Burning boy, p.57
Burning Boy, page 57
Then again, perhaps we should consider this. Crane never mentioned to anyone that he had received eight hundred dollars from Amy, and the assumption that he had comes exclusively from her. It could be that he talked about giving her eight hundred dollars one day, perhaps even promised to give it to her, and that the two deposits of six hundred and one hundred and seventy-six dollars were royalty earnings from his books (Red Badge went through fourteen printings that year) as well as money earned from newspapers and magazines. That would explain why Hawkins knew nothing about the eight hundred dollars—because they didn’t exist—and therefore, when he was given the five-hundred-dollar check from Crane, he took it for granted that it was Crane’s money to give. As early as December first, just days after Crane arrived in Florida, Amy began pressing Hawkins for money and kept on pressing until the last week of September 1897 (“I am broke and need the money very much”; “I must have it”; “I do not know how I am going to live if I do not get those cheaks” [sic]), and while Hawkins did what he could to help (sending money by messenger and arranging a modeling job for her with one of his artist friends), he eventually gave up in disgust and withdrew from his role as Crane’s proxy banker. Amy then turned to a lawyer, George D. Mabon, and began a legal action to recuperate the five hundred and fifty dollars she insisted she was still owed. Why that amount? If Hawkins had already given her five hundred, shouldn’t she have been asking for the remaining three hundred? Again, the mind spins round, and again there are no answers. The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and other newspapers ran articles about the suit, which turned the private quarrel into a public mess and established eight hundred dollars as the sum in question. The press seemed disposed to believe her—mistakenly assuming she was the other Amy Leslie from Chicago—but if the young A.L. had lied about the pregnancy to hold Crane in New York, there was every reason to suspect she was lying now in order to punish him for having abandoned her. Mabon pushed hard and had an attachment order issued against Crane’s royalties from Appleton, but in the end the case was settled out of court with legal help from Crane’s brother William. It is worth noting that the matter was never referred to anywhere in the correspondence between the two brothers, nor did Crane ever mention the sum of eight hundred dollars in any of the letters he wrote to Amy, nor did he ever suggest that he had done anything wrong in his financial dealings with her—not to Amy herself, not to Hawkins, not to William, not to anyone. Most important, not once in any of her letters did Amy badger Hawkins by insisting that the money belonged to her. From start to finish, her attitude was that of a woman living off the generous support of her absent lover—which would suggest that Crane was probably innocent, after all.
She rode with him on the train as far as Washington, and then she got off and returned to New York while he pushed on to Jacksonville. He had been told that the boat for Cuba would be leaving the morning after he arrived, which explained why she had accompanied him for only part of the trip, but things did not go according to plan, and several weeks went by before the boat finally left. From Jacksonville, dated “Sunday” (November 29, 1896), his first full day in town (written in the simple, baby-talk language he used in all his letters to her):
My Blessed Girl: I have dictated a long letter to you today but as it was dictated to a stenographer I could not very well tell you how much I loved you and how sorrowful I am now over our temporary separation. The few moments on the train at Washington were the most painful of my life and if I live a hundred years I know I can never forget them. I want you to be always sure that I love you. We start tomorrow night probably but if you have written today I will get it before the boat sails. Be good, my darling, my sweet. Don’t forget your old hubber. I think of you at all times and love you alone.
Your Lover.
And then another from the twenty-ninth, dated “Sunday night”:
My dearest: Two letters will reach you soon after this one. Just happened to get time to send this to you on the northern mail which leaves in ten minutes. God bless you and keep you safe for me. Yours with all the love in the world.
S.
Prepared to depart the next morning, and not knowing what would happen to him in the days and weeks ahead, he sent off two more letters that afternoon, one written to his brother William in Port Jervis (outlining the contents of his will) and the other (by dictation) to Hawkins in New York, which was largely about Amy.
In case you see Amy from time to time encourage her in every possible way.… I was positively frightened for the girl at the moment of parting and I am afraid and worried now. I feel that no one … could need a friendly word more than this poor child, and I know that you are just the man to do it in a right way if the chance presents itself.… It broke my heart to leave the girl but I could feel comparatively easy now if I could feel that she had good friends. There is not a man in three thousand who can be a real counsellor and guide for a girl so pretty as Amy.… Her sister is a good hearted sort of creature, but she is liable to devote most of her attention to herself and besides that Amy is mentally superior to her in every way. The sister is weak, very weak, and so I am sure that she would be of no help to Amy in what is now really a great trouble.
After the two letters he had sent to her on November twenty-ninth, he waited twelve days before writing to her again. He had met someone else in the meantime, which no doubt had cast him down still further into the mud of modern confusion, but he was not about to share this new entanglement with Amy, which in all likelihood would end as quickly as it began, and so he continued to shower her with his customary endearments. December eleventh:
My own Sweetheart: I have not written until now because every moment we have expected to get off and I have wished to save my last word here for you. We have had a great deal of trouble to get a boat ready and I think within 24 hours we will be on our way to Cuba. It breaks my heart to think of the delays and to think that I might have had you with me here if I had only known.… Remember me sweetheart even in your dreams. From now on I will have time to write oftener and you may expect to hear now every day … from your poor forlorn boy. I know you wont forget me. I know you love me and I want you always to remember that I love you.
Your lover
Not every day, as it turned out, but only the next day, which was the last time he wrote to her from Florida. Dated Saturday, December twelfth, it begins and ends with the following:
My Beloved: It has been altogether a remarkable series of circumstances which has delayed us here so long and it breaks my heart to think that I might have had you with me a few days longer—as I wrote you yesterday.…
Sunday—Today we are spending in misery at the hotel with a strict rule about drinking and no one to play with. I can do nothing but think of you. I love you, my sweetheart, my sweetheart.
Monday: Seems sure that we leave tomorrow. I love you, mine own girl. Be good and wait for me. I love you.
But he didn’t leave tomorrow, nor the tomorrow after that, nor the tomorrow after that, and when he finally set sail for Cuba on the last day of the year, the boat sank.
EXILE
1
A month in Jacksonville, Florida, with nothing to do but wait. Nine hundred miles to the north, New York City had turned into a mirage, and Dora Clark, Charles Becker, Theodore Roosevelt, and lawyer Grant could no longer touch him. He had left the weeping Amy on a train platform in Washington, and while he continued to send her occasional bits of money and wrote to her one last time in the fall, he never saw her again. Something new was on the verge of happening, an abrupt turn into a new way of living and thinking and breathing that would carry him through the last three and a half years of his life, and as Crane languished in Florida during that monthlong interval before the steamship Commodore set out for Cuba, one wonders if he had any idea how thoroughly the past had closed behind him.
Bacheller had given him a money belt filled with seven hundred dollars in gold, and following the practice of other journalists who had come to Jacksonville on their way to Cuba, Crane registered at his hotel under a pseudonym, Samuel Carlton.* The false names were a ruse to deflect attention from the Spanish spies in Jacksonville who were keeping watch on suspicious Americans. In his December twelfth letter to Amy, Crane shrugged off the potential difficulties. “We are troubled occasionally by Spanish spies. They follow us a good deal but they seem very harmless.” In fact, they were not harmless. The Spanish government had declared that any American journalist who managed to enter Cuba would be treated as a spy and dealt with accordingly. A few months earlier, a young reporter from the Key West Equator-Democrat, Charles Govin, had reached Cuba on a boat similar to the one that had been lined up for Crane. Immediately after he landed, Govin was captured, tied to a tree, and executed by firing squad. Then, to discourage others who might have been tempted to follow his example, the Spanish soldiers took out their machetes and hacked his body to pieces.
The crossings to the island, which had been under Spanish control since 1511, were organized by Cuban rebels in Jacksonville (the Junta), who had two tugs and one small steamship at their disposal for carrying out these “filibuster” operations between Florida and off-limits Cuba. Not “filibuster” as it applies to debating tactics in the United States Senate but as its first meaning is defined in Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary: “A freebooter or soldier of fortune who engages in unauthorized warfare against a foreign country with which his own country is at peace in order to enrich himself: first applied to buccaneers in the West Indies who preyed on Spanish commerce to South America.” Crane and the other Americans who had gathered in Jacksonville were not looking to enrich themselves so much as to participate in an adventure, the kind of derring-do that many of them had dreamed about as children, and as Crane put it in one of his articles, “The Filibustering Industry,” “The romance of it catches the heart of the lad. The same lad who longs to fight Indians and to be a pirate … longs to embark secretly at midnight on one of these dangerous trips to the Cuban coast.” Crane, too, was looking forward to the adventure, and also to what promised to be his first glimpse of actual combat between living men in a real war, but there were delays, many delays over the weeks that followed, and there was nothing for him to do but sit tight until the Commodore was ready.
On arriving in Jacksonville, however, he had been fully expecting to leave for Cuba the next morning, and so he had sat down and written what he assumed was his farewell letter to Amy—quickly followed by a postscript the same day—and another letter to Hawkins filled with anxieties about Amy and her “great trouble,” imploring his friend to look after her in his absence, as well as a last letter to his brother William about the terms of his will. Knowing the perils of the “dangerous trips to the Cuban coast,” and surely aware of what had happened to Charles Govin in July, Crane understood that he might never return, or, as he obliquely expressed it to Hawkins, “in case my journey is protracted by causes which you can readily imagine.” Hence the will—and the urgent need to put his affairs in order, just in case.
He had made out a will at some point in the recent past, but the document had been lost or left behind in New York, and with no time to wait for William to send a fresh copy from Port Jervis, he did his best to recall what he had previously judged to be “perfectly satisfactory.” On top of that, there were a number of new bequests that had occurred to him since then, and although he wasn’t sure that mentioning them in an unnotarized letter would “stand for anything in court,” he had been planning to bring them up the next time he saw William.
