Burning boy, p.50
Burning Boy, page 50
He became a bouncer of a saloon on the Bowery in New York.… He nearly killed Bad Hennessy, who, as a matter of fact, had more reputation than ability, and his fame moved up the Bowery and down the Bowery.
But let a man adopt fighting as his business, and the thought grows constantly within him that it is his business to fight. These phrases became mixed in Bill’s mind precisely as they are here mixed; and let a man get this idea in his mind, and defeat begins to move toward him over the unknown ways of circumstances. One summer night three sailors from the U.S.S. Seattle sat in the saloon …
As it happened, Bill chose to pick a quarrel with the sailors, and after he tossed them out of the bar, they regathered their forces on the sidewalk, chanced upon a stray beam of wood (“a scantling”), and used it as a battering ram “to punch him in the bulwarks of his stomach” as he stood triumphantly in the doorway, causing a wound to open up in him that the ambulance surgeon compared to “an excavation.” Thus Bill landed in southwestern Texas, where he began his new life as a sheepherder. As Crane puts it earlier in the passage: “Strange and still strange are the laws of fate.”
The third part begins with Bill examining his revolver immediately after the conversation with José. He killed the ranch foreman with this gun, has used it in “free fights” during which he may or may not have killed others, and by now it is his “dearest possession,” an object he loves “because its allegiance was more than that of man, horse, or dog. It questioned neither social nor moral position; it obeyed alike the saint and the assassin. It was the claw of the eagle, the tooth of the lion, the poison of the snake; and when he swept it from its holster, this minion smote where he listed, even to the battering of a small penny.”
This is Crane writing at full stretch and in full command of what he is doing, exploring the mythology of the gun in a language both biblical and deadly ironic, never more sure of the gifts at his disposal, at once able to plunge deep and range wide, traveling in a single sentence from claws to teeth to minuscule pennies, but no sooner do we settle in and begin to contemplate the lone, desperate battle this burned-out man is about to fight than another character suddenly and unexpectedly appears, invading “the desolation” and “stillness” of the desert as Bill looks up and sees “a motionless horseman in black outline against the pallid sky.” Another oddly cinematic moment; another solitary figure plunked down in the denuded, primal landscape; another surprise. Not once in the story do we see or hear any of the sheepherder’s sheep (because they are irrelevant), but this stranger, who turns out to be a young American greenhorn from “a far, black Northern city,” is essential. Never named, he will become the witness to the story, and everything that happens from now on will be seen through his eyes. He is Nick Carraway to Bill’s Gatsby, the innocent, rational, “eddycated man” poised midway between author and reader to function as the interpreter of the irrational forces that will lead to the violent death of the violent, gun-loving Bill.
The two men size each other up. Although Bill is fully prepared to shoot the stranger if necessary, what he sees upon closer examination is a harmless fellow decked out “in some Mexican trappings of an expensive kind,” a fairly ridiculous Yankee tourist of “a type which did not belong in the mesquit.” What the stranger sees is a “tattered individual with a tangle of hair and beard, with a complexion turned brick-color from the sun and whiskey.” When he asks the bearded one if he can spend the night in his camp, Bill puts him off by explaining that “some of these here greasers are goin’ to chase me off the range tonight; and while I might like a man’s company all right, I wouldn’t let him in for no such game when he ain’t got nothin’ to do with the trouble.”
Because he is an outsider, the stranger can ask all the questions an insider would not or could not ask. He can be shocked, outraged, and confused (just as the reader is), but the actors in the drama, Bill and José, are too absorbed in the action to step back and consider the consequences of what they are doing. Therefore, the stranger can bluntly ask: “And—great heavens! will they kill you, do you think?” To which Bill replies: “Don’t know. Can’t tell till afterwards.” And then, as he goes into the various ways in which the scene could play out, Bill concludes, “It’s awful hard on a man’s mind—to git a gang after him.” Appalled by what he is hearing, not only that Bill is determined to fight but that he will be outnumbered eight to one in that fight, the stranger cries out, “Well, why in the name of wonder don’t you go get the sheriff?” It is, of course, a dumb question, perhaps the dumbest question he could have asked—further proof of his naïveté and ignorance, his failure to grasp the full meaning of the situation he has stumbled into. Bill is so disgusted by the question that he doesn’t even bother to answer it. Instead, he barks out a single one-syllable, four-letter word—not so much a curse as a sign of exasperation.
