Burning boy, p.6
Burning Boy, page 6
The summer articles in the New York Tribune were unsigned, but hardworking Crane scholars have attributed a number of early pieces to him based on the evidence of the prose, and given the stylistic thumbprint that can be seen as far back as 1885 (in “Uncle Jake and the Bell-Handle”) and which would continue to be present in his later writing, there is no reason to doubt their attributions. After a couple of summers of informal work for Townley, Crane was officially put on the staff of his brother’s New Jersey Coast News Bureau in the summer of 1890, just after his final semester at Claverack. That was when he renewed his friendship with Post Wheeler, his old childhood smoking buddy, and met another young journalist, Ralph Paine, who also became a friend, and after the three young reporters had finished their work for the day, they tended to hang out together in the evenings. According to Wheeler, Crane’s assignments were devoted to chronicling “north Jersey social activities,” but slight as his subjects might have been, his writing is seldom dull. A few extracts from the summer of 1890, when he was still just eighteen:
WORKERS AT OCEAN GROVE: Ocean Grove is, beyond all doubt, for the family, of the family and by the family. There are thousands of babies here. The plump and pretty infants swing in hammocks under the trees and upon cottage stoops, shout with glee as they roll and tumble upon the sands of the beach or gaze with supreme disdain upon those who have to walk while they ride in royal state in gay carriages propelled by demure nurse girls wearing coquettish little white caps.
THRONGS AT ASBURY PARK: The city maidens and their gallant attendants have blossomed out in blazer jackets with caps to match which make them look like huge potato bugs.
THE BABIES ON PARADE AT ASBURY PARK: The most unique parade ever known here since the time when Asbury Park was a howling wilderness and the Indians marched in single file through the woods was seen this afternoon on the famous board walk of James A. Bradley, the founder of the town. It was a baby show on wheels. About 200 mothers and nurses wheeled babies in their little carriages … from the foot of Wesley Lake up the board walk to the big pavilion at the foot of Fifth-ave., and back again.… There were all kinds of babies. The little wagons were decorated with silk and satin flags, streamers and Japanese lanterns. Two Armenians carried a silk hammock hanging from bamboo poles on their shoulders, in which were Armenian twins. Several other carriages contained twins. Only one baby cried. The rest sucked their thumbs in great contentment, or cooed and smiled at the spectators and waved their rattles and other toys when the procession was applauded.
ASBURY PARK: The opening of the Ocean Grove camp-meeting this week has been the means of attracting large crowds to this town, and the good people from all parts of the country have been shocked to find that rum-selling was a thriving business in this supposedly staid prohibition town.… The principal offender’s place of business was near the main artery of traffic between this town and the Grove, which is only separated from Asbury Park by a small lake a few hundred feet wide. As the poker players rattled the “chips,” they could hear the sound from 5,000 throats singing the doxology.… On Thursday night, during the heavy storm, there were hops at Ralph’s Coleman House, the West End Hotel, the Oriental, Sunset Hall, the Ocean Hotel, Norwood Hall, the Colonnade, the Metropolitan Hotel and other large houses. There were also a number of progressive whist and euchre parties. At some of the houses the guests, while blindfolded, tried to pin tusks on elephants and tails on donkeys made of cloth, or engaged in the festive amusement of hunting the slippery button or firing the bean-bag at each other.
ASBURY PARK’S BIG BOARD WALK: All sorts and conditions of men are to be seen on the board walk. There is the sharp, keen-looking New-York business man, the long and lank Jersey farmer, the dark-skinned sons of India, the self-possessed Chinaman, the black-haired Southerner and the man with the big hat from “the wild and wooly plains” of the West.… The stock brokers gather in little groups on the broad plaza and discuss the prospective rise and fall of stocks; the pretty girl, resplendent in her finest gown, walks up and down within a few feet of the surging billows and chatters away with the college youth, who wears “old mater’s” colors in his blazer jacket and cap, or else sits hand in hand with her “own dear one” in a pavilion, and they two, “the world forgetting and by the world forgot,” chew gum together in time to the beating of the waves upon the sandy beach.
The mockery is refreshing, the jabs at bourgeois convention and the insipid pastimes of the summer crowd give a welcome dose of youthful cynicism to the articles, and whether the articles themselves qualify as true reporting or as semifictionalized renderings of personal impressions is less important than the fact that Crane was taking advantage of the opportunity he had been given. Not many aspiring writers have brothers who run their own news agencies, brothers twice their age who can hand out jobs to rank, untested beginners, and even if Crane wasn’t cut out for a steady career in journalism (extremely irregular in his habits), he didn’t know that yet, and at this juncture in his life he seems to have had no other ambition than to work for newspapers. As far as anyone knows, he wasn’t writing fiction then, nor had he ever expressed a desire to become the next Nathaniel Hawthorne or Charles Dickens. He had finished the equivalent of high school, he had returned to the Jersey Shore, and for now it looked as if he was content (perhaps even thrilled) to be doing what he was doing. But this work, trivial as it may seem in retrospect, proved to be a good training ground for his progress as a writer, for the only way a person can become a writer is to write, to write as much and as often as possible, and because of his job, Crane was writing much and often and quickly to boot, learning as he went along, and how fortunate for him that he started at such a young age, since it was imperative that he learn fast, learn fast and well, because it was already 1890, and when he arrived in Asbury Park that summer, he had only ten years to live.