The old terms were simple enough. William would be the sole executor. William and Edmund would each receive one-third of his estate, and one-sixth each would go to his brothers George and Townley. (Neither Wilbur nor his sister Nellie was mentioned.) Then came the new items. “For instance my saddle horse [Peanuts] I would not like to have sold. I would prefer that he be kept in easy service at Hartwood and have him cared for as much as possible by Ed himself, or by somebody whom it is absolutely certain would not maltreat him. As for the furniture of mine at Hartwood I would like that all to go to Ed except small things which the other members of the family might care to keep as mementoes of me.”
His horse, his furniture, his small things, and then he moved on to his literary estate, appointing Howells, Garland, Hawkins, and Hitchcock as his executors, men who would “no doubt be good enough to trouble themselves with my affairs.” Howells “of course” would be in charge of deciding on the contents of posthumous books drawn from work previously published in newspapers and magazines. In his desk at Hartwood, he added, there was a list he had compiled of his published stories, and although tracking them down would entail considerable effort, “there are some of them which I would hate to see lost.” Countering the misconception that journalism was of no importance to Crane and that he had cranked out his newspaper sketches simply for the money, he went on:
Some of my best work is contained in short things which I have written for various publications, principally the New York Press in 1893 or thereabout [1894]. There are some fifteen or twenty short sketches of New York street life and so on which I intended to have published in book form under the title of “Midnight Sketches.” That should be your first care and after that sketches of outdoor life such as “One Dash Horses”, “The Wise Men”, “The Snake” and other stories of that kind could also be published in book form if the literary executors thought that they were up to my standard. There will be a story in the January or February Century which also could go very well with this collection [“A Man and Some Others”].
The will ends there, and as it is with all wills made by all people, the finality of its pronouncements gives an X-ray view into the mind of the person who has written it. Young Crane’s last will and testament tells us what he thought of his work as a writer and identifies the people who counted most for him: four of his brothers, two of them in particular, with the mass of his other siblings and their many children left to duke it out among themselves over his “small things.” Although they are not named as beneficiaries, the letter also shows his absolute trust in Howells and the others to watch over his literary work after he is gone. There is something odd or even comical about describing “One Dash—Horses” and “A Man and Some Others” as sketches of outdoor life, I suppose, but even odder and far less comical is the omission of Amy Leslie’s name from the will. He had written to her just before he wrote to William, or was about to write to her just after he finished the letter to William—twice within the space of a few hours—calling himself her “hubber,” a conflation of “husband” and “lover” that seems to suggest both the pleasures of good sex and the promise of long-term devotion, and in his own words she was his “blessed girl,” his “darling,” his “sweet,” his “dearest,” and yet in spite of those fervent declarations, he did not mention her to William. It would have been difficult to do that, of course, both difficult and embarrassing, but a will is not an ordinary letter, and when a young man is facing the prospect of his own end, the obliteration of his life for all eternity, one would expect that man to tell the truth, to come clean and own up about the woman he loves, but Crane couldn’t bring himself to do that, which proves that for all his gushing adoration and sweet-talking pronouncements, he didn’t love her as much as he thought he did.
Nor should we overlook the question of Amy’s “great trouble.” It seems clear that Crane was referring to her pregnancy when he wrote those words to Hawkins, the fictitious pregnancy that Amy had invented in order to trap him into marrying her, and even if her “great trouble” was founded on a lie, it appears that Crane had fallen for it, which means that when he left New York for Florida in late November, he assumed he was facing the prospect of becoming the father of an illegitimate child. That turned out to be a false assumption, but he didn’t know it at the time, nor did he know that Amy had further deceived him by simultaneously carrying on an affair with another man, a traveling salesman named Isidor Siesfeld, who suggested hiring lawyer Mabon to launch the suit against Crane and eventually seems to have married Amy (the 1920 census report lists her as his widow), but what was true and what was false is not what counts in the matter of Crane’s will—only what he believed to be true when he dictated the letter to William on November twenty-ninth. He believed he was about to become a father, and that unborn child, whether legitimate or not, would one day have a legitimate right to a share of his estate, but as it was with Amy, so it was with his potential offspring: not one word.
By not saying what he could have said, this is what Crane’s will tells us about his blessed girl and her imaginary baby: If he happened to die in Cuba, he did not want them to be part of his legacy or to have anything to do with his brothers, and, because of that, if he happened to make it back alive, they had already been written out of his plans for the future.
* * *
Alternately described in the press as the “southern Newport” and the “American Nice,” Jacksonville was a pleasant resort town of twenty-eight thousand inhabitants with a lively winter tourist trade and the largest, most splendid hotel south of the Mason-Dixon Line, the St. James, which could accommodate more than five hundred guests. Along with many of his fellow American journalists, Crane had booked a room there, but in order to protect his secret identity, he shied away from the rich crowd that milled around in the lobby and made himself as scarce as possible. Another well-known journalist, Sylvester Scovel, who would become a good friend of Crane’s when they both covered the Greco-Turkish War that spring, had registered under the name of George H. Brown, and within a week of their arrival, the Daily Florida Citizen wrote that Samuel Carlton and two other men, George H. Brown and H. K. Sheridan, were “being closely watched by Spanish spies.” Brown was reported to be an “expert dynamiter” and Carlton “an ex-lieutenant in the army” who was “fully up to war tactics and maneuvers.”