The stranger has been told to “hit the trail,” and in the fourth part he is nowhere to be seen. Night falls, and before Crane begins to show us the battle that will soon take place in the darkness, he pauses to set the scene of the confrontation while at the same time announcing the philosophical intentions of his story. This is not just another shoot-out in another Wild West adventure yarn, he is telling us; it is an examination of the futility of human endeavor on an earth that has no time to trouble itself with the lives and deaths of mere men.
Long, smoldering clouds spread in the western sky, and to the east silver mists lay on the purple gloom of the wilderness.
Finally, when the great moon climbed the heavens and cast its ghastly radiance upon the bushes, it made a new and more brilliant crimson of the camp-fire, where the flames capered merrily through its mesquit branches, filling the silence with the fire chorus, an ancient melody which surely bears a message of the inconsequence of human tragedy—a message that is in the boom of the sea, the sliver of the wind through the grass-blades, the silken clash of hemlock boughs.
This is the do-or-die moment, but if Bill can do rather than die, the only thing in front of him will be another round of fighting, for the odds are against him, and how can he expect to kill all eight of the men who are out to kill him in the first round? But how clever he is that night, and how like Odysseus he is with his cunning strategy to outwit his opponents by stuffing his bedroll by the fire with various objects to give the impression that he is sleeping when in fact he is hiding somewhere in the bushes, and as José and his crew empty their sawed-off shotguns into the bedroll, how hard he laughs at them, such “a fearsome laugh of ridicule, hatred, ferocity” that it scares them into silence, and as they begin to run from the invisible revolver in Bill’s invisible hand, he manages to kill one of them as the rest scamper off into the darkness. A moment later, all goes quiet in the wilderness again, and the fire chorus goes on singing “the ancient melody which bears the message of the inconsequence of human tragedy.” By repeating this phrase, Crane transforms it into a kind of dirge.
The fifth part begins with a comment from the stranger.
“‘Now you’re worse off than ever,’ said the young man, dry-voiced and awed.
“‘No, I ain’t,’ said Bill rebelliously. ‘I’m one ahead.’”
Not gone, then, as Bill had asked, but still there, having lurked about in the vicinity all during the exchange of gunfire, and now that dawn has begun to break, he and Bill approach the campfire to assess the damage. Bit by bit, the young man has insinuated himself into the story and by now he is no longer strictly an observer but something close to a participant as well. A reluctant, horrified participant who has no business being there, of course, one so out of his element that he promptly becomes unhinged when he chances upon a clear view of the dead man’s face through an opening in the thicket. “That man there takes the heart out of me,” he says, “and makes me feel like a murderer,” and when Bill reminds him that “you didn’t shoot him, mister, I did,” the young man answers, “I know; but I feel that way somehow. I can’t get rid of it.” He is so rattled by the bloodshed that he wants to leave, to put the whole gruesome affair behind him, but before he can mount his horse and ride away from the impending slaughter, José and his men are suddenly back for round two, arriving with “a roar of guns” and filling the air with “such hooting and whistling as would come from a swift flock of steam-boilers.” The commotion spooks the young man’s horse, and when the animal bolts from the scene, the stranger is stuck there, forced to witness the last battle and, in the end, take part in it himself.
He and Bill throw themselves onto the ground, and for the rest of Part V Bill, José, and the others exchange insults, insults that grow increasingly ugly and bitter as Bill’s anger mounts.