10
That fall, for reasons that made no sense, Crane went off to Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. Most likely, the decision to go there was prompted by a suggestion from his brother William. Having talked Crane out of West Point and a future commission in the army, the Judge now proposed (with crackpot logic) that he enter the mining-engineering program at Lafayette because it might turn out to be advantageous to the family. And why, one asks, would he have thought that? Because whatever extra income the Cranes earned was derived from a portfolio of stocks they held in a number of Pennsylvania coal mines. By that reasoning, if they had owned shares in a tin company, William would have counseled his brother to become a metallurgist. No matter that the boy lacked all interest in mining and engineering, that he had barely passed his science and math courses at Claverack—maybe he would learn to enjoy those subjects in time. Not only was Crane being given bad advice, he was still being neglected by his family—not with any malicious intent, but simply because they sometimes forgot he was there. As Helen R. Crane bitterly recounts in her memoir: “His brothers and sisters may be the last persons in the world to note his gifts; if they happen to be many years older, married, and engrossed in their own children, he probably always remains much of an outsider to them.” Three paragraphs on, she writes: “It never occurred to them that he was a promising boy: he was merely their younger brother, rather strange and erratic, and a person who, if he mentioned his needs, did so in such a light manner that they did not take him seriously.”
Of course, Crane could have stood up and refused, telling William that he wanted to go somewhere else, but he was such an indifferent student, so unengaged in the question of what to study or not, of where to study or not, of why even bother to study or not, that he allowed himself to go along with the plan.
Predictably, the fall semester at Lafayette was a washout. Not a Methodist school this time but a Presbyterian one, with compulsory chapel attendance seven days a week and a fixed curriculum of seven courses with no electives: algebra, Bible study, chemistry, elocution, French, industrial drawing, and theme writing. Crane flunked five of them, receiving a grade of zero in theme writing, which was taught by an engineering professor and required the students to write papers on strictly technical subjects. In spite of cutting most of his classes, he became a member of the Delta Upsilon fraternity, joined both literary societies on campus, and played intramural baseball in preparation for the spring season. That was the good part of what happened to him during the three and a half months he spent there. Otherwise, Lafayette was a madhouse of violent hazing rituals and masculine mayhem, with constant battles between the sophomore and freshman classes, a notoriously out-of-control institution where “fellows … raise more hell than any other college in the country,” as Crane put it in a letter to an old friend from Claverack. According to Lafayette classmate Ernest G. Smith (writing in 1926), Crane’s dormitory room was broken into one night by a bunch of raucous “Sophomore gangsters,” who were persuaded to leave only after Crane pointed a loaded revolver at them. No one else witnessed the standoff, and Crane himself never talked about it, but even if Smith got his facts wrong, the fact was that Crane quit the school at the end of the semester.
It was Pennington redux. Once again, her son had said no to a school, and once again it was up to Crane’s mother to find him another school, in this case another college. Too bad there is no source to tell us how they wrangled with each other to solve the problem, what pressures they brought to bear on each other over how many hours or days, and how eager or reluctant Crane was to give college another try, for I suspect his heart wasn’t in it, and if in the end he went back for another semester, chances are that he did it to please—or appease—his mother. Under the circumstances, Mrs. Crane’s solution was probably the best one available on such short notice. Her uncle had taken an active part in the founding of Syracuse University, and because of that family connection, she managed to negotiate a scholarship for her son. She also knew that the place had a good reputation and was untouched by the sort of scandal that had occurred at Lafayette in the fall when another freshman in her son’s class had been invaded by a horde of sophomores and had fought off the thugs by cracking one of them on the head with a baseball bat, which had fractured the sophomore’s skull. What Mrs. Crane probably didn’t know, however, and what her son surely did, was that there were numerous bats at Syracuse as well (for hitting balls, not heads) and that the school had an excellent baseball team.
In Crane’s 1896 letter to Hilliard, he concludes his remarks about his parents and then begins another paragraph: “As for myself, I went to Lafayette College but did not graduate. I found mining-engineering not at all to my taste. I preferred base-ball. Later I attended Syracuse University where I attempted to study literature but found base ball again much more to my taste.” In an earlier letter to Hilliard (probable date: February 1895), he is somewhat more expansive about his college memories:
I did little work at school, but confined my abilities, such as they were, to the diamond. Not that I disliked books, but the cut-and-dried curriculum of the college did not appeal to me. Humanity was a much more interesting study. When I ought to have been at recitations I was studying faces on the streets, and when I ought to have been studying my next day’s lessons, I was watching the trains roll in and out of the Central Station. So, you see, I had, first of all, to recover from college.
We know that he stuck with Syracuse for only five months (early January to early June 1891), but that doesn’t mean it was the same kind of washout he had experienced in the fall. On the contrary, it was a time of enormous change for him, of profoundest change, and it served as a bridge between his adolescence and early adulthood, a finishing school that not only finished school for him but prepared him for the next step.
Syracuse was his first city, the first time he inhabited a place that was not a small town or seaside resort, a cold-weather city with a permanent population of around ninety thousand, not large by the metropolitan standards of New York but large enough to encompass a dense mixture of high and low, of wealth and poverty, and when Crane was slacking off from his schoolwork, he wasn’t only “studying faces on the streets” but prowling around the rougher parts of town, sitting in on sessions at the police court, drinking five-cent beers at the Music Hall on North Salina Street while he watched the show girls in their skimpy costumes (plunging necklines, skirts above the knees) sing and dance onstage, striking up acquaintances with tramps, winos, and prostitutes, and exploring the brothels on Railroad Street not far from the Central Station. There is ample evidence that he started working on an early draft of Maggie that spring, or at least an early incarnation of what was to become Maggie, and how could he have conceived of writing a story set in the slums without knowing something of the slums himself? Syracuse offered him his first taste of that world, and he was so stirred by the encounter that he was moved to write about it—not as a piece of journalism but as an extended, multilayered work of fiction.
That first of all and above all else—the birth of Maggie and the impulse to write fiction again—but even as a grudging, recalcitrant student, he was working during those months in central New York State as the Syracuse correspondent for the New York Tribune, a job given to him by the day editor of the paper, Willis Fletcher Johnson, a graduate of Pennington Seminary and a family friend who knew Crane’s writing from the work he had done for Townley in Asbury Park. In the final weeks of his final year as a student, Crane concocted a frivolous and funny little journalistic hoax with Johnson’s backing, a bagatelle that bore the headline GREAT BUGS IN ONONDAGA, which was published in both the Tribune and the Syracuse Daily Standard on June first. Inspired by an earlier report about an infestation of caterpillars that had stopped a train somewhere in Minnesota, the nineteen-year-old correspondent upped the ante and invented a new form of gigantic armored bug that had brought rail traffic to a halt near Syracuse, the seat of Onondaga County.
As the drivers rolled over the insects the things gave up the ghost with a crackling sound like the successive explosions of toy torpedoes.… The bugs became more numerous and the crackling grew to a monotonous din, as though some fire cracker storehouse had been touched off in an hundred places, until in the thick of the multitudinous swarm the engine was brought to a stop.… An erudite recluse whose abode is in the neighborhood of the quarries had by this time appeared, for news of the strange occurrence had spread rapidly. His opinion was that the bugs that had blocked the track were the issue of a rare species of lithodome—a rock-boring mollusk—crossed with some kind of predatory insect.
The following day, the joke was prolonged with a mock-serious apology from the paper, likely written by Johnson or by Johnson and Crane together, in which the “state entomologist” was warned that if he wanted to keep his job “he must board a monster of steel and iron, hurry to Syracuse and report on this new bug.” The older man and the younger man must have reveled in their little prank. Further proof that Crane was not languishing in some dark funk at Syracuse but was often in high spirits, for how could someone in low spirits find the energy to dig up such a recondite term as lithodome (not to be found in any standard dictionary) or to invent such a delicious phrase as erudite recluse?
His mother had made arrangements for him to live with her great-aunt, the venerable Widow Peck, longtime spouse of the now departed Bishop Peck, which would further cut down on expenses and ensure that her son was subject to adult supervision, but the experiment lasted only a matter of days, since the Widow was displeased with the boy’s behavior, although precisely how or why has never been elucidated. Perhaps it was his smoking, or his irregular habits, or his uncombed hair and slovenly approach to dressing, or perhaps they simply didn’t get along. Whatever the reason, Crane wound up spending the semester living at the Delta Upsilon fraternity house, where he fell in with a like-minded crowd of smoking renegades and made a number of close friendships that continued for years afterward. The crowd consisted of bright young men who went on to distinguish themselves as lawyers, journalists, doctors, and engineers, but as college undergraduates they shared Crane’s contempt for the stultifying strictures of the school’s academic and religious program. On top of that, every one of those friends seemed to admire him intensely. Crane’s Sunday night recital companion Frank Noxon (future reporter, drama critic, and editor) wrote in 1926: “Crane was brave, physically, morally, and socially.… One of [his] characteristics was a haunting solicitude for the comforts and welfare of other people, especially those of narrow opportunity. He thought about it as one thinks about an art or craft, developing a style and inventing original methods.” Clarence N. Goodwin (future lawyer) in 1926:
