note by insisting that he doesn’t want to be “melodramatic” or “to act like a tenor” and that the last thing he wants is for her to pity him. The conversation quickly collapses into a series of mutual misunderstandings, and the violet that was thrust at him is turned into the violet that was flung at his head. No, not flung at his head, she protests, but “freely-given.”
“Do you know,” said Hawker, “it is very hard to go away and leave an impression in your mind that I am a fool. That is very hard. Now, you do think I am a fool, don’t you?”
She remained silent. Once she lifted her eyes and gave him a swift look with much indignation in it.
“Now you are enraged. Well, what have I done?”
It seemed that some tumult was in her mind, for she cried out to him at last in sudden tearfulness: “Oh, do go. Go. Please. I want you to go.”
Under this swift change, Hawker appeared as a man struck from the sky. He sprang to his feet, took two steps forward and spoke a word which was an explosion of delight and amazement. He said: “What?”
With heroic effort, she slowly raised her eyes until, a-light with anger, defiance, unhappiness, they met his eyes.
Later, she told him that he was perfectly ridiculous.
The screen goes black, the curtain comes down, the book is over. And what, we ask ourselves, has just happened?
One possible reading: If we fix our attention on Grace’s sudden loss of control, then her tearful outburst commanding Hawker to leave the house can be interpreted as a sign of passion—passion as an indication of love—for Grace is a woman, and as master of ceremonies Hollanden has just told us, women are irrational creatures, meaning that Hawker’s “explosion of delight and amazement” comes from his recognition that Grace has finally let down her guard and expressed her true feelings toward him, which mirror his own feelings toward her, and even if her eyes are “a-light with anger, defiance, unhappiness,” those things count for little when a woman is in the heat of passion, for in the intensity of that upside-down moment anger means love and defiance means capitulation and unhappiness means joy, and therefore all ends well for the mismatched couple, and as they climb into bed on their wedding night, she gently teases him about how ridiculously he acted with her until that breakthrough moment.
Another possible reading: If we fix our attention on the word Later, then the happy-ending outcome most readers will take for granted is suddenly cast into doubt, for later is a relative length of time, an unspecified length of time, and what if Crane was not thinking of an immediate later but a more distant one, two or three years later, for example, and after Hawker’s solitary travels to unknown parts of the universe have ended, he comes back to New York, goes to a gathering where he runs into Grace (who is now married to Oglethorpe or some other prince from the leisure class), and when they slip off to the terrace for a word in private, she tells him that the reason she broke it off two years ago was because she was in fact angry, defiant, and unhappy that afternoon and felt he had behaved with her in a manner that was (to repeat the words of the book) perfectly ridiculous.
The reader is left to decide which ending is the proper one—or else not decide and hold on to both of them at once, which is what I suspect Crane had in mind by closing his love-opera with such a cryptic, ambivalent scene. By divulging so little, he has allowed himself to offer two opposite and equal endings, a strategy that is fully in tune with the parodic, self-reflexive spirit of the book as a whole. It is not an either-or proposition, then, but rather one of either and or. Both at the same time.
This is intricate, maddeningly nuanced stuff, and it will hardly come as a surprise to learn that the novel died a quick death after it was published in May 1897. Crane was in the Mediterranean by then, covering the Greco-Turkish War as a correspondent for Hearst, and was spared from having to face the firing squad of American reviews, which attacked The Third Violet as “a weak sister” (Buffalo Enquirer), “not realistic … in any plausible sense” (New York Tribune), “leaves a distinct impression of dissatisfaction” (Brooklyn Daily Eagle), “as inane a story of summer resort flirtation as was ever written” (Springfield Republican), and “a book with badness written large all over it” (Providence Journal). Godey’s Magazine was the only New York publication that seemed to have any inkling of what Crane had accomplished, and the anonymous reviewer, while calling the book “devoid of flesh and blood” (not without reason), praised it for being “a remarkable display of purely literary craft; as a study in handling and technical originality it is something unprecedented.” After further praising the “jerky, fragmentary” dialogue and the vividness of Crane’s language, the reviewer observed that “there is a constant display of a strong ability to suggest underlying subtleties of meaning and mood by careless-looking speech”—which was dead on target. What surprises me now, however, more than a century after the novel’s release, is how little attention has been given to the book in the years since then, even by Crane scholars and devoted advocates of his work. The Third Violet has mysteriously slipped through the cracks, which explains why I have devoted so much time to it in this chapter—because it continues to be neglected, and because it deserves a fresh look from a new generation of readers. Compared to Crane’s most powerful stories and novels, it surely falls into the category of “minor,” but minor does not mean insignificant, and by trying his hand at a novel of manners at the same moment his war novel was turning him into an international figure shows something about his willingness to take risks, to experiment, to thrash out into new territory. That he largely managed to succeed with his experiment by undermining the conventions of the form he had chosen to tackle proves, I think, how far in advance of his time he was. Not only is The Third Violet the world’s first screenplay, it is probably the world’s first postmodern novel as well.
Crane never attempted such a project again. After his two-month holiday on the Island of Love, he returned to the mainland, unfastened the blindfold he had wrapped around his head, picked up his pen with his right hand, and plunged back into darkness.
25
There were no literary prizes in America before the turn of the century. No foundations had been created to disburse grants and fellowships to writers, and no colleges or universities employed writers to teach other writers how to write. The market ruled all literary business in that era of raw, unfettered capitalism, and when it came to the business of honoring writers who had distinguished themselves with an exceptional work or a lifetime of work, the honors were bestowed by private literary clubs and informal associations of fellow writers at banquets marked by the consumption of much food and wine along with speeches—many speeches—in praise of the honoree. Crane had already been invited to one of those gatherings a year and a half earlier—the celebration of Frances Hodgson Burnett hosted by the Uncut Leaves Society in New York—but he had refused to go out of dread, terrorized by the thought of watching John Barry stand up and read his poems to what he assumed would be a hostile audience. Now the tables had been turned, and as the freshly anointed celebrity author of The Red Badge of Courage, Crane was thrust into the uncomfortable position of being asked to attend more and more of these dinners as the guest of honor himself. In spite of his misgivings, he usually accepted—for all the standard reasons to begin with (gratitude, common courtesy, a chance to shine in public for a few hours)—but once he understood how much those dinners meant to certain folks in and around Port Jervis, he also accepted from a deeper, more urgently felt desire to impress his older brothers with his new standing in the world. Most of all William, the biggest of the brothers and therefore a kind of substitute father to him for the past sixteen years, and what son doesn’t want to show his father that he isn’t the no-account wastrel he once appeared to be? On January 7, 1896, after Crane learned that Hitchcock was organizing a dinner for him at the Authors Club to be held in early March, he wrote to Hawkins:
The dinner scheme mingles my emotions. In one sense, it portends an Ordeal but in the larger sense it overwhelms me in pride and arrogance to think that I have such friends.
By the way, you ought to see the effect of such things upon my family. Ain’t they swelled up, though! Gee! I simply can’t go around and see ’em enough. It’s great. I am no longer a black sheep but a star.
But how frazzled that black sheep–star could become when plans were afoot to honor him, and never more frazzled than the first time, which happened to occur during his months at Hartwood, with the invitation arriving in early November from East Aurora, New York, just days after Crane had announced to Hawkins that the first third of The Third Violet was finished, which means that all through the final two-thirds of the book he lived in a state of ever-mounting panic, cursing himself for having accepted and yet too timid to withdraw with some fabricated excuse—a broken leg, perhaps, or a virulent eruption of hives—appealing to Hawkins again and again for moral support, logistical support, sartorial support, and making such a big to-do about such a nothing-at-all that it could be seen as a purely comic episode if not for how things turned out in the end. Crane had been duped by a con man, and through his own naïveté and readiness to believe in the good intentions of others, he never held that man responsible for the fiasco that took place at the Genesee Hotel on the evening of December 19, 1895. Even more astonishing, he remained a friend of that man for the rest of his life.
“Yes, you do, Penny. Go ahead and tell me.”
“Well—”
“Go ahead.”
“Well, she is rather handsome, you know.”
“Yes,” said Florinda, dejectedly. “I suppose she is.” After a time she cleared her throat and remarked indifferently: “I suppose Billie cares a lot for her?”
“Oh, I imagine that he does. In a way.”
“Why, of course he does,” insisted Florinda. “What do you mean by ‘in a way’? You know very well that Billie thinks his eyes of her.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. You know you do. You are talking in that way just to brace me up. You know you are.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Penny,” said Florinda, thankfully, “what makes you so good to me?”
“Oh, I guess I’m not so astonishingly good to you. Don’t be silly.”
“But you are good to me, Penny. You don’t make fun of me the way—the way the other boys would. You are just as good as you can be. But you do think she is beautiful, don’t you?”
“They wouldn’t make fun of you,” said Pennoyer.
“But you do think she is beautiful, don’t you?”
“Look here, Splutter, let up on that, will you? You keep harping on that one string all the time. Don’t bother me.”
“But, honest now, Penny, you do think she’s beautiful?”
“Well, then, confound it—no. No. No.”
“Oh, yes you do, Penny. Go ahead now. Don’t deny it just because you are talking to me. Own up now, Penny. You do think she is beautiful!”
“Well,” said Pennoyer, in a dull roar of irritation, “do you?”
Florinda walked in silence, her eyes upon the yellow flashes which lights sent to the pavement. In the end she said: “Yes.”
“Yes, what?” asked Pennoyer sharply.
“Yes, she—yes, she is—beautiful.”
“Well, then?” cried Pennoyer, abruptly closing the discussion.
Florinda announced something as a fact. “Billie thinks his eyes of her.”
“How do you know he does?”
“Don’t scold at me, Penny. You—you—”
“I’m not scolding at you. There! What a goose you are, Splutter. Don’t for heaven’s sake go to whimpering on the street. I didn’t say anything to make you feel that way. Come, pull yourself together.”
“I’m not whimpering.”
“No, of course not; but then you look as if you were on the edge of it. What a little idiot!”
In spite of certain hints and in spite of certain expectations founded on those hints, it seems clear now that Florinda never had a chance with Billie. But what of Billie’s chances with Grace? We will not know the answer until the final sentence of the book, and even then the resolution will be murky, with multiple, contradictory interpretations radiating out from that fiendishly complex last moment.
They have talked to each other twice so far, both times at the Fanhall mansion, which has been presented as a prison-like fortress, a barren environment devoid of people and objects, a vacuum of pure mental space that has been set apart from the physical world for the sole purpose of allowing the lovers to talk—as if on an empty stage. Other than noting a chandelier that gleams “like a Siamese headdress” and lace curtains that sweep down “in orderly cascades, as water trained to fall mathematically,” Crane tells us nothing about where we are, and during those first two visits to the house, we have no idea whether Hawker and Grace are standing or sitting while they talk.
On the first visit, Hawker’s anxiety makes him so tense that he can’t get his “tongue to wag to his purpose.” He begins by reversing himself on his opinion of the play, conceding that, yes, it is no more than the same old characters wallowing “in the mud of modern confusion,” then continues to sabotage the visit with a word storm of clumsy, inappropriate comments, and Grace, still miffed over the oxcart dispute, is no more than coldly polite to him during their testy, unsatisfactory encounter. The second visit goes more smoothly, building up to Hawker’s confession about his early struggles and Grace’s sympathetic remarks about his bravery, which in turn induces her to visit Hawker’s studio with Hollanden and one or two others, but that scene takes place off camera, as it were, with the lens pointed at the den dwellers across the hall as they listen closely at their closed door and manage to hear nothing but “a dulled melodious babble” coming from the other room. The chapter ends with Florinda standing at the window and looking down at Grace as she leaves the building—a crushing moment for poor Splutter—but Crane has left us in the dark about any further developments in the Hawker-Fanhall romance.
Toward the end of the book, Hollanden reemerges as a principal player in the action. Before Pontiac turns up in the restaurant scene—a brilliantly orchestrated bit of business, with Hollanden talking to Hawker in one part of the room as a violent quarrel breaks out in another—we learn how disappointed the writer has become with his friend’s behavior: “You will become correct. I know you will. I have been watching. What’s the matter with you? You act as if falling in love with a girl was a most extraordinary circumstance.” After pausing to comment on the fight, which is taking place behind Hawker’s back, Hollanden continues: “You have got an eye suddenly for all kinds of gilt” (guilt about gilt in the Gilded Age?) and then delivers this harsh judgment: “You are in the way of becoming a most unbearable person.” When Hawker tries to defend himself, insisting that he hasn’t changed at all, his companion cuts him off. “‘You are gone,’ interrupted Hollanden in a sad voice. ‘It is very plain. You are gone.’”
Gone or not, Hawker is in a bad way, and when we see him standing before a newly finished canvas in the penultimate chapter, several months have gone by and snow is falling on the great stone city. In an earlier chapter, we have already witnessed him hard at work on another canvas, going at it “fiercely, mercilessly, formidably”—as if “thrusting with a sword”—but now, as he looks over his most recent painting, he is revolted by what he has done. Hollanden walks into the studio, and when he sees the scowl on Hawker’s face, he asks, “What’s wrong, now?” Everything is wrong, and with words similar to the ones Crane spoke to his friend Ned Greene about not being able to write anymore, Hawker tears into his own work, calling the picture “vile” and then declaring, “I can’t paint. I can’t paint for a damn. I’m not good. What in thunder was I invented for, anyhow, Hollie?” Hollanden calls him a fool, an idiot, but suspecting that Hawker’s meltdown has something to do with Grace, he says, “Just because she—” Before he can finish, Hawker interrupts and says that she has nothing to do with it, although she, now that they are on the subject, doesn’t “care a hang” for him, in fact doesn’t even care “an old tomato can” for him, and why should she? By way of response, Hollanden begins lecturing Hawker on the irrationality of women, reprising that stale, ever-popular argument men have been broadcasting for centuries to assert their superiority over women, but Hollanden is a true believer and stands by the argument, concluding that “the safety of the world’s balance lies in woman’s illogical mind” and “thank heaven for it”—to which Hawker replies: “Go to blazes.”
Title page of The Third Violet and list of Crane’s previous books published by D. Appleton and Company, along with extracts of reviews, on facing page.(PHOTOGRAPH BY SPENCER OSTRANDER)
Again the house. Again the chandelier, which Hawker studies with “defiance and hatred” as he enters the blank room, sits in a chair (the first mention of a chair), and waits for the encounter to begin. Then it begins. Grace has not entered the room, she is simply in the room as Hawker starts the conversation by telling her that “perhaps” he is going away. Astonishment, followed by a decorously worded “We shall be sorry to lose you.” The we spares her from any obligation to express her own feelings about his impending trip as she dissolves into a generalized Fanhalldom that includes her sister-in-law and the children (we have already learned that her older brother, presumably the husband of the sister-in-law, is dead, and Crane says nothing at all about her parents, who could be dead themselves or lurking in another room). Hawker reminds her that he once told her that he cared for her and that even now he still cares for her and will carry the two violets with him as a way to remember her on his travels, which will take him far from New York and could go on for a long time, possibly forever. After that cornball moment of operatic excess, she tugs at her gown, removes a third violet, and “thrusts it at him,” which he interprets as a gesture of “supreme insolence.” Suddenly annoyed, suddenly on the verge of anger, he sounds a further operatic note by insisting that he doesn’t want to be “melodramatic” or “to act like a tenor” and that the last thing he wants is for her to pity him. The conversation quickly collapses into a series of mutual misunderstandings, and the violet that was thrust at him is turned into the violet that was flung at his head. No, not flung at his head, she protests, but “freely-given.”
“Do you know,” said Hawker, “it is very hard to go away and leave an impression in your mind that I am a fool. That is very hard. Now, you do think I am a fool, don’t you?”
She remained silent. Once she lifted her eyes and gave him a swift look with much indignation in it.
“Now you are enraged. Well, what have I done?”
It seemed that some tumult was in her mind, for she cried out to him at last in sudden tearfulness: “Oh, do go. Go. Please. I want you to go.”
Under this swift change, Hawker appeared as a man struck from the sky. He sprang to his feet, took two steps forward and spoke a word which was an explosion of delight and amazement. He said: “What?”
With heroic effort, she slowly raised her eyes until, a-light with anger, defiance, unhappiness, they met his eyes.
Later, she told him that he was perfectly ridiculous.
The screen goes black, the curtain comes down, the book is over. And what, we ask ourselves, has just happened?
One possible reading: If we fix our attention on Grace’s sudden loss of control, then her tearful outburst commanding Hawker to leave the house can be interpreted as a sign of passion—passion as an indication of love—for Grace is a woman, and as master of ceremonies Hollanden has just told us, women are irrational creatures, meaning that Hawker’s “explosion of delight and amazement” comes from his recognition that Grace has finally let down her guard and expressed her true feelings toward him, which mirror his own feelings toward her, and even if her eyes are “a-light with anger, defiance, unhappiness,” those things count for little when a woman is in the heat of passion, for in the intensity of that upside-down moment anger means love and defiance means capitulation and unhappiness means joy, and therefore all ends well for the mismatched couple, and as they climb into bed on their wedding night, she gently teases him about how ridiculously he acted with her until that breakthrough moment.
Another possible reading: If we fix our attention on the word Later, then the happy-ending outcome most readers will take for granted is suddenly cast into doubt, for later is a relative length of time, an unspecified length of time, and what if Crane was not thinking of an immediate later but a more distant one, two or three years later, for example, and after Hawker’s solitary travels to unknown parts of the universe have ended, he comes back to New York, goes to a gathering where he runs into Grace (who is now married to Oglethorpe or some other prince from the leisure class), and when they slip off to the terrace for a word in private, she tells him that the reason she broke it off two years ago was because she was in fact angry, defiant, and unhappy that afternoon and felt he had behaved with her in a manner that was (to repeat the words of the book) perfectly ridiculous.
The reader is left to decide which ending is the proper one—or else not decide and hold on to both of them at once, which is what I suspect Crane had in mind by closing his love-opera with such a cryptic, ambivalent scene. By divulging so little, he has allowed himself to offer two opposite and equal endings, a strategy that is fully in tune with the parodic, self-reflexive spirit of the book as a whole. It is not an either-or proposition, then, but rather one of either and or. Both at the same time.
This is intricate, maddeningly nuanced stuff, and it will hardly come as a surprise to learn that the novel died a quick death after it was published in May 1897. Crane was in the Mediterranean by then, covering the Greco-Turkish War as a correspondent for Hearst, and was spared from having to face the firing squad of American reviews, which attacked The Third Violet as “a weak sister” (Buffalo Enquirer), “not realistic … in any plausible sense” (New York Tribune), “leaves a distinct impression of dissatisfaction” (Brooklyn Daily Eagle), “as inane a story of summer resort flirtation as was ever written” (Springfield Republican), and “a book with badness written large all over it” (Providence Journal). Godey’s Magazine was the only New York publication that seemed to have any inkling of what Crane had accomplished, and the anonymous reviewer, while calling the book “devoid of flesh and blood” (not without reason), praised it for being “a remarkable display of purely literary craft; as a study in handling and technical originality it is something unprecedented.” After further praising the “jerky, fragmentary” dialogue and the vividness of Crane’s language, the reviewer observed that “there is a constant display of a strong ability to suggest underlying subtleties of meaning and mood by careless-looking speech”—which was dead on target. What surprises me now, however, more than a century after the novel’s release, is how little attention has been given to the book in the years since then, even by Crane scholars and devoted advocates of his work. The Third Violet has mysteriously slipped through the cracks, which explains why I have devoted so much time to it in this chapter—because it continues to be neglected, and because it deserves a fresh look from a new generation of readers. Compared to Crane’s most powerful stories and novels, it surely falls into the category of “minor,” but minor does not mean insignificant, and by trying his hand at a novel of manners at the same moment his war novel was turning him into an international figure shows something about his willingness to take risks, to experiment, to thrash out into new territory. That he largely managed to succeed with his experiment by undermining the conventions of the form he had chosen to tackle proves, I think, how far in advance of his time he was. Not only is The Third Violet the world’s first screenplay, it is probably the world’s first postmodern novel as well.
Crane never attempted such a project again. After his two-month holiday on the Island of Love, he returned to the mainland, unfastened the blindfold he had wrapped around his head, picked up his pen with his right hand, and plunged back into darkness.
25
There were no literary prizes in America before the turn of the century. No foundations had been created to disburse grants and fellowships to writers, and no colleges or universities employed writers to teach other writers how to write. The market ruled all literary business in that era of raw, unfettered capitalism, and when it came to the business of honoring writers who had distinguished themselves with an exceptional work or a lifetime of work, the honors were bestowed by private literary clubs and informal associations of fellow writers at banquets marked by the consumption of much food and wine along with speeches—many speeches—in praise of the honoree. Crane had already been invited to one of those gatherings a year and a half earlier—the celebration of Frances Hodgson Burnett hosted by the Uncut Leaves Society in New York—but he had refused to go out of dread, terrorized by the thought of watching John Barry stand up and read his poems to what he assumed would be a hostile audience. Now the tables had been turned, and as the freshly anointed celebrity author of The Red Badge of Courage, Crane was thrust into the uncomfortable position of being asked to attend more and more of these dinners as the guest of honor himself. In spite of his misgivings, he usually accepted—for all the standard reasons to begin with (gratitude, common courtesy, a chance to shine in public for a few hours)—but once he understood how much those dinners meant to certain folks in and around Port Jervis, he also accepted from a deeper, more urgently felt desire to impress his older brothers with his new standing in the world. Most of all William, the biggest of the brothers and therefore a kind of substitute father to him for the past sixteen years, and what son doesn’t want to show his father that he isn’t the no-account wastrel he once appeared to be? On January 7, 1896, after Crane learned that Hitchcock was organizing a dinner for him at the Authors Club to be held in early March, he wrote to Hawkins:
The dinner scheme mingles my emotions. In one sense, it portends an Ordeal but in the larger sense it overwhelms me in pride and arrogance to think that I have such friends.
By the way, you ought to see the effect of such things upon my family. Ain’t they swelled up, though! Gee! I simply can’t go around and see ’em enough. It’s great. I am no longer a black sheep but a star.
But how frazzled that black sheep–star could become when plans were afoot to honor him, and never more frazzled than the first time, which happened to occur during his months at Hartwood, with the invitation arriving in early November from East Aurora, New York, just days after Crane had announced to Hawkins that the first third of The Third Violet was finished, which means that all through the final two-thirds of the book he lived in a state of ever-mounting panic, cursing himself for having accepted and yet too timid to withdraw with some fabricated excuse—a broken leg, perhaps, or a virulent eruption of hives—appealing to Hawkins again and again for moral support, logistical support, sartorial support, and making such a big to-do about such a nothing-at-all that it could be seen as a purely comic episode if not for how things turned out in the end. Crane had been duped by a con man, and through his own naïveté and readiness to believe in the good intentions of others, he never held that man responsible for the fiasco that took place at the Genesee Hotel on the evening of December 19, 1895. Even more astonishing, he remained a friend of that man for the rest of his life.