His hidden enemies called him nine kinds of coward, a man who could fight only in the dark, a baby who would run from the shadows of such noble Mexican gentlemen, a dog that sneaked. They described the affair of the previous night, and informed him of the base advantage he had taken of their friend. In fact, they in all sincerity endowed him with every quality which he no less earnestly believed them to possess. One could have seen the phrases bite him as he lay there on the ground fingering his revolver.
The sixth and final part, all seen from the stranger’s point of view, quickly devolves into a blur of fragmented chaos, an episode from a dream that resembles a picture that is only “half drawn.” The enraged Bill wants to go after them, but the young man yells out, “Don’t you budge an inch! Don’t you budge!” Ignoring the stranger’s command, Bill casts his eyes on the bushes in front of him, no doubt beginning to lift his head, for the young man then cries out, “Put your head down!”—but by then it is too late.
As the guns roared, Bill uttered a loud grunt, and for a moment leaned panting upon his elbow, while his arm shook like a twig. Then he upreared like a great and bloody spirit of vengeance, his face lighted with the blaze of his last passion. The Mexicans came swiftly and in silence.
From then on, the images begin to break apart into “the rush of feet, the spatter of shots, the cries, the swollen faces seen like masks on the smoke,” and two short paragraphs down, in an obliquely told, after-the-fact account, we learn this stunning bit of news about the stranger’s role in the skirmish: “He killed a man, and the thought went swiftly by him, like the feather on the gale, that it was easy to kill a man.”
This is the final step in an ineluctable process that was set in motion by pure chance. An unsuspecting innocent wandered into a world of violence, and from neutral observer he became a reluctant participant, then an active participant, and by the end of the story he has become a part of the violence himself. With this terrible knowledge now buried in him for the rest of his life, “he suddenly felt for Bill, this grimy sheep-herder, some form of idolatry. Bill was dying, and the dignity of last defeat, the superiority of him who stands in his grave, was in the pose of the lost sheep-herder.”
After a one-space blank, the story unwinds in the last four paragraphs as the stranger sits on the ground wiping sweat and gunpowder from his face. “He wore the gently idiot smile of an aged beggar as he watched three Mexicans limping and staggering into the distance.” Three left out of seven, and counting the other one killed the night before, five of the eight Mexicans who came after Bill are dead. The now-dead Bill is the sixth corpse. The stage is cluttered with corpses, as bloody as in any final scene of a Shakespeare tragedy, but no Fortinbras will be coming to restore order to the world, and as the stranger finally stands up, he walks over to Bill, whose hands are wrapped around the throat of another dead man. He loosens the hands, and then, “swaying as if slightly drunk, he stood looking down into the still face.” Eventually, an idea comes to him, and he walks off to retrieve his multicolored Mexican blanket “from where it lay dirty from trampling feet.” Carefully dusting it off, he returns to Bill and lays it over the sheepherder’s body. This is not a moment for solemn introspection, however, and as the story comes to its end, there is one last jolt of fear.
There he again stood motionless, his mouth just agape and the same stupid glance in his eyes, when all at once he made a gesture of fright and looked wildly about him.
He had almost reached the thicket when he stopped, smitten with alarm. A body contorted, with one arm stiff in the air, lay in his path. Slowly and warily he moved around it, and in a moment the bushes, nodding and whispering, their leaf-faces turned toward the scene behind him, swung and swung again into the stillness and the peace of the wilderness.
* * *
A month or two went by before Crane got around to handing the story over to Paul Revere Reynolds, his new agent. Understanding the power of the work he had been given, Reynolds sold it to Richard Watson Gilder of the Century for five hundred dollars, the largest sum Crane had ever received for one of his stories. With Gilder’s strict policy of banning all coarse language and swearing in the pages of his magazine, however, there was some wrangling over the use of certain words, “B’Gawd” and “hell” in particular. When the story was published in the February 1897 issue (with a full-page illustration by Frederic Remington), those shocking epithets were modified to read “B’G——” and “h——.” Just two months earlier in Paris (December 10, 1896), Alfred Jarry’s revolutionary, modernist play Ubu Roi, which begins with a variant of the word Shit, provoked a riot in the theater on opening night and was closed after just one performance. W. B. Yeats, who happened to be present, famously commented, “After us the Savage God.”
