Burning boy, p.47
Burning Boy, page 47
If a beginner expects to have dreams of an earth dotted with white porcelain towers and a sky of green silk, he will, from all accounts, be much mistaken. “The Opium Smoker’s Dream” seems to be mostly a mistake. The influence of “dope” is evidently a fine languor, a complete mental rest. The problems of life no longer appear. Existence is peace. The virtues of a man’s friends, for instance, loom beautifully against his own sudden perfection. The universe is re-adjusted. Wrong departs, injustice vanishes; there is nothing but a quiet, a soothing harmony of all things—until the next morning.
And who should invade this momentary land of rest, this dream country, if not the people of the Tenderloin, they who are at once supersensitive and hopeless, the people who think more upon death and the mysteries of life, the chances of the hereafter, than any other class, educated or uneducated. Opium holds out to them its lie, and they embrace it eagerly, expecting to find a definition of peace, but they awake to find the formidable labors of life more formidable. And if the pipe should happen to ruin their lives they cling more closely to it because then it stands between them and thought.
It is useless to ask whether Crane tried opium himself or not. Given how he had prepared himself to write some of his other New York pieces—living as a bum in order to write about the bums in “An Experiment in Misery,” for example—I would say probably yes, but there is nothing on record to confirm my suspicion, and no one knows how he came to write the article, nor why he wrote it, nor what kind of research he did beforehand. It would matter to us now only if Crane had become an opium addict himself, which he didn’t, and therefore it shouldn’t, but nevertheless it does for this simple, gruesome reason: Sometime during his work on the article, he procured an opium layout (again, no one knows how or why), and after the article was finished, he mounted the layout on a wall in his apartment as a souvenir, something he was wont to do with objects that appealed to him (the plaques of Mozart and Beethoven, the spurs from Mexico), but some months later, when Theodore Roosevelt and the New York Police Department turned against him for testifying against one of their own in the Dora Clark trial, they ransacked the apartment, found the layout, and used it to charge him with running an opium den—one more piece of damning evidence that helped drive him from the city and then kept him moving until he was clear across the ocean. In the mind of the New York police, he had become a man with an X on his back.
* * *
With all that looming in the near but still-distant future, Crane blithely went about his business, working on his stories and articles, frequenting the Lantern Club, attending literary dinners where he was often the object of warm, laudatory toasts from his fellow writers, accepting membership in the Authors Club after being recommended by Howells, and bit by bit coming back to his senses after the shock of Red Badge, although by no means fully restored and with no particular plans in front of him.
The new Maggie and George’s Mother were published almost simultaneously in early June. However badly he had compromised his book, it was still more or less the same book as the original, enough the same in any event to provoke the same response an exact reprint of the original would have caused, and many of the reviews were predictably negative. Ever reliable in its disdain for him, the New York Tribune lashed into the novella with an assault of such vituperation and disgust that it achieved the ridiculousness of high (or low) comedy: “He puts on paper the grossness and brutality which are commonly encountered only through contact with the most besotted classes.… He has no charm of style, no touch of humor, no hint of imagination.… The book shocks by the mere fact of its monotony and stupid roughness. To read its pages is like standing before a loafer to be sworn at and have one’s face slapped twice a minute for half an hour.”
Other reviewers, not understanding that Maggie was an early work, saw it as a sign of disintegrating talent and regression, and still others were bored, hostile, or indifferent to the book’s language and lowlife setting, but then there were those who found it good, even exceptional, with the New York Times calling Maggie a book written by “the hand of an artist” and praising the author as “a master of slum slang.” More strong responses came in after that from other quarters, and before long the equally maligned George’s Mother was drawing its fair share of positive notices as well, so that in the end the overall response to Crane’s two-pronged book launch can be qualified as a resounding perhaps. Then, just as the noise was beginning to die down, out came Howells’s three-thousand-word essay on both novellas in the World on July twenty-sixth, and all the short reviews that had been published so far, the good as well as the bad, suddenly disappeared from memory—as if they had never been written.
“He’s a good boy,” Howells said about Crane in a letter to Hamlin Garland written just a few days before the article came out, a good boy “with lots of outcome,” he added, meaning that Crane’s work was not only good but limitless in its potential, and in spite of Howells’s disgruntled response to Red Badge and what he called S.C.’s prose poems, his new essay was unreserved in its admiration for the two short novels and, alone among critics of the time, he was able to situate them in their proper—and broader—historical context.
There is a curious unity in the spirit of the arts; and I think that what strikes me most in the story of Maggie is that quality of fatal necessity which dominates Greek tragedy. From the conditions it all had to be, and there were the conditions.… Another effect is that of an ideal of artistic beauty which is present in the working out of this poor girl’s squalid romance as in any classic fable. This will be foolishness, I know, to the foolish people who cannot discriminate between the material and the treatment in art [the subject and the style], and who think that beauty is inseparable from daintiness and prettiness, but I do not speak to them. I appeal rather to such as feel themselves akin with every kind of human creature, and find neither high nor low when it is a question of inevitable suffering, or of a soul struggling vainly with an inexorable fate.
About George’s Mother, which Howells told Garland was his wife’s favorite among Crane’s books, “the best of all,” he remarked that “The wonder of it is the courage which deals with persons so absolutely average, and the art that graces them with the beauty of the author’s compassion for everything that errs and suffers.”
Crane was off on another one of his summer jaunts with Senger and company in the Pennsylvania woods, which prevented him from reading the article until after he returned. From his letter to Howells on August fifteenth: “It is of course the best word that has been said of me and I am grateful in a way that is hard for me to say. In truth you have always been so generous with me that grace departs from my pen when I attempt to tell you of my appreciation.”
In the same letter he also talks about his admiration for Abraham Cahan, whose recently published Yekl was given several paragraphs in Howells’s article for the World, which led to the meeting between Crane and Cahan at Howells’s cottage in Far Rockaway, a subsequent one-on-one dinner not long after, and finally to an event at the Lantern Club on September twenty-second honoring Garland, Crane, and Cahan “as three young exponents of so-called realism in fiction” (New York Press), where Cahan talked about his dreams of becoming a writer as a young man in Russia and Crane read the manuscript of a new story, which, needless to say, “was duly criticized” by the audience, as per the regulations of the club.
* * *
A week before Howells’s article was published, a two-column profile of Crane appeared on the “Literary Den” page of the Illustrated American, written by a young man named Herbert P. Williams, who had been promoted to the job of literary editor at the Boston Herald just one year earlier. The piece is unusual because Crane allowed Williams into his apartment (a rare if not unprecedented invitation to a journalist), which gives us a chance to see his private world and understand something about how he lived in that
enormous room at the top of a house near the heart of the city, in the shopping district. The furniture of the room is curiously typical of the man: a tinted wall is relieved at intervals by war trophies and by impressionistic landscapes.… The small bookshelf contains batches of gray manuscript and potential literature in the form of stationery. One of the two chairs stands between the windows and the writing table at which a club might dine. An ink-bottle, a pen and a pad of paper occupy dots in the vast green expanse. A sofa stretches itself near the window and tries to fill the space. No crowded comfort is here—no luxury of ornament—no literature, classical or periodical; nothing but the man and his mind.
Describing Crane as “frank, open, natural, and completely devoid of affectation,” Williams then manages to extract from him a sentence that strikes me as the most eloquent description he ever gave of the inner work that was necessary before he could move on to the actual work of writing. “His method, he told me, is to get away by himself and think over things. ‘Then comes a longing for you don’t know what; sorrow, too, and heart-hunger.’ He mixes it all up. Then he begins to write.”
Heart-hunger.
A blind plunge into the self, a search for something that cannot be named—that must not be named—and then the slow work of pulling the words up and out and onto the page, where the words that once belonged to you now belong to others. Crane was still just twenty-four when he spoke to Williams, but he had been living in words for many years by then, and he understood that the solution to the mystery of how art gets made is itself the ultimate mystery.
29
Treading water for a time, then beginning to make progress, and as the year ticked on his production continued to grow until he was working at a pace that rivaled the frenzied output of 1894. On top of the articles for McClure, he wrote some new poems and published close to a dozen short fictions of two, three, and four pages in a wide spectrum of tones and styles (chiefly with Bacheller’s syndicate), but his most important works from 1896 are two Civil War stories (“The Veteran,” which was included in The Little Regiment volume, and a four-and-a-half-page masterpiece, “An Episode of War,” which was not) along with two adventure stories written at Hartwood during the summer, “The Five White Mice” (set in Mexico City) and “A Man and Some Others” (set in southwestern Texas). He wrote some other Western and Mexican stories that year as well, all of them good or at least interesting, but those two are the best ones, and each deserves a bronze plaque in the Crane pantheon of most memorable works. The same holds true of “A Mystery of Heroism” and the two other war stories from 1896, but the remaining four in The Little Regiment—“A Grey Sleeve,” “Three Miraculous Soldiers,” “An Indiana Campaign,” and the title story—do not measure up to the greatness of the best ones. They are eminently readable and skillfully done, but with so many dozens of small and large pieces cramming the ten volumes of Crane’s collected works, I have to be selective in what I write about, or else we’ll all be here until the cows come home.*
“The Veteran” stands apart from Crane’s other works as both a curiosity and an exorcism—a story written in response to another story that is at once a sequel and an act of destruction. Henry Fleming is brought back, is given a chance to live again for a few pages, and then Crane kills him off in a brutal, symbolic murder that seems to have been committed in the hope of putting an end to the drama of the “accursed Red Badge.”
Fleming is old now, old enough to be the grandfather of at least one grandchild, and on the first page of “The Veteran” he is referred to as “old” no fewer than five times, but if Crane has set his story in the year it was written (1896), the math tells us that Fleming can’t be more than around fifty. That is too young for Crane’s purposes, however, so he fudges the calendar a bit to comply with the emotional demands of the story he wants to tell and turns Fleming into a venerable old geezer, a man whose life consists of all past and no future, which makes his death in the concluding paragraph somewhat more bearable—not a grotesque accident that cuts down a life in mid-course but the fulfillment of that life as it comes to its noble, logical end.
The story begins with Fleming chewing the fat with a small group of men in a country grocery store one spring afternoon as his friends ask him questions about his days as a young soldier in the Civil War. One by one, Crane revisits the crucial events from The Red Badge of Courage, but now we get to hear about them from the protagonist himself. When one of the men asks if he was ever frightened in battle, Fleming looks down, grins, and surprises them by saying he was. “Pretty well scared, sometimes. Why, in my first battle I thought the sky was falling down. I thought the world was coming to an end. You bet I was scared.” The men laugh, charmed by Fleming’s candor and admiring him all the more for it because they know of his outstanding record and his rise through the ranks to become an orderly sergeant, “so in their opinion his heroism was fixed.” Now that Fleming has opened up to them, however, the memories continue to pour in on him, and he goes on with his recitation for some time, as if unable to stop himself.
“The trouble was,” said the old man, “I thought they were all shooting at me. Yes, sir. I thought every man in the other army was aiming at me in particular and only me. And it seemed so darned unreasonable, you know. I wanted to explain to ’em what an almighty good fellow I was, because I thought then they might quit all trying to hit me. But I couldn’t explain, and they kept on being unreasonable—blim!—blam!—bang! So I run!”
Two little triangles of wrinkles appeared at the corners of his eyes. Evidently he appreciated some comedy in this recital. Down near his feet, however, little Jim, his grandson, was visibly horror-stricken. His hands were clasped nervously, and his eyes were wide with astonishment at this terrible scandal, his most magnificent grandfather telling such a thing.
“That was at Chancellorsville. Of course, afterward I got kind of used to it. A man does. Lots of men, though, seem to feel all right from the start. I did, as soon as I ‘got on to it,’ as they say now, but at first I was pretty flustered. Now there was young Jim Conklin, old Si Conklin’s son—that used to keep the tannery—you none of you recollect him—well, he went into it from the start just as if he was born to it. But with me it was different. I had to get used to it.”
From one paragraph to the next, the scene suddenly shifts, and we are no longer in the grocery store but out on the street with Fleming and his grandson, the two of them walking past the shops in the little town as the agitated boy grips two of his grandfather’s fingers, ignores the old man’s remarks about the handsome colt “over in the medder,” and finally asks him if what he said in the store was true. Yes, Fleming says, it’s true that he ran. “It was my first fight, and there was an awful lot of noise, you know.” This confirmation has a powerful effect on the boy, who can be seen as a kind of latter-day incarnation of Fleming’s own delusions about the glory of combat when he was a raw, untested volunteer: “Jimmie seemed dazed that this idol, of his own will, should so totter. His stout boyish idealism was injured.” When the old man continues to talk about the colt, asking Jimmie if he wouldn’t want to own such a fine animal himself, the boy shrugs him off by saying it isn’t as nice as their colts and then lapses into “another moody silence.” The colts seem to be an incidental distraction at this point, but they aren’t, and by the end of the story they prove to be essential. Crane has planted a seed, and when the plant springs forth in the final paragraphs, the colts turn out to be the cause of Fleming’s death.
A one-line space follows, and then the second part of the story begins. Out on Fleming’s farm, one of the hired hands—identified simply as “a Swede” and thereafter as “the Swede” or “this Swede”—goes off to town one day and returns to the farm that night drunk, so drunk that he tips over a lantern and accidentally sets the barn on fire. Fleming, roused from sleep by the commotion, rushes out of the house as several hired hands rush out as well, but the old man is the only one daring enough to open the doors of the burning barn and go in to rescue the animals.
He flung a blanket over an old mare’s head, cut the halter close to the manger, led the mare to the door, and fairly kicked her out to safety. He returned with the same blanket and rescued one of the work-horses. He took five horses out, and then came out himself with his clothes bravely on fire. He had no whiskers, and very little hair on his head. They soused five pailfuls of water on him. His eldest son made a clean miss with the sixth pailful because the old man had turned and was running down the decline and around to the basement of the barn where were the stanchions of the cows. Some one noticed at the time that he ran lamely, as if one of the frenzied horses had smashed his hip.
Scorched and hobbled, Fleming acts as if he were reliving a battle scene from his youth (the youth that was invented for him by Crane), and he throws himself into the chaos of the fire with the same recklessness and lack of thought that sustained him in combat during the war—irrational, beside himself, blind to every risk that stands in his way. So far, his courage has spared a number of horses from certain death, and now that he has gone back and rescued all the cows but one, Fleming and the hired men return to the front of the barn and stand there “sadly, breathing like men who had reached the final point of human effort.”
That should be the end of it, but after a few moments the drunken Swede cries out, “as one who is the weapon of the sinister fates. ‘De colts! De colts! You have forgot de colts!’”
It is true. Fleming has forgotten a pair of colts at the back of the barn, and when he tells the others that he must go back and try to get them out, all the men protest, saying that “it’s sure death,” “it’s suicide for a man to go in there,” but their frantic warnings have no effect on him.