Following his immensely productive stay at Hartwood, Crane returned to New York to begin work on a series of articles about the Tenderloin district, also known as “Satan’s Circus.” By mid-September, the ground he had been walking on unexpectedly began to crumble, and because the laws of fate are strange and still strange, both New York and Hartwood would soon vanish as the centers of his world.
30
Enter Theodore Roosevelt. Enter William Randolph Hearst. One shoe dropped, then the other shoe dropped, and within a matter of weeks Crane was up to his neck in trouble.
T.R. Roosevelt—one of the great stone faces now carved into the southeastern wall of Mount Rushmore—was another precocious American phenomenon who not only devoured books (one before breakfast every day, often two or three more in the evening) but wrote them as well (close to forty), along with hundreds of essays and articles and no fewer than 150,000 letters. After serving three terms as an assemblyman in the New York State legislature, he left politics in 1884 when, within the space of eleven hours, both his wife and his mother died on different floors of the same house. He went out to North Dakota and lived as a rancher for the next two years, wrote three more books, and then returned to politics and New York, where he ran for mayor in 1886 and lost, after which he published a bestselling history, The Winning of the West, and married for the second time. Appointed to the United States Civil Service Commission by the Harrison administration, he lived in Washington for the next several years, but following the 1894 Republican sweep in the New York elections (reported by Crane in “Heard on the Street Election Night”), he left the capital and returned to his hometown, where the new reform mayor, William Lafayette Strong, had chosen him to be president of the board of New York City Police Commissioners, making Roosevelt the chief law enforcement official of the largest city in the country at age thirty-six.
W.R.H. Hearst was young as well—just thirty-three when he signed up Crane to furnish articles and sketches about the Tenderloin—but by 1896 he was already an experienced newspaperman. After being expelled from Harvard nine years earlier, he had become the editor of the San Francisco Examiner (owned by his father, a wealthy U.S. senator), and when Hearst moved to New York in 1895 and took over the failing Journal, the yellow-journalism war between his paper and Joseph Pulitzer’s World was launched. One year into it, Hearst had acquired a reputation for paying his writers well, and when he sent a telegram to Crane on August eleventh asking, “How much money do you require?,” one more writer was added to the Journal payroll.*
T.R. It is likely that Crane met Roosevelt at the Lantern Club in late 1895 or early 1896, but their friendship did not begin in earnest until the summer, when McClure was toying with the notion of asking Crane to write an article about the police department. That led to a request for an interview, and on July twentieth Roosevelt sent a brief note to Crane about where and when they could talk: “Court opens at ten, but eleven o’clock would be the time for you to come around. I have much to discuss with you about ‘Madge.’” He was referring to the new edition of Maggie that had been published in June, and although the piece for McClure was never written, Crane and Roosevelt dined out together a number of times that summer, at least twice in the company of Jacob Riis, Roosevelt’s fellow reformer and ally. After a long absence, Hamlin Garland had come back to New York for a summer visit, and in an undated message from July that Crane left at his hotel (along with an inscribed copy of George’s Mother), he wrote: “Just heard you were in town. I want you to dine with me tonight at the Lantern Club. Sure!! Roosevelt expects to be there. Don’t fail. I will call here at six—again.”* The next month, Crane wrote another letter to Roosevelt about police matters and included with it a copy of George’s Mother and a typescript of the recently finished “A Man and Some Others.” The first paragraph of Roosevelt’s response from August eighteenth shows how carefully he kept up with Crane’s work, and, in spite of his denigrating, prejudiced remarks about the Mexican characters in the story, how diligent a reader he was. Closing off with an amiable “I hope soon to see you again,” it is the letter of a man who considered himself to be Crane’s friend:
